Once Tao Ba had left the two of them dropped their subservient attitudes. Feiyan looked at the Stone Tablet with the sharp and inquisitive eyes of a researcher. She was the head researcher and had been for centuries before she was chosen to carry out his backup plan. Her hunger to explain the unexplainable was quite great, but it was also tempered by her management skills. She would never have become the head researcher if she couldn’t properly control her own desires.
The Stone Tablet was not a foreign object to her. She had already seen the results of prior research that had been conducted upon it. One of the young and reckless researchers had even gone against the rules and attempted to challenge it long ago. That fellow had given them a lot of data, once blood was combined with the Tablet he had entered a sort of stasis for a whole year. At the end of that year the man had suddenly dropped dead, his mind and soul erased without any harm being done to his body. They had gathered a lot of information from studying the man over the course of that year, which is why Feiyan could easily curb the desire to study the tablet more. Lang Sheng had introduced this object to the research institute many thousands of years before Feiyan had even been born so it was something of an ancient relic to them. She had never expected it to be the source of a possible apocalypse, and she was even less prepared to be chosen as the heir to the collected knowledge of her whole world. Even so, her position was high enough to know the truth about her world and the existence of another Lang Clan.
For her, they were legendary ancestors that had each created their own techniques that spawned a whole school. These ancestors were from more than ten thousand years ago and only a few members of the clan that were lucky enough to become Nascent Souls remembered the time when they were around. It was quite astounding to learn that they hadn’t died, but were instead alive and well. It was even more amazing to know that in the world they went to it had been only a few decades. These legends were alive and well and had no idea that hundreds of generations of their progeny had thrived and taken their creations to whole new levels.
Lang Feiyan along with a thousand others had made the difficult choice of giving up everything they knew. If things went well they would spend a year alone in this other place, the Universe Ring, while a thousand years passed by on their world. It was like volunteering to enter a time capsule. On the other hand, if things went wrong they wouldn’t just be in a time capsule, they’d lose everyone and everything for good. They’d have to start over and find the legendary ancestors they only heard stories about. Feiyan, as well as the other thousand Lang Clan members and the hundreds from the Purple Mist Sect faced this task of theirs bravely. Thankfully, as Cultivators, they had a powerful force of will and didn’t let the pressure of a pending apocalypse drive them mad. If they could crumble so easily, they would not have been chosen for this duty.
While Feiyan contemplated the seriousness of the situation, Sage was simply studying the Stone Tablet. This was the same piece of stone that he had run into a long long time ago at an auction. He’d felt something calling to him from it and decided to buy it despite knowing nothing about it at all. It was said to hold a great treasure, but that was only a rumor and the seller as well as the auction house's appraisers didn’t know much at all. From the competition he faced to win it, Sage sensed there were buyers who did know what it was, but he persisted nonetheless.
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Unfortunately, he was caught off guard.
As soon as he received the Stone Tablet from the seller, it reacted to him and shattered his Human Seal. Sage’s inhuman body was revealed and he became a public enemy. The Seal Masters had been wiped out a long time ago and he had been revealed as knowing how to use them. To make it worse, he had transformed into a monster, making it look like he was actually just a Demonic Beast. The Shihu Kingdom, where the Holy Flame Sect was located, was not a place where Demonic Beasts received equal treatment. Unlike the Demi-human Tianren Kingdom, or the Demonic Beast run Shou Empire, the Shihu Kingdom was not a kind place to beasts. Technically, anything with similar intelligence as a human could receive equal treatment if they followed the rules, those who were unique would face more opposition. The rules of the Cultivator world were already biased towards the strong, and there were many Cultivators who may not show as much restraint for something ‘different’ than themselves. A Cultivator who fancied themselves a righteous hero might not consider it an act of evil to kill a Demonic Beast, even if that beast was kind to humans and even more intelligent than they were.
Sage didn’t wait around to get hunted down and immediately fled from the Holy Flame Sect. He returned back to the Dou Kingdom which he had fled when the Lang Clan was wiped out. That had been a naive decision and led to many other difficulties, but that wasn’t important anymore. What was more telling was that he’d retained the cause of all these troubles ever since that time and had never been willing to subject himself to the danger of using it. Tao Ba had been able to translate the introduction and its contents had been enough to keep Sage from trying it out. Just like when Tao Ba sent his Qi into it earlier, it projected a set of information that gave its conditions.
A mysterious person, the Essence Sculptor, required a person to swear fealty to them as their Master and apply their blood to the Stone Tablet. Then, they would undergo a special trial. They would have one year to learn the Essence Sculptor’s technique. If they fail, they die.
It was such a vicious and final course of action that Sage had never been desperate or confident enough to make the attempt. Along with many other things, he’d given it to the research institute to study. He’d hoped they could perhaps crack open its methods. Was it a doorway to a pocket dimension? A portal to another place? A sophisticated mental space? He had no idea how the trial was supposed to work or what it could do. He had only the word of Tao Ba on what it said and that it was genuine. So, he hoped the researchers could fill some of those holes in his understanding. Unfortunately, one of the youngsters was too ambitious and suffered the ultimate price for it. They’d made far more progress on their research at that point, but it also proved how dangerous it was and caused them to improve their security measures.
They couldn’t confirm how the Stone Tablet worked in its entirety, but from the year of observation as well as the final state that it left the youngster’s body in, they concluded that it drew the mind and soul inside of itself. If the test failed, then that mind and soul never came back out again.