The next day, the Mysterious Bookstore opened for business.
Early that morning, just after Ma Feifei opened the door, Zhou Guanyu rushed inside.
"Shopkeeper, I want to read The Legend of the Condor Heroes." Zhou Guanyu handed six Spirit Crystals to Yun Qingyang, whose face was as cold as ever, and said excitedly.
Yang Chengzhi's comeback had made a big impression on him. All the way back from the imperial capital, he'd been thinking about The Legend of the Condor Heroes. He'd even arrived before dawn and waited across the street at the steamed bun shop, eating buns until the bookstore opened.
"Didn't your sister come today?" Ma Feifei was clearly more interested in Zhou Zhuling.
He was planning to copy out the Thousand Gold Formulas today. It was a medical text, and Ma Feifei guessed that readers might gain healing abilities from it.
Maybe Zhou Zhuling's illness could even be cured.
So he'd planned to copy out the Thousand Gold Formulas and have Zhou Zhuling try it out. But she hadn't come today.
Truth be told, he'd gotten used to Zhou Zhuling sticking close to him every day. Now that he couldn't see her, he actually missed her a little.
Zhou Guanyu sat down with The Legend of the Condor Heroes. As he opened the book, he replied, "I heard a living Buddha came to Yuanfang City. They say he can not only save all living beings, but also has miraculous medical skills capable of bringing the dead back to life. My mother got word of it and dragged my sister to Yuanfang City first thing this morning."
"Oh? Is this living Buddha more skilled than Medicine Saint Shaoyao?" Ma Feifei asked, a little surprised. After all, Medicine Saint Shaoyao had long since declared Zhou Zhuling's illness incurable. In this world, Medicine Saint Shaoyao's word was practically the final authority when it came to treating illnesses. If he said there was no cure, then there was no cure. No one else could do a thing.
Zhou Guanyu shook his head and replied without turning around, "I don't know. But apparently the living Buddha came from Leiyin Temple in the west. Maybe he has some secret method. Anyway, my sister said whether she gets cured is secondary. She's just going along to keep our mother company and help her relax."
After hearing this, Ma Feifei saw that Zhou Guanyu was entirely absorbed in The Legend of the Condor Heroes, so he didn't ask anything else. Still, he was a little curious.
The so-called living Buddhas were monks. They existed in this world of cultivation, too.
But according to what he'd heard, monks were extremely rare. After all, this was a world of cultivation, and immortals were the people's faith.
So monks were rarely seen on the Azure Dragon Continent. People only knew that they had their base in the far western lands.
But this also made the monks seem mysterious to everyone. They never interacted with the world, hiding away in the distant west. Sometimes, no one would even mention them for thousands of years.
Ma Feifei had heard of the monks in this world mainly because, at a tavern, he'd once heard some adventurers tell a strange story from two thousand years ago.
Apparently, two thousand years ago, Qin Shi Huang, the founding emperor of the Qin State, had invited a living Buddha from Leiyin Temple into the imperial palace. No one knew the exact reason, but the living Buddha was later appointed Imperial Advisor by Qin Shi Huang. After that, Qin Shi Huang lost interest in governing the state and spent every day with the living Buddha, tinkering with who knew what.
But within a few years, Qin Shi Huang died, and the living Buddha vanished without a trace.
The most widespread rumor was that the living Buddha had killed Qin Shi Huang. But that story didn't hold up, because Qin Shi Huang had already reached the Transcendent to Saint realm, at the fifth stage of Spirit Saint cultivation. No one on the entire Azure Dragon Continent could have killed him without anyone noticing.
Qin Shi Huang's successor never mentioned the matter. The official explanation was simply that Qin Shi Huang had reached the end of his lifespan.
Qin Shi Huang had indeed been over three thousand years old, so natural death was certainly possible. But most people rejected that explanation.
The strange story had been passed down to this day. Whenever the Qin State came up in conversation, adventurers would mention it.
"I wonder what's different about the monks in this world," Ma Feifei murmured, rubbing his chin.
