Iron Pillar

Bamboo Mountain Academy, beneath a bright moon.

Five youths roasted meat under the moonlight.

"Feng Xu, are you leaving tomorrow?"

Lin Feng took a skewer of roasted meat but did not take a bite.

"Mm, I'm leaving early tomorrow morning. I need to rest early tonight."

Feng Xu picked up a skewer and sniffed it. Not bad.

Though there was no cumin, the Great Wilderness had its own unique spices.

"I want to go too. Take me with you tomorrow."

Lin Feng looked at Feng Xu, his eyes gleaming.

"I'm going too. Take me with you!"

"I want to see the Central Wilderness Tribe. Take me along."

The others chimed in as well.

"What's so great about the Central Wilderness Tribe? It can't compare to this place. Not only do we have no worries about food and clothing, we can even skip class and go hunting. You'll probably be crying to come back within days."

Indeed, there were no classes in the Central Wilderness Tribe, so naturally, there was no skipping class.

Those brats would probably rather gnaw tree bark in the Great Wilderness than attend school in the Eastern Wilderness.

Learning a few words was like asking for their lives. In his previous life, learning this stuff in elementary school had been child's play.

"If the Great Wilderness is so bad, why are you going?" Tie Zhao clearly did not believe him.

"Because there are some problems that need handling. If they aren't dealt with, life here won't be peaceful either. I'm going there to do my part."

Feng Xu sniffed the skewer and stripped the meat off in one go.

"Then I'll help too!"

Lin Feng suddenly raised his voice, drawing angry shouts from the nearby dormitories.

"You should forget it. Come talk to me when you have the strength of a Heavenly Immortal."

"Aren't you below the Heavenly Immortal realm too?"

Lin Feng curled his lip.

"I use my brain."

Feng Xu rolled his eyes at him, took out an arrow, and tossed it into the distance.

The arrow tore through the sky and embedded itself in a mountain ten li away. The night was too dark for the others to see it.

"You're too weak. Come talk to me when you can throw an arrow barehanded from here and stick it into that mountain over there."

Feng Xu primarily cultivated the Eight-Nine Mystical Art while also cultivating the Nine-Turn Origin Art. Compared to cultivators of the same realm, his physical body was terrifyingly strong.

In terms of physical strength alone, he was not much weaker than a Heavenly Immortal.

"That's impossible. You definitely used magic power."

Feng Xu did not argue. He took out Two-Liang Immortal and set it on the ground.

The youths tasted the strong liquor again, but this time it did not seem quite so harsh.

The next morning, Vermilion Ridge.

Feng Xu packed his things and prepared to leave.

Several hundred people waited outside the house.

Feng Ling stepped forward to straighten Feng Xu's collar and reminded him to protect himself on the road. Once he got there, he was not to exhaust himself.

"If things don't go well out there, come back. The Eastern Wilderness will always have your back."

Feng Sui patted Feng Xu on the shoulder, his tone sincere.

The chiefs of the nearby tribes also stepped forward one after another to bid farewell.

Dashan took out a row of wooden rafts and used his magic power to carry them away.

Bamboo Mountain Academy.

Feng Yuqi was scolding the four boys for being late to morning class.

"Teacher, aren't you going to see Feng Xu off?"

"Are you telling me how to do my job? Get back to your books!"

Feng Yuqi rebuked them sharply and let them leave.

She walked to the window and looked toward distant Vermilion Ridge.

A row of wooden rafts flew from Vermilion Ridge, circled once above Bamboo Mountain Academy, then flew into the distance.

"Just as I thought. He still couldn't spare even a single tender word."

Feng Yuqi leaned against the window and murmured, bitterness filling her heart.

Before the spring breeze came, the narcissus had withered. Sleepless through the night, she gazed toward Immortal Bridge; her one-sided words of longing drifted ten thousand miles away.

Chaos filled her heart, impossible to dispel. That man's smiles and laughter filled her embrace. Could one soft sigh speak of all her loneliness?

This world was vast, so vast that even from ten thousand zhang in the sky, one could not see the end of the Great Wilderness Mountains.

The four traveled by flight during the day and landed to rest at night.

After a month, they neared the Human Race's territory in the Central Great Wilderness.

Feng Xu roughly estimated that they had flown several million li. The Eastern Great Wilderness alone covered an area far exceeding Earth from his previous life.

That night, the four made a fire and cooked.

"Won't cooking here attract Fierce Beasts?"

