"How did you get cursed?"
"Honestly, I don't know how everything started. Only some rumors say it's because of a few individuals. But in the end, it doesn't matter; we were pulled into a universal war.
Since you have contact from outside, you should have heard about this."
"Yes, the war between progenitors?"
Rook sighed, "Progenitor, I haven't heard that word for a long time. Well, since you also know about them, that makes things simpler.
We join the wrong faction and then lose the war. We have been cursed like this ever since."
[Queen, I think I get some idea of what happened.] A message suddenly came out from Vesa.
Vesa then started sharing some intel Alex got in the secret realm with the Felidae. 'So it's not really a curse, but because their special ability was stolen, probably all the side effects because of their power.
"Rook, aren't you a human just like me? How could your clan have a special ability then?"
"Special ability? Do you mean summoning spirits?
We got those not because of our species as humans but because our real ancestors somehow made a contract with the king of spirits.
Tough, most knowledge about this has been lost in that war," Rook said with a sigh.
'A power that comes from a contract?
Probably, the spirits made the oath to a specific family. This explains many things. No wonder they have a main branch; they are the ones who made the contract.
The enemy probably took their abilities, resulting in this curse,' MingYue thought.
This realization made her realize she could not lift the curse for now. 'This will lower LinFang's trust in me, but oh well, there's nothing I can do about it.'
"Can you tell me more about the past? How was the war?"
The atmosphere around Rook turned heavy, his voice taking a lower tone. "Unfortunately, Young Lady, I cannot help you with that.
The only reason I survived was because I was one of the weakest; I stayed back as a backup plan in case something happened.
Unfortunately, something really did happen, and I then brought the rest of us to escape…"
MingYue felt there was more to the story, but Rook just turned silent now, seeming busy reminiscing about his own life story.
Outside the village, there was an open area with a large tree in the middle of it. Linfang was sitting on the lap of one of the hooded figures. Only now, the hood was not there.
She looked similar to LinFang, with longer hair and more mature experience; with a glance, everyone could tell they were related.
The other figure stood a few steps away, his sharp eyes looking around the area.
"Mom, today I met another person calling you a puppet, as I thought we really cannot trust those outsiders.
They are all hypocrites that judge everything based on how things look. Both of you are my parents. How dare they call you a puppet."
Linfang then proceeded to tell her a story while her mother's hand patted her head. This made her look like a living person, but if everyone looked at her expression, they could tell something was wrong.
As Rook said, the puppets and weapons were created out of desperation. This planet is not their real destination; they were stranded here because their teleportation device was attacked, making the group split up. seaʀᴄh thё NôᴠelFirё.net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
Stranded in a world of cultivators without having any powers, the results were obvious. They were hunted down.
At first, they could fight back using their weapons that worked similarly to guns, but without the ability to refill their ammunition, these weapons soon turned into junk.
People kept dying left and right without any way to fight back. Thankfully, a hero was born in their group, a genius who performed better under pressure.
These people used their knowledge to create many ways to fight back; their first invention was the hidden weapon, each crafted with very precise mechanisms, just like clockwork.
They then combined it with poison they could find in the local area; this process took time, as they needed to capture some of the weak cultivators, sometimes even going as far as capturing villagers to test out the poison.
An inhuman act, but desperate times require desperate measures.
As time progressed, they finally perfected the weapon, allowing them to start fighting back. They also started learning about cultivation, raising their overall strength, but unfortunately, at this point, their population took a big hit; they needed to focus more on food production and other work rather than just keep fighting and risking their lives.
This was when another genius was born, mixing their cultivation method with their past techniques.
As summoners in the past, they not only had a way to make contracts with spirits, but they also made a method to control the spirits from making a bond to a forceful method that was condemned by most.
In the past, this method brought about many civil wars, but now it has become their Hail Mary.
Mixing it with cultivation methods, they created a way to inject qi into corpses, slowly creating a way to control them like puppets; at first, they used the qi like a thread connecting to their limbs.
However, this method proved very ineffective; any cultivator could see this qi thread and cut it with their own technique, so the creators at that time tried to improve this.
They finally created a technique that allowed them to control corpses without any thread, but there was a caveat: it could only be done with blood relatives. The closer their relationship, the better the control.
This was done by separating the core; when other cultivators reached the core formation stage, the Fang clan's technique allowed them to split the core formation into two groups, one being the main core while the other was the sub-core. As for how many sub-cores could be created, that depended on how talented the person was.
As they grew as cultivators, these cores also grew in strength; so far, the highest level the clan reached was only the Spiritual Transformation stage.