Yating was an exquisite businessman, like his mother, so Sage expected the new Lang Clan to flourish. The Prosperity Company had also sent many people out of the Inner World to build their numbers, and Ling would definitely be using them to assist the Lang Clan. Sage was quite confident in their skills, so he didn’t feel any conflict over keeping this new influx of wealth to himself. Especially since he was already wondering what sorts of gifts he would give them all. Thinking in this direction, Sage remembered he also had the full fortune that Jinxi Po had been carrying around. Sadly, the majority of that fortune was in the form of weapons and equipment, of which a large majority seemed to be expendable tokens and talismans. Even so, it was still sure to be worth quite a bit as long as he could find the proper channels to trade it away.
Well, that or he could supply it to the Clan to build up a sort of armory, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to have them rely so much on things that had to be purchased and they could not produce. He felt it was better for the Clan’s weapons and equipment to be things they could make on their own so they wouldn’t ever be caught at the mercy of arms dealers or merchants in the future. There was also a bit of his own pride wrapped into that desire as he wanted the equipment he and his descendants had developed to become renowned. That was also the reason most of the craftsmen of the Clan had not stayed on the Inner World. Even many of the researchers were brought out. Even if they would be more impactful upon Sage’s own research, if he died he didn’t want the Clan to lose the foundation of the groups they’d created.
At this time, the Lang Clan had been restored. Even if he were to die tomorrow, they could still continue on without him. His wives were both Nascent Souls, while his children were all Core Formation cultivators. Many of them had even been able to start feeling the laws with the help of Ling, Jiao, himself, and the Tiankong siblings he’d brought along. To that regard, the Tiankong Clan was actually substantially larger now. Those bird brains hadn’t been lazy in that regard and taken the trip as a thousand year vacation. Ruanfu had multiple children both from Wanqian Lei and Manji, while the other five had found many beasts on the Inner World and put Human Seals on them. They created a whole kingdom of their own and started having children, which was quite a happy thing for them all.
There was only one small hiccup. There was a very powerful beast that Sage had been trying to tame for a while, the two thousand foot long Diamond Eyed Leatherback that he once captured while crossing the land in his giant genesis spider form. Like other beasts he locked him into a cell and put a Human Seal on him. Unlike the others, this fellow was extremely stubborn and refused to sign a contract for a thousand years. He even gave himself the name ‘Wangu’ with the character for ‘stubborn or obstinate’. Sage felt it was a waste, but after a millenia he stopped paying attention.
It was at this time that the problem arose. Baozhai, the long legged auburn haired big-sister type of the Tiankong Siblings started sneaking into the place where the crocodile was being held. She was always the bossy one with advice to give to her siblings, yet she kept on sneaking in to see Wangu. Sage had no idea any of this was going on until he found out that Songji was taking care of a dozen children.
“Wow, how did you lay so many eggs at the same time?”
“Hehe, you’re so silly, brother. These ones are mine and these others belong to Baozhai! For some reason she just can’t handle kids so she gave them to me to take care of.”
With a little more digging, he learned the truth of the matter. The sister that always acted like she was a replacement mom for the Tiankong Siblings was actually an absolutely terrible mother. Sage was surprised until he thought back to a little bit of lore about her species. The Jacanas was a long-legged bird with thin wide spread toes, often called a lily-strider, and the species was notorious for mothers abandoning their eggs and leaving the fathers to raise them. Said fathers were also quite impressive as they would tuck up all their children under their wings, with just the chicks long legs dangling from their belly and carry their babies away from their constant predator, the crocodile. Only then did Sage realize that Ruanfu was not the strangest of the Tiankong siblings when it came to relationships. Ruanfu was out to collect all the best husbands, but it was nothing much in comparison to Baozhai having a relationship with the natural enemy of her species and then abandoning her children.
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Wangu had never been let out of his cage and Baozhai didn’t have access to get inside, which meant their relationship was definitely very unusual and Sage did not want to start thinking about any of the specific ‘difficulties’ the two might have faced. He could only ask the other siblings to watch out for her crazy taste in relationships, to which they informed him that she was currently seen talking to Purple Mist Sect members and he rushed over to give her a good kick in the butt.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work either and Songji had even more children to raise. At least till they were old enough to enter the sect.
Sage chuckled at how thinking of buying his family gifts had turned into a walk down memory lane. The Storage Ring he’d gotten from the Ancestor had four or five times the wealth that Jinxi Po had, but that was only his rough estimate. Much of the things in either ring were goods that he hadn’t much exposure to so he wasn’t quite sure about their value. Then he checked the other gift he’d been given and sent his consciousness into the Jade Tablet that the sixth ancestor had given him.
Reading the title of the ‘book’ he’d been given gave him quite the shock.
‘Simple Seals, Vol. 1’
Sage quickly read the introduction and found it wasn’t just a joke. The sixth ancestor had really given him a set of seal techniques. Seals also had two basic types of techniques, Repress and Siphon. When he first learned of Seals, there had been Repress the Mind, and Siphon the Will, which he gained from the Soul Taming Abode all those years ago. Later, he’d found the Human Seal in the Timeless Master’s library. There had also been a few sets of sealing techniques, but they used terminology that he didn’t quite understand. With so many things on his plate, he had never devoted the time to deciphering them. He had always been wary of how people treated Seal Masters and he’d only forced his learning of the Human Seal because it was so important to him.
This Jade Tablet that the Ancestor gave him was not really all that advanced or important on its own, but after reading through it, Sage gained the necessary foundational knowledge to understand the techniques from the Timeless Master’s library. He quickly brought out those sets of sealing techniques and immediately made immense progress in understanding them. It turns out that a ‘set’ of sealing techniques was a matching pair of Repress and Siphon seals. Then a greater percentage of an attribute would be sealed to allow for a greater return on the siphon. He also learned another interesting fact, Repress and Siphon techniques were only effective with limited levels of Crux, thirty percent to be specific. For it to be used in unison with greater seals, there was a higher tier of Repress and Siphon techniques that had to be used. The knowledge he had didn’t include those techniques, but the ‘Simple Seals, Vol. 1’ that the Ancestor gave him filled in a lot of the holes in his knowledge.
The Soul Taming Abode had only two unpaired techniques and the basic knowledge to learn how to use them, while the Timeless Master’s library had technique sets without any of the supporting knowledge to know how they worked. The new knowledge was like finally having a dictionary he could use to understand all the big words.
It seems I wasn’t really ever a Seal Master in the past, just a kid playing with his father’s tools.