Chapter 56:  Changes

A week passed by and the situation in the Lunaris city began to calm down. The common cultivators and small cultivation clans began to accept there was no way they could evade the incoming war. The frenzied buying and stockpiling began to slow down and everything became the same as before. The price of raw materials was just a bit higher than before, the crime drastically lessened and the citizens began to go about their usual lifestyle. But everyone knew it was just a clam before the storm because the great clans had not shown signs of any distress. And this lack of sign was one of the factors that calmed down the normal cultivators because they knew the more calm the situation became the more destructive their explosion would be. The aftermath was sure to change the landscape of Lunaris city.

Although the clans were also aware of it, they were helpless. They couldn't just choose a side and start a war just because there will be a war in the future. They just had to endure and strengthen themselves so they may be able to survive. This war was not about winning or losing but surviving because whoever party wins at the end will have to serve the main characters of the war. If the family and sects won, they would surely take most of the resources from smaller clans and if the royal family won, the tax imposed would skyrocket making it hard for smaller clans to survive. The big shots won't care about the survival of small fries if it means abandoning the benefits. So whichever side wins, the small clans that survived will have to take the burn of the aftermath. Anyone with common sense could predict this but they can do nothing about it, just survive till the end and continue surviving.

In this period of time, it wasn't just the normal cultivators and small clans that went quiet but the big clans were also quiet, there wasn't much presence of the clan members in the city but the number of their members had increased drastically in the outskirts of the Bareback mountains. The three great clans and medium clans of the city had sent most of their Qi sensing realm cultivators to the outpost. Although the presence of large numbers of cultivators could agitate the beasts located in the depths of mountains, there were only a few number of foundation building cultivators and even they didn't dare to go far. But even if this could agitate the beasts, the clan's options were limited, they had to increase their strength urgently and even if the beast tide occurred, the aftermath could only be similar to the war.

They couldn't afford to choose between two evils, there was no lesser evil or greater evil, and both options would only lead them to death so they had to pave their own way. Due to the presence of large numbers of cultivators, the area they could transverse became congested and skirmishes became common. Although the small and medium clans wouldn't dare to fight and kill the cultivators from the three great clans, they could always kill in secret. If no one found out about it then it is only free benefits. The number of casualties began to increase day by day. First, it was small fighting about the territory then the small fight gradually escalated to a life-and-death battle. Old rivalries were brought out at that moment and with the cultivators influenced by killing intent and bloodlust from slaughtering the beasts on the outskirts of the mountain, the situation came on the verge of clan war. There were even cultivators of the three great clans among the casualties.

The representatives of the three great clans on the outpost of Bareback mountains had to mediate and form a verbal treaty where killing fellow cultivators was punishable by death. This somewhat eased the situation in the forest but the main problem remained, the congested area. Then the three clan representatives along with others from medium and small clans came to an agreement to reform the previously allocated area but the problem was no one was ready to cede their territory. At that moment Radha came up with a plan to allocate some of the territory used by the three great clans to other smaller clans. This plan was agreed upon by Punya and the supreme elders.

This was an ingenious plan, first, they could allocate the already explored and exploited territory parts to small clans, which would force the other two clans to not be stingy as this would lead the smaller clans to harbor resentments, and since this plan was proposed by the Rijal clan, the small clan would be grateful for bigger territory. And smaller territory would somewhat lessen the development of the other two clans, and they couldn't even fall out with the Rijal clan openly for such a small matter. If they endure it, their development would lessen a little and if they questioned, they would come out a little petty. At this stage, even a little less development means fewer chances of survival. With this plan, the Rijal clan killed a few birds with an arrow. Although the Rijal clan would also suffer a little, they had top-tier alchemist and a lot of foundation building real cultivators who were exploring the inner region on a daily basis.

They had already gathered a lot of resources for all auxiliary professions, especially alchemy and their fail-safe plan was the lesser essence restoring pill which could somewhat offset the burning of blood essence while unleashing forbidden techniques. The main ingredient required was the blood essence of the second grade beast which they killed a lot of during this week. Although if they kept killing higher level beasts the probability of beast tide occurring increases, there were also a large number of second grade beasts on the outskirts of the inner region of the Bareback mountains. If they went even deeper there were a few third grade beasts. But the beasts they killed were only low-tier second grade beasts and rarely middle-tier.

 The high tier second grade beasts were fewer in numbers and the current Battle hall would struggle to kill one. Not only that but few of the high tier second grade beasts were descendants of the third tier beasts, so it was unwise to offend such beasts for some profits. Every member of the Battle hall was given one lesser blood essence restoring pill as they had found a lot of ingredients for it and the clan didn't know about that pill.