Chapter 1096, The History of the Tie Family

Translator: Silavin

 

Ye Wuxian’s words prompted the group to nod in unconscious agreement.

 

When one truly thought about it, the ability to move Heaven and crack the Earth with a casual gesture was nothing remarkable in itself.

 

A true supreme expert was one who could lift the heavy as though it were light.

 

One who could unleash Earth-shattering techniques while remaining perfectly composed, controlling their power with absolute precision.

 

That was what constituted a truly terrifying existence.

 

An existence whose fearfulness even surpassed that of Divine Beings?

 

After all, even a Divine Being descending through a vessel could not prevent energy from leaking uncontrollably upon departure, causing the vessel to undergo transformation and become a High Grade material.

 

The higher the Grade of the resulting material, the more it indicated the Divine Being was powerful.

 

After all, if it lacked power, the material’s Grade would not be as high.

 

But if it were truly powerful, it would never have leaked that much energy in the first place.

 

Unless it had done so deliberately, intending to bestow a form of reward upon certain individuals, using their Divine Power to transform the vessel into an exceptionally High Grade material.

 

Whatever the case, if this stone statue had truly been used as a vessel through which some entity descended in its day, that entity’s power must have been incomprehensibly terrifying.

 

Immeasurably more powerful than any ordinary Divine Beings.

 

This was reasonable. After all, to be worshipped by the Tie Family within a sealed chamber, with the lives of tens of thousands offered as sacrifice, this entity’s power must have been truly extraordinary. Otherwise, the Tie Family would never have given it such a lavish treatment.

 

What sort of creature had this been, to have once been worshipped by the Tie Family, and what had it done?

 

And what had its true power been? Every one of these questions remained a mystery.

 

Ye Wuxian thought for a moment, then issued orders to the Family members standing watch outside the sealed chamber, directing them to search through the Tie Family’s archives and see whether any records of the Family’s history existed.

 

Perhaps within those records, some clue to this sealed chamber would be revealed. More importantly, the identity of the entity enshrined here might be found.

 

After confirming there was nothing else unusual here, the young women withdrew from the chamber, sealed it off temporarily, and agreed to return for further investigation once any leads emerged.

 

Following a day and a night of searching, the Ye Family members did ultimately locate the Tie Family’s historical records.

 

Ye Wuxian and the others examined them together, and by and large managed to read through the entire account of how the Tie Family had arrived at the Western Border more than a thousand years ago and, step by step, risen to become a Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family.

 

In the end, however, the group gained nothing of significance from this.

 

Even though the Tie Family’s historical records were detailed to an extraordinary degree, documenting the experiences of every single Patriarch, the origins of every piece of equipment they had ever worn, all recorded in meticulous, exhaustive detail… there was not a single word of information regarding that sealed chamber.

 

This left Ye Wuxian and the others deeply bewildered. After all, given that this sealed chamber lay at the deepest part of the Tie Family’s vault, in theory it should not have been any great secret.

 

Restricted access to the vaults might well have meant that not everyone was qualified to enter, let alone discover the sealed chamber.

 

But members of the Tie Family at or above the Elder-level should all have been aware of the chamber’s existence.

 

Whatever the case, the fact that the chamber’s origins went entirely unmentioned in the Tie Family’s historical records was, no matter how one looked at it, deeply extraordinary.

 

Ye Wuxian found herself regretting it. Had she known earlier, she ought to have kept a few of the Tie Family’s Seniors alive, and extracted every last one of the Family’s secrets before doing anything else.

 

Now, she had been left with a mess, with no idea how to go about unravelling the mystery of the sealed chamber.

 

Having already given up much hope of solving the mystery, it was the perpetually taciturn Jian Ying who suddenly spotted an anomaly.

 

It turned out that three hundred years ago, the Tie Family’s development had taken a peculiar turn.

 

At that time, the Tie Family had been no more than a First Tier Ancient Noble Family. Though even within that Tier, they had been considered an unparalleled existence, the gap between them and a Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family was still too large.

 

Yet from the moment a Family Patriarch returned from an expedition, the entire Family’s strength began to surge dramatically.

 

Certain Seniors within the family experienced explosive growth in their Attributes and power, allowing them to form teams and explore the Wilderness with remarkable efficiency. They uncovered numerous Maps with a ton of resources, Dungeon Instances, and Secret Realms, and Cleared them with relative ease, reaping enormous rewards.

 

Through this accumulation of resources, the Tie Family’s rate of development over those few decades was nothing short of terrifying.

 

It was as though someone behind the scenes was actively assisting the Tie Family, driving their rapid ascent.

 

Furthermore, the sheer speed of resource accumulation alone was not enough to elevate the Tie Family from a First Tier Ancient Noble Family to a Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family.

 

During the period of the Tie Family’s rapid expansion, they attracted the covetous attention of a Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family.

 

This Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family was not the most formidable in terms of overall strength, but it still far surpassed any First Tier Ancient Noble Family.

 

After all, Supreme Tier and First Tier looked only one Tier apart, but the barrier between them was so thick that several generations of desperate effort might not be enough to bridge it.

 

This Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family, on the one hand, felt threatened by the pace of the Tie Family’s development and the proximity of their territories. On the other hand, they were envious of the Tie Family’s abundant resources and allowed themselves to be tempted into acting on that greed, intending to seize them by force.

 

Such things were commonplace.

 

Once a Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family set its sights on someone, and if there was no powerful Force backing them, the only path available to a Lower Tier Family was annexation.

 

And at that particular moment, the Tie Family had no Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family standing behind them.

 

What surprised everyone was that the Tie Family did not choose to capitulate and submit, but instead met this Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family head-on.

 

The two sides clashed, and the conflict lasted a full year.

 

The details of that year were not spelled out in the Tie Family’s historical records. They were glossed over in just a handful of sentences.

 

The final outcome was that the Tie Family, through combat, emerged victorious.

 

That Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family was thereafter struck from all records, and vanished without trace from the Western Border.

 

The Tie Family, in turn, successfully absorbed and annexed this Ancient Noble Family, and with that stroke, became a fully-fledged Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family in its own right, cementing its name throughout the Western Border.

 

As for the fate of the defeated Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family, the Tie Family’s historical records contained no further account of it.

 

It seemed that although this Supreme Tier Ancient Noble Family had not been deeply rooted, it had been quite populous.

 

And after their defeat to the Tie Family, every single member of that Ancient Noble Family vanished without a trace.

 

When one considered the bloodstains before the statue in the sealed chamber, it was difficult not to let one’s imagination wander.

 

This passage of the Family’s history was not conspicuous within the Tie Family records. It was just a few short lines.

 

If one was not paying close attention, it was easy to overlook everything.

 

Jian Ying, however, was exceptionally meticulous, and noticed the peculiarity within.

 

Evidently, from that point onwards, it was as though something special had taken up residence within the Tie Family, assisting in their development.

 

But what this something actually was, the Tie Family’s historical records offered not a single word in explanation.

 

[Something is wrong, deeply, profoundly wrong]