The valley was shrouded in a formation that shut out all disturbances from the outside world, so quiet it hardly seemed part of the mortal realm.
Hearing Shi Lan's blunt question, the old man fell silent for a moment, then raised a hand in a half-salute and said solemnly:
"This old man is Kuang Shaoqing. I came here first to offer my thanks, and then to ask what Your Excellency intends."
His tone was deferential; he did not look down on Shi Lan because of her cultivation.
In the past ten years, more than two hundred thousand children had left this place. They were now scattered far and wide, and as time passed, in a thousand years or more, their numbers would completely reshape the balance of power among the Lingyang human race.
The number of those children's descendants would be terrifying. A thousand or ten thousand years from now, every human who had yet to reach the pinnacle of cultivation would have perished. By then, the only text passed down among the lower and middle ranks of humanity would be the Martial Scripture: General Compendium, from this valley.
Kuang Shaoqing had read the entire cultivation manual and had been stunned by its brilliance. It seemed tailor-made for humanity, gathering the strengths of a hundred schools. In the path of martial cultivation, it had reached perfection, refined to the highest degree. If he weren't already on his deathbed, he might even have been tempted to start over from scratch.
That was precisely what puzzled him. Yang did not belong to the divine race of Lingyang. The Divine King had said so himself at Yao's coming-of-age ceremony. Why would a god from another realm pass on a cultivation method to humanity? He couldn't see what Yang stood to gain from it.