Chapter 94: Commitment
"Wait, that's it?" Paike said as he followed his brother out of the room.
"Liming can hold a grudge, but I think she will give me another chance eventually. But there isn't much I can do about that now, can I?" Taka said.
Paike wasn't so sure he would count on his sister's forgiveness like that. She knew how to hold a grudge and had been nursing this one for a while now with no end in sight. He also wasn't going to go out of his way to convince her for Taka. Certainly not now.
So he let the topic drop, having had enough family drama for the moment.
They walked for a little bit, and Taka quizzed him on how his training had been going while they moved through the forest looking for an empty clearing. He didn't just ask about the battle trance, but his cultivation in general.
When he heard about the change in the physical cultivation classes, he was very interested. He didn't have any information about Elder Ji anymore, though rumors had been going around the inner sect about increased barbarian activity. Apparently, expeditions were being planned to beat them back. It had been nearly a hundred years since the last punitive expeditions, and the voices calling for a more permanent solution were growing more prevalent.
As sons of the Kong family, they knew something about the military history of keeping the barbarians in check. Their family had been in every major conflict with them for the last several thousand years. So they had some idea of how futile it was to try permanently wiping them out.
Despite it being the same land every few generations, the barbarians bore no relation to the ones the empire had fought before. This was not commonly known or cared about by the empire, as these barbarians were not trading partners of any kind. Simply blights on their populations.
Even when the empire had totally depopulated the entire wild areas of humans, it would only be years before a new society took up residence in the mountains beyond the empire's borders. So the empire didn't bother anymore, yet the lands still changed hands with some regularity, another tribe driving the current barbarians from the high peaks.