Sixth-Rank Great Martial Master

"Master, that Blazing Qilin Ginseng has such ferocious medicinal properties. You're not planning to take it, are you?" After they had traveled far from Green Cypress City, Liu Qiaolian saw Xia Daoming's face full of delighted smiles, as though he had picked up an enormous bargain, yet she could not help feeling deeply worried.

"No hurry, no hurry. I'll save this medicine for later," Xia Daoming said with a smile.

The medicine's properties were ferocious, so Xia Daoming naturally intended to wait until he reached the Sixth-Rank Realm before taking it.

As it happened, strengthening his meridians at the Sixth-Rank Realm would definitely require better and fiercer medicinal ingredients.

Three-hundred-year-old Blazing Qilin Ginseng was not easy to find.

"That's good, then. This servant really was rather worried!" Liu Qiaolian let out a long sigh of relief.

"You worry about me that much?" Xia Daoming asked with a smile.

"Of course. Master is this servant's sky. If anything truly happened to you, this servant wouldn't be able to go on living either," Liu Qiaolian replied without hesitation.

Xia Daoming froze at her words. Only after a long while did he say, "Silly Lian'er, everyone has their own life. Whether I live or die in the future, you should still be strong..."

"No. Without Master, there is no me!" Liu Qiaolian cut him off, her face full of determination.

Xia Daoming looked at Liu Qiaolian. After a long while, he smiled. "Then for our Lian'er's sake, this master of yours must live well no matter what."

"Fortune favors the good. Master will surely live to a hundred!" Liu Qiaolian said.

"Live to a hundred?" Xia Daoming smiled noncommittally.

There were Grandmasters in this world, and it was said that they lived to at least a hundred years old.

Moreover, it was said that immortal cultivators existed in this world. Their lifespans must surely be even longer.

Having been reborn once, Xia Daoming's current small goal was to become a Grandmaster, while his great goal was to become an immortal cultivator and seek immortality. How could he possibly be content with living only a hundred years?

Of course, he was only a Fifth-Rank Great Martial Master now. Telling Liu Qiaolian such things would definitely be too far ahead.

By evening.

The two arrived at a small city.

That night, they stayed in the small city.

Xia Daoming cultivated after taking Thousand Treasures Pills.

Although this pill's medicinal effect was not as potent as the Three Yuan Blood Return Pill, because it was Xia Daoming's first time taking it, the results somewhat exceeded his expectations.

That night, Xia Daoming used up six Thousand Treasures Pills. By the sixth pill, however, its medicinal effect had clearly dropped by a great deal.

Over the following days, Xia Daoming continued traveling with Liu Qiaolian by day and finding places to stay at night.

Sometimes the mountains were dense and rolling, and they could not find a town or city to lodge in for two or three days straight. The two could only sleep in the wilderness.

Because of this, Liu Qiaolian could not help blaming herself for failing to plan the route in advance and making Xia Daoming suffer in the wild with her. Xia Daoming, however, found a different sort of pleasure in playing cards outdoors and did not feel that he was suffering or exhausted in the slightest.

Thus they traveled in fits and starts. Whenever they passed through a city, the two would first visit medicine shops to seek out medicinal ingredients.

Inspired by Thousand Treasures Hall's Blazing Qilin Ginseng, Xia Daoming would also deliberately inquire each time about precious, storehouse-bottom medicinal ingredients that the shops found inconvenient to sell.

If they came to a larger city, they would stay several extra days.

Sometimes, the two would get lost in the mountains, wandering in circles for several days before finally leaving them.

Sometimes, when they saw places of extraordinary scenic beauty, they were, after all, both young, and would deliberately linger to sightsee.

A month passed in this manner.

Xia Daoming discovered that in every city along the way, whether large or small, the medicine shops would not sell pills effective even for Seventh-Rank Great Martial Masters and martial masters above that rank.

Those pills were presumably extremely scarce and required special channels; or they needed to be custom-made and were not sold directly to the public. Xia Daoming was an outsider, and merely a Fifth-Rank Great Martial Master at that, so he had no way to buy them. Or perhaps the cities he had passed through were simply not of a high enough level.

