"What invisible big hand? Clearly that's just my own hardworking little hands!" Mu Xingqi muttered.
He earned his current cultivation level through sheer hard work, one spirit stone at a time.
The self in the simulation only needed to focus on cultivation, but he had a mountain of tasks in reality: earning spirit stones, seeking breakthroughs, strengthening the lineage...
Simulator: Ah, right, right, right.
[In November, your grandfather personally guided you in Spirit Platform Condensation. You felt the results were remarkable, at least much faster than fumbling through it on your own before.]
[In December, your grandfather conferred upon you the title of Young Clan Leader and officially held the investiture ceremony.]
[You began contacting lineage affairs and gradually understood the lineage's various industries.]
[You learned that the Mu Family currently took pill alchemy as its pillar industry, running two pill shops and one medicine shop in Jinzhou County.]
[Although your lineage only had your mother as a true alchemist, you learned that many rogue cultivators could not afford genuine medicinal pills. Therefore, the most popular pills in Jinzhou County were primarily unranked healing powders, followed by Yellow Grade Low Rank Qi Gathering Pills.]
[Unranked healing powder could be produced by alchemy apprentices, while low rank Qi Gathering Pills were refined by your mother. These were also the two main pills the Mu Family currently sold primarily.]
[The spiritual herbs of your lineage were also mainly planted with Gold Injury Leaf, Qi Gathering Grass, and Clear Spirit Tea.]
[Qi Gathering Grass was used to refine Qi Gathering Pills, Gold Injury Leaf was used to make healing powder, and Clear Spirit Tea was mainly sold as a spiritual herb at the medicine shop.]
[The yields of Qi Gathering Grass and Gold Injury Leaf were both considerable. It was mainly Clear Spirit Tea whose annual yield was very small, resulting in the medicine shop operating at a loss over the years.]
[After becoming the Young Clan Leader, your status within the lineage reached a leap, and even elders had to address you as Young Clan Leader upon seeing you.]
[Your prestige among the younger generation reached its peak, and at least in the Mu Family, no one did not know of you as the Young Clan Leader.]
[You relished the satisfaction brought by power.]
[Sometimes, you used that power to engage in shady dealings.]
[In January of the second year, you proposed to your grandfather to reform the lineage's shops and make new plans.]
[After understanding, your grandfather heavily praised you not only for your peerless talent, but also for your exceptional intellect.]
[With your grandfather's support, you waved your hand grandly and began the reforms.]
[You first changed the three shops respectively into: one responsible for selling healing powder, one for Qi Gathering Pills, and the last medicine shop into a tea room.]
[You planned for the healing powder to target the low-end market, leveraging high volume as an advantage, and pricing it even slightly lower than market rates.]
[You posted daily missions in the Pill Hall to recruit lineage disciples to process Gold Injury Leaf. Through your understanding, the main difficulty in refining healing powder lay in the proportioning, while the processing of Gold Injury Leaf could be handed over to ordinary disciples and the proportioning to alchemy apprentices. Simply put, it was the division of labor like an assembly line from your past life, which could greatly accelerate the production speed of healing powder.]
[You then positioned the shop exclusively selling Qi Gathering Pills as the mid-to-high-end market, stopping the sale of low rank Qi Gathering Pills and instead focusing primarily on mid rank Qi Gathering Pills, while limitedly selling one or two high rank Qi Gathering Pills every month.]
[Through your calculations, although the growth cycle of Yellow Grade Mid Rank Qi Gathering Grass was longer than the low rank, it was only about twice as long, yet the selling price of mid rank Qi Gathering Pills was more than twice as high. In other words, selling Yellow Grade Mid Rank Qi Gathering Pills earned twice as many spirit stones as the low rank ones. Moreover, the market for mid rank Qi Gathering Pills was not small, as cultivators in the mid-stage Qi Refining and late-stage Qi Cultivation both needed mid-rank Qi Gathering Pills—especially those rogue cultivators who, even upon breaking through to late-stage Qi Cultivation, lacked the spirit stones and means to acquire high rank Qi Gathering Pills.]
[As the final step, you converted the medicine shop into a tea room. First, you discovered that the Clear Spirit Tea planted within the lineage had a low yield but high quality, allowing it to be made into various tea products for sale. Second, the tea room's role went far beyond drinking and selling tea; you wanted this tea room to become the Mu Family's intelligence agency. Leveraging the Mu Family's prestige in Jinzhou County, this tea room could also dual-function in intelligence collection and sales.]
[After your sweeping reforms, the first person to benefit was your mother. Since your lineage previously focused on selling low rank Qi Gathering Pills, your mother had to busy herself refining pills every day. Yellow Grade Low Rank Qi Gathering Grass had a short maturation time of less than a month, leaving your mother with almost endless pills to refine daily.]
[However, after you positioned the lineage's Qi Gathering Pills at the mid rank, your mother's alchemy pressure was directly halved, and she could even return home every day to take care of you.]
[Seeing the growing smiles on your mother's face, you felt happy as well.]
[In February of the second year, Mu Xinger successfully became a Yellow Grade Low Rank Alchemist, and your plan shifted accordingly. You had Mu Xinger take charge of refining low rank Qi Gathering Pills, but in small quantities supplied exclusively to the pill shop selling healing powder at a monthly quota and prices several tenths higher than the market.]
[For no other reason than hunger marketing; anyway, you were harvesting the spirit stones of rogue cultivators, so you felt not a shred of heartache yourself.]
[Because you firmly believed in squeezing grease wherever grease could be found! You were a spirit-stone supremacist.]
[Under your reforms, the lineage's revenues saw an increase this month.]
[However, the Mu Family's reputation also suffered a blow, though they were merely mud-legged rogue cultivators, so it caused no major impact on the Mu Family's interests.]
"Why does this business acumen talent make me more and more like an unscrupulous merchant?"
"As expected of the system's output, it is bound to be a scam!"
Mu Xingqi muttered.
[In March of the second year, as the lineage industries earned more spirit stones, your grandfather decided to raise the stipends of everyone in the lineage.]
[You felt somewhat resentful in your heart, thinking that these were all spirit stones you had earned through bitter toil, only to be distributed to parasites within the lineage who didn't pull their weight. You should round up all the gluttonous and lazy parasites in the lineage and force them to do hard labor for you.]
[Yet on the surface you still smiled and agreed.]
[Your status within the lineage was reinforced once again, even somewhat surpassing your father the family head.]
[In June of the second year, the Mu Family expanded its industries and opened a second shop selling healing powder.]
[You also took the opportunity to scale up production.]
[Almost all branch lineage disciples began undertaking the task of processing Gold Injury Leaf in the Pill Hall.]
[In September of the second year, the Mu Family opened a third healing powder shop.]
[Relying on your price advantages and large-scale production methods, the Mu Family successfully crushed all healing powder shops in the Jinzhou County market, successfully gaining control over the entire Jinzhou County healing powder market.]
[In December of the second year, the Mu Family opened two consecutive shops, announcing the complete monopolization of the healing powder market.]
[As the Mu Family's spirit fields gradually proved insufficient—having already utilized all cultivable land on Muye Mountain into spirit fields—there was still a shortage of spiritual herb supplies, especially Gold Injury Leaf.]
[You decided to look for...]
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