Daily life of a cultivation judge-Chapter 1166 A fellow kindred spirit

1166: A fellow kindred spirit

1166: A fellow kindred spirit

Yang Qing, caught a little off guard by that remark, found his mind wandering as his gaze fell on the downcast Xia Fang.

If her grandfather was one, then is she…

Xia Fang looked up just in time to catch Yang Qing’s expression.

She smiled sadly and shook her head.

“I’m not one,” she said.

“Not for lack of trying, though.

My grandfather refused me.” Her expression wavered between resignation and sorrow.

“What reason did he give?” Yang Qing asked curiously.

Given the state her clan was in, they were in no position to be picky—not when their survival hung in a precarious balance.

They needed all the nodes they could get, and given that their resources were rapidly dwindling, they didn’t have the luxury of choice.

They likely couldn’t spare those resources for anything else outside of ensuring their formation diagram remained standing for as long as possible.

The way Yang Qing saw it, even if her grandfather didn’t want his granddaughter to become a node because it was a path of no return, what other choice did he have?

The clan was cut off, slowly being starved and strangled to death.

What else could he have done?

It wasn’t like he would be robbing her of her future, especially given how grim things looked.

In fact, letting his granddaughter become a node would have been the safest bet to guarantee her survival and future.

While being a node meant standing on the front lines against the onslaught of attacks from the three clans, it also granted access to one of the clan’s most powerful trump cards—along with first rights to the scant resources they had left.

If he wanted her to grow strong quickly, then making her a node was the best path.

Not only would she receive the available resources, but she could also rely on the formation diagram itself to hasten her cultivation.

Yes, her limit would be predetermined the moment she became a node, but this was a mid-tier formation diagram, meaning her ceiling would be the middle stages of the palace realm.

Yang Qing didn’t think that was a bad trade-off.

After all, reaching the middle stages of the palace realm was never guaranteed, even for those with the potential to do so.

There was no shortage of palace realm experts who stalled out at the early stages of the palace realm without ever getting even a sniff of the middle stage, and that number wasn’t small, either.

Yang Qing had no doubt that if those cultivators were offered a guaranteed path to the middle stages, with the only downside being they would never reach the late stages, many would take that deal in a heartbeat—let alone someone who hadn’t even started cultivating yet.

Improving even a single level in the palace realm was as difficult as scaling a mountain, with the challenge only growing steeper the higher one climbed.

Some even claimed that advancing from the first stage to the second stage of the palace realm was as difficult as cultivating from the middle stages of the foundation establishment realm to the middle stages of the core formation realm—a sentiment many agreed with.

That alone showed how arduous the process was.

It wasn’t uncommon for cultivators to take centuries, or even a full millennium, just to advance by a single stage.

And that difficulty only increased exponentially with each step, especially when crossing minor realms—such as breaking through from the early stage to the middle stage of the palace realm, or from the middle stage to the late stage.

To many, that gap felt less like a stage within the same realm and more like breaking through to an entirely new cultivation realm.

So when an opportunity arose to improve those odds, most cultivators would seize it without hesitation—especially those who had personally experienced the stagnant, grueling trenches of the palace realm.

And that was precisely why Yang Qing could not understand why Xia Fang’s grandfather had refused her request.

Well, there was a chance she could have died.

But considering she still managed to reach the late stages of the core formation realm in less than 500 years without becoming one—and with a blue-grade core at that—it seems whatever alternative plans he had for her worked just as well…

Yang Qing mused as he took stock of Xia Fang’s current foundation.

“He didn’t want me to risk my life alongside him or ruin my potential by becoming one,” she answered softly.

“But I think part of the reason he refused was guilt.”

A deeper sadness flickered across her face, one that ran even deeper than the sorrow she already carried.

Her gaze drifted back to her cup, her fingers lightly tracing its rim.

“Guilt?”

“Yes,” Xia Fang said, lifting her eyes to meet Yang Qing’s once more, her expression steeped in melancholy.

“My father was a node too…” she murmured, her voice trailing off.

“And he later died… along with my mother not long after.”

“Their loss shook my grandfather,” she continued with a pained smile.

“I don’t think he ever recovered from it.” The smile on her lips darkened, turning almost ghostly.

Clearly, she hadn’t fully recovered either.

“So when I brought up the idea of becoming a node, he refused and fiercely at that,” she continued, exhaling a helpless sigh.

“It was the one time I’d ever seen him so angry with me,” she added with a grimace.

A dry chuckle escaped her lips as she recalled that night.

“He chewed my ear out until morning,” she mused, shaking her head.

“I remember having to wash his spit out of my hair afterward.”

“He was so paranoid that I’d end up doing it anyway despite his stern warning that for the next seven years, he suspended all his other duties just to personally guide my cultivation all the way to the Qi refinement realm, all so he could effectively remove all chances of me becoming,” she continued, shaking her head helplessly.

Yang Qing couldn’t help but silently praise the old man’s actions who was clearly, a fellow kindred spirit when it came to acting on one’s paranoia.

Never leave things to chance if you can do something about them.

But the brief reprieve brought by those memories didn’t last.

Xia Fang’s expression, which had lightened slightly, grew heavy once more.

“It was eighteen months ago that I finally learned the real reason he didn’t want me to become one,” she said, her voice somber.

“The reason he refused me wasn’t just to protect me, but rather… it was because he knew that, in the near future, there would be no need for nodes anymore.”