The giant mantis screeched and stomped around a little bit more, then it slowly started to shrink, stopping when it was only twelve feet tall. Sage looked up at it and then realized that this was her new default size. He laughed softly and then used his pair of Timeless Eyes to learn her crux and then apply a nearly perfect Human Seal to her as he’d done for Ling. The huge blood red mantis with its vicious and violent appearance turned back into the petite and fragile looking frame of his wife Jiao. She changed from towering over him at double his height to looking up from chest height with a fierce smile, “How do you like my Blood Mantis?”

Ling laughed, “My sister, you are certainly uniquely beautiful.”

Sage nodded, “Absolutely... exquisite. I would have never thought of such a great shape.”

It took great control to keep from letting his smile break and also to not let any sarcasm slip into his tone. He wasn’t an idiot!

He’d imagined every member of the family having the same body, but at least now he wasn’t quite as concerned about that strange family line. It also meant he’d have to make the new Golden Mantis Body a little less specialized in order to easily adapt to any possible mantis, but he was confident it would still end up much easier for his descendants to learn than the original version.

With that in mind, he started the process of teaching the two of them what he was now calling ‘Nine Heart Arrangement’: the combination of the Death Sparing Manual and Blood of Nine Pits. With it, they could form a poison core within their poison dantian and store nine different poisons that could be combined with a Poison Qi that their poison dantian would produce. Along with that he also modified the Golden Mantis Body so the ‘Blood Mantis’ and ‘Paradise Mantis’ could use it easily. With these changes he gave it a new name ‘Jade Mantle’. These two techniques were to be the core of the new Lang Clan along with the Insect Immortal Index.

A few years later, Ling and Jiao had mastered both techniques and they were finally taking time to relax once again. At that point, a messenger entered and gave the three a bow. The man smiled, “Sir. Jinxi Po has finally cracked.”

Sage felt the urge to jump out of his chair, but he suppressed it, “Really? How? That fellow is completely immune to torture, isn’t he?”

Despite how much he’d said to Sage after being caught a second time, it soon became apparent that the old fossil was only paying him lip service. That ancient thing only spoke about the Yeying Shan Sect and superficial details about the Chong Clan. There were still thousands or more years of unknown background that the man never spoke about. They tried a bit more torture, but there were no results so Sage finally got rid of that detestably chop jockey and had his people look for other forms of interrogation. They’d been hiring different people for the last few years, but he’d never imagined they’d actually made progress! Excellent!

The three of them dropped their chopsticks. Eating was only for enjoyment at their level after all, and then they quickly left the room to follow the Purple Mist Sect member back to the dungeon chamber where Jinxi Po was being held. The three of them entered a room where a slightly short and rotund middle-aged man was waiting. He had a somewhat wide set of eyes and was balding on the top of his head, but was smiling madly while looking at the woman standing next to him. The woman in question was something of an amazon, she was tall and not fat per say, but big boned, a massive woman with a massive chest that she was swaying back and forth in front of the shorter man’s face. The rotund man’s face was at the same height as her chest, and he seemed to be about to bury his face into the cleavage of her robe.

Sage was stopped dead in his tracks by this surprising sight, but Ling and Jiao merely laughed. Ling gave the woman a short bow, “Forgive me Sister, for our interruption. We can return later, please excuse us.”

Upon hearing her voice, the man and woman turned away from each other and gave them a smile. The woman giggled and held her hand up daintily towards Ling, then made a dismissive motion, “Nonsense, we were waiting for you to get here!”

Then the both of them stopped and gave a bow in unison to Ling, Jiao, and Sage. Then they gave them a formal greeting, “Teacher. Teacher’s wives.”

“I told you last time not to call me that. Your teacher is the one who wrote those books, I’m more like your employer.”

“Ahh, then Boss it is.”

The man quickly made the switch and then laughed loudly at the discomfort he seemed to be inflicting. Then the tall woman gave him a little bump on the side and he quickly nodded, “Boss we’ve been waiting for you!”

“You have? Why is that? Did something happen?”

At this moment Sage looked over the two searching for injuries or signs of distress. The man chuckled and then patted his own chest, “We were waiting for your praise, Boss!”

Before Sage could start to question the man’s vanity, he was thumped again and continued on to properly explain, “We were the ones who extracted the information from your prisoner! I got word of your efforts to find different interrogation methods after I had just finished a bit of research. It just so happens that I had been experimenting with a new method of preparing materials and I hadn’t found a use for much of my results. At least until I heard the news and made the connection.”

This man, Pang Xie, was that Crab Spider he’d picked up in Icefire Valley while the woman was his wife, Pang Jiangbei. The couple had been working together to build their alchemical skills over the last hundreds of years and from the sounds of things, they seemed to have made big improvements. The Inner World had been stocked with many hundreds of natural treasures, the plants and herbs used by Alchemists. With the influence of Sage’s Heavenly Materials, these hundreds have changed and morphed into thousands of other different things. Even so, these thousands of ingredients still couldn’t compare to the millions that were available in the outside world. Without access to those ingredients while also having new and unknown plants available meant that Pang Xie had to do a lot of experimentation.

Experimentation was already a common thing for Alchemists to do, as it was necessary to create new pills and effects, alter recipes to make up for lacking ingredients or in the pursuit of enhancing or reducing the effects of existing concoctions. Sage was quite glad to see that the couple had already made headway in this direction. He was counting on the two of them to create recipes using only things from the Inner World and then train many alchemists to spread through the Inner World.

“Congratulations! Excellent achievement! One day I hope the Pang Sect are renowned throughout the whole world as the greatest Alchemists ever.”

Ling and Jiao were amused by how excited this little praise made Pang Xie. The rotund man was laughing heartily and beaming with pride while his ‘Boss’ patted him on the back. Eventually, Sage felt the man had been complimented enough and got to the real question, “So, you created an Interrogation Pill?”