"What's wrong with Master?"
"Why does he look like that?"
"Oh, he's just having a slight existential crisis. He will be alright."
Voices registered, I suppose, though quite shallowly. Like when you're thinking about something while working--a small part of your brain is dedicated to that thought, but not enough to register it with any sense of reality.
My mind was dominated, conquered, utterly and totally overcome with a very simple idea: I'm rich. I'm so fucking rich I could shove a thousand stones into a g-string of a very nice lady and not even feel the pang of pain over it. I'm so rich I could buy a mausoleum just for a goof. Never even bury myself there or anything.
I'm so rich I can finally fucking afford to have these blood-sucking kids--whom I love more than life itself--buzzing around me. I don't have to claw and scrape for stones just to give them something. I don't have to beg the system to give me stones. I don't have to do anything.
I just got 900,000 high-grade stones. A freakin' ludicrous sum. A sum so massive that there is a part of me convinced I'm making all this shit up.
"I really didn't think it'd go for nine Divine Stones," eh? Shufen's voice sprung me out of my stupor.
Spirit Qi Purification--it's something that we did on occasion, but as the kids had to cultivate and I would get bored out of my mind, we never really abused it that much. But don't I have someone here with connections spanning the world? While 900,000 high-grade Spirit Stones translated to roughly 9 Divine-tier Spirit Stones out there in the rich-getting-richer world, in my world, 1 Divine-tier Spirit Stone was equal to less than 1,000 high-grade ones.
Now, admittedly, it genuinely took like a month of near nonstop work to convert them, but shit, if I have some upstart sweatshop doing it, the hell do I care how long it takes? All I'll know is that, every once in a while, I could launder the ever-living-shit out of the Spirit Stones. Convert some of the high-quality stones into Divine-tier ones for a few thousand, then selling those Divine-tier ones for a few hundreds of thousands.
Shit, in a few years, I'll be drowning in money!
Though I want to lunge over at her and tell her to get out and find me a nice little sweatshop; there's that girl still here with us. Besides, I need to very deliberate with this plan.
We are, for all intents and purposes, a nomadic sect. While Shufen may have her connections, they're all static; we'd have to go to them, as it's not like we can deploy a thousand mini teleportation arrays like some high-tech stone delivery networks.
I could maybe bring them onto the mountain? Open a few little shops at the base of it, feed them some nice food made by Long Tao and some expensive wines... I mean, while Spirit Qi Purification does improve the rate at which one converts stones with the higher talent and comprehension, if there's 1,000 people doing it, it sort of makes up for the lack of talent.
This way, the kids and I can focus on cultivating and not being bored out of our(my) minds, while still reaping the benefits of a cheat art.
Yeah.
If I were a smidgen smarter, I would have been abusing the ever-loving shit out of this from the day I got it. But, alas...
Maybe it was the passing comment I made to Elder De about charging people to enter via a secret passageway which awoke the modern-day man in me, but now that I'm surging with all these ideas of how to exploit people for some monetary gain... goddamn, I feel dirty.
Oh well. Better dirty than dirt poor, is what a monster that I've become would say.
"Nine Divine-tier?" Xiu'er's voice did fully zap me out of my thoughts and just as I was about to jump in before she blew the lid on the whole thing, Zhao'er interjected.
"Xiu, I think Master is tired. I know that he really appreciates when you massage his shoulders--" he'd barely finished the sentence before the girl was behind me, her arms digging into my shoulders with enough force to break bones.
"Master. Uhm... did, did you find a... a reward for me?" she whispered, and though I couldn't see her face, I could hear in her voice just how red it'd become.
"I have." I replied.
"Really?!"
"Ouch!!"
"S-sorry! I'm so sorry!" she cried out apologetically as guilt surged in me like a storm.
"Uhm, I... I was just joking, Xiu'er."
"... humph," I glanced upwards and saw her wipe her tears as she stared at me with a big of anger in her gaze. "Master, other beastly men have influenced you too much!" she not-so-stealthily glanced at Lao Shun who suddenly looked as though he swallowed a fly, wondering why he was being called out. "You're mean so often! Don't look up to them; Master is much, much better than all of them combined!"
"..." yeah, that guilt I felt over wondering how to exploit this world for profit... it was about the size of a little pond compared to the freakin' ocean of it that I was feeling right now.
Though it's not exactly my fault that she kind of, sort of seemed to have deified me as a young girl, it kind of also is.
While she resumed her massage, going at it somewhat gently as though to stoke the flames of guilt in me, the auctioneer announced another item as it was being wheeled out onto the stage.
"I believe you all are familiar with the next one," she said, removing the cover rather unceremoniously. Underneath it, lying on top of a white, silken cloth, was... something. I actually had to pour some Qi into my eyes just to see what it was.
Barely fingernail sized, it was some kind of a slightly rusted metal, though I did immediately felt a strange kind of resonance with it it. Stealthily glancing over at Long Tao, he had a rather... complex expression on his face.
"Shard of Divine," the auctioneer announced. "Is being auctioned off with the exact same price as every other time: knowledge. If you have any, if you can confirm it or deny it, it does not matter. If, even this time, there is no one who can provide any answers, the item will be sold off by normal means of the auction. We will permit five minutes of deliberation; if you wish to have a conversation with the item's holder, please let one of the House's Attendants know."
The whole hall fell into silence--no, it fell into hushed whispers. Most of them were of mockery, though some of sympathy. Just like I thought, Long Tao stayed silent, merely staring at that shard with a layered expression.
I didn't say anything either, waiting.
Five minutes passed, and there was clearly nobody who 'knew' anything. As such, the auctioneer announced that the sale of the item would begin, starting with 50,000 mid-grade Stones.
I thought it was quite cheap, but even half a minute later, nobody bid on it.
"Buy it," I told Shufen who looked at me weirdly.
"Why?"
"I love to collect weird things," I said with a shrug. "And what's weirder than something nobody else wants?"
"... right." I don't know if she bought the 'excuse'. The reason I'm buying it was simple: the system told me it'd be beneficial for Long Tao and the shard to reunite. That's it.
"Double the price." I said before she could announce it.
"You are by far the weirdest thing here," she sighed. "100,000." a few gasps rang out at her voice, though nobody else bid after the fact, with the shard falling into my hands quite unceremoniously.
I wonder... is the person selling it actuallyconnected to Long Tao in any way?