In the end, Sage found his worries to be for naught. After spending hours on the Inner World trying to come up with ideas, Yating stood at the head of the table in the Lang Clan command tent and fixed a determined gaze upon him.

“Father, you did well in securing this opportunity, but you no longer need to do a thing. You are now the Honored Ancestor of the Lang Clan. It is no longer your duty to try to carry the clan upon your back. It is time for you to step back from clan matters and focus on your own cultivation. The only time you should have to get involved is when the clan faces annihilation.”

Without expecting it, Sage found himself being relegated to the same position as those Ancient Ancestors of the Lang Clan in the tomb. He was suddenly taken aback, but he remembered that’s how most of the Clans operated. If their Nascent Souls were running around outside, who knew when they might run into danger or be plotted against? Then, if a clan lost its strongest backing what would they do when their enemies came calling? Of course, this was also usually their own fault. As soon as a Clan had a Nascent Soul, they would get into conflict with their neighbors and get revenge upon their former rivals. The other groups would have to pay them tribute and go along with their new demands. If that Nascent Soul got killed, wouldn’t the rest of the clan come down with them when all those small slights were remembered by others?

Even for clans who had only rank fives to call upon, when their number was small they followed the same practice, reserving the clan’s greatest power at home. Sage felt it was somewhat silly that the strongest member of a clan would basically be turned into an emergency home defense system, but how else would these great clans act so belligerently? At least Sage wouldn’t have to follow this protocol to such an extent. The five greatest members of the Purple Mist Sect were already stationed at the Lang Clan to protect them, and that was without notifying the Great Ancestors in the tomb. Well, that’s not quite true. One of the five was here, shadowing Yating. They took turns acting as a hidden guard for the Lang Clan Patriarch, and that was in addition to the Purple Mist member that each of his children had as a bodyguard. Since eight of the ten of them were present in this battle, the Lang Clan technically had ten Nascent Souls present.

Technically, the Purple Mist Sect members were to be mentors and bodyguards for his children, but it was pretty easy for them to twist the rules. They weren’t supposed to get involved unless they were saving his children’s lives, but all they had to do was pick a fight with someone strong and then their guard would save them. That troublemaker Yahui had been especially good at taking advantage of his guard and they had to go through a dozen different sect members before finding one that could handle Yahui. The man let Yahui get beat into a pulp before he bothered to save him. He also let the kid get arrested, stripped naked, and locked into a set of stocks for a few days before he broke him out.

With Yating being so earnest and upfront with him, Sage merely nodded and left the command tent. He pushed down his curiosity and walked to a private tent, then he slipped his hand under the pillow of a cot and entered the Universe Ring. He was nervous, but his children were over a half-millennia old. He’d long ago known that he wasn’t the type of person that was good at leading others, and he’d already found a perfect person to take over. Yet, even if he knew that logically the clan would be perfectly fine without him, he was still worried.

To take his mind off the troubles of being a parent he switched to training. His body in the Universe Ring practiced the usage of his many Heavenly Materials. In the Inner World, he practiced Qi techniques, mental abilities, and tried to deepen his understanding of laws. With the time difference he had plenty of time to master most of his abilities, but unfortunately the Heavenly Materials were the very fabric of the Inner World’s existence. They were what he used to essentially be omnipotent in the Inner World, so they functioned drastically differently in the outside world. Along with the unique abilities of his different true body, they were the only thing he couldn’t really practice with on the Inner World.

In fact, Sage had been contemplating this problem for some time. As impressive as the gigantic body of the Genesis Spider was in comparison to the simple Jade Sky Mantis that he’d derived for his clan, there was still a problem. His descendants had spent hundreds of years working on techniques to make the most out of their bodies. There was now a whole library of advanced techniques that he’d already mastered on the Inner World, but most of them were tailored to their mantis bodies. If Sage changed his true body into a Jade Sky Mantis, or one of the variants his descendants developed, he could use the many techniques to quite possibly exceed the abilities of his current form. His descendants took the three hundred horsepower engine they’d started with, stripped off useless parts and added upgrades to create a high performance racing vehicle. Meanwhile, he may have a thousand horsepower in his giant body, but it was stuck in a giant truck body. Even though they had much less raw power, their overall performance could be much higher than his own.

There was also the idea of altering his body on the Inner World to more closely match that of his true body on the outside, but then he would not be able to take full advantage of the advancements that his descendants had come up with that were created to match their mantis bodies.

I suppose the best choice is something of a middle ground. I need to blend my two bodies together to maintain as much power as possible and spend time altering the techniques to make up for the differences.

Of course, he couldn’t do that just yet as metamorphosis took many months, or even years now because of his giant body. It would have to wait until this war with the Fu Clan was settled. A messenger arrived from the Chong Clan and Sage was surprised that he wasn’t even consulted before the Lang Clan started to move out. A messenger was sent to his tent to inform him of the impending action. He stepped out of the tent and it was quickly put into a storage treasure just like the rest of the camp. Then he went to join the large troop movement. They arrived at the main Chong Clan camp where Sage had been earlier and Yating didn’t call for him. Instead, he entered the Chong Clan’s command tent along with his two guards.

He immediately realized they’d already formulated a plan of action and the conditions of their cooperation. The leaders of the Clan handled all the decisions without him having to do a single thing. This sudden loss of responsibilities was both liberating and terrifying. He was proud of his family, but also worried about the danger. It would be much worse if he thought they’d be going directly into battle, but he knew that the combat doctrines of the clan used their extraordinarily large army of Dragoons to lead the way. It was a somewhat callous thing to put these other beings at risk, but he’d basically engineered them and not only were they culturally and socially encouraged to earn glory on the battlefield, it was an instinctual desire passed down to them at birth. His ethics and mortality had long been jaded by this harsh world in his first few decades here. Creating an entire race of people that would joyfully sacrifice themselves for his family was not something that would affect him too harshly anymore.

After a few hours, the Chong Clan command tent was emptied and the leaders of the Chong Clan watched with curious looks on their faces while the Lang Clan’s army arrived. Sage wasn’t told of the plans, but he saw that almost half of the troops they’d brought to this war had made their way to this location. Over a hundred airships started to land around the cave entrance while the rest of the sky seemed nearly filled with the black and green coloring of the Dragoons. They formed into disciplined rows and columns in the sky, stacking on top of each other like the layers of a cake and then filing into the tunnel entrance like a flying cube.