Of course, after entering Cangqing City,
Mo Fan didn't go crashing about like a headless fly,
rushing to hunt down this so-called" qi of heaven."
After all, he'd just arrived, knew nobody and nothing, and hadn't even gotten his east from his west yet.
So he simply walked a stretch along the main street...
Taking the opportunity to see what exactly made this so-called premier city of Cangqing Province different.
Compared to Qingmu Market,Cangqing City's biggest difference wasn't just its size.
It was that...
This place genuinely felt like a"city where cultivators lived."
The stalls lining both sides of the street weren't just selling pills and talismans.
There were beast shops that boarded and tended spirit beasts for people,artifact forges that handled repairs...
Formation pavilions selling formation discs and formation banners,courier stations that sent and received long-range messages for cultivators...
And even brokerages that took commissions for escort work,missing-person searches,and demon hunts.
Now and then along the roadside,spirit beasts of all shapes could be seen slowly pulling opulent carriages past.
Some of the larger shops occupied a full half of a street,with*Foundation Establishment*cultivators streaming in and out of their doors in an unbroken line.
Mo Fan walked,stopped,walked again.
This was the first time he truly felt that once the number of cultivators concentrated past a certain point,they'd form an exceedingly complete system of daily life and commerce too.
Cultivation wasn't just finding a cave and bitterly training in seclusion from the world.
You still had to eat and drink,still had to earn resources,still had to get your artifacts repaired.
And...
You still had to pay for a room.
Mo Fan eventually found an inn of modest size in the southern district.
The location was near the commercial quarter,and the prices could just barely be called fair.
Of course.
"Fair"was only relative to his currently bulging purse.
The most ordinary mid-tier guest room went for three Low-grade Spirit Stones a night.
Standing at the counter and hearing the price,Mo Fan couldn't help clicking his tongue inwardly.
No wonder they've got the nerve to charge twenty just to get through the gate.
The proprietor seemed well-used to that expression and said with a genial laugh:
"First time in Cangqing City,sir?"
"You'll get used to it in two days.Our spirit-gathering formation is standardized and allocated by the City Lord's Manor.The spiritual qi is absolutely abundant."
Funny,Mo Fan thought,that's word-for-word the same playbook as tourist traps fleecing visitors back home.
Just as he was about to fish out his spirit stones,a crisp voice suddenly came from beside him,utterly matter-of-fact.
"I want a superior room."
"The best one you've got."
Mo Fan instinctively turned his head to look.
The speaker was a girl who looked about sixteen or seventeen.
She wore a light-colored flowing-cloud dress,her hair tied up rather carelessly...
But at her waist hung a good half-dozen small trinkets that glimmered with spiritual light,clearly not cheap.
Her features were rather exquisite.
Especially those eyes,darting around,carrying a slyness she couldn't quite hide.
She did not look like the type to sit quietly and mind her own business.
The proprietor immediately piled on the smiles.
"Right away!Heaven-Class superior room,twelve Low-grade Spirit Stones a night."
Without a moment's thought,the girl pulled a Mid-grade Spirit Stone out of that Storage Pouch at her waist,obviously high-end goods...
And slapped it down on the counter with asmack.
"Five days to start."
The proprietor stared at that Mid-grade Spirit Stone and froze.
"Miss,this..."
"What,not enough?"
The girl arched an eyebrow.
"No,no,no."
The proprietor hurriedly explained.
"It's too much.There's forty Low-grade Spirit Stones left over."
The girl blinked,then waved a hand with total nonchalance.
"Then put the rest on my account."
"..."
"I'll use it next time I stay.Or you can count it toward meals."
For a moment,the proprietor genuinely didn't know how to respond to such extravagance.
Standing off to the side,Mo Fan's mouth twitched slightly.
Whose spendthrift young mistress escaped from home this time?
The girl clearly noticed his expression and immediately whipped her head around,her gaze carrying a hint of scrutiny.
"What are you smiling at?"
"Nothing."
Mo Fan instantly wiped his face clean and looked perfectly solemn.
"You were definitely smiling just now."
"I remembered something happy."
The girl stared at him for two full seconds,then her gaze dropped to the identity token at Mo Fan's waist.
She frowned slightly,seeming to release a thread of divine sense to probe.
Only to find it like a clay ox sinking into the sea.
She asked,somewhat puzzled:
"Azure Cloud Sect?If you're a cultivator,why is there no fluctuation of cultivation on you?"
"Body cultivator."
Mo Fan had no desire to chat,so he answered with just those two words,flatly.
"Oh."
She nodded.
No telling whether she actually understood or was just asking on a whim,but she quickly lost interest.
