Having spoken, Jing Qian tucked the blood contract ledger away and once again shot out threads of silk, binding the fat man tightly.
Then he plunged headfirst into the sea, diving toward the four sunken ships.
This battle had yielded no small harvest: four great ships, along with more than forty cultivators, and most of their wealth all lying now at the bottom of the sea.
Jing Qian naturally wouldn't miss such spoils.
With a surge of power from his Tidal Life Pattern, he sank smoothly into the depths.
In the shadowy waters, he moved with ease, slipping in and out of the wrecks, prying and searching.
Every so often, something of value would fall into his hands.
But halfway through his search, Jing Qian realized that these sailors had not lived very comfortably.
Most of their wealth was in red copper knife-coins, with only a few silver fate-ingots, and not a single golden yuan-ingot to be found.
After thoroughly looting all four ships, his total amounted to just over seventy knife-coins and four silver fate-ingots.
Aside from that, the only valuables were the weapons of three Fatebinding cultivators: two spears and a harpoon, all ninth-grade arms forged of Sea Fang Iron, designed for combat on the water.
Jing Qian slung the three weapons across his back and finally approached a corpse bound tightly to the deck in a net, his own handiwork.
As the strongest man in the fleet, Wu Yan's body was Jing Qian's most prized trophy. He had even gone out of his way to secure the corpse so it wouldn't drift away.
Yet after carefully searching, he found only a single silver plaque inscribed with a Life Pattern cultivation method, a major disappointment!
What Jing Qian didn't know was that Wu Yan had poured nearly all his wealth into resources to condense his Azure Wing Life Essence, selling off his weapons and armor to do so. That was why he had been so helpless before Jing Qian.
Examining the silver plaque, Jing Qian read:
[Heart Monkey]
Rank: Azure Wing
"The restless heart-monkey will not be tamed."
This Heart Monkey Life Pattern was a full rank higher than things like the Crab Jade and far more powerful.
Besides its bodily enhancements, it also granted techniques for controlling the mind and spirit in battle.
Jing Qian pocketed the plaque, adding it to his cultivation foundation.
Leaving the wreck behind, he drifted onward into the desolate deep.
Before long, atop a reef, he found two entwined corpses, the Jing family aunt and nephew, long dead.
Quietly, he approached and removed the hairpin from Jing Ran's head before gliding upward again.
In life, he had refrained from robbing her, granting her dignity. But such a treasure was far too precious to be left to rot at the bottom of the sea.
For the hairpin was a rare spatial storage treasure, Jing Qian's second such acquisition.
Recalling the first storage pouch and the wondrous synergy it had with his Sumeru Life Pattern, his heart surged with anticipation for this new find.
When he finally broke the surface of the sea, he slipped once more into the Void Realm.
By now, he was thoroughly familiar with this independent space, its attributes, its functions, its limits.
And he knew well that the Sumeru Life Pattern's pocket dimension was indeed absorbing spiritual energy and growing.
But the speed of this growth was so unbearably slow it was almost maddening.
Since the day Jing Qian consumed his grandmother's brocade pouch to open up this space, more than a month had passed. Yet in all that time, the accumulated growth of the space was still not enough to hold even a sesame seed.
At that rate, to expand just one cubic centimeter would take several years.
To Jing Qian, this was utterly useless.
So he had already given up on nurturing this space with his power.
It would have to rely on outside help!
When Jing Qian brought the peculiar hairpin into the Void Realm, the Sumeru Life Pattern in his sea of consciousness suddenly pulsed.
A filament of mana extended from the Life Pattern, down his arm, and touched the hairpin.
The treasure instantly shattered, dissolving into a plume of gray smoke that dispersed throughout the Void Realm.
As master of the realm, Jing Qian felt a strange power carried in that smoke, merging into the essence of the Void Realm.
Then, all at once, the cramped space expanded dramatically.
Sensing carefully, he realized the internal volume had grown by more than sixty percent, reaching about 1.5 cubic meters.
The figure didn't sound like much, but the difference in experience was real.
Before, as his collection of treasures grew and his body continued to develop, the Void Realm had become unbearably tight.
Only by curling himself up could he fit inside.
But now, with sixty percent more room, everything had changed.
For the first time in a long while, Jing Qian could stretch out and lie comfortably within the Void Realm.
With adequate space at last, he could properly arrange his spoils.
He shaped the realm into a neat cuboid about 1.8 meters long, just over 0.9 meters wide, and high like a bright, open coffin.
To his left, he lay five inscribed weapons: two spears, a harpoon, a hammer, and a spearhead.
In his hand, he placed two short Dragonfang blades, wrapped in silk threads.
On his right side, he lined up nineteen pieces of White Fang demon materials, ready for use at any time.
Above his head, he set a secret manual, a tortoiseshell, and a silver plaque, all cultivation methods he had been fortunate enough to acquire.
At his feet, he piled his coins: three gold, seventeen silver, and two hundred thirteen copper blades.
Judging from how poor the crews of those ships had been, this amount must have had significant purchasing power.
Other odds and ends were left over from the hairpin's storage, things like food, water, and clothing. Jing Qian picked out the important items and discarded the rest.
With everything neatly organized, he felt an unexpected ease of mind.
Then, without delay, he entered the Fate Stele space, ready to reap the true harvest of this battle.
There, five human souls stood silently in a row: Wu Yan, Jing Ran, and three other Fatebinding cultivators.
Human souls had always been far stronger than those of sea demons, and these five alone could yield resources worth at least double the soul of a beast.
Jing Qian wasted no time. Patiently, he began grinding each soul down, one by one.
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