After the New Year festivities, Qingxi City returned to its normal rhythm, and everyone got busy again.
Since cultivators did not celebrate the holidays, the Ji family head dangled Qingming Pavilion’s pills in front of them like a carrot and managed to register the cultivators throughout the city.
Of course, cultivators were generally undisciplined and disliked being managed, so there was no way the registration rate could reach one hundred percent. Covering eighty or ninety percent was already good enough.
When the jade slip was delivered to Xia Yunzhao, he swept it with his divine sense and was startled. “There are more than five thousand cultivators in Qingxi City?”
He still remembered the first time he came to Qingxi City, when he could not see a single cultivator and the streets were full of mortals. There were actually this many now?
And among them were more than thirty Foundation Establishment cultivators! Where did they all hide usually? How had he never seen a single one?
Ji Hongyu laughed. “Most of the Fellow Daoists on that list arrived within the past few months. They came specifically because of Qingming Pavilion.”
Xia Yunzhao nodded thoughtfully. He was quick-witted and understood almost immediately.
He had opened Qingming Pavilion purely to make money, but now it seemed the shop could be useful in ways he had never expected… Think about it. If a cultivator bought every pill he needed throughout Qi Refining and Foundation Establishment from Qingming Pavilion, then if Qingming Pavilion ever ran into trouble and asked him for a small favor, could he really refuse?
Surely that relationship would count for something, right?
And if he was already helping Qingming Pavilion, how was that any different from helping Qingxi City? They both belonged to the city lord!
Xia Yunzhao raised his voice. “Xiao Li! Come in for a moment!”
Xiao Li answered and hurried inside. Xia Yunzhao had no idea what he had been busy with, but despite the cold weather, sweat covered his forehead.
Xia Yunzhao said, “Run over to the carpenter workshop for me and order a batch of wooden tokens from Old Qiu. The requirements are…” He briefly explained what he wanted. “Have him make one first and send it over. If there are no problems, order three hundred to start.”
Xiao Li gave an eager acknowledgment and hurried out to handle it.
Xia Yunzhao then turned to Ji Hongyu. “I need you to help with something too. Spread a message for me. Say that…” He lowered his voice and explained. “Got it?”
Ji Hongyu quickly nodded. “I remember everything.”
Xia Yunzhao waved him away to get back to work.
He had barely finished with them when Jing Ruyun and Wei Xuening’s two groups came in as well. “City Lord, we’ve memorized everything you wrote down for us.”
Xia Yunzhao took a drink to soothe his throat. “Good! Your first task is to register every mortal in the city. Name, sex, age, residence… everything has to be recorded.”
Jing Ruyun and Wei Xuening exchanged a hesitant look. “Wouldn’t that be… too many people?”
Xia Yunzhao looked at them. “Didn’t you see the task budget? One million spirit pearls.” Thank you, Puppet Gate. He was very comfortably funded right now.
Jing Ruyun hurriedly waved her hands. “It isn’t about the money, it’s…”
Xia Yunzhao said, “Fellow Daoist Jing, maybe it isn’t about money, but money can solve most problems. The registration is tedious and the workload is huge, but it isn’t difficult. Take the money and hire a group of literate mortals to do the legwork. You only need to check for omissions and deal with anyone who refuses to cooperate. Wouldn’t that make things much easier?”
Jing Ruyun’s mouth fell open. Her whole face seemed to say: You can do that?
Wei Xuening hurriedly spoke up. “City Lord, we have one more question. Now that we’re all members of the city guard, the captain’s position…”
Xia Yunzhao assumed they were asking who would be in charge. Since harmony among their own people mattered most, he said, “Split the guard into two squads. Fellow Daoist Jing will lead Squad One and Fellow Daoist Wei will lead Squad Two. You two handle problems first, and if you can’t resolve something, come directly to me.”
Wei Xuening quickly waved her hands. “No, that isn’t what I meant. Fellow Daoist Jing has the highest cultivation and the most experience. We would like to nominate her as captain of the entire guard.”
Behind her, Ying Yanyu and Yu Fanyang both nodded. Apparently, the three of them had already discussed it.
Jing Ruyun glanced at them in surprise. She had not known anything about this.
Xia Yunzhao thought for a moment, then asked her, “What do you think?”
Jing Ruyun nodded calmly and said only three words. “I’m willing.”
Xia Yunzhao did not hesitate. “Then you’re the guard captain. We don’t have many people yet, so you’ll have to shoulder a little more responsibility.”
