Chen Fan stared at the mountain of High-Grade Spirit Stones piled up in his consciousness panel, his eyes sparkling, yet his face looked utterly done with life.
The [Eight Bushels of Wealth] trait had been active for ten full days, delivering precisely one hundred thousand High-Grade Spirit Stones every day. Now, a full million lay in the panel's storage space.
The Spirit Stones gleamed with a lustrous sheen, wreathed in Spiritual Qi. Any single one would be enough for an ordinary cultivator to cultivate diligently for months. Yet Chen Fan dared only look at this windfall from heaven, not spend it.
With spirit veins depleted and Spirit Coins everywhere, the Immortal Palace strictly controlled the circulation of Spirit Stones within its borders. They were much like gold: although readily available on the market, large transfers of High-Grade Spirit Stones had to be registered and traced to their source.
If an ordinary Jingfu University student like him suddenly produced thousands upon thousands of High-Grade Spirit Stones, the Inspectorate would invite him in for tea the very next day.
He could hardly tell them to their faces that he had a trait that dropped Spirit Stones out of thin air every day, could he?
"No, I have to find a way to make this legitimate." Chen Fan drummed his fingertips on the desk, his brows tightly furrowed.
Starving to death while sitting on a mountain of treasure was the height of stupidity. This million was only the beginning, and he had a long road ahead. He could hardly leave all those Spirit Stones to rot in his panel forever.
After turning it over in his mind, the only way out lay beyond the Immortal Palace.
In the Freedom Divine Domain and the Holy See's jurisdiction, fish and dragons mingled, and black-market channels were everywhere. Spirit Stone transactions were virtually unregulated. As long as he could make a connection, laundering this little pile of Spirit Stones would be no more trouble than lifting a hand.
The problem was that the Immortal Palace had a Spirit Network firewall spanning its entire territory. Every external network channel was controlled, and bypassing the firewall without authorization violated the "Immortal Palace Network Security Regulations." At best, he would receive a disciplinary demerit; at worst, he would be locked straight into the Law Enforcement Hall to reflect on his actions.
"Regulations are dead. People are alive." Chen Fan glanced around, made sure no one else was in the room, and swiftly traced several tiny spiritual patterns in the air with his fingertips.
This was an obscure trick he had dug out of the [Comprehensive Mirror of Myriad Techniques] trait a few days earlier, specifically targeting underlying vulnerabilities in the Spirit Network firewall.
The Immortal Palace's defenses might have been as impregnable as a city of metal with a boiling moat, but they could not stand up to his first-rate knack for finding loopholes. Setting up a small relay to bypass the outer monitoring nodes was no difficult task.
Half a minute later, the final spiritual pattern vanished into the air, and a barely perceptible ripple spread in front of the desk.
An unfamiliar dark-blue interface popped up-it was none other than the X Platform, renowned throughout the outside world.
"Got it." The corner of Chen Fan's mouth curled up. He clicked into the regional channels with practiced ease, heading first to the Freedom Divine Domain section.
The instant he entered, the deluge of curses nearly knocked him off balance.
"The Immortal Palace has gone too far! Leon only made a little mistake, and they just killed him like that! They don't take our Freedom Divine Domain seriously at all!"
"War! We must go to war! If we can stomach this, what can't we stomach?!"
"The guy above is shouting the loudest, but last time the Immortal Palace held exercises in the Freedom Divine Domain, you hid in your basement for three days without daring to come out."
"Cultivators are all heretics! They must be made to pay!"
Chen Fan leaned back in his chair, reading with relish.
But after flipping through dozens of pages, he found nothing but keyboard warriors. Not a single one truly dared to give the order to act. At most, they vented their anger from behind their network connections.
He casually switched to the channel for the Holy See's jurisdiction.
Things were much more orderly here than in the Freedom Divine Domain, but no less lively.
Some white-robed missionaries righteously denounced the Immortal Palace for "disregarding life" and "condoning heretical slaughter," calling on believers to pray day and night and ask the gods to "purify the evil in the East"; other, older missionaries earnestly counseled that "God loves all people, and war must not be undertaken lightly," advocating dialogue to resolve the issue.
