All of them were startled, the oath Zhi requested was the one most restricting one. Due to the environment he grew up in, he would never let anyone follow him unless they gave him a Bloodline Oath. Although there were ways to bypass the oath, tiptoeing down the thin line was extremely dangerous. Especially in the case of an oath like this: To follow him and never betray or harm him. To give an Oath to the Heavens or something wouldn’t be as bad because if they were forced to break it, only they would implicated, however with a Bloodline Oath, their descendants would be implicated as well.

The lion man said after a moment of silence, “I am willing to swear the Oath in their place. Please don’t implicate them as well.” It was obvious that he was worried about Zhi wanting to abuse the Elf Girls. Zhi just said, “I have no perverted tendencies like the Humans do. My goal is to get revenge on someone who killed my Mother and cast me to a desolate, barren prison for about 10 years. Since I can’t do it alone, I need help. I don’t have the luxury to gather people who may stab me in the back, by my side.” A look of loneliness flashed in his eyes as he said that.

Everyone also understood the reason Zhi had not left immediately but had actually listened to them first. While their goal was to survive and not fall captive, Zhi’s goal was to take revenge. Zhi’s power also made them realize that the person he wants to kill isn’t someone unknown but has a big backing behind her. If he couldn’t even trust the people behind his back, how could he dare to attack her.

Lion man just cupped his hands as he bowed, “I am willing to give the Bloodline Oath and I am sorry for doubting Senior.” Everyone else did the same and also gave a Bloodline Oath to follow him. Zhi looked at his new subordinates with a complicated looks. He had never worked together with anyone but he wasn’t stupid enough to think that he could get his revenge by himself. Since that woman had the strength to cripple his mother and cast the two of them in the Ancient Battlefield, she wasn’t anyone weak. Plus, there was the Clan behind her.

Zhi also didn’t have any clue on what the Clan he was from was. All he knew was that, it was the Long Clan and the jade pendant his mother always wore. He knew nothing more: Where the Clan was, what their status was, even if his father was still alive or not. Only a fool or an idiot would plan on taking revenge by himself if he knew nothing about the people he was up against. So the smartest move was to gather and foster a backing for himself.

Actually, this World was the perfect place to make a base for himself. The Human’s have driven the other Races to a corner and if Zhi moved smartly, he would be able to take control of this continent and also get the backing he needs. However, this isn’t something that will take a month or two to achieve, this is going to be a long term project where he needs to speak the right words at right times and also do the right things at the right times. He decided that to start this plan was now or never. Everyone present had left a bit of an impression on him, he knew that their hatred towards the Humans was strong enough for them to agree to his terms.

When everyone had given a Bloodline Oath to never betray him, Zhi retracted his cold and somewhat oppressive aura. He looked over everyone and said, “Now then, divide yourselves by your Elemental Affinity.” When everyone had divided themselves by their Elemental Affinity, Zhi nodded his head. However, he noticed that the people from the same race were mostly from the same Element as well. Zhi just counted the heads and murmured to himself, “13 with Fire Affinity, 19 with Water Affinity, 11 with Wind Affinity, 16 with Earth Affinity.” These were the four groups that had formed. Zhi took out 13 red Spacial Rings that he had acquired and put some things in them. He then took 19 blue ones and repeated the process, with green and brown ones as well. He put them all down and said, “Inside the Spacial Rings are the Pills and Body Tempering techniques. Fire ones take the red ones, Water ones take the blue, Wind takes green and Earth takes brown ones. As for the Cultivating Arts and weapons, I will personally inspect everyone and give them the one that suits them the most.” As his voice echoed out, everyone were a bit taken a back.

Spacial Rings were things only supreme experts or very influential or rich people had. Now Zhi had taken out 59 Spacial Rings like he had a mountain of them. No one dared to disregard his orders and everyone neatly took one of the Spacial Rings. Since most of them were too young in their terms to start cultivating, they couldn’t open their Spacial Rings. Zhi swept out his hand and a little island materialized in the air. Everyone looked at it puzzling but Zhi swept his arm out again and everyone felt a gust of wind carry them to the Island.

The island wasn’t big, only about 200 square meters but everyone felt puzzled by this move. Zhi had acquired this Island from the Spacial Ring of one of the corpses. What blew Zhi’s mind at the time was that his Island was a Fortress Type Artefact. Although it wasn’t as fast as Movement Type Artefacts, it was still fast. It also had a lot of different formations etched into it and only Emperor’s and up could enter this Island forcefully. Zhi also learned that he could control the size of the Island. The maximum it could reach was 600 square kilometers. In the Ancient Battlefield, he had no use for it because it was too conspicuous but now it was a different story.

