"We would also like to offer your thanks for the information that you have shared with us today and your willingness and the lengths you went to do it.
You can rest easy Patriarch Tang Wenyan. The Order will take up your great-great grandfather's decree on behalf of your clan and fulfill it.
We will seek retribution for the Shu Wen and the Shu clan as a whole.." said Yang Qing.
"Thank you.." Tang Wenyan softly mumbled half choked up in emotions.
After he regained himself he was led away by Xia Ting as they brought in other witnesses.
Yang Qing and the rest of the panel heard their accounts one by one, which slowly painted the picture of how dark the Ice Emerald Sect was.
The Shu clan wasn't the only clan to get slaughtered throughout the years. Between 40,000 years to 30,000 years ago, the killings were more prevalent in that period than in any other period and were not as meticulous as they are now.
Around 40,000 years ago, the Order wasn't around, so sect and clan annihilations were a regular occurrence, which is why it became easy for Yu Gen and the rest to dig out clues that tied back to the Ice Emerald Sect since back then they didn't bother to hide their fingerprints in most of those killings.
Yang Qing and the rest were shocked to discover that some of their members knew the non-luminous dissecating ghost yin flame even from 40,000 years ago.
While they didn't know the exact identity of the perpetrators since they didn't match the current lineup of the sect's hierarchy, the technique they used had similarities to their current core cultivation art the Emerald frost flow veiled scripture.
Using the shard they got from Ma Yuan it wasn't hard to use it as a point of reference and draw similarities to the witness account statements that were being given.
The witness testimonies finally ended with two individuals. It was a man and a woman who both seemed elderly and had varying cultivation bases.
The woman was a lady who looked to be in her early sixties. She was the maidservant of a princess of a rank 4 kingdom that had long changed its name from the Han Kingdom to the Chu Kingdom.
She was an eighth-stage core formation expert who was currently a supreme elder of the Mulberry Sect which was a rank 4 sect that was rated among the top tier sects in the rank 4 sector. It was skilled in alchemy and palm techniques. It had a balance of both the combat aspect and the alchemy aspect and was one of the rare all-rounded sects in the lower stratum that had shown a perfect balance in both combat and non-combative aspects.
The elderly lady was called Dai Ya and had been with the Mulberry Sect for 1,800 years. She had joined as an outer sect disciple and slowly made her way up the ranks till she became a supreme elder, and she was one of seven within the sect.
Before that, she was one of the maidservants who worked for the fifth princess of the Chu Kingdom, formerly the Han Kingdom. The name of the kingdom changed 2,400 years ago when the royal family that went under the Han name was slaughtered within the royal palace.
Their deaths looked like the work of a skilled assassin, as every single member died from a single slit to the throat, and no commotion was made even as over 100 of the royal clan members were killed.
The array protecting the palace looked to have been broken effortlessly, and the royal clan members even to their death seemed unaware of how they had died.
The fifth princess had been away from the palace at the time, so she escaped the massacre and became the only survivor of the Han royal family. As the only surviving member, it meant she was the next one in line for the throne, but it also meant she was the stopping block for all the major families that wanted to be the next rulers of the Han Kingdom.
Realizing the precarious position she was in, she decided to escape from the Han Kingdom along with a few of her guards and maid servants of which Dai Ya was one as they made their way to any other place but the Han Kingdom. She had the other aristocrats to watch out for and the mysterious killer who had just assassinated her entire clan. The Han Kingdom was the last place someone like her could be in.
The escape wasn't easy because they had few resources, and some of the former allies turned traitors, which put her life and escape in jeopardy. The princess ended up dying about four years later from succumbing to her wounds, and the grief of losing her entire family. Dai Ya was one of the few in her retinue who survived.
About 20 years later the Chu clan which was one of the four most powerful clans in the Han Kingdom managed to win out in the struggle for the throne and renamed the Han Kingdom into the Chu Kingdom.
Dai Ya in the meantime moved from place to place until she was at the doors of the Mulberry Sect. Years later when she was an elder at the sect, did she use the powers afforded to her as an elder of the sect to find out the goings of the Chu family and also to try and dig up what happened to the Han family all those years ago and who was behind it.
It was in those investigations that she discovered that the legacy art of the Han family was not found when the rest broke into the royal palace. And even after a couple of centuries of the Chu family being in power, they never obtained any trace of it. The legacy art along with a few key treasures of the Han royal family were said to have been looted by the killer.
The whole murder and even the theft of the royal treasury ended up being pinned on the fifth princess, who people knew was the only survivor but didn't know that she died a couple of years later.
Dai Ya assumed that the rumor being spread was a ploy made by the Chu family to discredit the fifth princess in front of the masses by accusing her of regicide, patricide, and the murder of her whole family. With such a reputation hanging over her, her odds of trying to seize back the throne would be lessened.
Even though Dai Ya was incensed by the ploy, she finally gained a clue as to the death of the Han royal family, which could have been due to their cultivation art. While she didn't know the particulars of the art, she did know of its name, which the fifth princess excitedly mentioned to her when she was told she had met the qualifications to cultivate it.
The art was called the hearthfrost spear dome. She had also heard from her that the art was just but a part of an art known as the Frozen Serenity Scripture. The founder of the Han family found the hearthfrost spear dome art through a lucky encounter and he who was once a servant for some mercenary organization rose up to create the Han family and later the Han Kingdom.
All the success he achieved was thanks to that cultivation art, and the Han maintained its hold over the Han Kingdom later thanks to that cultivation art.
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