The Buddha Saves None, Only I, the Demon, Deliver: The Pagoda Towers Were Not Tall (Part Two)

"Awake?" Hua Shiwei stirred, and a somewhat casual voice came from nearby. Luo Qian was sorting through a tableful of treasures. "Don't get greedy. These are all my spoils. None of them are yours, Guan." Hua Shiwei smiled. Having survived by the skin of his teeth, Luo Qian had lost no time showing his true colors as a profiteer.

After the Rakshasa Storm, severed limbs had littered the ground. To Luo Qian, though, they were treasures: Inner Cores, scales, horns, crystals... Ignoring the monks' well-meaning advice, he had insisted on staying to "clean up the battlefield." He had even worried they might compete with him, only to discover that the treasures strewn everywhere were no better than dirt in their eyes. Not one monk tried to take anything. The monks treated his companions, but the Yin-Yang Daoist was nowhere to be found. He had likely met the same fate as the scattered limbs.

They were already close to the Buddha Realm. Rakshasa Storms seldom came this near; this one had done so solely in pursuit of Luo Qian and the others. Even then, the part that reached the Buddha Realm was only a small fraction of the storm. It carried relatively few Demon Beasts, but "few" by the standards of an entire Rakshasa Storm was still a staggering number to Luo Qian.

His sweep yielded eleven Fire-Hardened Monster Inner Cores, sixty-seven scales, and thirty-two horns of various kinds. Among them was the Inner Core of that enormous Pangolin-like monster. Luo Qian had found its massive head and extracted a pearl-like core. He could no longer tell which creatures the scales came from, but twelve of the horns looked alike: shaped like antlers, with leaf-vein patterns across their surfaces. The largest horn was fifteen meters long and resembled coral.

For some