"You, help clean up the battlefield."
Shen Changchuan put away the Soul-Absorbing Bell. He had also spotted the village heads who had fled halfway before stopping, so he called out to them.
His words paused midway.
That brief pause was enough to turn their faces pale.
Fortunately, what he said next made them breathe a sigh of relief.
He was only assigning them a task, not settling accounts after the fact.
The men hurried to work, searching the corpses around them and gathering all kinds of spoils.
Shen Changchuan glanced over them.
He said nothing.
Come to think of it,
they had fled without a fight, scattering in every direction before the battle had even begun.
That had indeed left him feeling somewhat displeased.
But on closer thought,
they weren't his subordinates.
On the contrary,
the heads of these villages were, in a sense, his benefactors.
Every year, sixty or seventy percent of their harvest was offered up to him.
Since they were his benefactors, what was there to criticize?
It was like readers paying to subscribe to your novel and then calling it boring. What was wrong with that?
The customer was king.
Whoever paid was the boss.
Thinking it over,
the displeasure in Shen Changchuan's heart naturally vanished.
"Then again, they're only at the third or fourth level of Qi Induction. It's perfectly normal for them to be afraid in the face of such powerful enemies."
Considering how much the men offered up each year,
Shen Changchuan generously found them an excuse.
He walked over to the Leader of the Black-Clad Men's corpse and casually picked up a branch. With it, he hooked the Storage Bag from beneath the man's right sleeve.
He was in luck.
The battle hadn't damaged the Storage Bag.
Shen Changchuan poured his magic power into it, breaking the imprint left by its former owner.
A space of roughly seven or eight cubic units appeared in his awareness.
Shen Changchuan carefully searched through its contents.
But soon,
his brows furrowed.
There was far less inside than he'd expected!
There were only twenty or thirty Spirit Stones.
There seemed to be eight or nine hundred jin of Spirit Grain, along with Demon Beast materials, miscellaneous items, ores, and the like, which took up a large portion of the space.
But all told, it probably wasn't even worth a hundred Spirit Stones.
Besides that, there was only a low-grade magical sword and a bottle of pills.
Poor.
They were so poor!
Shen Changchuan was a little disappointed.
After experiencing the rich spoils taken from the Four Evils of He Mountain, he could hardly be impressed by what he'd found this time.
You were at the peak of the sixth level of Qi Induction, and so was the Eldest Brother of the Four Evils of He Mountain.
But that man had been far richer than you!
Never mind anything else. The Soul-Absorbing Bell alone was worth six or seven times more than everything in this Storage Bag!
Shen Changchuan couldn't help sighing to himself and giving a slight shake of his head.
With a turn of his palm,
a bottle of pills appeared in his hand.
He removed the stopper and examined the pills' appearance and color, then gave them a sniff.
His expression changed slightly.
"All right, I may have spoken too soon."
Shen Changchuan muttered to himself.
Without drawing attention, he put the stopper back in place and returned the pills to the Storage Bag.
Inside,
his thoughts grew grave.
The scent of Green Origin Water Grass—
there was no mistaking it!
Not long ago,
he had refined a seedling of Green Origin Water Grass himself.
That scent, which made his soul feel clear and unclouded, remained fresh in his memory.
The scent coming from this pill, which also left the soul feeling clear, was almost exactly the same as he remembered!
Shen Changchuan was certain:
the pill's main ingredient was Green Origin Water Grass.
And mature Green Origin Water Grass, at that!
"Even a seedling of Green Origin Water Grass is already extraordinarily valuable, let alone a mature plant—and one refined into a pill, at that?!"
"I remember there's a pill made with Green Origin Water Grass as its main ingredient. It's called the Green Origin Spirit-Cleansing Pill."
"And that pill is worth no less than a Soul-Exit Pill!"
Shen Changchuan narrowed his eyes.
The Soul-Exit Pill—
it was a breakthrough pill that could increase the chances of a cultivator at the peak of the ninth level of Qi Induction breaking through to the Out of Body Realm.
Its value went without saying!
The Green Origin Spirit-Cleansing Pill, worth just as much, had to be extraordinarily precious!
"Green Origin Water Grass..."
Shen Changchuan's thoughts shifted.
He was reminded of the Green Origin Water Grass seedling beneath the Dawan River.
He thought of the incident twenty years ago, when a branch member of the Shen Clan had died in Dawan Village and the Hu Clan had been wiped out.
"This kind of precious spirit herb isn't as common as cabbage."
"Could there be some hidden place in the Border Wilderness where these rare natural treasures grow?"
Shen Changchuan's expression turned uncertain.
He had suspected something was wrong for a long time.
Back then, the Hu Clan head in Dawan Village had been no more than at the seventh level of Qi Induction.
Someone of that strength could easily have been swept aside by any cultivator at the ninth level of Qi Induction.
Why, then, had a true cultivator of the Out of Body Realm from the Shen Clan gone to the trouble of coming in person?!
It was like using an anti-aircraft gun to kill a mosquito!
He had felt that something was strange,
but after Shen Shiying's time in Dawan Village, followed by Shen Changchuan taking over in turn, nothing particularly unusual had happened.
Even if he wanted to investigate,
he had no lead.
The only way to understand what had happened would be to meet that Shen Clan true cultivator of the Out of Body Realm and ask him directly.
But that was clearly impossible.
"Stop, stop, stop. Don't think about all that yet!"
There were too many entanglements involved. Shen Changchuan felt a headache coming on and hurriedly cut off his train of thought.
Those problems were too far away. He could deal with them later.
"None of that matters for now. The most important thing is to find out where this pill came from, and who else knows about it!"
Shen Changchuan quickly pulled his thoughts back
to the matter that needed his attention now.
"Right, what happened to the two people who were being chased?"
Only then did Shen Changchuan remember.
He called out to the people around him to ask.
As the ones who'd been pursued, they might know who the Black-Clad Men were.
But the village heads searching for spoils around him exchanged glances and shook their heads, indicating that they had no idea.
The fight had broken out too suddenly.
And they'd run off far too decisively.
As a result, no one had even noticed the two figures, one large and one small, whose pursuit had sparked the whole conflict.
"That... the old immortal cultivator just asked us who we were and told us to pass on his message to the cultivators. He said he would repay them handsomely in the future, then hurried off with his people."
Just then,
several mortal martial artists who had been at the back of the convoy stepped forward, trembling as they spoke.
"Did he leave any information about his identity?"
"No."
Shen Changchuan's brows furrowed.
But he didn't waste any more words.
He immediately gave the order:
"Pack up as quickly as possible. We leave at once!"
Shen Changchuan had a vague feeling
that they might have gotten caught up in some kind of trouble.
But there was nothing to be done.
The Black-Clad Men had attacked them first. It wasn't as if they could just put down their weapons, refuse to fight back, and let themselves be slaughtered.
They'd better leave first and figure things out later!
Soon,
everyone quickly gathered the spoils, and the convoy set off again.
Shen Changchuan brought up the rear.
He thought for a moment,
then sent out more than a dozen fireballs, burning away every trace of the battle.
Afterward, he followed the convoy and hurried away.
Before you continue