"Purple Palace True Venerable?" Golden Egg was startled.
"Indeed. It seems you've heard her story too, Senior." Shen Yuxia nodded slightly and smiled.
"No, I've never heard of Purple Palace True Venerable. I just thought the name sounded rather imposing. Most likely, she was a powerful cultivator."
At Golden Egg's words, Shen Yuxia's smile froze. Then she began explaining in a gentle voice.
Purple Palace True Venerable had been a renowned fifth-tier supreme-grade Formation Master of Great Shang thirty-nine thousand eight hundred years ago. Her cultivation had even reached the realm of a Cultivation Magnate.
Even in Great Shang, where powerful cultivators emerged in an endless stream, Purple Palace True Venerable had been a legend.
The reason was simple. Purple Palace True Venerable's original name was Zeng Tingsu. Born into humble origins, she had shown considerable talent for spell arts in her youth. This had caught the attention of Grand Historian Sima Gu, who took her in as a retainer and appointed her his Attendant Bookkeeper, responsible for managing the fragmentary cultivation methods from various regions collected by the imperial dynasty over successive generations.
In Great Shang, a bookkeeper was merely a sinecure, with neither actual authority nor any Spirit Stones to skim. The daily work was unbearably tedious: registering, classifying, and filing cultivation methods, or copying them onto Jade Slips. It was all trivial work.
To put it plainly, the only benefit for a cultivator serving as a bookkeeper was being able to browse the cultivation methods in the repository freely from morning until night.
But for the prodigies of Great Shang's powerful clans, spending all day reading the repository's low-tier cultivation methods could only hone their fundamentals. They could glean little of the path of cultivation.
Only when Purple Palace True Venerable Zeng Tingsu burst onto the scene,