They were currently near the ocean any ways, so it wouldn’t take long for him to reach it and sink the island down and make it take it’s true size. The main reason he brought this thing out in the first place was because he needed a base of operations. Even if they didn’t venture outside, in time, more people would come here and since Zhi was completely in control of the Island, it was safer to be on this Island rather than occupy a place and then start building everything up from scratch.

He had been planning on acquiring a backing when he got out but he didn’t honestly expect everything to fall onto his lap a few hours after he left the Battlefield. Such fall of good fortune actually made him suspicious a bit but like they say, don’t look a gifted horse in the mouth. The collection of different techniques and different pills he had obtained in the Ancient Battlefield wasn’t small.

It was way more than any Supreme Sect or Ancient Clan. What was most important was that all of it was diverse. He had everything from combat arts to healing arts. Pill refining, Artefact forging, Formations, you name it, he had it. These 59 people would make the best core for him to trust everything to. After he directed the Island to move towards the sea, he started talking to each of them and also passing on cultivating arts for them. He didn’t pressure them at all but rather told them not to pursue advancement but rather tempering their bodies to the maximum.

This was also something that all of them could do and actually the younger you were, the less effort you actually had to invest. The younger a person was, the less impurities they had ingested with food and from the air. The older you were, it was obvious that it would be more. However, he did it the same way that the Yin-Yang Fruit did with him, he didn’t give them the whole Cultivation Art but rather he gave them the Body Tempering part and told them to come and find him when they had fully tempered their bodies to get the continuation. This was just to keep them from trying to advance too fast and leaving themselves a shaky Foundation. If he had known that in the future, this little band of people would become the strongest Empire that would be called the “Perfectionist Empire” in the future, he would laugh to that.

When Zhi had given everyone their cultivation methods, and also given them repeated warnings to be thorough and not pursue speed, he gave all of them some food and gave them new clothes. He had learned everyone’s names as well, when he was talking to them. For example, the lion man was named, Shi Zhishi. He was also the leader of the little group before so when he followed Zhi’s orders so thoroughly, everyone else followed his example. Around the little campfire, everyone were eating the meat Zhi had brought out from somewhere. Finally Zhishi asked, “What is the name of our group?” Zhi looked at him and tilted his head, “Does it even matter?”

Zhishi objected, “Yes it matters. It will be the Banner under which everyone will rally in the future. A name is very important.” Zhi just sighed as he had not thought about this before. In all honesty, he did not give a damn what they were called but seeing everyone make a big deal out of it, he decided to make a few concessions to them as well. Mostly thanks to all of them giving a Bloodline Oath to him. He took a pendant from around his neck and said, “How about Dragon Cross? The Emblem can be the picture of this pendant.” Everyone were very excited about it. This made Zhi a bit puzzled as he thought to himself, “I do not understand them at all. How can they be so cheerful and happy?” As he thought to himself a man with eagle like eyes sat next to him and said, “A peculiar sight, isn’t it? Despite nearly being enslaved a few hours ago, they all act so happy and go lucky now.” Zhi just nodded his head as he looked at the man with eagle eyes.

His name was Zhang Feng. He was currently 20 years old and his physique wasn’t half back, if you ignored some of the obvious bird man features, he was quite human like. However, on his back were two majestic white feathered wings. Seeing Zhi nod like that Feng continued, “Actually, this is not anything surprising. For the last 3 years we have been constantly on the run trying to survive and avoid being enslaved. This is the first time they can just relax and not have to worry about some Humans jumping out from a nearby bush and trying to capture them.” Hearing this Zhi was startled as he listened to Feng. Constantly being on the run and being alert of everything nearby was something he was very familiar with. He had grown so accustomed to it that he just did it subconsciously and it didn’t impact his every day life that much. However, all of these people had grown up in a safe environment before and although it was only three years, they had not grown accustomed to it. Zhi and Feng chatted about the state of the world a bit and seeing everyone heading off to sleep, Zhi tightened the formations on the Island and didn’t let anything enter without him realizing it. After doing so, he told Feng and Zhishi that he will head into seclusion for a few days so they were left in charge of everyone.

