"Oh? I'll trust you for the moment. Then talk about what happened to the Longus family." Minos said as he stopped using his techniques on that man, giving him room to breathe better.
"Sigh... Your Majesty is really powerful." He said as he looked at Minos, smiling. "But before that, why don't we move? As confident as the patriarch's group is, some must be watching this area in search of you."
"Hmm, do you have any suggestions?" Minos agreed.
"We can't fly like you were doing earlier. The best thing is to move along the ground and travel through the forests." This being said, indicating the direction of the forests nearby. "It will be more dangerous because of the sentient vegetables, but we will hide better from them."
"By the way, how did you find us before our enemies? Is your faction stronger than our enemies' by any chance?" Starclaw asked, making that hybrid look at her and swallow his saliva.
'What an incredible beauty!' He thought momentarily. 'Your Majesty is really lucky!'
But soon, he controlled his instincts and answered her. "Senior, our faction is weaker than the patriarch's. However, that is precisely why we find you faster.
The patriarch is confident that His Majesty is coming to him, so he and his group is focused on setting a trap for the ancestor's chosen one.
They are putting less of their attention on the empire.
But my group is weaker, and as such, we have to try our best with the few possibilities we have.
We cannot compete directly with the patriarch's faction, so we have been focusing a lot of our attention in the last few months on the coast of the empire, where we hoped you would come.
Luckily we found you before they did.
Minos and Starclaw heard this and did not doubt that this was indeed the explanation behind it.
For this Minos-friendly faction, their only chance was him. So only by contacting him and combining their plans with their chosen one could lead them to victory.
As for the patriarch's group, they could only act against Minos if the stronger ones did so. But the strongest could not spread out to track Emperor Stuart through Grinie Empire.
Putting too many people after Minos would also be a problem, as this young emperor could kill too many of them, so it was better to focus on waiting for him at their headquarters, where they could act together.
With the vast experience these two had, they both believed in that being.
"What is your name?" Minos asked him as they moved through the terrain, heading into the dense woods of the area.
"My name is Nino Longus, Your Majesty."
"Well, Nino, tell me what happened to your family," Minos asked.
As someone with many of Henricus Longus' memories, he was curious how this family had decayed so much and still failed to stop its decay with genetic mixing.
Nino then began to tell the story of the Longus family.
"When our ancestor left us millions of years ago, our family was one of the most powerful organizations in the entire Spiritual World.
We had the first human God on our side, so we were the strongest humans. We had several high-level Demigods on our side, enough to ensure our dominance for tens of thousands of years.
Eventually, we developed well, had no problems, and followed the orders left by our ancestor without fail.
However, cultivating in seclusion is not easy when you are so strong and have such a special origin as ours.
For almost a million years, we were several times sought after by powers that wanted to steal our heritage.
Many believed that we were decaying because of our seclusion after the departure of our ancestor, which brought us many challenges.
Of course, we were not weak then, so we defeated almost everyone who dared to attack us. However, we lost talented people who could have become Gods, which damaged us."
Maintaining the power level of a stable peak organization was not easy. If they didn't get new Gods every few hundred thousand years, their Spatial Kingdoms would lose some of their property, and the natural problems of any family would catch up with them.
Not only that, genetic inheritance in the Spiritual World was not a sure thing. Parents with Physique and high-level talent had a greater chance of passing it on to their children, but it was not certain mathematics.
Sometimes it could happen that a child from the fruit of the union of two peak cultivators would be born with a lower level Physique and talent than the parents.
That was unlikely, but it could happen.
At the same time, having a child when one was very talented and powerful was very difficult, so having a child of inferior talent could be the beginning of the decay of a lineage.
Because of this, powerful cultivators needed to do their best to reach peak cultivation and have as many children as possible on their way, or almost certainly, sooner or later, their families would experience decay.
One could hardly change the talents of their descendants, but upon reaching peak cultivation, level 100, these people could at least ensure that their heirs reached their full potential. With this, new talents could emerge, maintaining the power within a family.
Without new Gods and with the deaths of great talents, the Longus family had begun its decline at that time!
"We were still powerful, but seven new Gods had emerged among humans in those 1 million years after the ancestor's departure. This put even more pressure on us.
We had to give up several contests for valuable medicines, and our peak members lost their opportunities to become Gods.
This made us hide even more, afraid that we would attract these Gods to us and be totally destroyed.
Because we hid, it had become difficult for our ancestors to marry exceptionally talented cultivators.
Since we had to hide because of our origin, there was no way we could attract the attention of descendants of powerful families.
Hence our ancestors were forced to breed with our subordinates or even distant relatives to maintain family power.
This did not bring us good results, and less and less talent came into the family.
Also, fights over territory and the weakening of the northern region of the Central Continent weakened us even more, forcing us to change territory for the first time.
At this point in the Longus family's history, our group was already eight times less than at the time of the ancestor Henricus Longus, and we no longer had peak Demigods."
Every journey through the Spiritual World has its risks. Not only that, when seeking new territory, one naturally had to occupy either empty spaces or spaces that already had owners.
Normally good places like the one in Lusmait were unlikely to be without an owner...
"We faced several challenges to be able to establish our second home." Nino continued as they moved through the lush forest on their way. "But once again, our peace had been disturbed and new talent lost in battles in that area west of the Central Continent..."
