Chapter 2070: Several Bad Associations

The Sages of the various Heavenly Fields in the Floating Star Region had ultimately been unable to obtain any useful information from the expert of the Taming Star Field.

When the expert of the Taming Star Field regained consciousness, he understood very clearly that even if he confessed all he knew about the Taming Star Field, the Sages of the Floating Star Region would be unlikely to spare his life.

For an expert of his cultivation stood among the very top of the Taming Star Field, letting him go would be tantamount to aiding the enemy.

Thus, the instant he awoke, he decisively chose to end his own life. Although the Sages of the Floating Star Region had anticipated this and made preparations to prevent it, once a Sage resolved to take his own life, even with his cultivation fully sealed, no one else could truly stop him.

Even so, the Sages of the Floating Star Region gathered the records they had collected over the years concerning the Desolate Forbidden Region and Taming Star Field, and delivered them all to Shang Xia.

After all, without Shang Xia’s help, they would never have captured a high-level Sage of the Taming Star Field expert alive.

This would, without question, weaken the Taming Star Field’s strength inside the forbidden region and exert a powerful deterrent on its invaders.

Shang Xia felt a tinge of regret, but he had not been wholly unprepared for this outcome.

After skimming the information on the forbidden region and Taming Star Field compiled, Shang Xia also activated the orb that Wanggui had left him.

Its contents held a wealth of information about the interior of the forbidden region, with some involving the Taming Star Field, though most of it overlapped the records collected by the various Heavenly Fields.

However, certain conjectures and inferences in the two sets of records corroborated each other and thereby grew more credible.

Of course, since Wanggui himself had come from the Floating Star Region, such overlap was only natural. But it should not be forgotten that Wanggui had very likely lived 1,000 years ago. Thus, the accounts he left in the orb were originally his firsthand experiences, and even reports he had heard were closer in time to the events, or even contemporaneous with them, so their credibility was naturally higher.

Crucially, these records addressed the origin of the enormous floating continent that hosted the Desolate Forbidden Region. It was nearly comparable to a continent in an Essence World. According to the aggregated information from the Heavenly Fields, many sources mentioned that the restrictions inside the forbidden region partly originated from Taming Star Field and that its ambient energy was a fusion of the essences of two Star Fields, changing the interior environment so that it was at odds with the Floating Star Region and even the entire Chaotic Sea of Stars.

Sages Lu Xin and Xin Zhi even suspected that Taming Star Field experts were intentionally remaking the interior of this floating land to better suit their cultivators, thus turning it into a springboard for an invasion of the Floating Star Region, and even the Chaotic Sea of Stars.

Wanggui did not agree. He asserted directly that the floating land of the Desolate Forbidden Region itself had come from Taming Star Field: a main continental landmass of a Yuan Realm from Taming Star Field had smashed through the void barrier between the two star seas and finally descended on the Floating Star Region’s side of the Chaotic Sea of Stars.

In the orb, he even stated bluntly that the reason the Taming Star Field had descended was directly connected to the Heaven Observation Sect. He boldly speculated that, in attempting to break the barrier between the two Star Fields, the Heaven Observation Sect had essentially sucked an Essence World from the Taming Star Field side over to their side.

This conjecture prompted Shang Xia to link it directly with the Nebula Forbidden Region.

The Nebula Forbidden Region had appeared not long ago and still had many living witnesses, so there was little doubt about its emergence. In that case, the process of its appearance had been that the Star Field on the other side of the barrier tried to break through the wall between it and the Chaotic Sea of Stars to open a void channel.

In response, several Sages conspired to push the nearby Essence Wilderness World into it to block it completely, which ultimately led to the formation of the Nebula Forbidden Region.

However, according to those elders, the Essence Wilderness World disintegrated after being shoved into the channel. Back then, Shang Xia and the others had even found the remnant World’s Will in the forbidden region.

Had the Essence Wilderness World not disintegrated at the time, who could say whether a forbidden region similar to the Desolate Forbidden Region would have formed in the Star Field on the opposite side?

Despite the many differences between the two cases, this made Shang Xia more inclined to believe Wanggui’s conjecture.

At the end of the memories recorded, Wanggui revealed another secret. The formation of the restrictions shrouding the Desolate Forbidden Region was also the effort of the Heaven Observation Sect. Because of their help, in an era more than 1,000 years ago, when Wanggui was active, the restrictions inside still had clear gradations and were not entangled as they had become. The danger and likelihood of becoming lost when entering and exiting were not what they had become.

Thus, many high-level cultivators voluntarily ventured into the forbidden region back then, and among them, the Heaven Observation Sect’s cultivators were the most frequent visitors.

Therefore, Wanggui further suspected that, during their participation in laying out the arrays, the Heaven Observation Sect must have left safe passages within, or at least mastered methods for moving in and out.

Yet, everything was merely the groundwork for his final secret. Inside the Desolate Forbidden Region, experts of the Heaven Observation Sect lured in people from Taming Star Field to hunt them, collected the Taming Star Field’s martial inheritances, especially their beast-taming arts, and then modified those inheritances to suit experts of the Chaotic Sea of Stars.

However, those captured experts were never taken out of the forbidden region by the Heaven Observation Sect, not even their corpses...

Wanggui was almost stating outright that the Heaven Observation Sect had been the prime instigator of the Beast Warriors, or at least one of the major driving forces behind their creation.

Shang Xia quietly set down the jade slips compiled by Lu Xin, Xin Zhi, and Wanggui’s memory orb. Beneath his calm expression, his heart churned like a stormy sea. He seemed once more to have glimpsed certain ancient secrets, which in turn sparked many troubling associations.

In the dim light of his cabin, Shang Xia’s gaze burned like a deep, intimidating flame. Only when he once again performed Shifting Dipper to draw origin energy from within the forbidden region, and found not only that it had been exhausted but that even his connection to the Star Origin Talisman seemed to have been cut, did he snap out of his state of contemplation.

Shang Xia quickly realized that Wanggui had deliberately severed the connection between the Star Origin Talisman and himself.