"Seems like you're easing into your new role rather well..." Yu Gen teased at the side.
"It's only because those involved were upstanding and the details you dug up were sufficient to reach a conclusion quickly.
Thank you for your help..."
Yang Qing was grateful to the two inquisitors for their in-depth investigations but the character of the three parties in the case also helped.
Had the Mountain Guarding Array Manor insisted that they had been slandered by Tang Qi, Yang Qing would have had to bring in three independent formation array masters of good repute to give their own opinions on the arrays at Tang Qi's abode.
Each master giving their own explanation would have taken at least half an hour each. Who knows, maybe he may have ended up with a rather talkative formation master who would veer off-topic and even delve into the history of those arrays like some instructors he had met at the Institute. Something that should have taken a few minutes to explain would turn into a full-day lecture.
The Manor Master Su Ye accepting their fault in the matter, removed the need to involve those formation array masters. Though Yang Qing felt pained since he would still have to pay them regardless of whether they testified or not since they had already investigated the Tang Qi's abode and the results were more or less the same as what Manor Master Su Ye had said.
Handling the Silver Blade sect was the easiest part since the evidence that put them in the wrong was already as clear as day and for them, there was already more than one evidence that nailed them to the coffin.
There was the saber qi present in the sect master Shao Rong and his disciple. The saber qi had the same quality as Tang Qi which proved their cultivation arts had the same origins.
The next piece of evidence was the contract between Tang Qi and the Mountain Guarding Array Manor that had the date the contract was established, written on it.
There was a universal guideline established when it came to the exploration of ruins which was unanimously agreed by three-quarters of the organizations that supported the founding of the Order.
The guideline was an Article called the Ruin Exploration article which was established as a preventive measure for the exact same thing that happened to Tang Qi.
Cultivators would go into seclusion for long periods of time and sometimes it may go beyond the planned timeline.
For example, a palace realm cultivator in the middle stages had a lifespan of 20,000 years. When such a cultivator went into seclusion, it could go from a few hundred years to a few thousand years, and within that timeframe, a lot could change one of which was the withering of their arrays or guarding treasures suddenly malfunctioning within such a period of time. And if the cultivator is in deep seclusion they may not realize their abode is exposed and with the withering of time, the abode may end up being mistaken for the ruins of a lost organization.
Therefore a stipulation was placed. There was a 5,000-year time limit placed in ruin exploration. A party could rightfully keep the gains of a place if the place in question looks to have been abandoned for more than five thousand years.
However if before five thousand years, the rightful owner is proven to be alive and well, or their descendant or legacy inheritor, they are to be compensated everything that was taken along with additional charges depending on how what they took altered their growth. The more monumental the change, the larger the charges imposed.
Other than cultivators going into seclusion, there were those who would go to explore mysterious realms or other places and would not be around for years, only to find their abodes or establishments have been ransacked and treated as ruins that were free for all to explore.
A lot of small-scale and large-scale battles appeared because of it which prompted the article to be established.
Among the major cases that prompted the establishment of the article was where an elder of a rank 3 sect who was in the palace realm ended up stumbling across an abode of a domain expert who was a high elder of a rank 2 clan.
That domain expert liked exploring the continent and would constantly move from place to place which left her little time to return to her clan headquarters, so she had the habit of building abodes that were spread about all around the continent.
As a result, she has over a thousand abodes spread about the continent, and each of those abodes is filled with various treasures she collects in her travels.
It just so happened that one of her abodes, by some twist of fate had its defenses weakened when a few cultivators fought a few thousand kilometers from where her abode was.
For the shockwaves to reach that far, it is assumed the cultivators were at the very least in the domain realm, but many who studied the events that happened after felt the cultivators were at least in the peak stages of the domain realm because the after-effects of their fight were sufficient to cause cracks in a top tier blue grade formation at the abode just from fighting over a thousand kilometers away.
Over a thousand years later the formation guarding her abode had weakened greatly, and since she was always moving about and had thousands of abodes spread about, that flaw in her formation was never fixed and the palace realm sect elderwas drawn to her abode due to the leaking energy of some of her treasures.
