What Is More Terrifying Than Your Own Failure Is Someone Else's Success

At first, this matter did not cause much of a stir.

Everyone acknowledged that the Alliance had a good reputation and treated independent cultivators well, but why should they send over spirit stones they had safely hidden away at home on a whim?

At the end of the day, anything in one's own hands was always more reassuring than in someone else's.

The independent cultivators scoffed at such behavior, while quite a few people from the major sects likewise mocked the Alliance's move.

What kind of joke was this?

They had tried so many methods, yet had never managed to make those independent cultivators willingly hand over their spirit stones.

And the Alliance thought it could swindle spirit stones from them with such a crude tactic? If it actually succeeded, wouldn't everything they had done before make them look like fools?

The Alliance merely smiled calmly at such ridicule.

Sorry, but they truly were not cut from the same cloth.

On the second day after the Alliance Central Bank opened, huge signs were hung directly upon every visible city wall in both the Inner City and Outer City.

What was written on them struck many people as utterly absurd.

Through terminals, the Alliance offered spirit stone deposit services to all independent cultivators, with the Central Bank's guarantee backed by the Alliance's own reputation.

It guaranteed that all deposits temporarily stored there by users could be withdrawn at any time.

Should a user's spirit stones be lost or damaged in any accident, even if it was only a single stone, the Alliance Central Bank would compensate them at one hundred times its value.

To be honest, these assurances did not hold much appeal for the independent cultivators.

After all, the major sects had made countless vows before this, yet once they