Each faction stuck to its own position, while the believers below argued in a jumble. Some clamored for an eastern crusade, others called for peace-a veritable hundred flowers blooming.
"So the Holy See hasn't even agreed internally, but they're still busy preaching." Chen Fan clicked his tongue in wonder.
He scrolled through the posts in boredom until a pinned trending topic suddenly caught his eye-"TSL Gigafactory Confirmed for Jingzhou; First Batch of Spirit-Powered Flying Cars to Enter Mass Production Next Year."
"TSL?" Chen Fan paused.
He had long heard of the brand, a spirit-powered technology giant from the Freedom Divine Domain whose spirit-powered flying cars and storage devices were renowned throughout the cosmos. He had never expected them to build a gigafactory within the Immortal Palace's borders.
He clicked into the post and found an even fiercer argument in the comments.
Some said the Immortal Palace was bringing in TSL to benchmark against outside spirit-powered technology, a wonderful move benefiting both the nation and its people; others cursed the Immortal Palace for opening its gates and inviting robbers in, saying TSL was a spy planted by the Divine Domain and might be hiding some plot to steal cultivation secrets; still other ordinary cultivators lamented their poverty online, joking that even if the factory was built on their doorstep, they still could not afford a spirit-powered flying car.
Chen Fan rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
TSL's arrival meant the commercial barriers between the Immortal Palace and the outside world would break down further, and restrictions on Spirit Stone circulation would only loosen. That was definitely good news for him.
He might even be able to use this opportunity to establish a legitimate foreign trade channel.
Just as he was considering whether he could position himself ahead of time, a soft chuckle suddenly came from behind him.
"You're quite absorbed."
The voice was quiet, yet it struck the back of Chen Fan's head like a thunderbolt.
His whole body stiffened. He scrambled to close the page, turning so hastily that he nearly toppled over, chair and all.
By the sofa, Jiang Qingyuan leaned at an angle against its back, her arms folded across her chest as she watched him with the hint of a smile.
She wore a deep-purple silk nightdress, its loose neckline revealing the delicate contours of her collarbones. Her usually immaculate bun had been let down, and her long black hair spilled over her shoulders. She had less of the chilly distance she carried in class and a little more languid charm.
The bedroom's warm yellow light fell across her face, softening her usually cool eyes, but the undisguised teasing in their depths left Chen Fan feeling deeply uneasy.
"P-Professor Jiang?" Chen Fan swiftly switched back to the campus Spirit Network interface and forced himself to look composed. "What brings you here? You didn't even let me know first..."
"Let you know first so you could destroy all the evidence?" Jiang Qingyuan raised an eyebrow and slowly walked over to the desk.
She carried a faint scent of cool plum blossoms, which drifted into Chen Fan's nose in delicate strands as she approached.
"Director Zhang of the Jingzhou Inspectorate sent me a Micro Message ten minutes ago, asking why unusual Spirit Network fluctuations had appeared in the villa district. The source happened to trace back to this very room." Jiang Qingyuan tapped the desktop with a fingertip, her gaze sweeping over the spiritual pattern that had yet to fade completely. "Student Chen Fan, care to explain? Instead of cultivating late at night, you're setting up a firewall-bypassing node in your dorm room?"
Caught red-handed with the evidence, Chen Fan did not hesitate for even a moment before immediately switching into apology mode.
"Professor Jiang, I was wrong!" He sat up straight, looking as sincere as he possibly could. "I was just curious for a moment and wanted to see what things were like outside. There absolutely won't be a next time! You're a magnanimous person-please let me off just this once?"
He looked up at Jiang Qingyuan with a hint of ingratiation in his eyes, the very picture of a student caught making trouble.
Seeing him like this, Jiang Qingyuan could not help the slight upward curve of her lips. Most of her displeasure faded instead.
This brat admitted his mistakes faster than anyone.
"You really won't dare do it again?" she drawled, looking down at him.
Chen Fan nodded like a chick pecking at grain. "Really! I swear! From now on, I'll stick to the campus network and behave myself. I won't touch firewall bypassing again!"
But inwardly, he added, I'm lying. I'll dare do it again later.