"All that will have to wait until after I've left this place..." Yang Qing muttered as he poured his concentration back on the slip.

Even though the founding families were his primary suspects, the small aristocratic families still had to be given due consideration. Who knows the mastermind might have come from there, keeping a low profile, hiding in plain sight.

For the next few hours, Yang Qing learned everything and anything he could about them. He supplemented the information on the jade slip from what the Library had in stock which turned out to be pretty extensive.

By the time he was done, he knew as much about those families as a rival spy would. But no matter how much information he had gathered about them, he still wasn't any closer to unmasking the identity of the culprit, which he had half expected from the start. Considering the mastermind was gutsy enough to remain even after the Order built their branch in the area, and still continue scheming with what they suggested to the Hua clan and the rest, it showed the mastermind was confident they would not be found out.

All Yang Qing was hoping for was to luck out on a needle, but if he missed the needle the information provided would at least help him know about the haystack he was investigating.

The small aristocratic families that joined later came as an invite of the six families, with some only choosing to come after they had made a solid footing, while others were settlers in different parts of the range. With the founding families establishing a foothold in the range, those families gravitated toward them. Their rationale was fairly understandable. In a place filled with spirit beasts, humans would naturally converge towards those of their kind even if they knew next to little about one another.That thought and the subsequent reaction was what became the foundation of the Deer Mountain Kingdom, with many of the human inhabitants of the range moving there when they heard of a place that had powerful cultivators with a foothold already established and was welcoming of those willing to join them.

In a few short years, the embryonic form of the Deer Mountain Kingdom was established. Yang Qing read through the jade slips along with every other information regarding the kingdom but none of them mentioned how it is they came to choose their current location.

His suspicious side kept looking for anything that seemed to suggest they already knew about the place beforehand, and not that they chose to settle in the area because it was one of the few areas in the range that powerful spirit beasts had not completely claimed. When he interacted with Gu Xing she had mentioned that Lady Gild avoided that location after discovering it contained the ruins of the Bi Xie Empire.

Yang Qing's gaze inadvertently moved over to the two statues in the midst of mulling over his suspicions.

"If it wasn't deliberate, and was just because it was the area with the least spirit beast presence, could those spirit beasts have avoided the area because of the presence of those statues?" murmured Yang Qing.

Though the statues were not the real thing, they still contained the aura and essence of a Tian Lu and Bi Xie. He had read accounts and even seen it first hand at the Blood charcuterie market town, how strong bloodline suppression was among spirit beasts. Even after a powerful spirit beast had left an area for years, as long as its aura lingered in the area, those weaker than it would be too petrified to come close to the area.

Yang Qing couldn't help but think that maybe the same thing was happening with the statues.

"But none of that matters.." said Yang Qing as he shook his head in disappointment.

"None of the information I have seems to connect any one of them to that mysterious black figure.."

The jade slip had a detailed record of the well-known cultivation arts of the noble families of the kingdom, it even went beyond just the noble families, as any notable figure known to have appeared in the kingdom whether they were associated with the noble families or not, their information was recorded in the information.

There had been a few talents that had appeared outside of the noble families who rose to prominence, which the slip highlighted, but none of them, or the noble families seemed to have any mentioned technique, special physique, or treasure that had the effects of breaking the mind and spirit of a cultivator by subjecting them to a harrowing torment of a stygian ocean filled with the wails of the dead like the lunar fury heron had described.

Yang Qing spent a few minutes trying to see if there was anything he had missed, and when he didn't, he ultimately shelved the matter as he proceeded to another line of deductions which was to confirm that indeed the Deer Mountain Range and the kingdom were in the former territory of the Bi Xie Empire. What he was specifically interested in was the capital of the Bi Xie Empire,the capital of Deer Mountain Kingdom, and lastly the capital of the White Mulberry Kingdom.

From the background done by Long Wan, he had mentioned that the Wang Patriarch established the capital of the Bi Xie empire in the first purification zone where he found the two statues.

Via the Xuanwu token on his shoulder, he asked for all maps associated with the three nations. He had not been too sure he would get one of the White Mulberry Kingdom considering it predated the existence of the Bi Xie Empire. Still, luckily, the Library seemed to have four maps, though they seemed to differ from one another in terms of scale and details. Still, the core details such as the capital was similar among the four along with some semblance of similarity in the outline of the entire territory of the White Mulberry Kingdom which was all Yang Qing wanted.

The BiXie Empire had about a dozen maps, which had little variation from one another. Yang Qing eventually settled on using just one after he compared them against each other. As for the map of the Deer Mountain Range, Yang Qing chose two variations, he chose the oldest copy and the newest, with both having the territory of the Deer Mountain Kingdom outlined.

After he had finished his selection he poured his qi into all the maps which turned them translucent and then he went for the map of the White Mulberry Kingdom and placed it at the bottom followed by the map of Bi Xie Empire, and finally at the top was the old version of the Deer Mountain Range.

Once the three maps overlapped each other, Yang Qing produced a small light that looked like a miniaturized gentle moon glow from the bottom of the pile which triggered a chain reaction from the map as it created well-defined features within the three maps, making it look like one, yet distinctively three at the same time.

Yang Qing moved the maps slightly till finally he found what he was looking for.

"They were one and the same.." he muttered with a shining glow in his eyes as he looked at the regional boundaries outlined on the maps that made it seem like the three maps were the same, with the one from the Deer Mountain Range looking like it had been chipped off from the other two.