As it turned out, the Niwan Palace did more than let him cultivate spirit insects beyond anything he could imagine.
It also accelerated the cultivation of his mental power.
He was certain it had other effects, too. His strength and knowledge were simply insufficient to bring them all into play.
Naturally, Lin Ke chose to focus on cultivating his mental power, stopping only when his head began to feel swollen.
His eyes now shone brightly, as clear as glass marbles beneath the sun.
The eyes were the windows to the soul.
Someone brimming with vitality looked different even in their eyes.
Lin Ke had only cultivated for a single night. His spiritual power had barely changed, since his aptitude was average at best.
But the increase in his mental power was fully equivalent to a week of his previous cultivation.
After a night of cultivation, Lin Ke was full of energy, his face radiant.
Still, cultivation required taking one firm step at a time. He could not cultivate from dawn to dusk; his body simply could not bear that much spiritual energy or mental power.
More haste, less speed.
Since he could not cultivate, and the egg in his head had yet to hatch, Lin Ke turned his attention to the Blackgold Silkworms' output.
After all, both the sect tournament and his sect assignment were hurdles he could not avoid.
The sect tournament was manageable. Now that he had recovered his ninth layer of Qi Refining cultivation, it did not matter if he lacked powerful spells or spirit artifacts. After all, he still had an egg in his head.
His sect assignment, however, had little to do with his strength.
It had everything to do with the Blackgold Silkworms!
What was his sect assignment?
Everyone else had to supply one jin of Blackgold Silkworm silk each month. Lin Ke alone had his quota doubled because of Li Le's persecution.
To others, a doubled quota might seem impossible.
But to Lin Ke, it seemed possible.
Creak.
As he thought, he opened the door and felt that everything outside had changed.
The air that greeted him smelled sweeter than yesterday's, and even the same scenery seemed more expansive to him today.
He knew this was because he now had the confidence to face his hardships.
The man he was today was no longer the man he had been yesterday, so today's scenery no longer looked like yesterday's, either.
He arrived at the wooden hut at the foot of the mountain, where several women were removing silk from shuttles and processing it.
A man approached from afar with a basket on his back, taking the shuttles out of it and handing them to the women.
The Blackgold Silkworm was a breed developed by powerful predecessors of the sect. Its method of producing silk in bulk did not involve forming cocoons; instead, it could spin silk as soon as it hatched.
Every day, the Blackgold Silkworms spun large quantities of silk around shuttles specially made by the sect.
The men normally tended to the Blackgold Silkworms. Once a certain amount of silk had wound around a shuttle, they removed it and brought it to the hut for the women to strip and process.
The processed silk was then collected in fine sandalwood boxes to await the monthly inspection.
If he wanted to find a way to increase production, he needed to gather information from these mortals who worked here year-round.
"Who is in charge here?"
Standing before the wooden hut, Lin Ke addressed the women.
"Exalted Immortal." A plump woman stepped forward and bowed, her expression anxious. "I'm the forewoman here."
"Mm. Come with me." Lin Ke pointed to a nearby rock, walked over, and sat down. He gestured for the plump woman to stand before him. "I'll ask questions. Just answer them."
"Yes, Exalted Immortal." The plump woman nodded timidly, not even daring to raise her head to look at Lin Ke.
These mortals had all undergone "training" before being sent here. Naturally, they were extremely obedient and deeply afraid of cultivators.
Lin Ke was decent enough, but many other cultivators treated mortals no differently from mosquitoes by the roadside.
As long as they did not bother them, all was well. If they got in the way and became annoying, a single slap would kill them.
Their lives were worth no more than blades of grass.
Thus, the plump woman stood meekly, not even daring to breathe too loudly.
"First question." Without wasting words, Lin Ke took out a jade slip after sitting down and went straight to the point. "How many days does it take for an egg to hatch after a Blackgold Moth lays it?"
"I-in answer to the Exalted Immortal..." the plump woman replied timidly. "The silkworm eggs usually take fifty-odd days, almost two months, before they bite their way out of the shells."
"Fifty days? That's quite a while." Lin Ke nodded, his voice remaining perfectly even. "Where do you usually place the eggs to hatch, and what precautions do you take afterward?"
Sensing that Lin Ke did not seem particularly vicious, the plump woman relaxed a little. "Huh? We just pick the leaves and toss them into a box..."
They haven't developed a systematic method yet... "Then how do the young silkworms molt? How many times? Roughly how long does each stage take?"
"They just... come out like that, Exalted Immortal. I don't really know..."
"All right, next question. How long after mating do the Blackgold Moths die?"
Question after question, Lin Ke asked about every detail, no matter how small, seeking to learn how the Blackgold Silkworms were raised.
The Blackgold Silkworms were merely an insignificant, unremarkable source of production that the sect had acquired from who knew where.
Yet the fact that their cocoons did not need to be boiled to reel off the silk already made them superior to other silkworm breeds.
Even judging by the original owner's knowledge of cultivation-world hearsay, these Blackgold Silkworms were quite unusual.
The sect neither valued nor studied them, but that did not mean Lin Ke could not study them.
Lin Ke himself was naturally ordinary and dull-witted.
But in his previous life, he had lived within a brilliant, glorious human civilization. He could stand on the shoulders of countless giants to take in the view. Thus, ordinary and dull-witted though he was, he still knew some fundamental ways of thinking, reasoning, and approaching problems.
"...The Blackgold Moths die roughly twenty days after laying their eggs."
Lin Ke recorded the final piece of information on his jade slip. "All right, I'm done asking."
"Have someone else come over. Anyone will do."
"Yes." The plump woman bowed, then hurried back and sent over the woman who had just been beside her.
Next, Lin Ke asked this woman the same questions about the Blackgold Silkworms.
Then he called over another person to question.
He wanted to avoid receiving incorrect information, which was why he needed to question three people in this manner.
The three had no time to collude, so naturally, they did not dare fabricate answers. They would share whatever they knew and remembered, and would not speak carelessly about things they were unsure of.
Once he had recorded all three accounts and found their contents more or less consistent, Lin Ke gained a certain understanding of the Blackgold Silkworms.
In a word, they were delicate!
They could not endure wind or rain. If they remained in the sun too long without crawling to the underside of a leaf, someone had to move them there, or they would die from the exposure.
They could only eat fresh mulberry leaves, never leaves picked more than a minute earlier. Their natural enemies included not only birds but also all manner of carnivorous and parasitic insects...
In short, they needed a nanny watching over them at all times. Otherwise, it was death, death, and more death at the slightest provocation.
Yet the silk produced by the Blackgold Silkworms was utterly ordinary, not even meeting the threshold of a spirit material.
As time passed, the sect had therefore stopped paying much attention to the Green Mulberry Garden's output.
However, Lin Ke vaguely sensed that whoever had developed the Blackgold Silkworms must have had grand ambitions.
If the Blackgold Silkworms could serve as breeding stock and mate with other breeds to produce silkworms that could spin silk endlessly without forming cocoons, the result would be terrifying.
He simply did not know why that predecessor had abandoned the research, leaving the Blackgold Silkworms to become an ordinary product.
Breeding stock... high adaptability...
A spirit breed like this is quite a good match for my Niwan Palace's abilities.
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