He shook his head, clearing away the distracting thoughts, then picked up his pen and paper and began copying the Thousand Gold Formulas.
The Thousand Gold Formulas was a medical text written by Sun Simiao, the Medicine King. It consisted of thirty volumes and was a comprehensive clinical medical work, hailed as Huaxia's earliest clinical encyclopedia.
Of course, Ma Feifei had never read a book like this. He only knew it was very, very famous. A friend of his in his previous life had somehow had nine copies of the Thousand Gold Formulas at home.
"Huh? Something feels off." After writing four characters, Ma Feifei sensed something strange and stopped, staring at the paper in confusion.
"Why is the writing so faint?"
The writing was so faint that it was almost disappearing.
"Am I out of ink?" Ma Feifei looked at the Ballpoint Pen in his hand, raised it up, and examined it.
"Huh?" Suddenly, Ma Feifei noticed a line of tiny text on the Ballpoint Pen.
"To copy books of Yellow Quality or higher, Spirit Crystals must be infused!"
"So there really are higher grades above Blue Quality." Ma Feifei looked as though he'd known it all along. After the bookstore had produced Blue Quality and White Quality books, he'd already suspected there were different grades. Now the system said the Thousand Gold Formulas he was copying was Yellow Quality, proving his earlier guess had been right.
It was clear that since the Thousand Gold Formulas was Yellow Quality, the benefits hidden within it had to be greater in quality than those in Blue Quality books.
Put simply, readers could gain more from Yellow Quality books than from Blue Quality ones.
"But what does 'infused with Spirit Crystals' mean?" Ma Feifei glanced at the Ballpoint Pen in his hand and suddenly had an idea: Spirit Crystals as ink?
With that thought, Ma Feifei took out the bag he'd been keeping for himself.
Yun Qingyang, not far away, shot him a look.
"Mine," Ma Feifei said.
Yun Qingyang said nothing and kept staring.
"Mine!" Ma Feifei raised his voice.
Yun Qingyang curled her lip, looked away, and went back to staring blankly while holding her sword.
Ma Feifei turned back and opened the bag. He took out a Spirit Crystal and placed it beside the pen.
The Spirit Crystal began to emit tiny specks of white light, which streamed into the Ballpoint Pen.
In the blink of an eye, the Spirit Crystal was gone.
"It's already gone?" Ma Feifei took out another Spirit Crystal.
Just like before, it turned into white light and streamed into the Ballpoint Pen in an instant.
This happened again and again, until all the Spirit Crystals in Ma Feifei's bag had disappeared.
Ma Feifei picked up the pen and wrote eight large characters on the paper: "Thousand Gold Formulas, written by Sun Simiao of the Tang dynasty."
The writing was clear, and faint spiritual power rippled across the characters. The idea of "Spirit Crystals as ink" was real!
Although he'd confirmed that Spirit Crystals really could be used as ink, Ma Feifei couldn't bring himself to feel happy.
"I thought this was supposed to be a special pen. Why does it need ink too? And not just any ink—it uses Spirit Crystals! How many Spirit Crystals does the bookstore even earn in a day? Is that enough to write a book that's nearly a million words long?"
"How am I supposed to make a living? How am I supposed to pay my employees?"
Ma Feifei had always thought that the profits from people reading books in the bookstore belonged to him personally. The system just wanted him to copy books to complete its tasks. Spirit Crystals were vulgar things the system wouldn't care about.
But now he had to use Spirit Crystals as ink just to copy a book. That meant every single character in the Thousand Gold Formulas would be written with Spirit Crystals!
How many Spirit Crystals would a book nearly a million words long cost? Only the heavens knew.
"Sigh!" Ma Feifei sighed and began copying the Thousand Gold Formulas.
This time, though, he didn't write with the same freewheeling flourish he'd used for his previous books, splashing ink whenever the mood struck. Instead, he wrote carefully, making every character small and neat, as though he were copying a model.
Better to save a little wherever he could!
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