Demon Creature in the River

Great Bay Village lay amid a valley plain ringed by mountains.

A vast river, shaped like a crescent moon, ran through the broad plain between the mountains, dividing the entire valley basin into two irregular halves.

Great Bay Village stood upstream along the river, on high ground at the foot of the mountain behind it.

The Twelve Mu Spirit Field lay

on the mountainside behind the village, beside a courtyard halfway up the slope, upon terraced fields that looked like tier upon tier of stairs.

Great Bay Village's Spirit Spring, rich in spiritual energy, flowed down from the mountains. Over countless days and months, its waters soaked into the land, granting the areas it passed through the spiritual essence needed to grow Spirit Grain.

At this moment, however, Shen Changchuan was in the main hall at the center of the village at the foot of the mountain.

So when the uproar outside reached him, he naturally heard it.

After putting away the spirit ginseng,

Shen Changchuan went outside the village,

where he saw a group of people gathered on higher ground, pointing and gesturing toward the river.

"What happened?"

The moment Shen Changchuan arrived, the people around him quickly made way.

Then,

Shen Changchuan followed the direction of everyone's gaze,

and saw an awning-covered boat overturned upon the rippling, muddy river not far away. More than half of it had already sunk beneath the surface, leaving only part of its top exposed.

Amid the churning, rising and falling currents, a faint crimson hue could be seen welling up from beneath the river.

The once-lush grass along the riverbank

had been crushed flat over a large area, leaving the place in a complete mess.

It was clear that many people had moved about on the formerly thick riverside grassland, while several piles of black silt, dredged up from the riverbed and stacked several feet high, lay nearby.

Several dozen feet away from the riverbank, Maternal Grandfather Han Qinhu and the other members of the Han Family were maintaining order, making the gathered crowd retreat.

"Maternal Grandfather, what's going on?"

Shen Changchuan walked up to Han Qinhu and asked.

"Something happened. There's a Demon Beast in this river!"

"Those fools who don't value their lives wanted to dredge up silt from the river. They never expected there to be a monster in these waters. Two of them were dragged straight down by that beast!"

Seeing that Shen Changchuan had arrived, Han Qinhu did not hide anything and directly explained the entire sequence of events.

After hearing Han Qinhu's account,

Shen Changchuan frowned slightly.

Speaking of it, this sudden mishap

was not unrelated to his reform experiment.

Back when he had devised the reform plan, in order to stir up the enthusiasm of the members of Teams Eleven and Twelve as much as possible, to give them the motivation to tend the Spirit Grain more meticulously and raise the yield per mu of the two experimental fields as much as they could,

Shen Changchuan had made a promise: when the Spirit Grain was harvested, as long as the yield exceeded one hundred jin, they could claim thirty percent of the excess.

The developments afterward

unfolded exactly as Shen Changchuan had expected. This reward-sharing plan greatly roused the enthusiasm of both teams.

Thus, during the planting of the Spirit Grain,

nearly everyone in Teams Eleven and Twelve pored over the two sets of Spirit Grain cultivation notes Shen Changchuan had left behind.

They analyzed them word by word and sentence by sentence, carefully putting every method within into practice.

Almost every one of them pulled out all the stops, hoping to reap an excellent harvest of Spirit Grain this season.

Deep plowing, turning the soil, selecting seeds, raising seedlings... they did everything as perfectly as they could according to the experience notes.

Yet among those methods, there was one troublesome matter.

That was composting.

The fertilizer in question was not the stuff that passed through a person's five organs.

Spirit Grain was, after all, a Spirit Item imbued with spiritual energy. Shen Changchuan did not need to think hard to know that human waste would not only fail to increase the yield of Spirit Grain, but might even contaminate it, causing the rice seedlings to wither and die.

Spirit Items were delicate by nature.

The methods used to tend ordinary crops could not be copied wholesale onto Spirit Items.

But since Shen Changchuan had written down the steps for composting,

he naturally was not indulging in wishful thinking.

Because at the time,

he recalled something he had read during the two and a half years he spent at Shen Family Manor—a record in a travel journal written by a Shen Family ancestor who had roamed the world.

That ancestor had once witnessed low-level cultivators near a place where the power of water veins was especially dense dredging up great quantities of silt containing "deposits" from the water, then forcibly opening up fields capable of growing Spirit Grain in a patch of land devoid of spiritual energy.

Although the Spirit Grain yield of such artificially made "Spirit Fields" was far inferior to that of true Spirit Fields,

the sight had astonished the Shen Family ancestor at the time.

Later, driven by curiosity, he conducted some investigation.

He discovered that when the qi of rivers and water veins mingled with the qi of earth veins, they produced certain fertile "deposits."

It was precisely these "deposits" within the silt, formed from the union of water-vein essence and earth-vein qi, that provided the growing environment for Spirit Grain.

They allowed even ordinary fields to grow Spirit Grain.

When Shen Changchuan had read this account back then, he had merely found it somewhat interesting and had not paid much attention to it.

But not long ago,

while Shen Changchuan was organizing his notes on improving Spirit Grain cultivation, he recalled this matter.

At the same time, a thought arose in his mind.

If that silt containing "deposits" were used as fertilizer and piled into the Spirit Fields, would it make the Spirit Grain there grow better?

With that idea in mind,

Shen Changchuan included composting in the notes.

And the source of the silt

was naturally this river before them, which ran straight across the entire valley plain.

The members of Teams Eleven and Twelve, greatly encouraged by the reward-sharing arrangement,

naturally would not overlook this step of improving composting in the experience notes.

As a result, not long after they began working,

something went wrong.

An unknown Demon Beast in the river suddenly attacked, overturning the boat dredging silt and dragging the two people aboard directly beneath the water.

"How could there be a Demon Beast in this river? Has it always been here?"

After learning the full story, Shen Changchuan's expression darkened.

He had never imagined

that before his reform attempt could yield any results, an accident would occur—and people would even die because of it.

"I'm not sure."

"I asked the villagers, but they don't know whether there are Demon Beasts in this river either."

"This river is extremely wide, and the current in its middle reaches is especially swift. Even outside Crescent Bay, where the water is slower, the surface may look calm, but beneath it, hidden currents surge and dangers abound."

"On top of that, the village has always used stream water diverted from the mountains as its water source. Few people have ever ventured into this river, so they do not truly know much about the Demon Beasts within it."

As the person Shen Changchuan trusted most, Maternal Grandfather Han Qinhu served in Great Bay Village in a role similar to that of a village chief, managing all manner of village affairs.

Long before Shen Changchuan arrived, Han Qinhu had already clarified the situation.

When faced with Shen Changchuan's questions, he answered smoothly and promptly, quickly providing the answers.