Not only was Ning the Little Girl, with her powerful family backing, untouchable; Li Mu also turned a blind eye to the junior sisters in the sect.
There was no doubt about it: female disciples who managed to join the sect all had connections. Influenced by traditional Confucian culture, noble clans only sent their sons into sects.
Families that could tolerate their daughters entering the martial world were either commoners too poor to afford their next meal or families whose elders were all martial artists.
The Mount Hua Sect of today was not the Mount Hua Sect Yue Buqun had once commanded, with only a few stray cats and dogs. It no longer took just anyone who came knocking.
Not only did it require excellent aptitude, it also demanded a clean family background. The age of admission was strictly limited to ten and under, and most disciples joined at seven or eight.
Fail to meet even one of those requirements, and at most you could enter the outer sect. No amount of pleading would help. The Sword and Qi Factions were watching each other closely, each eager to catch the other in a mistake, so neither dared openly violate the sect rules.
Setting the restrictions aside, martial arts required a foundation built from childhood: conditioning the body, training in the basics, learning to read and write, and so on. Commoners could barely guarantee three meals a day, so they obviously lacked the means for that.
Most children from ordinary families entered the outer sect first. Only after improving their basic abilities in every area did they have a chance to become an elder's disciple and enter the inner sect—or to break through to the second-rate level and be promoted automatically.
It was realistic, and it was true to life. A sect wasn't a charity hall, so naturally it chose disciples with the best overall qualities.
With a complete promotion system in place, it only needed to identify the geniuses. Ordinary people with average all-round abilities weren't worth much.
For most disciples from ordinary families, staying in the outer sect was also a very good path.
Making one's way in the martial world was dangerous, but fortune favored those who braved danger. Even an outer sect disciple could earn a respectable income.
As far as Li Mu knew, the Mount Hua Sect paid its outer sect disciples at least three taels of silver a month, with the highest earners receiving over a hundred. Their exact pay depended on factors such as cultivation, position, and contributions.
Of course, inner sect disciples received better treatment, but overall, the gap wasn't all that large.
If two disciples had the same cultivation, performed the same tasks, and held the same positions, the difference in their pay wouldn't exceed twenty percent.
Besides, inner sect disciples didn't earn anything during their first ten years. That was their learning period; they didn't need to take on missions, and they only consumed the sect's resources without contributing anything.
Once they came of age and entered the martial world, inner sect disciples earned a starting wage of ten taels a month. The highest could also make over a hundred taels a month, depending on their cultivation, contributions, position, and seniority.
There was no need to envy those with high incomes. That money was earned with their lives on the line; the more they made, the more dangerous the tasks they had to undertake.
If you weren't afraid to die, you could volunteer to infiltrate the Demonic Cult. Make even a little progress, and you were guaranteed a three-digit salary.
Unfortunately, missions like that were usually one-way trips. Even those lucky enough to return unscathed would face targeted retaliation from the Demonic Cult in the future.
The Mount Hua Sect had no choice but to offer high pay. On average, dozens of its disciples died away from home each year for one reason or another. In the end, fewer than one in five Mount Hua disciples managed to leave the martial world in one piece.
If the sect's disciples were paid so well, its elders certainly weren't paid any less. No wonder the Mount Hua Sect was expanding outward. If it kept growing this way, it would soon be unable to afford its own disciples.
A quick tally made it clear: the Mount Hua Sect had over a thousand outer sect disciples, several hundred inner sect disciples, and dozens of elders. Salaries alone cost at least fifty or sixty thousand taels of silver each month.
In fact, salaries were only one part of the sect's expenses. Food, clothing, lodging, travel, cultivation resources, and compensation for injuries and deaths—all of it cost money.
Martial artists were all big eaters, especially beginners, who could only draw energy from food. Every last one of them was a bottomless pit.
Those who trained in external arts needed even more meat. Usually, these fellows didn't even use bowls for their meals; they ate straight from basins.
Livestock in this era wasn't nearly as fat as it would be in later generations. Not only did it take a very long time to raise, it yielded little meat.
A local ox weighing three or four hundred jin—using the sixteen-tael jin—yielded only a little over a hundred jin of meat. Sheep were even worse; getting thirty jin of meat from one counted as an exceptionally fat sheep.
Local pigs were no better. Improved breeds hadn't been developed yet, and even after two or three years of raising one, it could barely reach a hundred jin.
On average, the Mount Hua Sect went through three oxen, ten sheep, thirty "Ten-Thousand-Mile Oinkers" (pigs), and countless chickens, ducks, and fish every day.
Productivity was low, so meat was naturally expensive.
In the Guanzhong region, an ox was worth roughly a dozen or so taels of silver, a sheep two and a half taels, a "Ten-Thousand-Mile Oinker" two taels, a five-jin big carp one qian, and a live chicken four fen...
Besides meat, there were vegetables, fruit, firewood, rice, oil, salt, spices, wine, tonics, and all sorts of other things, many of which weren't cheap either.
By a preliminary estimate, food alone cost the Mount Hua Sect three or four hundred taels a day, or around ten thousand taels a month.
And even that was an underestimate. The Mount Hua Sect didn't just feed its disciples; servants and attendants needed to eat, too. Even if their meals were more modest, they still cost money.
The martial world ran on human relationships, so hosting meals was unavoidable. Take the last martial arts convention, for example: it added over ten thousand mouths to feed, a considerable expense in itself.
Cultivation resources went without saying. They couldn't even be measured in money. Most precious resources were in the hands of the major powers and simply weren't sold to outsiders.
The medicinal herbs needed for cultivation by the various sects, including the Mount Hua Sect, were mostly grown by their own people. They only bought small quantities of herbs that couldn't be grown locally.
Li Mu had no idea how much this cost. But according to his master, Zhou Qingyun, the cultivation resources he had won in the tournament could have fetched tens of thousands of taels on the black market.
Of course, prices like that were also the result of monopolies held by the major powers. Unless absolutely necessary, no one would sell those resources under normal circumstances.
Everyone was a martial artist, and their own cultivation mattered most. If they were truly desperate for money, they could go out and rob someone. Selling cultivation resources was out of the question.
The cost of growing and preparing medicines was difficult for outsiders to determine. But judging by the number of people employed in the industry, Li Mu estimated it took at least a hundred thousand taels of silver a year.
Clothing was another sizable expense. Martial artists were bound to get knocked around, so it was easy to imagine how often their clothes wore out.
Four outfits for each of the four seasons added up to tens of thousands of garments a year. Inner sect disciples and the sect's elders also needed high-quality fabric. There was no way to cover it all for less than fifty or sixty thousand taels of silver.
Lodging wasn't worth mentioning. The main expense came when disciples went on missions; they didn't need to spend money while living on the mountain.
Weapons were another enormous expense. Because of the imperial court's monopoly on salt and iron, the price of iron goods had always remained high.
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