Then she turned back and dragged the proprietor into an inquiry over whether the room had a hot spring,whether there'd be fresh spirit fruit,and whether Cangqing City's local specialty food could be delivered to her door.
Mo Fan couldn't be bothered arguing with a young mistress who'd clearly never known a day of hardship.
He took his room tag and headed straight upstairs to rest.
Once he'd settled in...
Mo Fan spent a few Low-grade Spirit Stones buying the most ordinary Cangqing City map jade slip from the inn's proprietor.
Sinking his divine sense in and skimming through it,he finally gained a basic concept of the city's overall layout.
The southern district was the liveliest,a convergence of every walk of life.
Being close to the airfield,a huge number of inns,restaurants,caravans,and rogue cultivators were concentrated here.
Dragons and fish mixed together.
The eastern district was the money-devouring den in the truest sense.
The headquarters of major trading guilds,pill pavilions,and artifact workshops were densely distributed here...
Also where high-tier cultivators most frequently appeared.
The west was mostly old cultivation clans,along with residences of cultivators who'd settled here long-term.
Quiet surroundings,and far tighter security.
As for the north...
That was the City Lord's Manor and the various government offices the Great Xia Dynasty had established within Cangqing City.
The true power core of the entire city,and where the rules were strictest.
Mo Fan's original first target should naturally have been those big trading guilds in the eastern district.
But when his divine sense swept across a gray zone on the map at the boundary between the southern and eastern districts...
It suddenly stopped.
That area had no official name on the map.
Only a few crisscrossing old streets,laid out like a spider's web.
When the proprietor had sold him the map,though,he'd deliberately lowered his voice and mentioned one thing.
"If you've got anything in hand that's...not too convenient to show at a legitimate trading guild."
"Or if you want to dig up some off-the-books goods,you can go take a look over there."
Mo Fan's interest was immediately piqued.
The black market.
Of course.
Cangqing City's so-called black market didn't have the mysterious air of something buried underground and hidden from daylight.
This was,after all,a provincial capital under Great Xia Dynasty jurisdiction.
If someone actually sold things explicitly banned by the court in broad daylight,or killed for treasure in there...
The City Lord's Manor would still step in.
And step in hard.
But cultivators spent their years roaming outside.
Materials from hunting demon beasts.
Broken artifacts dug out of ruins.
Things confiscated off enemies whose provenance couldn't quite be explained...
Who didn't have a few of those on hand?
On top of that,there were also offbeat techniques and curios with thin margins and murky origins that legitimate big guilds couldn't be bothered touching.
So long as nobody made a scene in the street and nobody crossed the red lines Great Xia had actually drawn,the City Lord's Manor generally kept one eye shut about places like this.
Water too clear holds no fish.
Over time...
Several gray-market trading streets had naturally formed here by unspoken consensus.
No questions about origin.
Only questions about price.
Which happened to suit Mo Fan's taste perfectly.
The things in his possession...
Strictly speaking,quite a few of the artifacts and secret manuals confiscated from the old freak Mi Chen really weren't suitable for laying out on a legitimate shop's counter.
Toward evening.
The lanterns were just coming on.
Mo Fan changed into an inconspicuous gray-black robe and,following the map,cut through several bustling main streets.
The shops around him gradually thinned out,and the lighting dimmed along with them.
In their place came buildings that were clearly older and lower,some with signboards that were half broken off.
The cultivators coming and going weren't like those on the main streets either.
No clusters of three and five holding forth loudly.
Most moved hurriedly and said little.
Some wore wide bamboo hats.
Some used secret arts to slightly obscure their faces.
Others simply did what Mo Fan had done and draped themselves in a large black robe.
But that was the extent of it.
None of the imagined murderous atmosphere,and certainly no scenes of someone drawing a blade to rob you every few steps.
Standing at the mouth of the street,watching the rogue cultivators haggling under the dim lamps,Mo Fan couldn't help muttering inwardly.
This so-called black market...
Is actually pretty orderly.
Just then...
A slender,somewhat familiar figure ahead suddenly flitted past a street corner.
Mo Fan's steps paused slightly.
She'd deliberately changed her outfit,but that light-colored hem,and that familiar profile with its trace of slyness...
It was the girl from the inn that afternoon,the one who threw spirit stones around like water.
Except now she'd thrown on an oversized,coarse gray robe that fit her exceedingly poorly.
What was even more absurd...
She was skulking along behind two burly cultivators.
A few steps.
A pause.
A few more steps.
Then a casual glance down at some pile of scrap metal on a nearby stall that nobody on earth cared about.
That tailing performance...
You couldn't say it was entirely absent.
