Great Qian's founding Grand Ancestor and Ye Ci had been close friends who brought relief to the world together. Later, he had married a woman of the Ye clan and made her Empress, naturally intending to bind their families together and thereby protect his descendants and even Great Qian's reign.
However, Ye Ci had been born a wanderer of the Jianghu and had studied away from home at the Academy since childhood. He had no sisters of his own, so the woman Grand Ancestor Qian married was the daughter of Ye Ci's distant maternal uncle.
Later, Ye Ci's distant maternal uncle had been named Duke of Zhen Guo. His great-grandson had been the former Crown Prince's Companion-the same wastrel who had won eight thousand taels playing cards with Zhao De, forcing Zhao De to rob the Imperial Father-in-Law's Residence to repay his debt to his sister.
Since the relationship had been distant to begin with, they did not even share a surname, and several generations had passed, Ye Yunchi had practically no contact with the Duke of Zhen Guo's branch. But if they insisted on counting generations, she was indeed of the same generation as students such as Monk Wuxin and Lu Wuzhen.
And as the Grand Ancestor's grandson, Zhao Xiao really did count as Ye Yunchi's junior.
Over the past century, the Zhao family's branches had spread and produced countless imperial relatives. Normally, relatives so distant that eight bamboo poles could not reach them would not even qualify to see the emperor, but this great-aunt's father was Twin Saints Ye Ci!
Ye Ci was not the emperor, but aside from having to sit immobile atop the golden Great Cauldron to suppress Chaotic Heaven and Earth, he was little different from the Human Emperor.
For the first half of its