Gu Chengming had no idea that someone had already set their sights on him.
Then again, a man fully absorbed in his corner-of-the-world game wouldn't have a clue what was happening in heaven or earth.
If there was anything different about his days lately, it was that Junior Brother Jiang Lu — the one with that prematurely "weathered" face — hadn't come by in quite a few days now.
Come to think of it, had that last sword strike of his actually given the other fellow that much to chew on?
Gu Chengming rubbed his chin, gaining a much more concrete appreciation for the benefits that cultivation-technique favorability could bring.
Sure, in the grand scope of the Wenjian Sect, Junior Brother Jiang Lu was at best a middling, unremarkable disciple.
But within Huiyuan Gate, he was still considered fairly decent.
To beat someone like that in a sword arts match — those thirty-odd points of favorability were probably worth years of bitter training for most people.
As expected, the Gal Grand Path was truly the path to the heavens.
Gu Chengming thought this with no small amount of smugness.
That said, his "Gal Grand Path" had recently hit a bit of a bottleneck.
Sword practice was sword practice — nominally about the sword, but at its core, it was still a form of cultivation.
And cultivation, at the end of the day, inevitably consumed resources.
For Gu Chengming at least, just over half a month of practice had already left his body struggling to keep up.
Part of it might have been his abnormally low constitution. But if he was being honest about the main reason... he had simply run out of cultivation resources.
Or more accurately — he had never really thought about cultivation resources from the very start.
It wasn't until his body started running on fumes that Gu Chengming finally had his lightbulb moment.
Oh right. I can take medicine.
Pills like "Blood Replenishment Pills" and "Spirit Focusing Elixirs" were actually quite useful at the First Realm stage.
The Wenjian Sect was one of the top sects on the Nine Provinces continent, and it was correspondingly generous with the resources it provided to its disciples.
First Realm disciples, for instance, could collect ten Blood Replenishment Pills, five Spirit Focusing Elixirs, and one low-grade spirit stone from the sect each month.
For a hardworking disciple, these resources weren't exactly lavish — but they were enough to cover daily consumption.
Gu Chengming's cultivation realm was a complete mess, but when it came to benefits, he hadn't missed out on a thing.
And, as it happened, there was actually some good news on that front.
Before transmigrating here, he hadn't paid the slightest attention to cultivation.
Which meant that in his three full years as a disciple, he had never collected a single resource. Not one.
In a sense... wasn't that basically a windfall dropped from the sky?
To keep himself from being completely drained dry by the Huiyuan Sword Art, Gu Chengming decided it was time to go collect everything he'd left unclaimed.
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Wenjian Sect. The Cangjiange — Sword Repository.
Though it was still early morning, voices were already beginning to stir.
The half-acre bluestone building stood on the eastern side of the Wenjian Sect. Bronze wind chimes hung beneath its upswept eaves and elaborate bracket sets, yet when the wind blew, not a sound came from them. The entrance was a pair of heavy zitan-wood doors carved with a pattern of "azure birds carrying sacred fungus," their ring-pulls shaped like taotie beasts devouring pearls — cool to the touch. Dozens of outer disciples in gray-blue daoist robes were already waiting outside.
Despite its impressive name, the Sword Repository actually held very few actual weapons. Instead, it was piled high with cultivation resources — pills, spirit stones, talismans, and the like.
Legend had it that when the Repository was first established, it truly had been used to store the sect's divine arms and sacred weapons. But as the sect grew and disciples' demand for pills and spirit stones steadily increased, it had gradually transformed into something more like a large-scale logistics depot.
There was also a curious piece of trivia about the Sword Repository: supposedly, even to this day, a sword once wielded by the founding patriarch was stored on the very top floor. But the sword had a notoriously temperamental nature and could only be wielded by someone of transcendent genius. One elder, who hadn't believed the warnings, had once tried to forcibly subdue it — and been struck by the sword's energy, leaving him bedridden for a full hundred years of recovery. After that, no one had dared so much as glance at it again.
By the time Gu Chengming arrived at the Sword Repository, a fair number of disciples were already queuing to collect their resources.
He joined the end of the line, curiously looking around.
The interior of the Repository was enormous. Tall wooden shelves stretched in rows as far as the eye could see, every surface lined with jade bottles and wooden boxes of every shape and size.
A faint medicinal fragrance drifted through the air, enough to sharpen the mind just by breathing it in.
Just then, the disciple ahead of Gu Chengming seemed to be getting into an argument with the female elder handling registrations at the front desk.
"Elder Yu, surely you've made an error? How could there possibly be a problem with the resource list I submitted?" The disciple explained anxiously, looking panicked.
Gu Chengming stretched his neck and peered toward the front counter.
A woman in elder's robes was lounging lazily in her chair, a list held loosely in one hand. She gave it a cursory glance, then raised her eyes — and delivered her verdict in a tone so cool it carried not a trace of human warmth:
"Three stalks of Crimson Flame Grass. Two blooms of Qingxin Lotus. Didn't you collect these just last month? You've already used them all up?"
Her voice was lovely — clear as a mountain spring — but the content of her words made the disciple break into a cold sweat.
"Th— this..."
The disciple sputtered and stammered, unable to get a single word out.
This female elder was named Yu Wenqiu. Her ink-black hair was straight and long, left completely unbound to fall freely down her back. Her skin was pale, her features exquisite enough to have been painted rather than born — yet her eyelids drooped ever so slightly, giving her a permanently drowsy, half-asleep air.
