"Can you tell me a little more about him, senior? What happened to him?" Ning asked.
"Sigh, it's the age-old tale of power corrupting people," Principal Singeer said as he shook his head.
"Gassain family was a family of merchants in the beginning. They had made their name known quite wide and within a century, the then head of the family, Clive Gassain managed to get a noble status from Emperor Reen."
"Once he became a noble, Clive started to make his only son cultivate. Surprisingly, his son, Horom had great talent in cultivation, and thanks to his father's knowledge in merchant became great in both."
"By the time that Clive died, Horom had already become the head of the family and started getting bigger and bigger."
"After a few years, he sent Trebor to study with us. The boy showed great talent in alchemy and was going to be one of the finest for sure."
"While his family increased in power, Trebor got better here too. In fact, Trebor even ended up as a teacher in the academy."
"Within 5 years of joining, he had the Silver badge, and was getting close to becoming a Gold Starred teacher, that was how good he was."
"However, that was when tragedy struck. Since Horom had been gaining more and more power, he thought he could be the next Emperor, and one day took his entire family and friends to go attack the current emperor."
"Thankfully, the Emperor was ready for the attack and successfully defended himself. Horom died in that battle as well as a lot of the family members. His wife and daughter who had remained behind were captured and publicly executed for defying the throne."
"Trebor killed the two royal guards that came to capture him in the academy as well and then disappeared. We never heard anything about him after that."
"That was 80 years ago. I don't know where he had been all this time, but it seems he had been plotting to take revenge."
"He wanted to use us as the leverage to destroy the Emperor's current status, and perhaps even take over the throne, just as his father did."
"Sigh, he could have been such a great person if only his family didn't stupidly attack the emperor," Singeer said while shaking his head.
"I… see," Ning said. "That is indeed quite tragic."
"It is what it is, teacher Ning. Let us go too," Singeer said and the remaining staff members followed behind them.
Ning took his leave once he came outside and went to the classroom where everyone was hiding.
The students and Eleonora jumped when they heard him walk in.
"W-Where are they?" She asked.
"They're all dead. The threat is gone," Ning said. "You guys can leave now."
"We're saved."
"Thank god."
"I thought I was going to die."
"I'm going back to meet my parents."
The students shouted left and right as they made their way outside the room and soon everyone was gone except Eleonora.
"You saved us all?" she asked with wide eyes.
"You could say that," Ning said.
"I see… I guess I should apologize then. I'm sorry for all the times I have been rude to you," she said.
"That's not needed. You were only trying to protect your brother," Ning said.
"Still, I wrongly assumed you were trying to hide your cultivation base for something malicious. I'm sorry," she said.
"Yeah, well that wasn't why I did that. I assumed there wouldn't be that many people with the Nascent soul realm in the central continent. So I had to lower my cultivation base so as not to stand out."
"Who knew that there were so many of them here," Ning said.
"Central… continent? Are you saying you've been to the other continents?" Eleonora asked with a surprised look.
"Yeah, of course. Wh— Ah right. I forgot travel between continents is impossible right now. Well, it's not for me," Ning said with a smile.
"Anyway, it's been a rough night. You should go get some rest. I will find you sometime soon to talk about the system in detail. Goodbye," Ning said and left.
He too felt unnaturally tired, mostly just mentally. He did use up quite a bit of mental strength in that fight. Also, he wanted to look up the Origin, so he went back to his room.
He opened up the book once more and read through it. The unnamed book really didn't give much information at all.
'Maybe the full book has more information,' he thought and looked up through the interface. Without the AI, it took him nearly half an hour to even find ways to search for this current book.
'Damn, I didn't realize how bad it was at finding existing stuff,' he thought and finally bought the information.
When the whole book came to his mind, he finally read it all. The book seemed to be actually written a little before the war from ten thousand years ago.
The fact that half of it even survived was a mystery of its own. The full thing seemed to be the daily life of a cultivator, mixed in with an understanding of his own.
Finally, Ning got to the sentence he had been waiting for, and it read…
"I heard the beasts could breakthrough once they reached the peak of Nascent Soul realm whenever they wanted to. That was only in the past however… since then, one can only enter the Spirit Transformation by cultivating at the Origin," Ning read.
"Tsk, that didn't add much information at all. Also, what is the Origin? There's nothing like that in the map of the planet?" Ning thought. He tried searching for it through the interface, and all he could find was a single piece of information.
Origin referred to the location on the planet where Qi originated from. As for the location itself, it didn't say.
Ning sighed and gave up on finding any more information about it for now. It was too early anyway.
He then thought of something else and bought another piece of information. He bought the memories of Trebor Gassain.
For some reason, Ning couldn't put Trebor's sadness and Singeer's story together. So, he decided to find out the information on his own.
Once the knowledge of Trebor's past was in his mind, he took a peek at it.