Yang Qing had a complicated expression as he stared at the carnage going down below him. The earth-shattering explosion was still ongoing and it didn't seem like it would be letting out.
After ten minutes the ground cleared and what was once Ice Emerald Sect was now a shattered charred crater that was over 1000 meters deep.
The main central grounds of the sect occupied about an area of 50,000 square kilometers which was a tenth of the whole area of their sect ground which run for 500,000 square kilometers.
The sect grounds of the Ice Emerald Sect were rather modest in comparison to other organizations of a similar rank that had grounds that ran for millions of square kilometers.
Everything within the central grounds which had borne the brunt of Yang Qing's attacks, anything and everything within the area had been eviscerated which also included all the sect members he had frozen before in glacial ice.
Among those members, there were those who were guilty and there were those who were innocent, however, they all faced the same ending. When the latter group chose to remain behind, they had essentially doomed themselves to suffer the same fate as the guilty ones. Yang Qing had no option but to follow through on the claim he made before.
As things stood, the only members of the Ice Emerald Sect who survived were the seventeen who had decided to leave when Yang Qing made the offer, though technically there were still eighteen survivors, if one was to count the one person who managed to weather through Yang Qing's attack.
At the center of the burned crater, there was a tree that still stood tall with a red-blue dome surrounding it that had numerous cracks on it. However, despite its feeble look, there were undulations of stability coming from that red-blue dome.
The dome vibrated for a few seconds and melted away with the liquid dissolving back into the tree that now had someone coming out of it.
"Yang Qing, here.." Dai Chen said as he handed over a girl who looked to be around fifteen years old to Yang Qing.
She looked to be asleep, while her brows contorted showing deep consternation in her face. She looked like she was having a nightmare. She had black hair mixed with tinges of white, and when one looked at her face, she bore a faint resemblance to Ma Yuan.
"Thank you, Dai.." Yang Qing said as he took over the young girl with relief on his face, which soon turned complicated as he looked at the Wisteria tree below him.
"She had a controlling seal on her, along with a memory-altering gu placed in her brain. I've gotten rid of them, but with the gu, it seems like it has been there for quite some time. It's too early to tell the extent of the damage it had done. I think it's safer if we bring her back with us and have the Medicine Valley look at her for an extended period..." said Dai Chen as he and the three other judges grimly stared in the same direction as Yang Qing.
Before Yang Qing dropped his attack, he had already pin pointed the location of Ma Yuan's daughter. She had been secluded from the rest somewhere and seemed to be in a hypnotic state.
He had Dai Chen grab her just as he was preparing his move.
"I'll tell Ma Yuan when we get back.." answered Yang Qing as pity and sympathy flashed in his eyes as he scanned the fifteen-year-old young girl.
He could detect the remnant effects of the controlling seal on her immature mental sea and foundation pillars, and her mind's fluctuations seemed to be in disarray due to a part of her brain having a hole in it that was closing up.
From the essence he detected from the hole that was closing up, he knew that was the region the gu implanted into her had been nesting in.
Memory-altering gu were special worms that had been soaked in countless precious herbs and certain blood of spirit beasts along with other countless treasures, along with being inscribed with arrays that specifically targetted the mind.
This type of gu required meticulous care and technique to produce, along with an accompanying cultivation art.
This type of gu was highly valued by both heretical and orthodox cultivators due to its purpose. One could use the gu to implant memories into someone, and that person would never be none the wiser that the memories they had were planted.
With the help of this gu, someone who had his loved one's killed, could worship the killer as his/her parents if the killer decided to implant the gu on him and implant memories that made the victim amenable to them.
The gu was highly used in heretical organizations where loyalty was a factor, and even by certain royal families who wanted absolute loyalty from their retainers.
The memory-altering gu came in different grades and qualities depending on the skill used and the quality of ingredients used in making them. One made by someone truly skilled at it would leave the person it was implanted into unaware it was even there until they broke through to the soul formation realm, which by its nature makes cultivators in such a realm, immune to certain abilities, one of which were ones that targetted their minds.
But until then, they would be completely oblivious of it.
The one used on Ma Yuan's daughter was unlikely to be a high-grade one otherwise Dai Chen would not have been able to detect it or remove it as easily.
Yang Qing suspected it was either a two-ringed or three-ringed gu. Their qualities were determined by the rings it formed when being made. One was the lowest and five was the highest. A five-ringed gu would remain undetected to a domain expert.
It was truly an insidious technique and the preferred weapon of choice when controlling someone or when planting a mole because of how difficult it was to detect it, from both outsiders and the person under its effects.
Yang Qing had no doubt that it wasn't only Ma Yuan's daughter who had the memory-altering gu implanted in her, others from the sect had likely fallen victim to it, maybe even the elders down to the sect master who was now gone, had it implanted on them.
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