"Came here to cook the books?"
The corner of Yu Wenqiu's mouth curved into a sardonic arc.
"Get out."
One word. Not a hint of heat behind it. And yet the disciple fled as though pardoned from execution, stumbling over himself to escape.
Gu Chengming clicked his tongue inwardly: people actually cooked the books here?
Soon enough, it was his turn. He handed over his identity token and resource list.
Yu Wenqiu took the list and ran her eyes over it out of habit. When she saw what was on it, she couldn't help but pause.
Huh. Three years as a disciple, and not a single resource collected even once?
She looked up and studied Gu Chengming for a moment, then glanced at his cultivation realm.
First Realm, Third Layer.
Hmm... no wonder he was still at the First Realm, Third Layer.
Now, this Yu Wenqiu was something of a legend within the Wenjian Sect in her own right.
Despite holding the rank of elder and possessing a cultivation level that was anything but low, she was extraordinarily lax in her daily practice and paid almost no attention to sect affairs.
Her days consisted of sleeping and reading story serials. Only when an elder evaluation was imminent would she scramble to cram in some cultivation at the last minute.
This sort of behavior naturally irritated the many hardworking elders and disciples around her. Unfortunately, Yu Wenqiu's natural talent was simply too exceptional. Every time she crammed at the last minute, she managed to break through without fail — infuriating anyone who witnessed it into cursing the heavens for their injustice.
The sect leadership had eventually grown tired of looking the other way, and so they assigned her the idle post of Sword Repository administrator.
Nominally, it was "sharing the sect's burden." In practice, it was a way to rein her in a little.
And thus, a great slacking prodigy was laid low by bureaucracy.
Yu Wenqiu withdrew her gaze and turned back to the list.
Still — why had this kid gone three years without collecting anything, only to suddenly show up now?
The question surfaced in her mind. But before long, another thought followed: weren't the disciple evaluations coming up soon?
Could it be... this person was the same type as her — a last-minute crammer?
My goodness. To think someone in this world could be so alike to herself!
She knew nothing about him as a person, yet Yu Wenqiu found an inexplicable fondness welling up in her chest.
She was just about to sweep her brush across the page and approve Gu Chengming's resources — when she noticed something wrong while reviewing the list.
For some reason, exactly half of the resources that should have been allocated to this male disciple had simply vanished.
Hm?
Yu Wenqiu couldn't help but frown.
She traced it further back through the records, and discovered that as far back as one year ago, the resources belonging to Gu Chengming had been redirected to another disciple entirely.
Someone's nephew or grandchild of one of the elders, by the looks of it?
Was there truly such injustice in this world?
Yu Wenqiu was just about to blow her top and stand up for this fellow kindred spirit — when she continued scrolling upward and caught sight of the name of the disciple who had siphoned away the resources. And all the air went out of her at once.
Ji Chang.
Ji Chang... wasn't that the grandson of Inspector Elder Ji Fenglin?
Yu Wenqiu didn't know many people in the sect, but Ji Fenglin was one of the few she did.
Not because they were on good terms — quite the opposite. Elder Ji Fenglin was one of the loudest voices among those who couldn't stand her attitude.
And he was an Inspector Elder at that... as they say, even one rank above can crush you to death. This man outranked her by three.
Thinking of her own grim circumstances these days, then looking at the male disciple before her — three years in the sect, still stuck at First Realm Third Layer, not a single resource ever claimed — Yu Wenqiu felt an unexpected pang of fellow-suffering.
Haah. Gu, Gu Chengming... little Gu, it's not that this elder doesn't want to help. It's just that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
With that thought, she approved the remaining one year's worth of resources that were still his to claim, and as she passed it over to Gu Chengming, she said in a carefully veiled tone:
"You came in late, so some of your resources were... drawn upon in advance. This is your remaining year's share. Take it."
Gu Chengming heard this and seemed genuinely caught off guard.
But he took it in stride, without a trace of dejection. Instead, he smiled and said:
"Thank you, Elder."
Seeing his reaction, Yu Wenqiu felt even worse about the whole thing.
She gritted her teeth, reached into her robe, and pulled out a token, pressing it into Gu Chengming's hand.
"Take this token to the sect's scripture library and claim a cultivation technique. Consider it compensation."
This time, Gu Chengming was genuinely surprised. He accepted the token carefully and ventured:
"Elder, you really don't need to worry — I won't breathe a word of this to anyone."
Clearly, he had concluded that Yu Wenqiu was the mastermind behind the misappropriation of his resources.
Yu Wenqiu stared at him, thoroughly exasperated. But she couldn't be bothered to explain, and simply waved him off with unconcealed irritation:
"Go, go, get out of my sight."
After sending Gu Chengming on his way, Yu Wenqiu sat back and privately admitted that her own behavior just now had been a little rash.
After all, she wasn't exactly the type who loved sticking her nose into other people's business.
Gu Chengming was decent-looking, sure, but it wasn't as though she had a weakness for handsome men, either.
She turned it over and couldn't arrive at any conclusion, other than feeling like she'd simply gotten a rush of blood to the head and lost her good sense for a moment.
Still — it was only one cultivation technique redemption, when all was said and done.
She'd never been one for diligent practice anyway, and who knew how many redeemable technique slots had piled up unused in that token. Giving one away was hardly anything.
With that settled in her mind, Yu Wenqiu stopped thinking about it, fished a story serial out of her drawer, and settled in to read with great relish.
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