Chapter 900 Terms of the deal (5)

?Even with the faintness of the voice, everyone could feel the grand presence and power within. All, from the core formation experts present to the domain experts, were slightly affected by the sense of majesty and power within that voice.

How could they not, when said voice was delivered through one of the most powerful dao natural treasures known in the entire continent, the Ten Thousand Dao World Jade Tree, the foundation of the behemoth that was Jade Leaf Empire and the aforementioned Jade Leaf Academy. A natural treasure rumored to have escaped the confines of a saint-grade treasure.

Feeling just a tiny bit of the profound power it contained, Yang Qing couldn’t help but feel curious about how it would feel like standing before the real thing if just a tiny portion of its aura was this impactful.

Just this tiny exposure left him feeling like his mind had been given a sudden jolt as countless ideas that he had been ruminating on over the past few months were suddenly being transformed from a jumbled mess with no clear path, and now they were being smoothened out and he could roughly sense the path he should tread on.

Yang Qing’s look turned pensive as a certain memory surfaced in his mind, triggered by his current state.

“This feeling.. it is eerie similar to the feeling I got from that book. However, the reaction is different. The book’s effect was much more tyrannical. It seemed to have had a demand on one’s comprehension.

My comprehension isn’t bad even when compared to those from the Order, but even with old Lei reducing the book’s effect, the flood of insights rushing into my mind made me feel like my brain and soul were about to explode, but the jade tree’s sensation is different. It is milder, more like a patient and kind teacher meeting the student at the level they are art.

With such a treasure, no wonder the Jade Leaf Empire has existed for so long. With its effects, who knows how many hidden dragons and tigers lurk within it? Them being dubbed a quasi-holy land may be an underestimation of their true strength..” thought Yang Qing as his attention drifted off to the rest.

They all had mixed reactions with the most intense being on Duan Hu, whose impassive look finally had strong emotions reflected on it, and it was of fear and shock.

When he walked into the courtroom, he instantly recognized Wu Mingli and his mother. When Wu Fang’s matter happened, he investigated everything related to him, and that of course included his family.

Before he gave the nod to have Wu Fang handed to the store owner of the Green Dragon General Store, he had personally paid them a visit on the day of the incident and saw the family sitting together in their backyard, as Wu Fang leisurely drank his wine while sharing his tales with an attentive Wu Mingli.

He only ever saw them that once, and it was over 200 years ago, but with the sharp memory of a palace realm expert, anything he saw even just in passing, whether it happened yesterday, 10 years ago, 100 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, the memory of that moment would be as vivid as someone reliving that memory in its entirety.

He may have not thought about Wu Mingli, or his father for those 200 years, but the instant he saw him, even though he had changed from the youth he was with a qi refinement cultivation base, and transformed drastically, into a young man with a quasi palace stage cultivation, Duan Hu still instantly recognized both him and his mother, despite the changes that had happened to both.

And the moment he did, all he could think about was how horrible his luck over the past few months had been. He clashed with an official of the Order when he, Lin Duyi, and Yao De were attempting to capture Ellie. The act landed them a beating, and imprisonment, which in turn led to the uncovering of a whole heap of worms, and now one of those uncovered worms had grown into a dragon that was after his head.

He could already tell Wu Mingli’s foundations were much stronger than he had been at his stage, and he did not doubt that if Wu Mingli broke through to the palace realm, he would not be his match.

The turn out of the battle would be just as similar to what happened when they fought against Yang Qing, if it could even be called that. He was a third-stage palace realm expert, Yao De was at the second stage, while Lin Duyi was at the first stage, but with the treasures he had on him, he could hold his own against a regular third-stage palace realm expert like himself.

But despite all three of them working together, they were still slapped around by Yang Qing. With the powerful fluctuations Wu Mingli released, he felt fairly certain that there was a possibility he could replicate that same feat, and even if he couldn’t defeat all three as Yang Qing, at the very least when facing one of the three, he would be able to defeat them with the same ease as Yang Qing did.

The instant he came to that conclusion, he began to worry. His worry wasn’t at the prospect of being defeated. Wu Mingli may have contained his emotions well, but Duan Hu had been an emperor facing treachery on all sides, Wu Mingli was a thousand years too young to hide his true thoughts from him. 𝔣𝔯𝔴𝖇𝖓𝔬𝖛𝔩.𝖈𝔬𝖒

He knew the look of a man seeking vengeance, and considering the history, he knew he was one of the targets of that vengeance. With the choices he made, and the direction he led the Empire in, and the things that happened, he knew one of those choices would come back to haunt him at some point in his life if he lived that long.

He had long surrendered himself to the possibility that someone may one day come to collect on the many debts he owed, and he had made his peace with it. When that moment came, he would face it head-on, and if he died in the process, so be it.

As long as he was the only one to pay that price, he was okay with it, but Wu Mingli had him worried, and it wasn’t the defeat that had him worried, but rather the implications behind his strength.

Someone doesn’t just become that strong, in such a short amount of time, without a force behind it. Over 200 years ago, Wu Mingli was just 16 years old and in the qi refinement realm, but jump forward 200 years, he was already a quasi-

palace stage expert, with terrifying foundations.

Such a result could have only been the work of something powerful. Either a powerful treasure that can do astronomical things such as give a 16-year-old youth a stupendous transformation to the quasi-palace stage, or there was a powerful organization behind the transformation. He was more inclined to believe the latter. Such an implication terrified him because it meant whoever his backer was, they could produce a powerful quasi-palace realm expert like him in a short 200 years.

By his guess, not many organizations could pull that off, and those that he thought could, were bound to be organizations that the Red Maple Empire could not afford to offend. As an emperor and the chaos surrounding him, he had long grown accustomed to assuming worst-case scenarios, rather than best-case scenarios, so he is not caught flatfooted, and in his worst-case scenario, he had Wu Mingli belonging to an organization that was maybe at the same caliber as the Golden Bamboo Pavilion, not once had he thought he would have a behemoth like the Jade Leaf Academy backing worth.

The Red Maple Empire wasn’t worth a fart when compared to such an institution. Wu Mingli belonging to some rank two organization already made him nervous to no end, as he thought of the possibility of Wu Mingli using said backer to not only punish him, but the entire Empire, …but the Jade Leaf Academy ….his mind was shocked beyond comprehension, to even contemplate the implications of having created an irreconcilable feud with one of their members.

He had gone beyond just feeling frightened. Even their founder, despite his domain-level strength, would not be able to subvert the danger if the Academy was dead set on destroying the Empire. The threat factor of the academy was at a different level. It was to the level that even figures like one of the leaders of the Golden Bamboo Pavilion Lin Guiren, or a haughty person like Cai Hong, or the Imperial Household Manager of the Gold Leaf Empire, a rank one entity, itself, the same as the Academy, all of them without exception had grim expressions on their faces, when that warning was issued.

All Duan Hu could think of was in trying to avoid a mess he had ended up creating a disaster. He wondered at this point if his life was even enough to quell a bit of that disaster.

The fact that the Academy was willing to threaten a renowned rank two organization like the Golden Bamboo Pavilion meant that Wu Mingli was valued by them. It was for this reason that Duan Hu didn’t feel his worries about the Empire currently hanging at a precipice, being too outlandish. It was a very real possibility.

“What kind of luck is this?” he bitterly thought as he hoped Wu Mingli’s ire would just be on him, Shao Ren, and the deceased commander.