The Ten-Day Plan

"Good thing it worked..."

Jiang Yiming turned his head and saw that he was lying on the concrete ground.

Yulan was squatting beside him, watching him quietly, a faint trace of anxiety hidden in her lovely eyes.

Yulan had nearly poisoned Jiang Yiming to death, and now everything seemed dull to him.

"Was your second objective to poison me to death?" He sat bolt upright and asked with a cold expression.

"The poison isn't deadly." Yulan seemed delighted to see him awake. "The poison in the soup can test a person's will. I went to a lot of trouble to steal it."

Jiang Yiming was at a loss for words. "You mean I should thank you for poisoning me?"

"That won't be necessary," Yulan explained. "The Gu world has a rule: anyone who raises Gu must first pass the village's test before they can begin. Anyone who raises Gu without permission is killed without mercy."

"Normally, the village chief uses this poison to test people's will. Only those with a firm will can pass the test and earn the right to raise Gu. I was worried you wouldn't pass, so I gave you a dose in advance."

"Everything's fine now. Since you can pass the test, I can take you to Fallen Flower Village without worrying."

Jiang Yiming's anger had yet to subside. "When did I ever say I'd go to Fallen Flower Village with you?"

"You! If you don't gain recognition, you won't be able to establish yourself in the Gu world."

Jiang Yiming refused flatly. "I decide for myself whether I'm qualified to raise Gu. I don't need anyone else to test me!"

"That makes it easy for other Gu masters to kill you by mistake!" Yulan urged.

"If I really am killed by mistake, I'll only have my own lack of skill to blame, not anyone else!"

With that, Jiang Yiming had no desire to keep arguing. He turned and walked away.

"Hey! Why are you so stubborn?" Yulan shouted after him. "This is the first time in my life I've worried about someone else's affairs, and you don't know what's good for you!"

Jiang Yiming didn't look back.

The main reason he was unwilling to take the test was that he didn't have enough confidence in his own will.

If he really went to Fallen Flower Village and couldn't cheat in front of those experts, he didn't know whether he could pass the test by willpower alone.

Perhaps he could, perhaps he couldn't.

But Jiang Yiming had disliked doing things he wasn't sure of since he was a child. So he wouldn't be going to Fallen Flower Village for now.

Besides, he relied on the system to cultivate, making him completely different from other Gu masters. The so-called test was utterly meaningless!

By the time he left the pavilion and reached Sunless Mountain, it was past three in the afternoon.

To make it easier to search for Gu insects, he rented a private house at the foot of the mountain for 300 yuan a month.

"I don't work at the industrial park anymore anyway, so there's no need to keep living there. The rent's almost due, too. I'll let them keep the deposit as compensation."

He had damaged the tables, chairs, and bed in the room earlier and had never found time to buy replacements. The deposit would just about cover them.

After settling in, Jiang Yiming took out pen and paper and drew a rough map of Sunless Mountain.

Then, based on the maximum area he could search each day, he divided the parts of Sunless Mountain he hadn't searched into ten even circles.

Each circle covered roughly the same area, just enough to keep him searching for a whole night.

After looking at the map for a while, he murmured, "At this rate, I'll need ten days to finish scouring Sunless Mountain."

"Once I've searched all of Sunless Mountain, there won't be any suitable places nearby to catch Gu insects."

To avoid the awkward predicament of having no insects to catch, Jiang Yiming decided to leave Qiuyang City in ten days.

"Before I leave, I have to deal with Tu Ming!"

On the first night, Jiang Yiming rode the Single-Horned Wandering Snake up the mountain and searched all night, catching more than 2,100 Gu insects!

That many Gu insects needed a great deal of food.

He had calculated that raising one Primordial Gu from level one to level five required about 30 jin of meat.

Raising over 2,100 Primordial Gu to level five would require at least 63,000 jin of meat, or 31 to 32 metric tons.

If he bought ordinary pork, it would cost at least 700,000 to 800,000 yuan.

Jiang Yiming couldn't afford meat that expensive, of course, so he could only buy cheap things like chicken carcasses, chicken intestines, and pig lungs.

Cheap meat like that generally cost a little over two yuan per jin wholesale.

Even so, buying over 60,000 jin would cost around 150,000 yuan.

One batch of Gu insects ate so much. That was why Jiang Yiming was always short of money, even though he had a fortune on him.

Boss Rou, whom he had bought from before, couldn't fill an order worth over a hundred thousand yuan all at once.

Jiang Yiming had no choice but to look online for some large slaughterhouses.

Even large slaughterhouses couldn't produce that much cheap meat all at once.

After a great deal of effort, Jiang Yiming found five slaughterhouses online and managed to scrape together 60 metric tons of meat, enough to feed the Gu insects for two days. Ordering two days' worth at a time saved him from worrying about food every day.

Since the slaughterhouses he found were all in the same province, they could deliver within a day. He didn't need refrigerated trucks, saving him another sum.

On the second night, Jiang Yiming rode the Single-Horned Wandering Snake up the mountain again. The snake could move freely along many paths he couldn't traverse himself. That night, he finished searching the designated area ahead of time and caught another 2,000-plus Gu insects.

He checked the time. It was only three in the morning.

"There's still time. I can go loot Rainbow Shopping Mall again!"

With that thought, Jiang Yiming took a ride to Rainbow Shopping Mall.

By the time he finished looting it, dawn was just breaking outside.

Strangely, although the freezers in the underground supermarket had been looted several times, their owners hadn't reduced the amount of meat they put out. Instead, they had crammed more than a dozen freezers full, stocking them with large quantities of low-quality meat.

On the ride back, Jiang Yiming figured it out.

He guessed that the owners of the freezers in the underground supermarket were outside vendors who had moved in. They spent a great deal of money renting space in the mall, so the mall was responsible for protecting them.

So when their meat was stolen, the mall had to compensate them for a large portion of the loss.

They had probably filled the freezers with low-quality meat to pass it off as good and profit from the mall's compensation.

By that reckoning, aside from the first time, when the freezer owners had suffered losses, Jiang Yiming's subsequent raids on the meat in their freezers had actually been a good thing for those small business owners. They had made money instead.

The only one losing money was Tu Ming, the mall's owner!

For as long as the police failed to catch Jiang Yiming, there was no way for Tu Ming to recover those losses.