After entering the luxurious mansion in the middle of the island, he entered to the deep underground. This was the storage room and Zhi was going to spend the next few days organizing all of the things he had obtained in the past ten years. As he looked through the Cultivation arts, he categorized them by their Tempering requirements and Elemental Affinity. He did the same to all the armours, pills, weapons, Weapon Arts basically everything was categorized and divided. To do a complete inventory of all the things and divide them took him 6 days. When he was finally done and exited the underground storage room, he thoroughly locked it.

No one but him would be able to enter that place from now on and he also didn’t like wearing all of his wealth on him all the times. When he went to find everyone else, he was quite surprised to discover that there were Banners strung up all around the island. The Emblem on the Banners was the same as the pendant, a dragon coiled around a cross. Also, all of the people had divided the island by the elemental affinity and everyone was currently whole heartedly cultivating. On their clothes was the same Emblem of Dragon Cross. Zhi had no idea how long he had actually been underground but he felt that it couldn’t have been that long.

Finally, he found Feng, Zhishi and two others discussing some things. When he approached them, they all stood up and respectfully cupped their hands as Fend said, “Ancestor.” Hearing this, Zhi blanked out as he asked, “Ancestor?” Zhishi immediately explained to Zhi, “We four used to be City Lords, so we have experience managing people but we can tell that Ancestor used to be the “Lone Wolf Type”. So we shamelessly decided to aid the Ancestor in managing the people here.” Zhi scratched his head as he couldn’t refute them.

He truly had been the lone wolf type that had zero experience managing people. However, he didn’t understand the Ancestor thing. Seeing the confused expression on Zhi’s face, Feng explained, “Since we know that Senior has no experience managing people, we wanted to propose the Ancestor System.” Zhi was now even more confused but he grabbed a nearby spot to sit and gestured everyone else to sit as well. Zhi said, “Although, I don’t mind you managing the people, would someone mind explaining to me the Ancestor System?”

Feng smiled as he said, “Well, the Ancestor System is that You are the “Ancestor” the highest authority but most of the time you focus on doing your own things and other people manage the mundane things. If you issue an order, everyone will follow it but it is just that we will be the ones who organize people, oversee the cultivation, distribution of resources, trades, security and so on.” Zhi just said, “Ohh...” He understood how the Ancestor System worked.

The Ancestor basically had people take care of everything else and the Ancestor focused on his own things, be it cultivation, formations, crafting or pill refining. Should something happen that needed the Ancestor intervention, he would show up and take command but he didn’t have to deal with every minor matter there is. Zhi actually liked this system very much because it gave him more time to deal with his own cultivation and also familiarize himself with his core techniques a bit more.

He looked towards the four with a suspicious glance and they were all covered in cold sweat as Feng quickly said, “We did not mean to offend Senior but felt that having you supervise every single thing would take too much of your time and be very detrimental to Seniors own cultivation.” Zhi understood that they wanted to help him as much as they could so that his own cultivation wouldn’t fall into a stalemate because of them. Zhi just smiled as he said, “Don’t worry, I am actually thankful to you for taking on this burden. I was wracking my brains on how to balance my own cultivation with supervising yours at the same time. This actually takes a big burden off my shoulders.” He even lightly bowed his head.

The four were baffled by the honesty and modesty of Zhi. One thing they had been afraid of the past few days was how Zhi is going to act to the proposal. Seeing it go smoothly, everyone felt a burden fall off their chests. Zhi inquired about the progress of the other people and after getting a general run down, he nodded. Although only a few days had passed since all of them had gotten their cultivation methods, all of them were whole heartedly cultivating. No one was slacking off. Feng suggested opening a training ground in each of the 4 districts and also a weapons hall and so on. Zhi felt that this needed to be tuned out a lot because 90% of the things he had were of Miracle Grade in this world, to put them all out there without any restriction was a bit detrimental.

Shang suggested to lay down formation on weapons and armours that tested the person. If they could pass the test, they could acquire it but they couldn’t pass it on to someone else. Shang was one of the Fishman Race. His hair was blue and between his finger was a web. His skin colour had a bronze hue but on his neck were gills that allowed him to breathe underwater. This suggestion was actually a good one. The people would have something to thrive for while at the same time, they couldn’t just obtain them so easily. As they were discussing all of the things, suddenly Zhi looked towards a direction in the distance.

Seeing a smile spread out on Zhi’s face, they all felt that something had just happened. As they all looked towards Zhi, he stood up as he said, “Seems like some people just don’t appreciate life. Having escaped with their life once, they still dare to come back just to die.”

Hearing this, everyone’s expression fell as they felt fear gently grip their heart.