"You really picked up something good."
The Written Spirit stepped out from behind him and spoke.
Lin Feng had heard of Wood Guests.
Wood Guests were a kind of mountain Nature Spirit.
A kind, not a single individual. A Wood Guest might be a mountain Shi or a tree that had become a spirit, or perhaps a mountain ape or a Ghost. They often appeared in miscellaneous tales.
The Three Words and Two Slaps collections included quite a few stories about them.
The Wood Guests in those tales possessed two extremely enviable abilities.
One was the ability to bring wealth.
They could bestow wealth on others. Mountain Nature Spirits though they were, they even came down to sell timber—the origin of the name Wood Guest—but these timber merchants possessed astonishing riches.
No one knew where their wealth came from.
Yet they did indeed possess a portion of a wealth God’s “authority.”
If you prayed to the civil or martial Gods of wealth, they might not grant you riches. But if you prayed to a Wood Guest, you were very likely to receive wealth you could pass down to your descendants, though it would soon be taken back, and you would lose many other things in the meantime.
This was what worship entailed. Worshiping a Wood Guest differed in many ways from worshiping the civil and martial Gods of wealth. At least if you worshiped the latter, they would not do anything to you even if you were somewhat neglectful.
With a Wood Guest, neglect was hardly necessary.
Simply being in a bad mood was enough for one to bring disaster down on its believers, much like certain Defeated Soldiers and Fallen Generals from the age of the six heavens' old qi.
Likewise, Wood Guests possessed another enviable ability.
The ability