Feng Xu looked around and listened carefully to the sounds nearby.

"Don't worry. This is already the edge of Human Race territory, so there are very few Fierce Beasts. Even if we run into one, we can quickly seek help from nearby tribes."

A-Fei grinned.

After eating cold food for a month, they could finally have something hot.

The others cleared the site and gathered dry firewood and wild vegetables.

Feng Xu lit the fire, set a clay pot on the rack, and boiled a pot of meat soup while pan-frying flatbreads beside it.

"What kind of cooking is this?"

Dashan smelled the fragrance, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed.

"They're called potstickers. They'll be ready soon."

Feng Xu covered the pot and arranged the wild grass they would use as bedding.

"Boss, look who I ran into!"

A-Da returned to camp with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old youth.

"Ha, isn't this Iron Pillar? What are you doing here?"

Dashan stepped forward enthusiastically to greet him.

Iron Pillar did not respond to Dashan. Instead, he went straight for the soup pot.

"This is meat soup? No, there's another scent."

Ignoring everyone's strange looks, Iron Pillar lifted the lid, and his eyes lit up.

"This is... bread? And made from white flour!"

Iron Pillar reached out to grab one, longing in his eyes as though he had not eaten in days.

"Hey, it isn't ready yet..."

Feng Xu was about to stop him, but Iron Pillar had already taken a bite.

"Whoa, there's salt too!"

Iron Pillar picked up a clay bowl from the ground and ladled himself a bowl of hot soup.

He narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath.

Without fearing the heat, he poured it straight into his mouth.

He took a sip of soup, then a bite of flatbread.

"Delicious!"

He kept drinking soup and eating flatbread as he spoke.

When he finished one bowl and reached for another, Feng Xu caught his wrist.

"Wait until everyone can eat together."

Feng Xu frowned. This guy was far too rude.

"Oh, right. I got carried away. Sorry, I couldn't help myself just now."

He put the lid back on and waited for everyone else to gather.

But after only a short while, he grew restless again. He picked up the clay bowl he had used earlier and licked the little remaining soup from it.

Had this brother gone hungry for several days or something?

No, he had just mentioned white flour and salt.

How did he know about those things? Did they have them where he came from too?

That did not seem right either. Qu Shan had visited Vermilion Ridge before and said he had never seen such things.

"This is the genius Iron Pillar from the Northern Great Wilderness. The lord thinks highly of him."

Dashan introduced him.

"Iron Pillar, why are you here? And why are you so hungry? How many days has it been since you ate?"

"Ah!"

Iron Pillar scratched his head sheepishly.

"It's not that I haven't eaten. The smell is just so good. Envoy Qu asked me to come receive you. I've been wandering around this area for the past few days."

Qu Shan was the one who ran errands and delivered orders for the lord. People from the Central Wilderness Tribe often called him that.

Feng Xu added another flatbread. Looking at Iron Pillar, he had a feeling the man could really eat.

A-Fei returned to camp with wild vegetables. Once the pot was opened, everyone began ladling out soup one after another.

"What are salt and white flour?"

Pretending not to know, Feng Xu asked tentatively.

"You made this, yet you don't know what those are?"

Iron Pillar asked in return.

"I don't. We brought these things from our tribe, so I don't know what they're called elsewhere."

Feng Xu continued playing dumb.

"That makes sense. Different places call things differently. We don't have these things where I'm from either. I only saw them a long time ago."

Iron Pillar explained salt and white flour to Feng Xu.

"Do you have a lot of this stuff where you come from?"

Firelight danced in Iron Pillar's eyes as he stared straight at Feng Xu.

"Tons. As much as you want."

A-Da patted the Storage Bag at his waist and answered, "We traded Fierce Beasts for several million jin of it. It'll last us a long time!"

"Really?"

Iron Pillar picked up the Storage Bag. After inspecting it briefly, delight appeared on his face.

"So much? How could you bear to trade it?"

He had seen those Fierce Beast carcasses before. Altogether, they could yield at most several hundred thousand jin of meat, yet they had traded them for so much grain.

"They have tons of this stuff over there. They can't even finish eating it."

A-Da replied.

Though that was the truth, from the perspective of the three envoys, it sounded exaggerated.

That was because they did not know about the granaries below the mountain.

"Ah, from now on, you're my brother—closer than a real brother!"

Iron Pillar threw an arm around Feng Xu's shoulders and laughed heartily, completely missing Feng Xu's strange expression.

This guy was very likely a transmigrator too.