Yang Qing took a few deep breaths to calm himself as he exorcised the treasonous and envious thoughts that were welling up within him.

Once his heart and mind were clear, Yang Qing hesitantly poured his concentration back into the scroll.

"I was taken aback by the level of generosity and had even thought of rejecting the treasures, but they were saint-grade treasures, only a lunatic would refuse..."

Yang Qing nodded agreeably as he read that sentence, nodding his head a few more times with staunch conviction. After getting the feel of the wonderous might of saint-grade treasures during his promotion ceremony, he has been daydreaming about getting one of his own. One could even say it had easily wormed its way into one of his life's ambitions along with living safely and long. He would not trust anyone who said they could refuse saint-grade treasures.

"Pretentious murderous hypocrites.." he thought to himself with a snort before delving back into the scroll."For the next eight years, I stayed at the academy as its dean and trained countless talents, some with even enough talent to rival mine...

Ever since I opened my eyes, and felt the warm inviting currents of the flow of dao, got nurtured, nourished, and interacted with it, I was inexplicably influenced by its sense of purity, which was why when it came to the impartation of knowledge and understanding, I never held back on it.

Other than the arts and techniques I received from the Jade Leaf Empire, I shared all I knew with students of the Academy. All my insights, accumulations, experiences, the arts that I created over the years, and some of the legacies I found in the unexplored ruins, I shared it all without reservation much to the surprise of most, especially my colleagues who were not citizens of the Bi Xie Empire.

Most of them held back in their impartation, which I didn't fault them for, but to me, out of the dao were we birthed, and into the dao will we go when our time comes. Hoarding wisdom serves no purpose other than to shackle one's spirit, mind, and heart.

By not sharing, you're inadvertently admitting you're afraid, afraid that you're inferior to the other person, that if they learn what you know, their exploits will further outshine yours. That fear will burrow into your heart and mind and slowly eat away at you, stifling any progress and heights you could have ever reached

The dao is free-flowing and endless, we can never exhaust it, it is better to share and see how much we can travel and explore in that never-ending mystery. I've always been excited to see the countless forms and interpretations others make with it, even rudimentary ones because I get to see and experience something special from it.

It was the one thing I appreciated about the Jade Leaf Empire. While they didn't have academies like the Bi Xie Empire, the royal family never held back in allowing others to cultivate beneath the ten thousand dao jade tree, be it commoner or noble, as long as they displayed sufficient talent worthy of the recognition of the jade tree, they would get the opportunity. It was how I, who came from a common birth managed to reach the heights that I reached in a short period. The Empire never held back.

I think if an academy like the Bi Xie Empyrean Chronicle was set in the Jade Leaf Empire, even if we can't compete fully in resources, with the ten thousand dao jade leaf tree as its foundation and the spirit of the Empire, it is bound to do better than this one. It wouldn't be a bad idea to set up one there.

Because of my work, the Bi Xie Empire thought me selfless as some reincarnated sage when in truth I was anything but selfless. All that I did was to further my self-

interests and curiosities about how many mysteries of the Dao I would get to see through the lives of those students, but I wasn't going to admit that to them because I finally got the chance I was looking for when I first took the job.

I managed to become close with some of the leading figures of the empire, one of them being the Emperor's brother. I found a kindred spirit in him, as he too was a soul that loved delving into the mysteries of the grand dao, and we managed to strike a friendship and even became sworn brothers as a result.

It was from him that I learned the history of the empire, the one that only those who were there at the start knew of. The founder of the Empire, the Wang family patriarch, in his youth he had been forcibly conscripted when his kingdom formerly called the White Mulberry Kingdom went to war with a cult called the purgatory black tiger cult, which sought to destroy the kingdom after the crown prince had killed the cult's holy child over a fight over some treasure.

I didn't know of the cult, but from what the Emperor's brother told me, they were pretty nefarious, and the kingdom and the cult were always at odds with each other like water and fire and the death of their holy child was just the spark needed to trigger an all-out war.

The cult had a skill called the purgatory flames of damnation whose flames never stopped burning as long as there were corpses around. It used negative feelings such as despair, resentment, bitterness, rage, and desperation as fuel along with the baleful energy released from corpses.

The flames had terrifying abilities such as corrupting and contaminating the spiritual qi with its energy poisoning those within its sphere of influence. It could also trap the souls of those who fell to it, and use their dying wails to destroy the souls and minds of others, and it could even forcibly reanimate the corpses for a brief while to cause corpse explosions that were as terrifying as a cultivator self-destructing.

Hearing those effects, it wasn't strange that the longer the battle between the two sides went on, the worse things got for the White Mulberry Kingdom, who only managed to hold on because of their famed White Mulberry Tree that had a purifying ability that could slightly contain the purgatory flames of damnation...