"Even a mosquito's leg has meat on it, however small. By a rough reckoning, I barely turned a profit. A pity these things aren't just lying around everywhere!"
After the battle, Li Chen had the Auxiliary Brain roughly estimate his gains against current market prices. He found that wiping out an entire demon tribe of modest size had netted him assorted spirit materials worth forty to fifty thousand.
For someone in the Qi Refining Realm, such a haul would certainly have been a windfall.
But Foundation Establishment cultivators had greater abilities and greater expenses. Feeding their followers, powering puppets, operating magic arrays-every one of these cost money.
He could not call this battle a loss, but his actual profit was nowhere near as great as he had imagined.
Besides, this really had been a chance encounter. He could not expect forty or fifty thousand a day, over a million a month, and over ten million a year.
"Most of the gains actually came from the demon chief and the stronger demons. I should have killed them outright and left the underlings."
"But even if ordinary demons are like chicken ribs to me-little meat to eat, yet a pity to discard-leaving them unchecked would still bring devastating calamity to the land."
Li Chen finally began to understand why demons could never be completely exterminated.
For ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivators, chasing these small demon tribes far and wide was certainly a chicken-rib proposition. Even when they happened upon one, most would kill its leader rather than bother fighting the entire tribe head-on.
They would often exploit their ability to fly through the skies and burrow through the earth, strike successfully from above, then leave without a backward glance.
Li Chen had ordered his Sword Guards to wipe them out because he could