When he arrived at the site and saw the degrading blue-grade formation, he instantly assumed that the place was likely some abandoned abode of a long-forgotten organization.
It had all the telltale signs of one. There was no one in there, and it didn't look like anyone had lived there for years. It had a degraded top-tier blue grade formation which he assumed had degraded due to time, and the owner was likely dead since there was no way they would leave the place unattended especially not with the top-tier monarch grade treasures he had felt from within it.
With a heavy sense of responsibility to not leave the treasures without an owner, he decided to do the selfless thing and take them under his care.
So with great effort he broke through the degraded top tier blue grade formation array guarding the place and made away with all the items in there.
He left with a lot of valuable items from the abode. There were monarch-grade herbs, and other natural treasures, a few necklaces and artworks in the monarch grade that the domain clan elder had made along with several blue-grade cultivation arts and maps and journals that detailed the domain expert's experience within certain mysterious realms that were in the area.
That elder did the sensible thing he could do after getting the items which was to use them to make himself stronger first. Before he explored the 'ruin' he had been at the third stage of the palace realm but after he used a few of the treasures from the abode his strength experienced a massive jump.
In fifteen years, his strength leaped to the sixth stage of the palace realm, and was just inches away from breaking through to the seventh stage and becoming a late-stage palace realm expert.
With his newfound strength, he made his way back to his sect and reasonably asked the sect master who was at the fourth stage of the palace realm to retire, which resulted in the sect master getting crippled after the discussion and a few of his supporters mysteriously disappearing over the next few years.
That elder became the next sect master. With his power as sect master, he mobilized the strength of the sect and explored the few ruins listed in the journal of the domain expert. Even though they didn't find extremely valuable resources, they still found enough to catapult their sect into a major hegemon in their area, and in thirty years the number of palace realm experts within their ranks had increased from 11 to 34 and the sect master was already a ninth stage palace realm expert.
However all that changed a few years later when that domain expert realized one of her abodes had been robbed and with the skills of a domain realm cultivator, it wasn't hard for her to track those items to the doors of that sect.
The domain expert on reaching that sect was pretty reasonable with her demands and didn't kill them outright. She just casually destroyed their sect guarding array and casually displayed the prestige of a domain expert by crippling the cultivation base of a few(14) palace realm experts of the sect before she gave her demands, which was compensation on the items taken and she would forget the matter.
She seemed to have a merchant's background because she tabulated the owed amount to the last spirit stone whose amount would have left the sect in the hole for 10,000 years but at least they'd get to exist.
She gave them half an year to come up with the amount, in addition, she had also put forth a special arrangement in the deal where they'd get to be her assistants in the exploration of various mysterious realms and grottos she had information on.
On the surface, that sect seemed to agree with her demands, but there was no way a sect that had just tasted the heights of power and with a sect master who had murdered another sect master for that position just agree like that. So they did what they thought was the best solution which was to hire assassins to hunt that domain expert and pay them a third of the amount she asked for.
In addition, they also leaked that the expert had a few treasure maps that led to ancient legacies for good measure, so that the organization would be sufficiently motivated, and gave up copies of some of the journals they had stolen from her abode as proof.
What they didn't know was that they had kicked a hornet's nest. The domain expert was a member of a long-established rank 1 clan, and even without them, the woman herself was powerful by her lonesome as a sword domain user, and she also had numerous connections, especially with the merchant and auction houses due to her reputation as a treasure hunter, so it wasn't hard for her to find out what that sect had done using their information network.
That sect along with the assassin organizations they hired disappeared overnight.
Other than them, numerous other organizations have fallen due to the exact same reason minus a few details. They end up stumbling in some area they assume to be abandoned or sometimes they conveniently ignore clues that it may not be abandoned due to cultivators' greed, and they end up inviting calamity upon themselves.
To deal with this issue, the ruin exploration article was established, which was meant to deter exploration without due diligence but also to avoid total annihilation by having the Order step in and act as a mediator between the two parties just like what the Silver Blade Sect had done.
They knew they were in the wrong and were the weaker party, so their only path of survival was to involve the Order in the process. Even if they may end up paying through the arm in reparations, at least the sect would be intact in the end.
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