"Senior, are you truly unwilling to stay here with us? If you stay, this secret realm will be yours to command. You can do whatever you wish, and the other elders and I will all obey you!"
Beside a gently flowing stream, a middle-aged man spoke earnestly to Chen Lin, doing everything he could to persuade him to stay.
Chen Lin shook his head. "Say no more. I have important matters to attend to and cannot remain here. However, I haven't found any powerful monsters in this area. As long as you exercise caution and rely on the secret realm for survival, you shouldn't have any major problems."
Disappointment appeared on the middle-aged man's face. If a powerful cultivator like this, who was not even eccentric, could stay in their secret realm, they would no longer have to spend every day with their hearts in their throats.
Unfortunately, their secret realm had nothing that could entice him to stay. They had only some young, beautiful female cultivators, but he seemed uninterested in women and barely gave them a second glance.
Not daring to press him further, the middle-aged man smiled helplessly. "Then I wish you a smooth journey, Senior. May you soon find the people you're looking for. If I hear anything about those fellow Daoists you mentioned, I'll notify you immediately."
Chen Lin nodded without another word, then vanished in a flash.
"What happened? Did Senior Chen refuse?"
After Chen Lin left, the Emaciated Old Man he had rescued earlier flew over and asked.
The middle-aged man gave a bitter laugh. "Our secret realm is completely barren now. We don't even have a single spiritual herb. What could we possibly offer to keep someone so powerful here? Stop dreaming and hurry up and find a way to get food.