Alex read the diary with a weird look on his face. The people around him were still looking at him, even staring, but he didn't have the mind to think about that.
He thought about what the diary said.
It was a tragic tale of a demon who had to live through the war, and while Alex did empathize with him to a certain extent, there was something else that grabbed his attention.
Something that was entirely too easy to miss if you weren't looking for some clues.
Alex read the two lines that he found were the most important.
[I avenged you, mother. I avenged you. I killed those humans in battle. I carved your name with their blood on the snow.]
[The young lord was ambushed by 4 humans in the blizzard. I saw him dance with death. I saw him find glory.]
He quickly thought back to the other diary from nearly 10 years ago that he had managed to take from another one of these big houses and remembered the similar lines in there.
[I killed a human today. I vividly remember as his blood melted the snow beneath his dead body. I can't believe I had it in me.]
[I lost my left leg in the fight today. The enemy hid under the frozen lake and sneak attacked me. I'm a little saddened.]
Snow wasn't something so easy to come by on the Western continent. Even when it got cold in the winter, it didn't snow.
However, there was one place. A place where the snow covered the land and the blizzard threatened to kill them.
"The Icy Hell," he thought. "Is that where it is?"
A smile appeared on his face as he was sure that was it.
"If the demons were in war then they most likely have a fortress on the eastern side of the continent," Alex thought. "If that place was forever in ice and that is the only description I ever get in fights, then that must be the case."
Alex was about to relish in this discovery of his when his attention was tugged away by the continuously watching people around him.
'I'm not a celebrity, you know?' he wanted to say but simply didn't want to bother talking with them. If they saw an opportunity to talk back, they would likely talk for hours.
'I'll confirm my hypothesis later,' Alex thought. 'First, let's go check the northern mountain.'
Alex ignored the stares of the people and walked away from the mountain, quickly walking in the northern direction.
The ones that were watching him continued watching for a while before bringing out a talisman to speak into it.
"He's going in the direction of the 6th mountain in the north."
* * * * *
The sun had gone past the zenith and the jaguar was starting to feel bored. He wondered why he was here. He wondered why he had to be the one to chauffeur the kid around.
Why couldn't it be the Puma? Or the Leopard. Or the Lynx. Or the Cougar. Or even the young Serval.
'No, it has to be me,' the jaguar thought. After all, it was the one that was given the order to look after the human kid and the young lord before Lady Ren—
The jaguar's eyes sharpened. It looked up front and saw a few of the Saints walking towards him.
It slowly got up and stared back at them.
"Greetings, senior," the group of them greeted them the moment they arrived close to him.
"What do you want?" the jaguar asked.
"We were wondering who exactly you were, senior," one of the women in the group asked. She wore a brown and gold robe, belonging to the Glory's Edge sect.
"What do you want to know about me? My name or my faction?" the jaguar asked.
The group watched expectantly as if they wanted both.
"My name is—"
Before the jaguar could finish speaking, the Saints moved. The jaguar quickly created a halo of white light around its black body, but they weren't attacking him, but rather moving around him.
The jaguar was confused for a split second before it saw the Saints bring out metallic weapons.
No, they weren't weapons.
Those were formations flags.
The Saint had already reached position and dug the formation flag onto the ground. Before the Jaguar could move away, a barrier opened up all around it, confining it to just that formation.
The jaguar's white halo brightened and it opened its mouth. A giant tiger head appeared all around it, large enough to be bigger than two elephants, and it roared. The roar struck the barrier with magnificent force.
The barrier shuddered, sending shivers up the Saint's bodies, but nothing else happened.
The jaguar attacked a few more times, but nothing happened even then. "What are you doing?" the jaguar attack.
"Sit still, kitty. Or we will be forced to kill you," the old woman with the blood-red robe spoke while freely pouring her Qi into the formation flag below her.
The jaguar looked around. They all were.
Each one of the 14 Saints that stood next to the 14 formation flags was pouring their Qi onto the formation flags.
They were trapping him in here and the only way to get out of this formation was to strike it so hard that Saints outside were forced to pour out their entire dantian before they were empty.
The Saints casually started sitting down on the ground and started cultivating while pouring in the Qi.
The jaguar knew that so long as their Qi and their Will lasted, he wasn't getting out of here.
The old man in the crimson robe was giddy with happiness at the fact that his years of research on the formation finally paid off. He blessed the person that threw the formation manual down from the heavens that night nearly 1200 years ago.
There was a reason why the old man had gone with this approach, rather than using normal formation flags with spirit stones.
For one, Saint spirit stones were almost impossible to find except in the treasuries of the big houses and sects. Since the Saint spirit veins were taken away back before these saints were even born, the new Saint spirit veins would take years to die and turn to Saint spirit stones.
And given how rare they were, they couldn't just use it to contain a beast in the upper Saint Core realm, where it could break the barrier eventually and turn their rare Saint spirit stones useless.
Secondly, spirit stones weren't infinite. At least, not in the same way a cultivator could be. With 14 different cultivators constantly channeling the formation, while renewing their lost Qi, the formation would last as long as it would.
And they knew that they would last forever.
The people around them were looking at them with a horrified expressions as they didn't understand what was happening.
"What are you doing, seniors?" one of the Saint from the Lu family asked, but he was met with a glare from the Song family matriarch.
"Any one of you that questions or dares to interfere with us right now... dies," she said. Then, she realized that this wasn't enough to keep them away, so she decided to go one step further.
"In fact, anyone that doesn't leave this island in the next 5 minutes will be struck through their dantian and have their cultivation base ruined," she said. She knew that wasn't something she could do as the collective wrath of so many houses and sects was not something even she could handle. But, she didn't need to as the threat of a crippled cultivation base alone was enough to send the people scurrying.
Now, only the people from the 5 different great houses and 2 great sects remained.
The Lu family and the Shen family had not involved themselves in this, and neither had the Falling Lotus sect or the Heaven's Peak school.
The jaguar struck the barrier again, but the Saints outside didn't even flinch. While they weren't as strong as the jaguar, they were still in the Saint core or high Saint foundation realm.
"Why are you doing this? What's your purpose?" the jaguar asked.
"We want answers," the lady said without hiding anything. "We want answers from the kid inside and we don't want you to interfere while we get it."
