After visiting Mount Longhu, Mount Zao Pavilion, and the ancestral grounds of other Daoist Sects, he could only return disappointed.
The third stop was Mount Tai.
There were no major sects established on Mount Tai.
However, Mount Tai in the Shrouding the Sky World was extraordinary. Perhaps he would encounter cultivators who had come to pay their respects there.
To attract the cultivators' attention,
Li Zhi set up a small stall at the foot of the mountain and created a literacy game.
He mixed up the translated Oracle Bone Script with the untranslated Oracle Bone Script in Stealing Heavenly Secrets, offering a hundred yuan for every character to attract tourists to play.
Ten yuan per game, with ten Oracle Bone Script characters drawn at random each time.
Recognizing three or more would trigger the hundred-yuan-per-character reward.
In other words, for every additional Oracle Bone Script character they recognized, they would receive a hundred yuan.
Perhaps because the reward was generous enough, his game stall soon became extremely popular.
From early spring all the way until midsummer, not a single one of the unfamiliar Oracle Bone Script characters in Stealing Heavenly Secrets had been recognized by the tourists.
As for the other Oracle Bone Script characters, they had cost him more than a hundred thousand yuan in prize money.
Until one day, a young man and woman came down from the mountain.
As they passed Li Zhi's stall, the girl suddenly stopped and called to the young man, "Senior Apprentice-Brother, wait a moment. There's a fun game here."
Neither of them possessed any Immortal-like Demeanor. Although they looked dignified, they seemed utterly ordinary.
An ordinary person's gaze would not linger on them for even a moment.
But Li Zhi noticed that the two were extraordinary.
Unlike ordinary people, they had walked from the foot of the mountain to his stall without turning red or breathing heavily, and they were not carrying any equipment at all.
They did not seem to have even brought cell phones in their pockets.
"Miss, would you like to play a few rounds? If you're knowledgeable, you might even earn enough for this entire trip from me." Li Zhi began promoting his game like a swindler.
The girl giggled and said, "If I win, you won't refuse to pay, will you?"
Li Zhi said, "Miss, you sure talk big. If you dare to win, I'll dare to pay. I'm only worried that you won't recognize the characters and will get so desperate after losing that you'll call the police and accuse me of fraud."
Previously, someone had spent several hundred yuan looking at several hundred Oracle Bone Script characters without recognizing a single one, then called the police directly.
It was only after other tourists who had won money from Li Zhi explained things to the police that the police let him go.
After all, Li Zhi's business could be considered a cultural game. It was more sophisticated than those simple ring-toss games, and the scenic area's staff were happy to see it continue.
The young man looked over the stall and the rules before asking, "Boss, your game doesn't have a limit on the number of attempts, does it?"
Li Zhi said, "There is no limit on attempts, but the difficulty increases level by level. If you can clear all the levels, it's possible to win a hundred thousand yuan."
As he spoke, Li Zhi patted the metal box beneath him.
There seemed to be a hundred thousand yuan in cash prepared inside.
Seeing this, the young man said to the girl, "Junior Apprentice-Sister, since you want to play, go ahead and enjoy yourself. Let this ignorant boss learn that there is always someone better, and the heavens lie beyond the heavens."
Then, the game began.
The girl seemed to recognize every single character.
Li Zhi had originally been brimming with confidence, but by the third round, sweat had already appeared on his forehead.
The young man asked with a smile, "Boss, how is it? Do you still dare to continue?"
The girl seemed to be enjoying Li Zhi's increasingly terrified expression. She said, "Senior Apprentice-Brother, I haven't had enough yet."
Li Zhi gritted his teeth and said, "Continue. I refuse to believe it. Could you two really be more capable than professors in the field of ancient writing?"
Then he secretly switched to the Oracle Bone Script from Stealing Heavenly Secrets.
The order had been scrambled, and the characters were printed on individual cards, so no one could associate them with characters extracted from a complete article.
Sure enough, once the difficulty increased, the girl could no longer answer immediately.
She had to think, and sometimes even ask her Senior Apprentice-Brother for help before she could recognize the characters.