Jing Ruyun nodded and led the group of women out to work.
Xia Yunzhao collapsed backward in his chair. He had barely started to enjoy a moment of rest when the door opened again. He immediately sat straight up, but when he saw Xing Wenyu entering, he deflated. “Brother Xing, you scared me.”
Xing Wenyu was speechless. “You’re already a Golden Core cultivator. Don’t you know how to check with your divine sense?”
Xia Yunzhao slumped back into the chair. “Sweeping your divine sense around all the time is so rude. Besides, everyone here is one of us. There’s no need.”
Seeing him like this, Xing Wenyu could not help feeling a little sorry for him. The child had not had a single quiet day since the New Year ended. He had never realized before that being a city lord involved this much work.
To be fair, other city lords did not have this much work either. More than half of Xiao Xia’s tasks were things he had invented for himself.
Xing Wenyu said, “Shang Shuangze took me to your little valley. I separated the time formation for you and brought back the section where time flows ten times faster. Decide where you want to put it.”
Xia Yunzhao nodded. He had asked Xing Wenyu to do that earlier. The city guard had already begun working, so their rewards needed to keep pace. For cultivators, cultivation resources were the best reward, and access to a time-acceleration formation was obviously the greatest attraction.
As for where to put it… Tsk. Now that he thought about it carefully, he was a dignified city lord without even a proper place to put the thing!
“What about Qingming Pavilion’s backyard?” he suggested tentatively.
Xing Wenyu gave him a look. “Have you seen how little room is left in that backyard? Unless you want to tear down the room you use for pill refining?”
“Absolutely not.” Xia Yunzhao hurriedly waved his hands. What kind of pill shop had nowhere to refine pills?
Seeing that he was still thinking, Xing Wenyu said, “Why not simply clean up the Fang family’s ancestral residence and use it as the city lord’s residence? It’s already there, and the location is suitable.”
Xia Yunzhao blinked. “We can do that?” Then he thought about it. Why couldn’t they? Qingming Pavilion had been ready-made too!
His mood instantly brightened again. The Fang family really was wonderful. They had been gone for so long and were still continuously making contributions. What a good Fang family!
How could he possibly sit still after that? The beginning of every year was when he was at his most industrious, practically the first day of summer vacation. “Come on, come on, come on! Let’s go look right now!”
The two walked outside and found Shang Shuangze in the courtyard, controlling Mingyun with one finger and making it dart back and forth while Xianchan chased after it… Looking more carefully, he was actually training Xianchan to hunt!
Yesterday, Xia Yunzhao had casually mentioned that Xianchan was already five months old but was still a silly little cat who only knew how to eat meatballs. He had even watched Xianchan fail to catch a bug the other day. If this continued, the Spirit-Claw Civet was going to turn into a Clumsy-Claw Civet.
He had not expected Shang Shuangze to remember it and start giving Xianchan lessons today.
Xia Yunzhao watched Xianchan having a great time and beckoned. “Come on, Shang Shuangze. We’re going to inspect the Fang family’s ancestral residence. If it’s suitable, that’s going to be our city lord’s residence from now on.”
His voice was not quiet, so by the time they walked out, Zhong Yundu and Du Yan had somehow joined them too.
Zhong Yundu made sense. He was a guest elder, after all, so naturally he should inspect the place where he might work in the future. As for Du Yan… Xia Yunzhao looked at him once, then again. “Brother Du, aren’t you staying at your shop to sleep today?”
Du Yan’s expression was indescribable. He waved a hand.
Xia Yunzhao: ?
He looked at Zhong Yundu, who was trying not to laugh. What was going on?
There was no chance Zhong Yundu could keep a secret. Before he even opened his mouth, laughter had already escaped. “Yesterday he took in a trapping cage and was too lazy to inspect it. Turns out there was an Earthwalking Glutton inside. It chewed through the cage in the middle of the night and ate his entire shop empty. Hahahahahaha!”
Du Yan: …You’re laughing way too loudly!
Xia Yunzhao wanted to laugh too, but forced himself to hold it in. “Everything in the shop is gone? That must’ve been a pretty big loss, right?”
Du Yan waved it off. “Nothing in the shop was worth much. If it ate the goods, so be it. But it also ate my wall and door, and I can’t be bothered fixing them. I’ll stay at your shop for a few days. I’ll watch the place for you.”
Xia Yunzhao laughed. “That’s perfect! Brother Du is a professional shopkeeper, hahahahaha!” In the end, he still burst out laughing.
