CHAPTER 103: THE FUTURE CHANGES

Chapter 103: The Future Changes

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"Well, now this is unexpected," Zhu Rong muttered as he looked at the piece of paper in his hand.

He had decided to head to the Information Pavilion, a place with quite a bit of prestige when it came to gathering information for its clients.

He was certain that if anyone knew about the sudden, strange movements of the various families in the city , it would be them.

After all, there was no way they would have overlooked something so unusual.

And indeed, he was right.

They knew exactly what was going on, and fortunately for him, that information was for sale.

The difference between information for sale and the more secret kind, accessible only to a handful of individuals, was quite significant.

The kind available to the public for a certain price was the sort of information that wouldn’t draw the anger of someone powerful they couldn’t handle, and it was also information that wouldn’t harm them or the Empire itself.

After all, they were partly under the Empire’s supervision, which certainly wouldn’t allow them to operate without restrictions.

As the saying goes, knowledge is power, and once sensitive intelligence fell into the wrong hands, it could cause a lot of problems.

The information restricted to certain individuals, on the other hand, touched directly on this very matter. And though it too was monitored by the Empire, its nature allowed it to be shared if certain conditions were met.

Needless to say, this second category, though extremely important, was also the hardest to obtain, since qualifying to access it was already difficult in the first place, let alone actually getting your hands on it.

That said, Zhu Rong was currently in the wroking room at the pavilion, examining the information.

His expression was conflicted as he finished reading.

’Fantastic. Who would’ve thought something like this could actually happen.’

He had already speculated quite a bit about what might be causing all these families to stir like this, and in the end, he had concluded it must be related to the appearance of that creature.

And he had been right, just not in the way he had imagined.

Apparently, to avoid burying the peoples in the mine alive or damaging the surrounding village in the area, the beast had been forcibly moved elsewhere. There, after an intense battle, it had finally been killed.

This part he already knew, after all, he had been directly involved.

But what he didn’t know was that during the battle, the destruction had been so great that several small mountains in that direction had been reduced to rubble. One of them, partially intact, had revealed the entrance to a secret realm.

The existence of secret realms was common knowledge.

Over the centuries, many had been discovered and conquered, either by the Empire, by powerful families, or by other organizations.

In fact, the Zhu family themselves possessed a secret realm that had long since been fully explored, and it was one of the main reasons for the family’s current position in the capital.

Inside it, Within it, a technique had been discovered to develop a special flame that the ancestors of the family had used to create increasingly powerful and high quality weapons.

This technique had been passed down through the generations, but in recent times, fewer and fewer people had managed to master it and create their own special flame, until it had dwindled to just one person, who was currently the only successful wielder of such a flame.

Needless to say, this was one of the main reasons for the Zhu family’s decline.

No matter how powerful or useful the inheritance from a secret realm might be, if its usefulness couldn’t be preserved over time, it eventually became nothing more than a wasted resource.

The only reason the family still had someone with a special flame was because, in the last few centuries, a method had been found to pass one’s flame on to a successor with good affinity for it.

If not for that, even the current patriarch’s flame would have ceased to exist by now.

Zhu smiled bitterly to himself.

He was probably one of the last surviving descendants of the Zhu family after the catastrophe that had struck the capital, and somewhere along the way, during his long life, he had actually managed to form his own special flame.

Who would’ve thought that the very person they had cast out as useless would end up developing the next special flame?

That aside, secret realms were either natural formations or inheritances left behind by powerful individuals of the past, before they died or ascended.

Finding one wasn’t common, of course, but every few centuries, a new one would occasionally be discovered. The problem was that most of the inheritances found in the past millennium had been of low level.

This time, however, fate had it that this accidental discovery turned out to be a high level secret realm.

The level of a secret realm could be measured through various indicators: fluctuations of spiritual energy, its place of origin, or the requirements it imposed.

Yes, these places often had specific entry requirements, things like cultivation level, age, and so on.

Ignoring those requirements or trying to force someone in could lead to problematic situations, anything from the intruder’s death to the destruction of the realm itself.

In the past, a Spirit Realm expert had tried to force their way into one.

Unfortunately for them, it was a high level realm, and they ended up on their deathbed, while the realm self destructed, wiping out nearly a ten mile radius of the area around the entrance.

Since then, no one had dared to play tricks with these realms, regardless of their level.

The appearance of a secret realm always caused a stir, no matter its rank, but in this case, the level of commotion spreading among the various powers was far too high to be ignored.

He had never known of this secret realm in his past life, but that was probably because no one had ever discovered it, after all, there were no methods to locate secret realms.

Even without knowing of its existence, he could tell that this particular secret realm was certainly no ordinary one,

there was a good chance it was a high level realm.