Li Zhi watched them with a smug look, apparently delighted by his own cleverness.
The young man seemed to have been provoked by Li Zhi's expression and actually stepped in to play the game himself.
In less than half an hour, they had recognized every Oracle Bone Script character in Li Zhi's character bank.
Seeing them clear the game, Li Zhi felt as if the sky had collapsed. His legs went limp, and he sank directly to the ground.
There was not a trace of pity in the girl's eyes as she looked down at him and said, "Boss, we've cleared the game. Hurry up and pay us. You aren't planning to welch on us, are you?"
The young man also looked at Li Zhi and said sarcastically, "Who was it just now who said, 'If you dare to win, I'll dare to pay'?"
Li Zhi seemed furious. He used the box to pull himself up, glared at the pair of Junior Apprentice-Siblings, and then ground his back teeth as he said, "I'm afraid you won't be able to carry it."
Then he opened the box, took out a backpack stuffed with twenty bundles of hundred-yuan bills, and threw it straight at them.
He seemed to be speaking out of spite. "It's only two hundred thousand yuan. I can still afford it."
The girl caught the backpack. When she saw the neatly bundled hundred-yuan bills inside, she immediately said to her Senior Apprentice-Brother, "Senior Apprentice-Brother, this trip wasn't for nothing after all. We even earned two months' worth of pocket money."
Then they prepared to leave.
But Li Zhi called out, "Wait a moment."
The young man stared at him. "What? Are you planning to go back on your word?"
Li Zhi said, "You can take the money, but leave my bag behind. That was a brand-name backpack I bought for six hundred yuan."
"Haha, this boss is hilarious."
As soon as he said this, the crowd gathered around the stall burst into uproarious laughter.
The girl also stared at Li Zhi in disbelief, seemingly unable to believe that he would quibble over such a cheap bag.
The young man made no visible movement. He merely gave the bag in his hand a light shake, then tossed the backpack back to Li Zhi and said, "Here. Your bag."
After catching the backpack, Li Zhi immediately realized that the money inside had vanished, further confirming that the two were cultivators.
He tossed the empty bag into the box and then addressed the tourists watching them. "Folks, Li has suffered a crushing defeat today and taken a severe blow to his Primal Qi. I need to rest for a while."
After saying that, he began packing up amid the crowd's mocking looks.
Then, amid the tourists' cheers, he left in a sorry state.
But no one noticed that his eyes were exceptionally bright.
Did they really think he was heartbroken over that money?
No. He had been putting on a live performance for everyone.
Li Zhi dared say that his performance just now had reached perfection, surpassing all the students of every drama academy.
The gains this time had been enormous.
He had neither exposed himself nor solved his problem.
He had spent only a little money and left behind no karmic entanglement.
It had been an excellent bargain.
He could hardly wait to return and translate the entire book of "Stealing Heavenly Secrets."
After more than a year,
Li Zhi returned to his hometown once again.
Moreover, he returned directly from Mount Tai to Da Li Village.
He did not notify anyone along the way. Even Zhou Mei, who called Li Zhi almost every day, did not know that he had already left Mount Tai.
Deep in his heart, Li Zhi subconsciously felt that his home in Da Li Village was his true home—the place where he could study "Stealing Heavenly Secrets" without distraction.
His home in Da Li Village seemed to be where his soul truly belonged.
Although Li Zhi had lived in Da Li Village for less than three months in total since arriving in this world,
when faced with a major event in his life, he still returned without hesitation.
Although he no longer had any family at home, home was still home—the root that had given birth to and raised him.
Perhaps this was the soul imprint left in every cell by growing up eating Da Li Village's grain and drinking Da Li Village's water.
Although he had been away for more than a year, everything in the house remained intact.
It did not look like a place that had been uninhabited for years.
This was because Li Zhi had asked Li Zhong and his wife to clean it every week.
A house that went unoccupied for years would usually lack human presence.
But Li Zhi's home did not lack human presence.
Even the appliances in the house were used regularly.
Before you continue