Bai Sui was still somewhat conflicted about it. He knew that raising people with the potential to cultivate the Dao from scratch would take a tremendous amount of time and effort.
It would even mean starting with language, since one's mother tongue truly affected the way one thought.
So if Bai Sui wanted to have fellow cultivators to discuss the Dao with in the future, he would have to start from the beginning and raise a group of people whose mother tongue was Chinese. They would also have to want to cultivate the Dao, be willing to do so, and have a heart devoted to it. It was easy to imagine how much trouble that would be.
To be honest, Bai Sui didn't want to do it. He didn't want to turn himself into a nursery teacher; that would leave him with no freedom at all and run counter to what he wanted.
Bai Sui knew that thinking this way was wrong. What good thing in life came without effort?
But if someone asked him to start raising children right now, he still wouldn't be willing. In the end, he decided it was best to take things one step at a time. If that day really came, he could raise them.
He followed the main road, driving a cart loaded with money and goods toward the next village.
Of course, by now the valuables in the cart weren't just payment for medical treatment. Quite a few had been contributed by the bandits and robbers along the way.
Bai Sui had even discovered that exchange shops already existed in this era.
He'd found one while using his divine sense to search the hideout of a group of bandits. In a mountain hollow, he'd spotted a clearly man-made facility. He hadn't gone inside, but he'd been able to get a rough look at it with his divine sense.
He found it quite fascinating. He waited on the road for three days and saw plenty of people coming and going.
The exchange shop offered quite a few services, but its most important business was collecting corpses. Ninja corpses made up the vast majority.
Bai Sui had waited there because he wanted to find out what they were doing with the bodies. After three days, the exchange shop's workers finally made a move.
They loaded the corpses onto carts and transported them from the exchange shop to a large underground facility built specifically for storing bodies. There, they sorted and arranged them.
After examining the place inside and out with his divine sense, Bai Sui discovered it was nothing more than a morgue. That only made him more curious.
There was clearly something suspicious going on. There had to be a major secret inside, or why go to such lengths to keep it hidden?
Fortunately, Bai Sui didn't have to wait long. The morgue made its move the next day. They opened a hidden compartment, revealing a secret passage.
Bai Sui had already discovered the passage, along with three others. They all led far away, and he couldn't see where any of them ended.
Now that he saw them enter through this passage and transport most of the ninja corpses along it, Bai Sui followed them.
He wasn't afraid of being discovered. He was hundreds of meters away from the underground group transporting the corpses, watching them from a distance with his divine sense. No one would suspect he was there.
Bai Sui didn't devote all his attention to the group, either. He continued treating patients along the way.
At the same time, he worked out roughly where they were headed: the capital of the Land of Iron.
Keeping his distance, he watched the group enter the capital underground. Bai Sui didn't enter the city. Instead, he used the time of day as an excuse to rest outside the walls.
The group eventually arrived beneath a townhouse, where they opened a secret passage and carried the corpses out.
Bai Sui then noticed that several of the surrounding townhouses also belonged to them. They carried the bodies to different houses. He didn't find any other secret passages inside, so it seemed the group would have to arrange for the corpses to be moved from there themselves.
Sure enough, less than an hour later, a group of riders arrived and took some of the bodies away. They looked like subordinates of some noble or Feudal Lord, though they wore no insignia.
After that, more groups came one after another, all to haul away corpses.
This piqued Bai Sui's interest. After all, this was the Land of Iron, the samurai's domain. Ninjas were rare here, yet so many ninja corpses were being collected. There had to be a reason.
The next morning, Bai Sui pretended nothing was amiss and entered the capital openly.
The conspicuous carriage he'd been traveling in had already alerted the people in the city to his arrival when he was still outside the walls the day before.
So as soon as the gates opened, a group of riders was waiting to welcome him.
Bai Sui didn't turn down their hospitality and went with them toward the Daimyo Mansion.
As he made his way there, Bai Sui reminded himself to keep this world entirely separate from a certain island nation in his previous life. Most of the countries in this world were on the mainland, not crowded onto a small, ever-shaking island.
That wasn't to say there weren't similarities in culture and other things, but island and mainland ways of thinking were ultimately different.
For one thing, the capital and Daimyo Mansion before him were both imposing. Bai Sui had visited the old residences of feudal lords in his previous life, such as Azuchi Castle and Osaka Castle, but those so-called castles were small and nowhere near as impressive as the buildings here.
That made sense. This world was on a continental shelf, and the Land of Iron alone was nearly as large as Sakurajima in his previous life. It was only natural for the buildings here to be grander.
The capital of the Land of Iron also had a distinctive style of its own. From a distance, the Daimyo Mansion gleamed in the sunlight.
A sweep of his divine sense revealed that even the roof tiles were made of metal. Perhaps the Land of Iron had an abundance of metal; Bai Sui had often seen metal objects along the way.
Once inside the Daimyo Mansion, Bai Sui didn't use his divine sense to look around, since that would have been impolite. He made some small talk with the person guiding him.
He suddenly caught the smell of food, so he tried to draw some information out of the attendant walking beside him. He learned that the Feudal Lord had gathered the city's nobles to host a banquet for Bai Sui.
Bai Sui told the attendant outright that he no longer ate and thanked the Feudal Lord for his kind offer.
He wasn't trying to reject the Feudal Lord's invitation through the attendant right away. He wanted to give the attendant time to pass the message along.
Sure enough, a young attendant who had been lingering at the edge of the group hurried away after receiving a signal.
Bai Sui deliberately slowed his pace and chatted with the attendants about the customs and local culture of the Land of Iron.
The Feudal Lord and the others preparing to host Bai Sui weren't surprised when they received the young attendant's report.
After all, Bai Sui hadn't eaten anything along the way. No one had seen him dine, whether in the villages or in the towns.