Daily life of a cultivation judge

Chen Gutian stood weakly, still wearing a genial smile on his face that wouldn't think he was the one with a massive gaping hole in his chest. His aging face seemed to be aging even more as his white hair turned into a faint translucent color looking like it was a web string and not hair. One could feel his life draining out of him.

"I can .....see why..... Xue'er admired you so. At the clan..... I doubt .....there are .....many... with your level of talent.." Chen Gutian said in between labored breaths.

"I admired him too... at some point.." Chen Zholan slowly said as he removed Chen Gutian's sword that had impaled him in the chest. He ended up coughing up blood as he removed it.

His body looked worse than Chen Gutian's, with deep lacerated wounds that revealed bone covering almost every part of his body. Just like Chen Gutian, his aura seemed to be rapidly declining, though his was less severe than that of Chen Gutian.

Save for those two the whole platform was blanketed by a heavy silence with looks of shock coloring the bulk of those present, particularly the elders. Almost every single one of them had their eyes wide and their jaws to the floor with a couple of them having pale, petrified faces.

There was a look of disbelief on their faces, understandably so after what they had seen, considering Yang Qing and Yu Gen looked slightly surprised while Chen Zian, even though he was silent, he had this solemn look on his face as he looked at Chen Zholan. His eyes became grimmer as he recalled the scene from earlier.

Chen Zholan's final attack was the cause of it all. His final attack had been brilliantly fast and terrifyingly sharp to the point that most of the elders couldn't track it with their eyes, and for Chen Zian, he felt were he the one facing off against it, surviving with devastating injuries was the best he could have hoped for.

"I can't believe he reached the prerequisite to master that move," he thought with his eyes still locked on Chen Zholan, as other emotions started flashing through them such as regret.

The cultivation their ancestor had left in the insight jade bamboo was tiered into sixteen leaves with a rising difficulty when it came to grasping one leaf to the next. However, there were chasms in difficulty that stood out in grasping the leaves, there were three major ones in particular, one was moving from the fourth to the fifth leaf, the other one was moving from the eighth to the ninth, and the last one was moving from twelfth to thirteenth.

The last chasm from twelfth to thirteenth was an educated guess on their part since to date no one has ever reached the thirteenth leaf, with the highest holder having reached touched on the doors of the ninth leaf but failed in the end, and the price for the failure was his cultivation got crippled in the process.

His ending was a testament to how perilous and huge the gap was. For Chen Zian before he made a leap for the fifth leaf, he had to make a lot of preparations for almost 300 years and even then it didn't feel like it was enough. It had taken him slightly 100 years to move from the first leaf to the fourth leaf but the attempt for the fifth leaf, just a single leaf had taken him 300 years and even then he barely made it through.

Because of the dangers involved in mastering each and every one of those leaves, ignoring the chasm stages, their ancestor's will allowed one to move from one leaf to the next upon reaching the minimum level of standard in grasping the insights within each and one of those leaves.

This meant there were different standards in the display of that art because of it, and what Chen Zholan showed was a move that only someone who had reached a major understanding of the four leaves could pull off. It was a technique that one would only access if they reached a certain level of understanding in those four leaves.

In the entire clan, counting Chen Zholan and Chen Xue, Chen Zian could only count four people who had mastered that art since. Of the remaining two, he was one of them while the last person was one of the supreme elders.

That showed how difficult the demands for mastering that technique were. When it came to him, the major part of the preparation he made for the fifth leaf was to master the four leaves into onetechnique, and of the 300 years it took him to prepare, he had spent close to 200 years mastering that technique.

When he did, it was well worth the hardship and pain he went through to master it as it was one of the impetuss to helping him master sword intent along with surviving the mastery of the fifth leaf. However, what he truly appreciated about it was its destructive force. Its power rivaled that of someone who had a basic mastery over the sixth leaf.

Just with that move alone, Chen Zian was confident of facing off against the two supreme elders who had not mastered it, despite both of them being at the quasi-palace stage.

"He mastered it.." he muttered with bitterness in his tone.

The bitterness wasn't out of envy that Chen Zholan had mastered it in a much shorter time frame than he did, but out of sorrow and deep regret for the loss to their clan in the loss of a true talent.

They managed to produce two talents in the same generation gifted enough to master the four leaves into one at such young ages.

He couldn't help but feel like he had eaten a fly as he imagined the future the Chen clan would have had with those two at the helm.

Earlier, he had bemoaned the loss of Chen Xue and wanted to murder Chen Zholan because he was the cause of it, but now, seeing the potential Chen Zholan showed, whatever anger he had was washed away, and all he had was a deep regret at the rot in their clan that it ended up pitting two stars against one another, and harbored clan members who would nurture pill slaves and human cauldrons just to get ahead.

At the rate things were going, the Golden Bamboo Pavilion or the other rising noble families wouldn't have to plot against them, they were already doing a fine job by themselves.