After leaving the Ancestor Vein Hall, Zhang Tie was escorted by two stern-faced stewards from the Clan Affairs Hall into an underground cell beneath the Clan Affairs Hall.
For someone like Zhang Tie, who had actually dared to defy the orders of the family elders, the stewards' expressions were as hard as iron. It was not that Zhang Tie had not considered resisting, but he knew that with his current abilities, making trouble in a place like the Clan Affairs Hall would be nothing more than asking for humiliation—a futile struggle. So he merely kept a grim face and allowed himself to be taken to the cell without expression.
With a bang, the iron door of the cell shut, leaving Zhang Tie alone inside.
Only then did Zhang Tie carefully examine the cell—a small room of just over ten square meters, its walls all made of bluish-gray stone. Inside were a wooden plank bed, a toilet, and a water pipe. On one wall was a faint row of air holes leading to the surface, with a little light filtering through them, so the room was not utterly dark. But escaping through those holes was possible only for a rat.
A nation had its laws, and a family had its rules. What Huaiyuan Hall was enforcing upon Zhang Tie now was precisely its family rules—awakening one's divine bloodline yet failing to place the family's interests first, refusing the family's arrangements, acting willfully, and talking back to family elders. Zhang Tie knew such offenses were grave, extremely grave. But asking him to leave this continent now was something he truly could not do, because he had promised those people on the Ice and Snow Wilderness who had placed such great hopes in him that as long as even one Slav warrior loyal