If they are to pick which evil they will suffer, they would rather suffer the lesser evil, so they would rather offend the people here than offend Elder Calcetti.
This point made them begin arguing with each other. One of the elders in the airship saw and heard them arguing with his divine sense. So he decided to intervene.
He said to all of them, "I will tell Calcetti. So you don't need to fight."
They rose up to thank the elder. Then they began chatting about something else.
What they wanted to know was how Arthur managed to acquire his current power in five years and what kind of talent he had before he entered the sect.
They were curious about him, so they eventually began chatting about him. This made them come back to the earlier statement that his achievement isn't far-fetched, to the embarrassment of a certain elder.
The elder who spoke earlier was listening to their conversation. He was also the one who saw Arthur kill the rank 3 bull with a cultivation at the fourth transformation of the second mortal coil.
He didn't know that Arthur had saved the people of his family until after they left the secret realm. He didn't know earlier because he wasn't following the disciples of the sect.
Just like the disciples, he too has a job to acquire as many precious materials as quickly as possible. The materials are precious because they don't grow in the outside world. Only the high mana environment in the secret realm can grow them.
Any attempt to grow the precious plants in the outside world will either fail or be expensive. So if he can't get them this time around, he will have to wait for the next five years to do so.
The search for precious materials is a race against time. He has to be fast enough to reach a precious plant first so that he won't have to compete with others for it.
He especially didn't want to meet the elders of the Blood Skull sect at all. At least the disciples have the advantage of number and can overwhelm some disciples of the Blood Skull sect if they catch them alone. But that is nearly impossible to do at the level of elders.
There are only 43 elders in total. So even if every elder from other sects gangs up on a single elder from the Blood Skull sect, the best they can have is 40 to 1.
That number might be enough to kill an elder from the Blood Skull sect, but it is certain that at least 10 people will die first. Because of this, no elder will want to risk their life by ganging up on the elders from the Blood Skull sect.
Every elder has at least a life span of 250 years. No one wants to throw all of that away by fighting to the death.
This is especially so for the elders from families like his. People like him are usually the only ones in the family. They are the only ones at the peak of the third mortal coil, so their death will be a devastating loss to the family.
What's more, they are only fighting for precious resources to create more people at the third mortal coil for their families and sects. They are not fighting for resources to reach the fourth mortal coil because they don't usually appear in rank 3 secret realms like that.
They are all at the peak of the third mortal coil. So if there were resources to transcend the third mortal coil in the secret realm, they would be more motivated to fight. Since there isn't anything worth losing their life for, they are not inclined to fight at all.
But if they don't gang up on the elders of the Blood Skull sect, they surely won't want to fight the elders of the Blood Skull sect alone. So what everyone tries to do is run around as fast as possible to get as much as they can without having any conflict with the people from the Blood Skull sect.
Because of this, he didn't waste his time trailing after the disciples of the family. Instead, he rushed ahead to look for treasures.
It was along the way that he encountered his brother from the Sword Way sect. Then the two of them came upon Arthur fighting a beast at the third mortal coil and winning.
He sighed and said, "I can only say that the Blood Skull sect is very powerful for being able to help a disciple rise from the tenth transformation of the first mortal coil to the fourth transformation of the second mortal coil in five years."
He can only say that because he doesn't know what to say about Arthur. The more he thought about what he saw and what he had learned about Arthur, the more amazed he was.
He doesn't know why Arthur is so powerful, but as he made some calculations, he can estimate that when Arthur reaches the peak of the second mortal coil, he will be twice as strong as he currently is.
When he thought of this, he was both amazed and heartbroken. He felt heartache that such a talented descendant had to be given to the Blood Skull sect.
He sighed and said, "No matter how good something is, if you don't have the strength to keep it, then it will be a curse, not a blessing."
He is not talking about the fact that if Arthur had remained in the family, his existence would make the sects feel threatened, and they would try to kill him. He is not talking about that because Arthur can be hidden.
But even if Arthur is willing to spend most of his life in hiding, it won't be good because it is unlikely that Arthur will be able to reach the fourth mortal coil. The chances of that happening outside of a sect are just too low.