Standing on the flying spiritual artifact, Lin Daqiao began explaining everything to Li Yan in detail. Just as Li Yan had guessed before, the Mission Hall stood amid the dense bamboo grove behind the mountain. Small Bamboo Peak offered three kinds of missions: watering spiritual plants, raising demon beasts, and cooking for demon beasts. Li Yan could understand the first two, but the last struck him as strange.
Besides eating the raw flesh and blood of other demon beasts and certain spiritual plants, some more unusual demon beasts needed large quantities of spiritual food to nourish them. If such beasts grew up in the wild, they would spend each day searching for food suited to their constitutions. But when raised in captivity, some special foods could not be supplied over the long term. These foods therefore had to be refined or cooked separately to ensure that the beasts could grow normally.
As they talked, they reached the bamboo grove behind the mountain. They landed and put away the spiritual artifact, and Lin Daqiao headed toward a path with practiced familiarity. Seeing this, Li Yan opened his mouth, hesitated, then finally asked, "Seventh Senior Brother, there are so many paths through this grove. The ones with stone markers should lead to the Mission Hall and the places where missions are carried out. There are only a few such paths, but the markers have neither words nor pictures. New disciples are bound to take the wrong path fairly often. Couldn't someone put some kind of sign on them?" This question had lingered in his mind for several years without an answer. Today, he finally could not suppress his curiosity.
"So you've walked these paths too, Little Junior Brother. Signs, you say? There are signs." Hearing Li Yan's question, Lin Daqiao turned to