If Zhong Yundu laughed at him, Du Yan could at least glare a couple of times. There was not much he could do when Xia Yunzhao laughed, so he could only shake his head helplessly.
Once Xia Yunzhao had laughed enough, he asked, “I know Earthwalking Gluttons are spirit beasts, but can trapping cages catch spirit beasts too?”
Earthwalking Gluttons were a fairly common spirit beast. Xia Yunzhao and Shang Shuangze had seen one on the road to the ice plains, also being raised by a cultivator.
The species could reach only Level Two at most. It resembled a plump pangolin with a relatively short tail. As an earth-attributed spirit beast, some individuals could even master the Earthwalking Art. They were excellent at locating mineral deposits, so many people raised them to search for spirit mines.
They also had voracious appetites and two huge front teeth and would eat almost anything, which had earned them the nickname Mountain-Burrowing Gluttons.
After laughing enough, Zhong Yundu explained, “Trapping cages are generally meant for slaughter beasts, but some particularly stupid spirit beasts wander into them too. Take that
greedy little cat of yours. If it accidentally ran outside, it might very well get carried off in a trapping cage.”
Xia Yunzhao felt the sting of truth. He had no rebuttal. That was absolutely something Xianchan could manage to do.
Chatting and laughing along the way, they soon reached the Fang family’s ancestral residence.
Ever since the Fang family had died out, no one had managed the estate. Cultivators occasionally came in hoping to pick through the remains, leaving the place in complete disarray.
The main walls and buildings were still standing, though. With some repairs, they could still be used.
And the Fang family’s ancestral residence was enormous. There were hundreds of rooms of all sizes. They only needed to clean up a small section for their purposes.
The little valley was home. This would only be a place to work. City Lord Xia was not picky. He found the section with the most intact rooms, raised a hand, and pulled. Surging spiritual power swept up the rubble from the ground like a siphon. With a light squeeze, he crushed the debris into powder.
Du Yan looked down and tossed out a Cleaning Art. It blew the powdered debris away, and the whole section became clean enough to look surprisingly respectable.
Shang Shuangze and Zhong Yundu jumped down and searched the place. Apart from a few wild rats, there was nothing living inside, so they waved the others over. “Come down.”
Xia Yunzhao paused. After landing, he looked in a certain direction. “Are you sure there isn’t anything alive here? Why do I feel some kind of spiritual-power fluctuation coming from somewhere…?”
Ever since reaching Golden Core, Xia Yunzhao’s senses had become even sharper. He could detect even the tiniest disturbances. In this regard, not even Shang Shuangze could compare with him.
The others instinctively moved in front of him. “Where?”
Xia Yunzhao hurriedly waved them down. “Don’t panic. It isn’t an enemy. It feels like… mm, I can’t explain it. Let’s just take a look first.”
Holding Shang Shuangze’s hand, he followed the almost imperceptible fluctuation until they reached a secluded courtyard behind the Fang ancestral residence.
It was far from the center of the estate, and even farther from the section Xia Yunzhao had chosen.
Du Yan had grown up in the Du family, so he could judge from the location alone. “Whoever lived here was either a Fang family servant or a collateral relative who wasn’t valued.”
Everyone nodded. The courtyard looked shabby too. The other courtyards had deteriorated after being abandoned, but this one seemed to have been poor from the beginning. Even the materials used for the courtyard wall were mediocre.
Still, none of them could sense the fluctuation Xia Yunzhao was talking about, so they could only watch him wander around.
City Lord Xia circled the courtyard, pushed open a door, and walked straight up to one wall. He raised a palm and struck. With a clattering rush, spirit pearls spilled out from inside.
Everyone behind him stared at the spirit pearls covering the ground. “You can find them like that too?”
Zhong Yundu crouched down to inspect the wall. “Look at this. It seems rough and ugly, but the material was actually mixed with something that blocks spiritual energy. No wonder this many spirit pearls barely leaked any aura. If our city lord didn’t have a dog’s no… that super-sensitive perception of his, we might’ve lived here for quite a while before noticing!”
Xia Yunzhao wanted to kick him squarely in the butt. You have the dog’s nose!
Shang Shuangze was still the best. Without saying a word, he had already started helping pack the spirit pearls away. He opened a Hundred-Compartment Pouch, and the pearls on the ground streamed into it like water. More kept pouring from the wall as fast as they disappeared. After quite a while, the pile still did not seem to shrink.
