Thousand Wave Lake

But not long after Ning Fa's parents met with disaster, the deed to this shop ended up in the hands of Ning Fa's eldest aunt, Ning Muchun, and her husband, Meng Jinliang.

The shop had originally been rented out to someone else. Ning Fa's aunt and uncle found him and said they wanted to rent it to deal in spiritual materials.

Remembering that they were relatives from the same branch of the family, his former self agreed without thinking much of it. He even set the rent slightly lower than before.

Thinking of this, Ning Fa could not help feeling utterly speechless. His former self had truly been a colossal sucker.

Renting it out was one thing, but he had actually let those two sweet-talk him into handing over the deed as well. The thought made Ning Fa, who had come later, so angry he wanted to vomit blood.

At first, this aunt had still paid the rent normally. But later, she paid less and less, until she eventually stopped paying altogether.

When his former self was desperately short of spirit stones in the final year and wanted to take back the deed and sell the shop—

His aunt and uncle threw up every conceivable excuse to obstruct him, and he never succeeded.

Furthermore, after Ning Zhiyuan's death, Aunt and Uncle became the decision-makers of their branch because their cultivation was the highest within it.

Meng Jinliang in particular was a live-in son-in-law, yet he was now the only Late Qi Condensation cultivator in their branch.

With him backing her, Ning Muchun, despite being a woman, held the branch's right to speak.

Under such circumstances, even if his other two uncles wanted to help, there was little they could do.

Moreover, neither of those two families had cultivators with outstanding aptitude, so they held little influence within the branch.

At this thought, Ning Fa let out a soft breath.

He still decided to first seek out that aunt of his. Even if he could not recover the deed, getting back fifty spirit stones would be enough.

As for the deed, there was no hurry. Once he officially became the family's alchemist, he would come back and settle accounts with that aunt properly.

Time was precious. Ning Fa did not bother resting and immediately left home for Ning Muchun's house.

After Ning Fa stepped out of his home, he could faintly hear the sound of rolling waves, and the air was noticeably damp.

That was because he was currently on the edge of an island called Pingchang Island.

In fact, the entire Ning Clan was situated upon a great lake known as Thousand Wave Lake.

The lake covered an area comparable to Blue Star's largest lake; calling it a sea would not have been an exaggeration.

With Thousand Wave Lake being so vast, the Ning Clan was naturally not the only cultivator family there.

There were dozens of cultivator families of all sizes, as well as quite a few independent cultivator factions.

The Ning Clan was considered one of the stronger forces among them, easily ranking in the top three.

The family had four Foundation Establishment Cultivators and nearly five hundred cultivators. Among them, there were as many as sixty or seventy clan members at Late Qi Condensation.

Their mortal bloodline numbered in the millions.

With such strength, only the Xue Family and the Qian Family could stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

Though there were several other Foundation Establishment Families, they basically had only one Foundation Establishment Ancestor each and were far from comparable to those three families.

The rest were mostly Qi Condensation families without even a single Foundation Establishment Cultivator, or minor factions.

Moreover, Thousand Wave Lake was far from peaceful.

Not only did demonic beasts from the lake attack frequently, Calamity Cultivators also ran rampant.

The environment of Thousand Wave Lake was naturally suited to the survival of Calamity Cultivators.

There was even a Calamity Cultivator organization in Thousand Wave Lake called the Ironclad Alliance.

It even possessed two leaders at the Foundation Establishment level.

With such strength, it could already be considered a second-tier force in Thousand Wave Lake.

Minor factions could only huddle together for warmth.

Only large powers like the Ning Clan could keep the Calamity Cultivators from daring to invade.

Over more than six hundred years, the Ning Clan had risen from a tiny Qi Condensation family in Thousand Wave Lake to its present state, carving a path through brambles and thorns. It had not been easy in the slightest.

Apart from the favor of heaven and terrain—

What mattered more was harmony among people.

Yet the Ning Clan's harmony among people was different from others'.

It did not mean the family was united.

It was more like a pack of wolves.

The Ning Clan had always pursued a wolf-like strategy, one very close to the style of Devil Dao Sects.

The Ning Clan encouraged its descendants to fight and compete, worshipping the law of the jungle.

Other than the family's basic provisions, all other good things had to be fought for and seized personally.

They could even stop at nothing.

It was like raising poisonous insects in a jar.

The family descendants who rose above the rest in this manner were basically ruthless people, possessed of both strength and cunning.

Compared with them, other cultivation families of equal size were as docile as sheep.

Thus, in one external war after another, the Ning Clan always laughed last, its strength steadily growing.

That was how it had expanded step by step to its current scale.

Such a strategy for governing the family naturally carried serious drawbacks.

It could easily make the family's descendants selfish and self-serving, even insufficiently loyal to the family and prone to betrayal.

This required powerful family higher-ups to keep them under control.

Fortunately, for all these years, the Ning Clan's upper echelon had largely been people of exceptional talent and grand ambition.

They established exceedingly harsh family laws, imposing extremely severe punishments for acts of betrayal against the family.

Even relatives from the same branch would be directly executed, without the slightest room for mercy.

At the same time, rewards for external wars were extremely generous. The family took only a small share of the spoils, while the participating family descendants received the lion's share.

To Ning Fa, the Ning Clan's strategy was much like that of the Qin State before it unified the six states.

In this way, it preserved the wolfish nature of the Ning Clan's descendants while also maintaining a certain degree of family cohesion.

Thus, in foreign wars, Ning Clan cultivators fought like wolves and tigers, stopping at nothing.

Their methods even violated morality and the harmony of heaven, but so long as matters did not go too far, the Ning Clan turned a blind eye.

This also gave the Ning Clan a notorious reputation throughout Thousand Wave Lake.

There was even a saying: "Better provoke Calamity Cultivators than provoke the Ning Clan."

Now, the Ning Clan had decisively defeated the long-established Foundation Establishment Qian Family several years ago.

It had already taken the Qian Family's place as the second strongest force in Thousand Wave Lake, surpassed only by the Xue Family.

Only then did the Ning Clan halt its campaign of conquest, retract its claws, and begin developing steadily.

Yet the customs passed down over the years had not changed.

Even Ning Fa's aunt forcibly occupying his shop could be seen as a reflection of that very atmosphere.

It left Ning Fa rather speechless. Why could he not have been reborn into a cultivator family that was warm and harmonious?

Now that the Ning Clan had grown vast and powerful, it contained numerous internal branches, and the struggles between them were exceptionally fierce.

Although Ning Fa was currently only part of the Ning Clan's lowest stratum, he had still heard some of this news.

But none of that hindered the Ning Clan's current prosperity.

The Ning Clan now controlled several hundred islands of all sizes in Thousand Wave Lake. Its many cultivators and countless mortal bloodline members were scattered across those islands.

More than forty of those islands contained spiritual veins, and the best even possessed a Second-grade High-grade spiritual vein.

That was Ningchang Island, the Ning Clan's ancestral land, where only core figures of the Ning Clan could reside.

After Ning Fa had originally tested positive for a Lightning Spiritual Root, the family brought him to Ningchang Island to cultivate.

But later, unsurprisingly, he lost his qualification to remain there long-term and returned to his original Pingchang Island.

Pingchang Island was also where Ning Fa's branch and several other collateral branches of the family lived. It was fairly large and had a spiritual vein that barely reached the first-grade mid-level.

Several collateral branches' cultivators lived on the island, along with some of their direct-line mortal family members.

Most mortal bloodline members were not qualified to live on islands with spiritual veins.