After several days, Chen Ming happily held up the bottles of pills and counted them. He had ten bottles each of Beauty Pills and Slim Figure Pills, with ten pills in every bottle.
He put the Alchemy Furnace and all the pills back into his Storage Bag, stepped outside, and stretched. Looking at the golden Spirit Rice before him, he went over to the farming tools by the door, found a sickle, and headed toward the Spirit Field.
A breeze blew, and a pitch-black cloud drifted across the previously clear sky. Chen Ming had just bent down to harvest the Spirit Rice when he noticed the sky suddenly darkening. He looked up, then turned and went back to the wooden hut.
After a long while, no rain had fallen. Chen Ming came out and checked the sky. It was still just as gloomy, so he headed toward the sect gates.
Chen Ming had now thought of someone whom he considered his very first customer, and he made his way to the Outer Sect Miscellaneous Affairs Hall.
After asking where Yuan Wulang's Pill Room was, he hurried over in high spirits!
"Elder Yuan, are you there?"
Chen Ming arrived outside the Pill Room, knocked on the door, and called inside.
Before long, a thin outer sect disciple opened the door, his face bleary with sleep and dark circles under his eyes. He looked at Chen Ming and asked, "Who are you? What do you want with Elder Yuan?"
"Greetings, junior brother. My name is Mo Juren. I have something important to discuss with Elder Yuan today. Please let him know!"
Seeing that this outer sect disciple was only at the seventh Qi Refining layer, Chen Ming hurriedly spoke.
"Wait here a moment, then. I'll tell the elder!"
The young man closed the door as he spoke, then leisurely made his way toward the room in the center of the Pill Room.
"What is it? Is something wrong?"
As soon as the young man entered the room, Yuan Wulang, who sat with his eyes closed on a meditation cushion before the Alchemy Furnace, sensed the approaching footsteps and asked.
"Elder, a senior brother named Mo Juren is outside. He says he has something to discuss with you! Will you see him?"
Hearing this, the young man quietly asked.
"That brat? Tell him to come in!"
Yuan Wulang still had a strong impression of Chen Ming. Other cultivators tried their best to sever their karmic ties to the mortal world, yet this brat had gone in the opposite direction. He had even made his twisted reasoning sound convincing, leaving Yuan Wulang with a fairly good impression.
"Come in! The elder is inside!"
The young man led Chen Ming into the Pill Room and closed the door. He pointed to the room straight ahead as he spoke, then returned to the room on the side to continue sleeping!
"What do you want with me?"
The moment Chen Ming entered the room, Yuan Wulang's voice rang out!
"Elder Yuan, look. These are the Beauty Pill and Slim Figure Pill I've recently developed. Would you like to try them?"
Upon hearing Yuan Wulang's question, Chen Ming took two bottles of pills from his Storage Bag, walked up to him, and spoke with a fawning grin.
"Why did you refine this stuff? Do you really think nobody else could think of what you did? There's simply no market for pills like these among cultivators!"
Hearing Chen Ming's words, Yuan Wulang was momentarily dumbfounded before speaking.
"Why?"
Chen Ming asked in bewilderment.
"Even mortals have a martial arts method called the Disguise Technique. Do you think cultivators lack similar cultivation methods? If you want this stuff, I even have a bottle with pill patterns on the pills. Take it!"
As he spoke, Yuan Wulang took several bottles of pills from the Storage Bag at his waist and tossed them to Chen Ming.
"Then why are you...?"
Chen Ming looked dumbfounded. He stared at the fat, bald Yuan Wulang and asked in confusion.
"What about me? Is there something wrong with my figure? Resources are scarce enough in the cultivation world as it is. People come to blows over even a few scraps. Who would be bored enough to buy this stuff? Besides, what man have you ever seen who cares about his looks? Rather than spending money on this, you'd be better off buying cultivation resources to improve your cultivation. Get out! Stop bothering me!"
Yuan Wulang glanced at Chen Ming and rattled off his reply, eventually breaking into curses.
"That brat!"
Watching Chen Ming leave, Yuan Wulang could not help remembering his younger self. When he had first entered the cultivation world and become a First-Rank Alchemist, he had done the same sort of thing, even running around to different markets to sell his pills. In the end, he had not sold a single one!
A year later, he had met a middle-aged cultivator who had refined similar pills in his earlier years. The man had opened his eyes, and he had returned to ordinary cultivation, never again entertaining dreams of getting rich overnight!
Chen Ming walked along dejectedly. He had thought his chance to make a fortune had arrived, only to discover that the greater the hope, the greater the disappointment.
A bolt of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a clap of thunder, and rain came pouring down.
"Can I really be this unlucky?"
Lying on the ground in the rain, Chen Ming spoke with his hair curled up, his face charred black, and his clothes reduced to a pile of rags, puffing a mouthful of black smoke.
"Who's this? How unlucky does he have to be to get struck by lightning!"
"Don't say that. Maybe this senior brother is undergoing a tribulation!"
"Maybe he cultivates lightning arts and needs to undergo the baptism of lightning!"
"You know, that really might be it! Hahaha...!"
Several outer sect disciples from Spirit Beast Mountain passed Chen Ming with umbrellas in hand, talking without pause.
"Laugh at me, will you? I'll make you shit yourselves to death!"
Chen Ming returned to the wooden hut at the foot of the mountain, washed off, and changed into another set of disciple robes. Then he sneaked into the kitchen, waited for the disciple doing the cooking to leave, and secretly sprinkled croton powder-the main ingredient for refining Slim Figure Pills-into the food and medicinal soups.
Meanwhile, in a palace in the Southern Region, eighteen people sat in a circle, discussing something.
"Why are you so determined to fight your way back to the Northern Region? Isn't staying here in the Southern Region just as good? The spiritual energy here is considerably richer than in the Northern Region, too."
One of them, dressed in blue Daoist robes, suddenly spoke.
"Qing Yunzi, your Daoism lineage has already been wiped out. You're the only one left. You have no right to speak here."
Upon hearing Qing Yunzi's words, a burly man stood up and spoke, while inwardly thinking, Who knows who invited this fellow? If I weren't trying to avoid making things too ugly, I'd throw him straight out.
"Lin Lie, watch your words. We all came from Zhao State and were forced to come here. We ought to work together."
A middle-aged man dressed as a scholar, holding a folding umbrella and with a face like polished jade, rose and spoke.
"How about this? Those who want to fight their way back can stay. Those who don't can leave!"
As the Ghost Spirit Sect's sect master finished speaking, six people rose and headed out of the hall.
After Qing Yunzi, Heavenly Sun Sect Master Li Zimo, Ten Thousand Buddha Temple Abbot Yuanzhen, Saintess Sect Master Chen Yan, Ghost King Peng Shan of the Ghost King Sect, and Five Poisons Sect Master Zhao Chen left, the remaining people began their discussions one after another.
"I never expected that the Ghost King Sect and the Five Poisons Sect would also choose to stay here rather than leave!"
Just after they walked out of the hall, Heavenly Sun Sect Master Li Zimo looked at the two men and asked in puzzlement.
"Haha! Without us, wouldn't you all be lonely?"
Ghost King Peng Shan of the Ghost King Sect laughed and teased them.
"Exactly! Without us, wouldn't your lives be too comfortable? That wouldn't do. Without us, how would you look so lofty and noble?"
Five Poisons Sect Master Zhao Chen responded in kind!
In the end, those led by the Ghost Spirit Sect agreed to begin invading Zhao State in the Northern Region three years later, using Zhao State as a foothold before gradually expanding into the surrounding territories.