Xia Yunzhao could not help marveling. “Don’t tell me this entire courtyard was built out of spirit pearls?”
Xing Wenyu shook his head. “Impossible. Spirit pearls aren’t fixed building material and can’t bear much weight. If the whole courtyard were made of them, it would’ve collapsed a long time ago.”
True… but the more he thought about it, the more curious he became. “Who exactly owned this courtyard? He lived in a place this remote and still managed to save this many spirit pearls. More importantly, didn’t he have a storage pouch? Why hide them in the walls?”
Du Yan suddenly poked his head out from an inner room. “Want to read a book?”
Everyone asked at once, “What kind of book?”
Du Yan waved the book in his hand. “Looks like the courtyard’s owner wrote it himself. Lots of filthy language.”
“Really?” Xia Yunzhao immediately perked up. “Bring it out. Let us respectfully study it!”
Everyone beckoned for him to put it on the table, then crowded around to read.
Shang Shuangze shook his head and continued collecting spirit pearls. When one compartment filled, he switched to another while silently counting. They had already passed three million.
Xia Yunzhao cleared his throat and opened the book… Sure enough, the pages were packed with curses. The writer seemed abnormal. In his eyes, not a single member of the Fang family was a decent person. He could start by cursing whoever was beside him and keep going all the way up to the Fang family’s founding ancestors.
Honestly, some of the insults were extremely satisfying.
But everyone was still more curious about the spirit pearls, so they struggled to pick useful information out of the sea of profanity. After reading for quite a while, they finally pieced together what had happened.
The man’s name was Fang Feng. Both of his parents had been Fang family cultivators, but their cultivation was low and they were not valued. Fang Feng had it even worse. Two cultivators had somehow produced a “mortal” child. He had no spiritual root and could not cultivate.
His parents were afraid that if the Fang family discovered he had no spiritual root, their own treatment would become even worse. During the family’s aptitude testing, they tampered with him and made it appear as though he could cultivate, allowing him to remain in the ancestral residence.
The good times did not last. His parents died during a mission, leaving Fang Feng alone. Without anyone helping him maintain the disguise, his identity should have been exposed quickly, but it was not, because he found other people to latch onto.
He seduced Fang Wenyuan’s son’s Dao companion, Fang Wenyuan’s younger brother’s Dao companion, Fang Wenyuan’s uncle’s Dao companion… Working his way around Fang Wenyuan, he seduced practically everyone in the circle.
Fang Wenyuan should count himself lucky. Fortunately, his head had been too full of evil schemes for him to find a Dao companion of his own, or he definitely would not have escaped being cuckolded too.
A family like the Fangs obviously did not treat their Dao companions well. Many of those Dao companions had originally been wandering cultivators. Before marrying in, they had been promised all kinds of wonderful things. Only after entering the household did they discover just how filthy the Fang family truly was. By then, they could no longer escape. They knew too many secrets, and the Fang family would never let them leave.
As for Fang Feng, he had spent his entire life disguising his identity, so he had long mastered the art of telling people exactly what they wanted to hear. Seducing a group of people trapped inside the Fang ancestral residence was child’s play for him.
…The writing did not make every Dao companion’s sex entirely clear, but from the descriptions, Fang Feng appeared to swing both ways.
After seducing them, he did not do anything else. He simply extracted money from them. Relentlessly. Ferociously. As much as he possibly could.
He had no cultivation and did not dare leave the Fang family. He could not make use of spiritual resources either, and to protect his secret, he did not even dare marry or have children. No one knew what use he had for all that money. Yet he kept taking it, taking everything he could get. It was almost as though he wanted those spirit pearls to fill whatever part of him had been missing since childhood.
Every spirit pearl he acquired went into the walls. Each night, he slept in this courtyard that looked shabby outside but contained an unimaginable fortune within. Each morning, he got up, maintained his relationships with the Dao companions, and went back to making money. Day after day, the cycle repeated.
By the end, Xia Yunzhao was almost impressed. “That’s way too much dedication! With that mentality, what couldn’t he have succeeded at? If he’d opened a restaurant, Zhao Family Restaurant might never have had a chance. But no, he had to do this instead.”
“His world was too small,” Shang Shuangze said. Xia Yunzhao had not noticed when he finished collecting the pearls, but he had come over just in time to see the final page. “In your words, he thought the entire world was only as big as the Fang family’s ancestral residence.”
Xia Yunzhao immediately looked up with a grin. “Finished collecting the spirit pearls?”
