With Sage stepping down from his position, he cleared up a huge amount of time for himself and finally picked up his research efforts in full once again. He still spent time with Ling and Jiao, but after being married for a few hundred years they knew each other so well that they’d started a tradition of spending time apart for a few weeks before meeting up again. They would have enough time to start missing each other, but not enough to become detached and grow distant. They would keep in touch with Messaging Jades, but for the most part followed their own interests. After being so hands-on with their children, and grandchildren, they’d started to be less involved with the great grandchildren. By the time their great great grandchildren were around there were just so many of them they couldn’t possibly spend time with them all and just saw them at every family gathering.

Sage had sometimes wondered why they didn’t celebrate birthdays, but he realized why once his family started to grow larger and larger. With so many people in the clan that just kept getting larger, wouldn’t they just be throwing a party every day with a list of the people whose party it was? Once they no longer felt special and singled out, what was the point? If they wanted to promote a large and united clan, then there was no reason to single people out like that. It was a bit harsh, but if they wished to be special in the clan then they had to make themselves stand out. If they excelled at something they would be rewarded with fame and prizes that would help them advance even further. Those who showed they were useful would get attention.

There was a hidden danger here: that of parents treating their children badly if they were not exceptional. He wanted this danger to be minimized so the children’s success did not benefit the parents. Not directly at least. He didn’t want them abusing their children to make them perform better so they would earn riches. At the same time, he knew there was also the possibility of bragging rights and social standing for them to fight over and there would inevitably be those who treated their children poorly if they did not perform, but it was hard to make a simple rule to deal with that issue. He could only hope the cultural values they established would continue on and those who took the helm of the clan would be able to notice such problems and handle them appropriately.

With the daily concerns of the Clan out of his hands, Sage conducted research. His main focus at this time was the many paths his children and grandchildren had started to forge. It was this hope of building a rich and powerful legacy for the Lang Clan that he’d had them use a similar beast body after all. With each successive generation there were concerns over too much human blood making them lose their abilities, but the vast majority of those who suffered from this problem performed a merge with a Jade Sky Mantis and fixed the issue. A few hundred years later only one child chose to instead leave the Lang Clan. There was a clan member who followed the path pioneered by Yahui and the child was born out of wedlock. Disgusted by his father, he stayed with his mother and rejected the offer to join the Clan. The clan made the two of them wealthy but otherwise did as they wished, leaving them alone.

Over this time, Ling and Jiao both broke through and became Nascent Souls. Jiao was a bit embarrassed because she broke through a few decades into their marriage while it took Ling a few centuries. Because of this, Jiao still appeared to be a woman in her mid-twenties, while Ling looked to be in her late-thirties even though Jiao was technically a few years older. Ling didn’t seem to care because this was a level she’d never imagined reaching in her life. She had always felt it would be unlikely to even reach rank five before she looked like an old woman, let alone being a rank six before she had gone gray. When Jiao became a Nascent Soul, she started avoiding Ling for a few years until Ling got fed up and sat her down. Sage wasn’t privy to their conversation, but from that day on they were close once again.

As they expected the clan flourished under Yating. Not only was he highly skilled, his greatest strength was his ability to gauge the skill of others and delegate responsibility to them. He had a knack for picking out the best place for people to use their gifts. While Sage had focused on instilling values and making strong clan members, Yating got many more people involved in empowering the clan. The new descendants started to advance many times faster than before when they were supplied with more resources and had better teachers. The techniques of the clan were separated into different schools and turned into full time research projects, rapidly advancing the different paths that Sage’s children had pioneered.

I really should have put this kid in charge sooner. This is the true power of a leader that knows what they’re doing!

There was also another interesting development at this time, as one of Sage’s grandchildren, Yiming, managed to learn the secret of the outside world from Jiao. She immediately decided she was going to become the greatest general and lead a grand army out to conquer the world. Sage found this situation amusing so he organized a set of wargames among the clan. Most of the people on the Inner World were not aware that there was more than one continent on this planet. Sage had set up a large continent for the humans to use, but there were also a set of smaller land masses that he reserved for emergency use as well as another continent nearly the same size as the one used by the humans. This is the continent that Sage set aside to be populated by insects.

He intended this insect continent as a place for the creatures to battle and evolve on their own, to give him a source of new materials to experiment on. Later, he established Dragoon colonies on the shores of the continent so they could use the insects as foes to practice war upon. Most recently, he built the Purple Mist Sect on the Insect Continent, but eventually he realized it was not convenient for him to administrate the humans in this position. With this in mind, he restructured the world, reshaping and moving the insect continent so that the location of the Purple Mist Sect was upon a, comparatively, narrow land bridge joining the two major continents. The poison miasma prevented others from using the bridge and gave the sect easier access to a training ground as well as human civilization.

It was also something of a test for the insect species. The change caused many small disasters for the moved territory and many places would have drastically different climate and conditions than before. Large portions of the land were left intact, but the borders between what Sage thought of as tectonic plates were thrown into turmoil. This wasn’t a bad thing in his eyes, because insects reproduce very quickly. Since they’d already inhabited the insect continent for a long time, then this would be a chance to see what species rose to the occasion and thrived under changed circumstances. Those changes had already taken place hundreds of years ago and it was quite interesting to see the changes. The Dragoons were constantly out training in the insect continent, cataloging the creatures and using some of them as cattle and others as training instruments.