On the other hand, under Xia Daoming's deliberate inquiries and searches, he truly managed to buy another medicinal ingredient with ferocious properties like Blazing Qilin Ginseng.

It was a hundred-year-old Ice-Cold Purple Ganoderma. After bargaining, he purchased it for five thousand taels.

Xia Daoming paid three thousand taels in cash, while the remaining two thousand taels were offset with Evergreen Hall pills.

Along the way, Xia Daoming had already used quite a few Evergreen Hall pills that had been sitting in his hands to offset payments. Their prices were even slightly higher than the local market prices in Li City.

This was the thirty-second day since leaving Li City.

By relying on taking different new pills along the way and cultivating tirelessly with unwavering perseverance, Xia Daoming finally completed Ninth Level Meridian Strengthening. Then, like bamboo splitting beneath a knife, he broke open his sixth meridian and became a Sixth-Rank Great Martial Master.

After becoming a Sixth-Rank Great Martial Master, Xia Daoming did not rush to take medicinal ingredients with ferocious properties like Blazing Qilin Ginseng. Instead, he continued taking the new pills he had bought along the way, consolidating his cultivation and steadily advancing it step by step.

First, he chose caution. Merchants' words could not be fully trusted, and Blazing Qilin Ginseng's medicinal properties could very well be even fiercer than the merchant claimed. It would always be safer to take it after strengthening his Sixth-Rank Realm meridians by one or two levels.

Second, medicinal ingredients like Blazing Qilin Ginseng were not only expensive but difficult to find. They had to be used at critical moments. The newly acquired pills still had considerable effects on strengthening the meridians of the Sixth-Rank Realm, so he naturally continued taking them while searching for more.

In the blink of an eye, another month passed.

Xia Daoming found two more powerful medicinal ingredients.

One was Blazing Qilin Ginseng over three hundred and sixty years old, while the other was three-hundred-year-old Crimson Flame Ganoderma.

These two medicinal ingredients were very expensive and cost Xia Daoming twenty thousand taels of silver.

Together with the pills purchased along the way, Xia Daoming had spent fifty-five thousand taels of silver in just two short months.

Part of that amount had been offset with Evergreen Hall pills.

Even so, Xia Daoming had spent forty-five thousand taels in cash over those two months, leaving him with only around eight thousand taels in liquid funds.

The Evergreen Hall pills piled up in his hands were also nearly gone, likely worth only four or five thousand taels.

Of course, where there was expenditure, there was gain.

Xia Daoming had now completed two levels of meridian strengthening, while the progress of his third level had already reached twenty percent.

Moreover, he still had some new pills on hand, as well as four potent medicinal ingredients that could be taken directly as supplements.

It was simply that the requirements grew higher and higher the further meridian strengthening progressed.

With those new pills and four potent medicinal ingredients alone, Xia Daoming believed they definitely would not be enough to support him in completing all nine levels of meridian strengthening at the Sixth-Rank Realm.

Therefore, Xia Daoming decided to continue onward and travel all the way to the provincial city to see what conditions were like there.

As for his shortage of money, Xia Daoming planned to find a suitable place to sell the Dark Cloud Art and Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagram from Wu Family Fortress that he had been holding onto.

Now that Xia Daoming had traveled far from Li City, he was not worried in the slightest about being traced back by anyone from Li City.

The only concern was how to find suitable buyers and sell them at a suitable price.

However, this did not trouble Xia Daoming.

The customers for high-grade medicinal ingredients and pills sold by medicine merchants were basically the local prominent clans or gang factions, and these people were also the potential buyers of cultivation arts and Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagrams.

So long as Xia Daoming went through local medicine merchants, he would not have to worry about finding suitable buyers, nor would he have to worry about learning the market price of Hidden Strength Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagrams.

Furthermore, after these two months, he had already accumulated abundant experience dealing with medicine merchants.

Cuiling City.

A mountain city of modest size in the southeastern region of Mang Province.

Xia Daoming found the largest local medicine merchant. After several transactions made the two sides familiar with each other, Xia Daoming began inquiring about the situation in Cuiling City.