Shang Shuangze nodded. “Eight million spirit pearls in total.”
“Whoa!” Zhong Yundu stared. “That many? Did he dig a tunnel into the Fang family treasury?”
“Didn’t you read the rest?” Xing Wenyu flipped through the book again from the beginning. “Fang Feng started with those Dao companions and gradually used them to gain the trust of Fang Wenyuan and the other core Fang family members. Before the Fang family fell, he already held considerable authority and was effectively their chief steward. Getting his hands on this many spirit pearls wouldn’t have been difficult.”
Du Yan asked in confusion, “Fang Wenyuan never noticed that he was faking his cultivation? Fang Feng was this clever. Could he still be alive somewhere?”
“Maybe Fang Wenyuan was too clever for his own good,” Xia Yunzhao said. “Fang Feng was around him every day and kept pretending to have cultivation. In the end, Fang Wenyuan probably absorbed him too.”
Remembering the miserable pile of corpses in the Fang family’s mountain branch estate, he shook his head. One of them might very well have been Fang Feng.
There was not much to mourn, though. By the later years, Fang Feng had been the Fang estate’s chief steward and had done plenty of vile things. Who knew how many people had died indirectly because of him?
Two bad people had torn each other apart, while the spoils had somehow ended up in Xia Yunzhao’s hands. Eight million spirit pearls acquired, and his already bulging purse grew even fatter!
Xia Yunzhao was in high spirits. “Everyone who saw it gets a share! We’ll split the spirit pearls in a bit. Now we’ve got something to power the formations at the city lord’s residence!”
Since they had a city lord’s residence, they naturally needed defensive formations. Without materials to power the formations, someone would have to supply them with spiritual energy at regular intervals.
Fortunately, they had those materials now.
Who would have thought the Fang family could be so generous? Not only had they given them a residence, they had even thrown in spirit pearls! Where was the justice in that? What a pity their ashes had already been scattered. Otherwise, Xia Yunzhao would have made a point of paying them a visit with a bag of rotten fruit.
With Xing Wenyu around, defensive formations were hardly a problem. Two hours later, no fewer than three defensive formations lit up over the city lord’s residence. Then they flashed once and vanished from sight.
They might have disappeared from view, but anyone who tried to break in would learn just how formidable those three formations were. Xing Wenyu had never been a softhearted man.
Xia Yunzhao waved a hand. Money that had fallen into his lap was easy to spend. He poured five million spirit pearls into the formations in one go. He divided the remainder among his friends. Even Xiao Qing popped out of his qi sea to claim a share.
With the city lord’s residence settled, they installed the formation that accelerated time tenfold there as well. People working at the residence could exchange their contributions for time inside it.
Jing Ruyun and the others were naturally delighted, and they threw themselves into their work with even greater enthusiasm. The ordinary people they had hired noticed that the cultivator lords were checking everything more carefully and did not dare slack off either. Fortunately, the work was fairly light and the pay was good. They felt a little more pressure, but they had no complaints.
Xia Yunzhao had no time to concern himself with that for now. After the New Year, Qingming Pavilion was finally reopening for business.
The reopening had been delayed by a few days because he wanted to stockpile more pills and get the year off to a strong start. And this time, there was something new in addition to the pills.
Firecrackers crackled merrily, scattering scraps of red paper across the ground. Xiao Li stood at the entrance with a cheerful smile, welcoming customers.
He was wearing the new clothes he had bought with last year’s wages. He treasured them so much that after wearing them on New Year’s Eve, he had been reluctant to put them on again. But today was the grand reopening, a happy occasion, so he had taken them out once more.
Apart from his new clothes, he also wore an excellent lowest-grade protective magical treasure. As a mortal, he could only use treasures of the lowest grade. Xia Yunzhao had searched through his own collection and even asked the merchant caravans to keep an eye out before finally finding a suitable one. Xiao Li cherished it dearly and had carefully hidden it beneath the innermost layer of his clothes.
Qingming Pavilion behind him had changed as well.
Xia Yunzhao had defensive magical treasures to spare these days, and he certainly would not stint on protecting his own little shop. Qingming Pavilion now had one Level-Four defensive magical treasure, three Level-Three defensive magical treasures, and defensive formations arranged by Xing Wenyu besides.
One day, Xing Wenyu and Shang Shuangze had made a trip together. When they returned, more than half of Shang Shuangze’s spiritual power had been spent, and Qingming Pavilion had acquired a defensive formation so sturdy that it resembled an enormous turtle shell.
