Daily life of a cultivation judge

"The main show is about to start. Yang Qing we are of...watch our backs, will you? She looks like the poisonous and hidden attacks type.." said Dai Chen as he and the rest took out their weapons when the person they had been waiting for finally revealed herself.

Something that looked like a withered tree with humanoid features walked out from the tree. One couldn't even tell whether it was alive. It walked wobbly and had white scattered hair with red tinges at the edge.

The corpse-like figure had on a grey plain robe and on one of its hands it held a broken-off branch to support itself. 

It was bent down and hunched over, so one couldn't see its face, but Yang Qing and the rest had no doubt as to the identity of the humanoid creature below.

Who could it be, other than the founder of the Ice Emerald Sect, Feng Qiu, who started all this 40,000 years ago with the massacre of the Sun Jade Kingdom?

Even though she looked to be just on death's door, none of the judges present dared to underestimate her as the four main attackers got ready.

Dai Chen took out two single-edged long swords that were six feet long and the blades were as black as the night sky. They occasionally glittered as if they contained stars in them. The deep blackness and the occasional starlight was a characteristic of weapons or artifacts made from meteor starlight metal which was a top-tier monarch-grade material.

Dai Chen's whole demeanor changed when he held the two swords. A formless pressure accompanied by an extreme slicing sensation formed around him. The air vibrated around him, moreso his swords that seemed to be in a highly excited state.

Mo Liwei had taken a silver spear that had a handle that resembled the wings of a bird. His tired state instantly transformed into one of extreme vigor. His eyes changed into a bird's eyes. It was silver on the outside and yellow on the interior.

Wei Ying took out a purple fan that was filled with all sorts of inscriptions. Even though she didn't have any visible changes to her like Dai Chen and Mo Liwei, there was a sense of quality in her that seemed different from before and was even different from Dai Chen and Mo Liwei. 

If one was to point out was what different, it was she seemed more at one with the world compared to them. Like she could borrow its force easily.

As for the last person Zhang Qingge, she was the only person without a weapon, but that didn't diminish her presence at all, and her transformation was the most drastic. The shy, gentle-looking person was no more and was replaced by a short lady with an indifferent gaze exuding a battle lust so huge and palpable that it made the air around her quake.

The four of them were like arrows that had already been pulled back to its most limits on a bowstring and were ready to be let lose and obliterate the target and the target of those arrows was a hunched over, wilted bark-looking lady, who with every wobbly step she took, the world seemed to echo it.

An expert at the sixth stage of the palace realm, one whole minor realm than her opponents. Yang Qing despite besting seven palace stage experts, couldn't hope to replicate such a feat on their founder. He would be lucky to get out with his life if he insisted on fighting her to the death in a one-on-one fight, using normal means.

A middle-stage palace realm cultivator was a middle-stage palace realm cultivator, it didn't matter that he had a deeper more stable foundation base than her, or that he cultivated a purple-grade art, and had a peerless jade physique to work with, he would lose to her if he faced her alone.

There was nothing to it, the fact that she was a middle-stage palace realm cultivator meant she could infuse more dao in her attacks, making them more lethal than whatever Yang Qing could throw at her with his current level. 

The palace realm involved cultivating your embryonic dao to maturity, and her embryonic form was a bit larger than Yang Qing's or the other judges in the vicinity. 

The only way to bridge that gap was to gang up on her and stack their own qualities along with using high-grade equipment to close that gap, and lucky for them, they had already faced middle-stage and late-stage palace realm cultivators who had a much scarier presence than her by a thousand times, and they did so when they were just in the core formation realm.

To keep them humble, their sadistic instructors would occasionally challenge them to a fight. One instructor would face the whole class. They would be soundly defeated and traumatized after the fact because of how ruthless the instructors were despite holding their punches, but the experience was nonetheless invaluable to them.

This was why despite the founder of the Ice Emerald Sect fully releasing her cultivation base and pressure, they still dared to face her when others in their situation would have shrunk back and escaped.

Her pressure paled in comparison to the instructors, they even felt it was weaker when compared to the instructors who were at the fourth stage of the palace realm, despite her being at the peak of the sixth stage, just at the cusp of breaking through to the seventh stage, effectively breaking into the late stage of the palace realm.

Her power seems impure almost as if artificial and borrowed. Whatever means she used to get her this far will not help her establish her core palace no matter how many lives she sacrifices. Her path will forever stagnate, where she is....

...

"How did this happen?...how did this happen?... Why isn't Master answering even now?..." the founder of the Ice Emerald Sect muttered over and over in a delirious state before she suddenly looked up revealing a dried-up face with hollow sockets with red orb in them.