Chapter 426 - 227: The Yao Family’s Plan, Little Hidden Dragon (Part 3)

Chapter 426: Chapter 227: The Yao Family’s Plan, Little Hidden Dragon (Part 3)

Ning Zi sighed.

"The Yao family really has fallen into decline. No wonder they’re trying to make their presence felt elsewhere."

"The Demon Sect Saintess was ruthless back then, but the Yao family was also the most provocative. I was only a teenager at the time, but it left a deep impression on me. I can recall the names of at least five of the Yao family’s Grandmasters who were killed."

Qin Zhenyang remarked with a rare sigh of emotion:

"The War of the Eight Sects was truly a great upheaval that reshaped the entire Great Li Empire."

Xie Yuan, Lin Zhen, Huang Zifeng, and the others all nodded silently.

Xie Yuan had heard about it from Situ Qin. Each of the Eight Great Families had lost Grandmasters. Never before had Martial Dao experts seemed so fragile. In one great battle, they fell from the sky like rain before the might of the Stove Sect.

The Stove Sect’s power surpassed even Prajna Temple and the Xuanzhen Sect, earning it the title of the world’s foremost sect. Its top position in the hierarchy of "One Sect, Two Orders, Four Schools, and Eight Families" wasn’t just for poetic effect—it was backed by undeniable strength.

If not for the Demon Sect Saintess’s questionable decision to declare war on all eight families simultaneously instead of focusing her attacks, the Eight Great Families might have been short two or three of their number today.

At that time, members of the great families fell like rain, with devastating casualties. Countless branch families were wiped out overnight, with no survivors. The slaughter was so great that many family members, once proud of their surnames, changed their appearances and went into hiding. The main families could barely fend for themselves, so how could they have time to worry about their branches?

The final climax of that great upheaval, which had swept through the great families and eventually all of Great Li, was when the Saintess found herself besieged by the Grandmasters from three houses: the family of King Langya, the Xie of Chen County, and the Cui of Qing River. Against all odds, she slew the Patriarch of the Chen County Xie, Xie Xuan—who at the time was ranked sixth on the Celestial Dragon List—and departed with ease, leaving the world in terror.

But just when everyone thought the Saintess would return after a period of rest, defeat the Grandmasters of the Wang and Cui families one by one, and then completely annihilate the Eight Great Families, she never appeared again.

The Grandmasters of the Wang and Cui families themselves confirmed that the Saintess had not been severely injured; they even went so far as to petition the imperial court for aid. Yet, just as the court, seeing the Stove Sect’s unstoppable momentum, was preparing to join forces with the great families, the War of the Eight Sects abruptly came to an end on its own.

The War of the Eight Sects had originally started because the great families united to assassinate the King of Pingxi, but in the end, even the imperial family was prepared to join forces with them again, which shows just how great a threat the Saintess and the Stove Sect had become.

But just when the Stove Sect seemed capable of throwing the world into chaos and the Saintess was at the zenith of her power, everything came to a screeching halt.

The Stove Sect, which had hidden its strength for many years, had revealed much of its power, only to be purged afterward by the combined forces of the imperial family and the great families. And still, the Saintess was nowhere to be found.

Many speculated that she had gone completely mad, attempting to break through to the supreme realm above that of a Grandmaster, and died from cultivation deviation;

Many speculated that, unable to bear her heartbreak, her spirit had withered, and she had followed the King of Pingxi into death;

Still others guessed that Zen Monk Ziling and Master Yuxu had intervened to stop the Saintess’s rampage, and that she was still imprisoned in Prajna Temple or on Luofu Mountain to this day. But this claim has never been confirmed by anyone from Prajna Temple or the Xuanzhen Sect.

Even Situ Qin herself didn’t know her mother’s whereabouts, or whether she was alive or dead;

But for at least a year or two after the War of the Eight Sects ended, when she was still just a little girl, she had received cultivation techniques and treasures sent by her mother.

According to Situ Qin’s intuition, her mother was likely still alive, but all contact had been lost, and she had no idea what she was doing.

But even Situ Qin felt a little frightened by the sheer scale of the slaughter back then.

Situ Qin’s original words were:

"Even though I had lost my father and, like my mother, wished for the complete extermination of the Eight Great Families, when she actually led her people on a rampage, creating seas of blood and mountains of corpses, slaughtering everyone, young and old alike... and among them were innocent little girls my own age, and even babies in swaddling clothes... I felt that it was wrong. At least, they were innocent, weren’t they? They had to be...

"But when I heard that she had ordered an entire village slaughtered just because they had sheltered some fleeing family members—that the mountain streams ran red with blood and a peaceful mountain paradise had become a land of ghosts—I... I felt that she was truly wrong.

"She had really gone mad... She was no longer the mother I remembered."

For many years after, Situ Qin felt the cycle of hatred was endless, and so she stopped concerning herself with it. She even felt a faint sense of guilt when she thought of the children who should have grown up just like her, but were brutally killed simply for sharing a surname with a main family they had never even met.

Situ Qin’s true nature was sunny, forthright, kind, and even naive—more like her father, and less like her mother.

Xie Yuan snapped back to the present. The thought of her lovely face, beautiful whether pouting or smiling, made him suddenly miss Yunzhou.

After the War of the Eight Sects, the Yao family—who had been highly active and a key instigator in the plot against the King of Pingxi, hoping to rise among the Eight Great Families—was knocked straight into the abyss, becoming the weakest of them all.

But a thousand-year-old family has deep foundations, and this wasn’t the most dangerous crisis in their history. By relying on their accumulated resources and shrewd maneuvering, they shifted their strategy and managed to stabilize their position.

Onstage, Yao Qinglai spoke at length, but when he saw the open dissatisfaction on the faces of many Martial Artists, a muscle in his temple twitched and he cursed inwardly:

’If only Uncle wasn’t so... aigh. This is all that little thief Xie Yuan’s fault!’

He hastily wrapped up his speech and announced the rules.

The first day would be dedicated to the "Junior Crouching Dragon" matches, where young experts of the Qi Blood First Transformation Realm would be paired off to battle until a victor emerged;

The second day was for the powerhouses of the Second Transformation Realm, who would compete for the crown of the Little Crouching Dragon Tournament.

Aside from rewards like medicinal pills, sharp weapons, and Cultivation Techniques, the most important prize for the winner of the Little Crouching Dragon Tournament was a spot to enter the Jianzhen Lake ruins.

The Jianzhen Lake ruins were a site jointly controlled by several of Great Li’s major families and sects, used for training their disciples. The ruins were relatively stable, making them particularly suitable for exceptional disciples to enter for cultivation and enlightenment. It wasn’t unheard of for disciples blessed with both talent and fortune to experience a meteoric rise after a single visit, breaking through their bottlenecks and advancing directly to the Grandmaster realm.