Daily life of a cultivation judge

"My father wasn't exactly the most talented, but there were two places that I found he excelled at. One of them was being steadfast and the other was his sense of responsibility. His steadfast heart made him unwavering in the person he was as he stood up for the things he held dear, one of which was his family, and the other was the Empire.

He loved both more than his life..." Wu Mingli paused as he sighed lightly as his gaze drifting elsewhere.

"I wish he had a bit of selfishness in him, if he was, maybe his fate could have been avoided.." he muttered absentmindedly before sclarity resumed in his eyes.

"He was born in one of the villages in the frontiers of the Red Maple Empire. Slong remote village that was far removed from people and was neighbored by mountains, hills, and rivers.

His parents were farmers and had things remained the same, he would have likely followed the spath. He was not a man with that much ambition. As long as he could care for the things that mattered to him, he was more than content. For the him back then that was showing filial pity to his parents and caring for them when they got old, getting a wife, having children, and training his children to be dependable people.

To him such a life would have been more than enough, and now that I think about it, even later in life what he wanted out of life didn't change by much. It was only the scale that changed, moving from a village to an empire, and the reason for that change was what happened to him when he was sixteen years old..." Wu Mingli paused when he felt his voice trembling.

"A certain morning when he was sixteen, just like always, he went to the mountain that bordered the village to harvest sherbs and do sfishing in one of the creeks.

It was a routine that he had maintained almost every day since he was four, and that morning he had assumed it would be just another doing the sthing he had done over a thousand times.

Only he had no idea that the creek he always fished silver perch at, harvested crab gillyweed from, actually harbored a dangerous spirit beast in the core formation realm. The spirit beast in question was a riverstone serpent..." Wu Mingli said as he smiled when he recalled his father's expression as he narrated the story, especially when it cto that riverstone serpent.

At the this understanding of the spirit beast was rudimentary. Their village was at the fringes of the border in sforgotten territory. Their lives were far removed from the rest of the Red Maple Empire, as such they didn't know much be it when it cto cultivation or matters related to it such as knowledge of spirit beasts.

Their knowledge was restricted to the local flora and fauna that neighbored the village, more specifically the ones they interacted with on their day-to-day. He didn't know what a riverstone serpent was, or how terrifying it was.

Only when he moved and was exposed to cultivation-related topics did he realize how lucky he had been. That knowledge and the experience he had with the serpent left him with an inadvertent fear of all snakes be it those without cultivation or those that had it. He feared them all with equal measure, a fact that Wu Mingli exploited when he was young and felt himself bold enough to play a prank on his father with a green snake he had caught in their courtyard.

The prank was successful as he petrified his father and had a great laugh from it, but his joy was short-lived. He shivered slightly as his gaze fell on his mother. Immediately after the prank, his mother gave him the worst beating of his life which left him wondering if they were truly related.

Immediately after the beating she went and bought about five hundred red-scaled spiders, dug a 400-meter pit in their courtyard, and threw him and the spiders in there for a few hours. His father feared snakes, and he feared spiders, specifically the red-scale spiders having been chased by a hoard when they caught him torturing one of their kinsmen.

It was one of the scariest experiences of his life, luckily his father saved him from the torture immediately after he regained his senses from the prank Wu Mingli had pulled on him with the green snake.

Pulling his thoughts back, Wu Mingli continued with the tale.

"Beneath the bedrock of the creek he usually fished at lay a core formation riverstone serpent that had been in hibernation for quite a long time, and if I was to guess it must have been lying there in that state for a few thousand years at least.

The village has been there for almost 3,000 years and in that tnot once has there ever been any recording that mentioned any sighting or encounter of the riverstone serpent.

The serpent was likely inactive during that whole time, otherwise, if it had been active, I doubt the village would have remained active to date..."

Wu Mingli's conjecture wasn't unfounded. A riverstone serpent while not the most ferocious of spirit beasts was still not your garden-variety spirit beast. It was skilled with both water and earth elements, and they were infamous for causing mudslides that would suffocate its victims before it devoured them.

One that was at the core formation realm had the capability of drawing an entire town, maybe even half a city if it was sufficiently motivated. They had the ability to cause widespread destruction and because of their affinity with the water and earth elements, they had terrifying vitality and defenses, one of which involved perfect camouflage in areas that were filled with either water or earth-based spiritual qi.

The incapacitated state of that riverstone serpent was likely the only reason that village remained standing.

Yang Qing couldn't help but sigh at the village's luck. Countless cases of villages being attacked and devoured to the last man were reported to the Order every single day. There were even sthat he couldn't believe what he was reading, such as one village where the villagers were raised like chives by a crimson cloak ape.

The ape raised those villagers like a farmer raised his livestock. It would feed the villagers spiritual fruits and other plants to help improve their strength and health, in a bid to ensure their birth rates would swell and the quality of their bodies would be high. It would then harvest seven of them per year.

That village had been living in that hell for almost 6,000 years up until one of the inquisitors of the Order stumbled onto the village while on a mission and eradicated the ape. But by then the ape had consumed tens of thousands of villagers. Those villagers from the moment they were born, were raised as cattle primed for slaughter.

The fate of Wu Fang's village was far kinder than what other villages faced when they neighbored a spirit beast and they were the weaker party. Wasn't the Deer Mountain Kingdom facing the sissues despite their numbers and the powerful cultivators within their ranks? In saspects they were no different than those villages whose fates were not in their hands but on the whims of the spirit beasts.