Core room of the Bluefin

"Oh.. seems like my hunch was right. He isn't just your typical palace realm cultivator.." Bai Chen muttered as he sensed Yang Qing's aura suddenly vanish.

Even though the gold-tiered chambers were cloaked in blue-grade arrays that had isolation and presence-cloaking effects, with the orb he had in his hands which was the controller of every aspect of the ship from the flying to the arrays, he could sense what was happening throughout the ship.

Though he didn't actively spy on his guests, with the orb he could feel their presence and states, but a few seconds ago Yang Qing's presence disappeared completely, even hiding from the orb which was a top-tier monarch-grade artifact.

The reason he had volunteered to fly Yang Qing was because he had sensed Yang Qing's presence and bearing wasn't the same as others, there was something unique about it, just the pressure of his cultivation base was enough to draw his attention. He was at the fourth stage but when facing Yang Qing, despite the latter having a lower cultivation base in the second stage, Bai Chen felt a slight pressure coming from him, as to why he felt that way his experience at Jade Leaf Academy was enough to give a few reasons.When he joined the Jade Leaf Academy, he had not yet stepped into the foundation establishment realm, but because of the care and training given to him, his foundations as a qi refinement cultivator were deep enough to gain him admission into the Academy.

A few months in he broke through to the foundation establishment realm with blue-grade pillars. Despite the bluefin spine-tailed swift being a spirit beast to whom grade of pillars had no significance as spirit beasts relied on refining the entire bodies to be one with the dao, the bluefin spine-tailed swift knew extensively about the grade of pillars and other aspects of human cultivation which she didn't hesitate to educate Bai Chen deeply on, till at one point Bai Chen even suspected she was a human pretending to be a spirit beast.

Of the knowledge and wisdom she poured on him, one of them was the grade of pillars and cores and their significance, so he knew what an astounding achievement it was to get blue-grade pillars. Were he anywhere else such an achievement would have been worthy of praise and in some organizations, he would have even been nurtured as a prized seedling but he was in the Jade Leaf Academy, a ground that housed crouching dragons and hidden dragons.

It was there that he got first-hand experience on the fundamental difference between the different grades of the foundation pillars and the cores, which was how he knew for a fact, that Yang Qing had to have had pillars that were at least in the gold grade when he was in the foundation establishment realm following him all the way through to the core formation realm.

The heavy presence he felt coming from him could only come from someone who had deeper foundations than him. It was the same sensation he felt from the academy students with gold-grade and purple-grade pillars and cores. Even with a weaker cultivation base, their presence never lost out to those they were in the same realm with. This was why he was prompted to pilot the trip himself despite not being in the books for it.

To him, someone with Yang Qing's foundations was anything but simple, and with his own background, he could only strengthen himself through the connections he made along the way, which was something he came to be painfully aware of.

Sometimes just being strong wasn't enough, it could only be enough if you had strength capable of shaking an entire continent and an entire era, but if you didn't, the connections were needed, especially as a rogue cultivator where you only had yourself to depend on. He had gotten where he was because of it, and it was the last lesson given to him by the Bluefin spine-tailed swift who raised.

Pushing away the melancholic thoughts that were welling up within him, Bai Chen focused his senses on the orb in his hand which he used to navigate the ship.

...

Yang Qing's chambers.

"Now let's see who Vice Warden Shao An chose for me.." muttered Yang Qing as he used his spiritual essence to unlock the black jade slip in his hands to read its contents. The slip flashed with hundreds of runes and glyphs being lit up before it dimmed out a second later with its contents being poured into Yang Qing's mind.

Guardian new moon spirit, Luo Suyin, sentenced to 100,000 years, has served 400 years of that sentence. Luo Suyin is a saber whose spirit awakened upon the untimely demise of its wielder, Luo Xue.

Luo Xue was the only child of Luo Shen, a blacksmith who lived in the frontier village in Gentle Rock kingdom, a rank 3 kingdom that has existed for 37,000 years. Luo Shen had once been an apprentice for the royal blacksmith and was suited to be his successor, however, he resigned from his post when he fell in love with one of the palace attendants, and together they left the capital for one of the remote villages in the kingdom.

The process went smoothly in part due to the support of the royal blacksmith who was highly regarded in the kingdom and the king at the time.

When he left the palace, Luo Shen had been in the middle stages of the core formation realm and an orange-grade blacksmith, while his wife, Wen Yu had been at the peak stage of the foundation establishment realm, with both being cultivators as imagined it took a while before they conceived a child, almost a century passing by before they finally had one, their daughter, Luo Xue whom they both adored immensely.

However, tragedy struck four years after her birth when her mother went with her to the neighboring forest to harvest some herbs as had been their routine. Only this time there was something different, they were attacked by a deer horned boa that had wandered onto the periphery of the forest where they had been...