The Ma Clan.
One of the Chu Kingdom's twelve great surnames.
Legend had it that the Ma Clan's ancestor was a mighty cultivator who commanded the arts of witchcraft and gu, and whom the first King of Chu had appointed as his shaman-diviner.
The Ma Clan had followed the royal Xiong surname ever since, serving as the royal family's trusted confidants generation after generation.
With that ancestor still alive to this day, the Ma Clan remained firmly seated among the Chu Kingdom's twelve great surnames.
Its fief lay to the left of the royal capital, guarding it alongside the Qu Clan and the Wu Clan.
The heart of the Ma Clan's fief was Ma Clan City.
Ma Clan City spanned a thousand li. Its towering, majestic walls had been refined from countless first- and second-tier spiritual materials and inscribed with a vast number of formations.
It was said that the Ma Clan's ancestor had chosen this place precisely because it possessed two fourth-tier spiritual veins. Using immense magical power, he had made the two veins converge at the center of Ma Clan City—in what was now the Dragon Convergence Pool, where he resided.
The Ma Clan's ancestor had laid down layer upon layer of formations here, spending enormous quantities of spiritual materials and spirit stones in an attempt to fuse the two fourth-tier spiritual veins into a single fifth-tier vein.
Fifth-tier spiritual veins were exceptionally rare. Only three clans in the entire Chu Kingdom possessed one, and the Ma Clan naturally could not compete with the Xiong Clan, the Xiang Clan, or the Zhuang Clan.
But lacking a natural vein did not mean they could not cultivate one themselves. After spending a thousand years on the effort, the Ma Clan had already made considerable progress.
Within the inner city of