Sage didn’t let himself get preoccupied with worries over diluting bloodlines. Even if a majority of his grandchildren were half-human, they were still quite formidable and the miasma didn’t bother them. In fact, the most annoying thing was that his children had built their own homes outside of the border of the Purple Mist Sect. Out of worry, a team of Purple Mist Sect members were assigned to each of their families, but that was far less secure than the impenetrable defenses of the Sect proper.

In the interest of letting them retain their freedom he could only step back and let them do as they wished. Thankfully, his fears were unfounded as the reputation of the Purple Mist Sect was terrifying in the neighboring cities. Their mere presence was enough to deter all thoughts of wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, that indomitable reputation was not enduring. After decades of making no major moves and with the constant expansion of territory that was driven by the growing clan, they finally faced some resistance. Yahui’s penchant for creating children finally became a weakness. Yahui was such a loose cannon that keeping track of all his offspring became difficult. Especially since he didn’t pay enough attention to all of his ‘victories’, nor did he bother to report it to the clan.

So, it happened that someone took offense to the Lang Clan’s expansion efforts and captured a pregnant woman that the clan didn’t know existed. They were even patient enough to keep it a secret until the child was a year old and starting to show similar features as its father. By the time Sage heard about it, he was impressed they went to such ends to ensure the mother felt safe and secure enough to carry her pregnancy to term and even past the first few months that were the most difficult. They held onto this bargaining chip of theirs for so long before finally bringing it into use against Yating, Sage’s second son. Yating had formed a chain of herbal shops, following in his mother’s footsteps to start a business. It was even more impressive in that Yating didn’t accept any assistance, building his enterprises all by himself. The only help he’d ever had was the Purple Mist Sect bodyguards and the backing of his substantial name. He said that if he couldn’t be successful with those kinds of benefits then he would accept that he was a giant fool and announce it to the world.

The rival company intended to use Yating’s nephew against him, because they knew the child’s father, Yahui, wouldn’t care one whit, even if he knew of the child’s existence. The clan had even created a sort of single mother’s home that collected all of Yahui’s partners. His children were unfortunate compared to Sage’s other grandchildren, but they were still many times more privileged than the rest of the population of the Inner World, so they had plenty to be thankful for. This thought was something he made sure to instill among these grandchildren, to make sure they realized how lucky they were. Even if their father was a wastrel, they still had plenty of other family to rely upon.

Yating handled the blackmail situation quite excellently, while Sage and Ling watched over the proceedings with worried eyes. As the overlord of this world, Sage could have solved the situation instantly, but he let Yating handle his own business. Since he didn’t come to Sage for help, Sage let him handle the problem on his own. At the same time, he didn’t want anything to happen to one of his grandchildren so that was why he was watching over the events with Ling. At any instant, Sage could use his true body to intervene and pluck the mother and child out of the situation.

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Surprisingly, Yating didn’t use threats of violence or power, but won over his business rival with a legitimate business offer without any strings attached. He didn’t handle it as a hostage exchange or a blackmail at all and even offered them a bonus for finding and rescuing his nephew. Over the coming years, the rival business was turned into a close business partner and the two budding companies were combined into one. Ling was beaming with pride to see her son surpass her in this regard and Sage made sure to lavish her with praise for making such a great kid.

Before he realized what was going on, Sage had already become a great grandfather. With so many grandchildren to visit and arrange trainers and mentors for, the time on the Inner World seemed to fly by and those grandchildren were already starting relationships of their own. The treatment that Bingqing’s and Yujie’s husbands received was available to the whole clan’s prospective spouses, but most of them chose not to lose their humanity and the clan spread to an even wider area.

With time, he had so many great grandchildren he couldn’t even remember all of their names. He also let Ling convince him to put into convention the one she’d used when naming her own children. Most of the given names in this world consisted of two characters, and it was not an uncommon practice for clans to use a single character in every name for all the children of a given generation. Each of Ling’s children had a name that started ‘Ya’, which made it easier for a big clan to keep track of generational seniority. It was an important part of the culture to use the proper titles to denote one’s elders. Along these lines, many clans even had generational poems. It was a poem that included all the generational characters in order, arranged into a poem so it was easy to remember. In fact it was usually undertaken in the opposite order, using a poem of significance to the clan and then using the words from it to name their children.

With how many descendants had already started to appear, he realized this practice would certainly be helpful for keeping track of what generation someone was in. Especially because of the long lifespan of a cultivator. It was easily possible for someone’s great grandfather to look far younger than themself if they had not focused much on cultivation or that great grandfather was extremely talented and advanced at a very young age. Sage thought about creating the poem himself, but he knew little to nothing about the art of poetry. With a language consisting of pictographic characters and many tonal speech, it was not just trying to convey ideas, but also layering multiple meanings into the characters along with making the sounds and tones of the words sound pleasing. To avoid making a mess of things, Sage just hired a scholar to come up with it. Ling and Jiao even turned it into an event, scouring through the many applicants to find a scholarly poet they both agreed with.

Why were there scholars? Well, when Sage started awarding knowledge to the inhabitants of this world for their accomplishments, he made sure to include not just combat techniques and cultivator professions but all the knowledge of the common world that he could get his hands on. Agricultural practices, mortal craftsman and artisanal skills, the mathematical and engineering knowledge that was common, and also the scholarly pursuits of studying literature and poetry. He’d purchased a large library of scrolls and had the Hoplites create and distribute copies to all the cities to disseminate to the public. He had no desire for the Inner World to degenerate into a primitive society after a few generations so he made sure to give them things to build a foundation upon. Also, only the largest city had been managed by the Tiankong Clan, the Prosperity Company, or his Hoplites over the now long history of the Inner World. Many unusual kingdoms had been created and destroyed over that time before reaching the state they were in now with three allied nations existing peacefully.