The elders returned not long after and the ship took off. The ship had some concealment capabilities, but not enough to hide it from the senses of the beasts below.

Of course, the beasts here weren’t strong enough to threaten a ship full of Saint Transformation realm cultivators.

Scarlet was towards the front of the deck and was speaking with the elders, and Alex was a little behind, talking with his father.

“It took you 5 days to find someone?” Alex asked with a surprised look. “You must’ve been incredibly hungry.”

“I was,” Graham said. “Had the Goldflame tribe members not found me, I would’ve most likely become unable to even move if it had been a few days later. Given how many beasts there were around, I would have died.”

“But the Goldflame tribe found you,” Alex said. “You stayed with them for long?”

“Yes,” Graham said, getting slightly sad in the process. “I had no idea what was going on, so I lived my new life as well as I could. I thought of going out to look for you, but… I didn’t know how I could even start.”

“And then… about 7 years later, those bastards came and took me away,” Graham said. “And they killed everyone else in the tribe.”

Alex stayed quiet. He could feel his father’s rage, so he let him be angry. At that time, he thought about something.

“You must have been very strong at the time for them to take you,” Alex said.

“Huh? Oh yes,” Graham said. “I was one of the best in the tribe.”

“In only 7 years?” Alex asked.

“Yeah,” Graham said. “I don’t know how that is possible, but everyone in the tribe was surprised at my improvement too. They joked around about how I would soon be the leader of the tribe and stuff. Now that I think about it, they might not have been joking.”

“Did you improve after coming here?” Alex asked.

“A bit,” Graham said. “But I don’t think I improved a whole lot since I didn’t get to train.”

Alex wondered if that was true. There was a suspicion in his heart that had grown in him after what Shen Jing had told him all those years ago.

“Father, after I was born, did you ever try to have another child?” he asked. “A brother or sister for me.”

Graham looked at him. “Why are you asking that?” he asked.

“Just curious, I guess,” Alex said.

Graham sighed. “We did,” he said. “Of course we did. We had to. Out in the middle of nowhere, you would be lonely. And we also wanted another child. There was nothing much to do for us in the farm, so we had the time to care for another.”

“However, fate didn’t have such plans for us. After you were born, we were never successful at all,” he said. “Hell, it took us so many tries to even get you conceived. Father was worried he would die without a grandchild. He was less irritable after Hannah was born though.”

Alex nodded. ‘So he was right,’ he thought. His father and mother both had such incredible talent and constitutions that heaven didn’t want them to procreate.

Which was to say, his father was special too.

‘I’ll have to check later on,’ Alex thought.

He stood up and stretched a bit. It had been such a long day today that he almost forgot how long it had been.

It was only today that he had gone into the void. It was only today that he had come back from the void. It was today that he came out of the sanctum, killed someone in the Kang family, and then killed so many more in the Sunless lands.

‘I will have to rest for a long time after arriving,’ Alex thought.

“I’ll go talk to them for a bit,” he said as he walked towards the elders and Scarlet. He arrived next to them and sat down as he heard tidbits of what they were talking about.

Alex listened to most of it and found that most events they talked about were political in nature. Very few were actually related to non-political events, one of which was the Sundering Sanctum.

“The sanctum has been getting worse and worse over the years. The space inside is crumbling way too much. We’re afraid that a few centuries down the line, it won’t even be usable,” one of the elders explained.

“What can we do?” Scarlet asked. “I don’t have much knowledge of secret realms and formations. I can’t help you with that. If it can persist for another thousand years, the next phoenix that will arrive might bring some helpers of her own to aid you all.”

The elders were dejected at the answer, but it was understandable.

“Oh, don’t worry about the Sanctum,” Alex spoke from the side. “I’ve fixed it already.”

“You’ve… fixed it?” the elders looked at him weirdly.

“Yes,” Alex said. “The problem with it was that one of its space-stabilizing formation poles was slightly leaning in the wrong direction. Once I fixed that, it stopped destabilizing. It might even be properly usable in just the next 2 decades, although the rooms that have already been destroyed won’t be.”

The elders looked at him in shock. “You fixed the problem of the crumbling space?” they asked. “Why did you not tell us?”

Alex simply pointed behind him toward his father. “Priorities,” he said. “Besides, the information isn’t very important to you anyway, because I’ll be taking over the sanctum very soon.”

The group looked at him weirdly, not understanding what he meant. Even Scarlet was somewhat surprised.

“I’ll explain it to you when I have done what I say I will do,” Alex said, not bothering to explain everything just yet. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it.”

“O-okay,” the elders said, trying to think of what else they could mention.

“What about the barrier?” Alex asked. “It can go down now, right?’

“Uhh… can it?” the elders asked. “If we can get rid of the Phoenix fire from being spread, then yes. But, I’m not sure if the current her can—”

“I could do it when I didn’t even have any cultivation base,” she said. “Making every single one of the flames go out is within my ability. In fact, even he can do it if he chooses to.”

The elders looked toward Alex with a surprised looks on their faces again. “You can get rid of the Phoenix fire?” they asked.

Alex nodded.

“How?” they asked.

“Fire Dao,” Alex said. “No wait, it’s actually because of her.”

The elders looked at Scarlet for a moment, before turning back to Alex. “What do you mean?” they asked.

“Oh, haven’t you told them yet?” he asked her.

“Haven’t had the time,” Scarlet said.

“What… are you two talking about?” the elders asked.

“I have bonded with Scarlet,” Alex said. “She’s my bonded beast.”

The elders looked at Alex with almost no change in expression at all. It was hard for them to understand what Alex was saying as they weren’t expecting that to be the case at all.

However, as time passed and they gathered each of the words’ meanings, they finally understood what he meant.

“You can’t do that!” one of the elders said.

“This isn’t right,” another one said.

“You must end the bond right now,” another one said.

The elders spoke one after another, about how this shouldn’t have been done, and how Alex should immediately free Scarlet from her bonds.

However, before Alex could even answer, Scarlet spoke up. “Shut up, you lot. I did what I did myself. No one forced me to,” she said. “The bond stays up.”

They all looked at Scarlet in awe. “But lady Phoenix, you—”

“No one is allowed to talk about this matter again,” Scarlet gave them the order.

The elders wanted to still talk about it, but they didn’t want to go over her orders.

Alex looked at Scarlet with a weird look as well. “I thought you would want to get rid of this bond now that you’ve got your wish of going back home,” he said.

“I have,” Scarlet said. “But that doesn’t mean everything is over.”

Alex looked curiously. “What else is remaining?” he asked.

“There’s still the mystery of why I am bonded to you,” she asked. “There has to be a reason I felt the need to bond with you, a reason why I felt safe doing that, and it most definitely isn’t because of your White Tiger’s bloodline. There’s something else going on with your body.”

“There’s actually quite a lot going with my body,” Alex said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to specify.”

“I don’t know,” Scarlet said. “There’s something up with your body and it’s familiar to my very being. I’m sure I’m not crazy, so until I find out what is going on, I have absolutely no intention of breaking this bond.”

“I see,” Alex said slowly. “How long do you think it will take you to find out?”

“A thousand years,” Scarlet said without hesitation.

“A thousand ye— wait, isn’t that when you’re going back to your other world?” Alex asked.

“Yes, I am,” Scarlet said. “And I plan on taking you with me. If I can get my elders to look at what’s going on with you, I’m sure I’ll find my answer.”

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