Zhong Yundu had teased them about it at the time. It was obvious at a glance who the family’s precious child was. Whenever Xing Wenyu needed help with something like this, he dragged along either Zhong Yundu or Shang Shuangze, or perhaps Du Yan. In any case, he would never ask Xia Yunzhao to do it.
In fact, Zhong Yundu had also visited Qingming Pavilion and drawn a circle with that strange, enormous black saber of his. Xia Yunzhao had no idea what he had done and had sensed no fluctuations of spiritual power. But ever since, something about Qingming Pavilion had seemed different. He felt unusually at ease whenever he stepped inside, though he could not say why.
In short, Qingming Pavilion was probably the safest place in all of Qingxi City now. If cultivators from Yunjiangguan came looking for trouble again, the entire city might collapse around them while Qingming Pavilion remained standing!
As the firecrackers echoed across half the city, more and more cultivators lined up outside the entrance.
Some of the more perceptive cultivators noticed that Qingming Pavilion had changed. They exchanged looks and quietly warned their companions to be careful. They must not underestimate the place just because a mortal was welcoming customers at the door.
Others were less suspicious. They visited Qingming Pavilion so often that everyone knew one another, and they paid no attention to those faint fluctuations of spiritual power.
Of course, a few unfamiliar cultivators were scattered through the queue as well. Their eyes darted about, and who knew what they were plotting? All one could do was wish them luck.
The firecrackers finally stopped. Xiao Li smiled warmly. “Welcome, honored lords. Please come inside.”
At the front of the line stood a tall, thin cultivator. As luck would have it, he was the same man who had once encountered Xia Yunzhao and Shang Shuangze while waiting in line.
He was a regular customer of Qingming Pavilion. The moment he entered, he asked anxiously, “Shop assistant, do you have the full selection of pills today? Do you have Qi-Replenishing Pills and Bloodstanching Pills?”
Xiao Li answered at once, “We do. Every kind of pill is available today, with no limit on purchases. They’re available until they sell out.”
The man was delighted. “That’s wonderful! Then get me…”
“There’s no hurry, my lord,” Xiao Li said with a smile. “There’s another benefit today!” He pointed to the counter. A wooden box sat there, filled with neat stacks of exquisitely made wooden tokens. Each token had a piece of spirit jade set into its center. These were the very tokens Xia Yunzhao had commissioned Qiu Cang to make.
Xiao Li explained, “To celebrate our reopening, Boss has a special offer. Any honored guest who receives a wooden membership token can buy pills here at five percent off from now on. The token also earns points. Once your total spending exceeds one million spirit pearls, you can upgrade to an iron membership token and receive twelve percent off. In the future, we’ll also have silver and gold tokens with even bigger discounts!”
The man nearly dropped his jaw. “Y-you really offer discounts that large?”
“Would I lie to you?” Xiao Li smiled, then raised his voice. “Boss says that since all you honored lords support our little shop day after day, you’re already part of the Qingming Pavilion family. Merchant caravans get discounts when they buy pills in bulk, so instead of letting them take all the benefits, why not give those savings to our own people? Everyone who receives a membership token even gets a special name: ‘Qing Fans.’ You’re one of Qingming Pavilion’s own, and one of Qingxi City’s own too. Boss hopes that when you meet fellow members in the future, you’ll be willing to lend each other a hand. That way, our Qingxi City can become an even better place.”
Xiao Li’s words were both dignified and heartfelt. How could these straightforward cultivators withstand a speech like that? They were moved at once. “Good! Well said! Give me a token!”
“I want one too!”
“Qing Fans, is it? Hahahaha! Not a bad name at all! How does it compare with the tokens from Yunmeng Marsh? This old man wants one too!”
Only then did Xiao Li explain the membership rules in detail, including the requirement that only cultivators registered in Qingxi City could receive a token.
From a teahouse across the street, Xia Yunzhao watched the scene and nodded with satisfaction.
Cultivators had always valued their freedom. It was difficult for them to develop any sense of belonging to a city. Even if they had registered in Qingxi City now, they would leave whenever it no longer suited them.
That was not what Xia Yunzhao wanted. Qingxi City needed people, and so did he. He needed to make those cultivators genuinely willing to stay, and preferably draw even more people in. More importantly, those who came had to accept being governed and recognize him as their city lord.
That was not so difficult. All it took was a little solidarity, a little tangible benefit, and a little promise of greater things to come… enough to convince them that following him was the best decision they could make, now and in the future!