After asking around, Xia Daoming learned that the mountain city was divided and controlled by five major forces.

The strongest figures among those five forces were only Seventh-Rank Great Martial Masters. There were no Eighth-Rank Great Martial Masters stationed there.

After getting a clear understanding, Xia Daoming decided to sell the Wu family's cultivation art and Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagram in Cuiling City.

With his current cultivation, unless an Eighth-Rank Great Martial Master appeared, or several Seventh-Rank Great Martial Masters joined forces, no one could possibly keep him there.

Therefore, Xia Daoming was not afraid that someone in Cuiling City would try to force a purchase or even rob him outright over the cultivation art and Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagram.

Before this, he had already learned the general market price of Hidden Strength Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagrams from medicine merchants in several large cities ahead, so he was not afraid of being made a fool of.

What surprised Xia Daoming was that when the medicine merchant heard he had a cultivation art and a Hidden Strength Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagram for sale, they immediately stated that their lineage wanted to buy them. Moreover, their offer was somewhat higher than the market price Xia Daoming had learned of, reaching fifty-eight thousand taels.

As a result, by the time Xia Daoming left Cuiling City, his liquid funds had reached sixty-three thousand taels, slightly more than when he had first left Li City.

Along the road, Liu Qiaolian would occasionally steal glances at Xia Daoming.

"Why are you looking at me like that? Have flowers grown on my face?" Xia Daoming quickly noticed Liu Qiaolian's unusual behavior and teased her with a smile.

"No, no." Liu Qiaolian hurriedly shook her head in denial.

Yet after a while, Liu Qiaolian began sneakily glancing at Xia Daoming again. Several times, her crimson lips even parted slightly, but she stopped herself before speaking.

"Do you want to ask how I came to possess Wu Family Fortress's cultivation art and Mysterious Divine Rhyme Diagram?" Seeing Liu Qiaolian steal another look at him, how could Xia Daoming not know that her curiosity had been stirred? He asked with a smile.

"This servant would not dare!" Liu Qiaolian said in panic after Xia Daoming exposed her thoughts.

"Do you remember the masked old man who broke into our home that night? That was Jing Xuanying, Wu Family Fortress's steward. Wu Yueli, the fortress lord, had sent him to kill me.

"So after I figured out what had happened, Jing Xuanying led me into Wu Family Fortress, where I assassinated Wu Yueli. While I was at it, I also pried open his private treasure vault," Xia Daoming said casually.

Before Xia Daoming and Liu Qiaolian left Li City, news of Wu Yueli's death had only spread through a few small circles. Liu Qiaolian lived secluded within the Xia residence and still knew nothing about it.

So when she heard that Xia Daoming had actually infiltrated Wu Family Fortress and assassinated Wu Yueli, she was so shocked that she nearly cried out. Her eyes widened round.

Even her full, soft breasts rose and fell violently beyond her control.

Wu Yueli was a Sixth-Rank Great Martial Master and the lord of an entire fortress, with many clansmen and household guards beneath him. To a commoner martial master like Liu Qiaolian, he was absolutely a great figure she could only look up to, someone she could never possibly contend against.

Yet now Xia Daoming was telling her that he had infiltrated Wu Family Fortress and assassinated Wu Yueli. How could Liu Qiaolian not be stunned?

"After this trip to the southeast is over, tell me properly about the destruction of Liu Family Village. If the other side is not too formidable, I'll find a time to help you avenge that blood feud," Xia Daoming said after looking at Liu Qiaolian's shocked expression and giving it some thought.

Ever since the time he had played cards with Liu Qiaolian and caused her to bleed, Xia Daoming had actually harbored the thought of helping her take revenge someday.

But at that time, he himself had been like duckweed without roots, with an uncertain future and limited strength. Naturally, he did not dare make such a promise lightly.

Now, his strength and wealth were far beyond what they had once been, and he was full of hope for his future. Since they had spoken of assassinating Wu Yueli, Xia Daoming felt that it was time to discuss revenge with Liu Qiaolian and give her a promise and something to look forward to.

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