Apart from its reputation for fierce local customs, Ya County held no particular standing in Yan Prefecture. In the context of the whole Jing Kingdom, or even the Saint Origin Continent, it was utterly insignificant.
Thus, the destruction of a small lineage in a remote region attracted no attention.
In fact, after Gao Mo arrived in the Jing Kingdom and established the Anti-Thug Office, he did not immediately make any major headlines. He simply began investigating cases thoroughly, one step at a time. Under the Jing Kingdom's current classification system, the Anti-Thug Office handled only serious criminal cases, while civil cases continued to be adjudicated by Jing Kingdom officials.
Many well-informed people discovered that the Anti-Thug Office had made a great show of its arrival, but its actual handling of cases remained entirely conventional.
The Anti-Thug Office was now chiefly responsible for three areas: major unresolved cases from the past, reviews of potentially unjust or erroneous convictions, and major cases occurring in the present. Its work was highly methodical, quite different from what people had imagined.
As for the occasional major new cases that erupted, uprooting a few small lineages, they were all nominally handled by Jing Kingdom officials and had nothing to do with the Anti-Thug Office.
Many of those watching the Anti-Thug Office did not connect those new cases to it. They merely assumed that, under intense pressure from the Sacred Academy, Jing Kingdom officials had been forced to make a sudden push for achievements to appease it. This was a common occurrence.
After some time, people noticed that while the Anti-Thug Office itself had done nothing earth-shaking, the Jing Kingdom had gained a new department after its arrival, called the Legal Affairs Department.
The Legal Affairs Department's responsibilities were rather complex. They included drafting laws and regulations,