You could only say it was,on some level,a little bit distressing to watch.
Mo Fan watched for a couple of seconds.
He even wondered whether those two ahead had noticed her ages ago.
But it clearly had nothing to do with him.
He quickly withdrew his gaze,in no mood to mind other people's business.
Except right at that moment...
The girl suddenly looked back.
And met eyes with Mo Fan,standing right there in the shadows.
"..."
"..."
Her eyes went wide instantly.
Like a thief caught red-handed mid-crime.
The next second,the girl immediately raised a finger to her lips and let out an exceedingly earnest"Shhh."
Then she made a rather vicious throat-slitting gesture at Mo Fan.
Mo Fan shifted his gaze away,expressionless.
And kept walking.
As though he'd seen nothing at all.
Behind him,the girl visibly let out a breath of relief and soon resumed her pursuit.
Mo Fan naturally didn't give the matter a second thought.
In a place where dragons and fish mixed like this...
Who didn't have their own schemes and secrets?
Once he'd pressed deeper in,Mo Fan finally got a real look at the ecosystem of this gray trading zone.
Some people simply spread a scrap of cloth on the roadside and set up a stall to sell old artifacts that had passed through god knew how many hands.
Some hung up signs offering high prices for all sorts of damaged demon beast corpses and inner cores.
And there were small shops with no signboards at all that specialized in dismantling old artifacts for cultivators,erasing existing imprints,and smelting down leftover scrap.
Passing one artifact workshop,Mo Fan even happened to see the forge-master firing up a furnace right in the back courtyard.
Crimson earthfire licked at the artifact blank.
The forge-master's movements were practiced,controlling strand after strand of fine formation patterns,embedding them bit by bit into the material's interior.
Mo Fan stopped and watched a while longer.
Under*[Death Vision LV.3]*,the trajectories of spiritual qi that were normally hard to observe with the naked eye,and the changes as the formation patterns fused with the material,all became markedly clearer.
But the longer he watched...
The more certain he became of one thing.
Being able to see it was one thing.
Being able to do it was another entirely.
The craft ran obviously far deeper than he'd imagined.
"Figures it wouldn't be that simple."
Mo Fan rubbed his chin.
But he wasn't in a hurry.
This trip had only ever been about broadening his horizons.
If he really wanted to study it...
He could go back to Hundred Forging Peak later and tinker with it slowly alongside Zhao Ziwei.
No rush.
After making most of a circuit through the black market and getting a rough sense of local prices,Mo Fan finally remembered the other item of actual business.
Selling goods.
Ordinary Tier-1 and Tier-2 demon beast materials,he didn't much care about.
Even in Qingmu Market,that sort of thing could be offloaded easily.
As for the flying swords and secret-art jade slips left by the old freak Mi Chen...
Somewhat thornier,sure,but as long as he spread them out and worked slowly through a few different black shops,they weren't unsellable.
What genuinely made him curious,and was the most valuable of the lot...
Was that thing in his Storage Pouch left behind by the Peak*Golden Core*Blood-Red Python.
The damaged snake molt.
Mo Fan wandered the depths of the black market a good long while and finally settled on an old shop that specialized in buying high-tier demon beast materials.
The storefront wasn't large.
The lighting was somewhat dim.
Yet the inside was piled with all kinds of bones,scales,and beast hides,and the air carried a faint mingled smell of blood and medicinal herbs.
Behind the counter,a somewhat gaunt middle-aged man with sunken eye sockets kept his head down,fingers flicking rapidly across an abacus.
Hearing someone come in,he didn't even look up,just asked offhandedly in a hoarse voice:
"Buying,or selling?"
"Selling."
"What sort of goods?"
Mo Fan didn't say much.
He simply walked up to the counter and took out a small piece of dark red snake molt he'd prepared in advance.
Palm-sized,cut from a spot along the edge of the damaged molt that had already been torn to begin with.
"Proprietor."
"Take a look at this."
The middle-aged man still paid little mind,merely reaching out one hand casually to take the snake molt.
He pinched it twice between thumb and forefinger.
The next instant...
His abacus-flicking stopped.
The man lowered his head.
And pinched it again,harder.
Then,at last,he raised his eyes for the first time and took a careful look at the man standing before his counter.
Immediately after,without a word,he pulled a slender little knife from a drawer beside him,one glinting with a frigid,ghostly light.
Clearly an artifact of no low grade.
He gripped the handle,let true essence circulate faintly through his body,and drew it lightly across the surface of the snake molt.
Screeee...
A tooth-grating scrape rang out.
And yet...
That seemingly flimsy dark red snake molt didn't retain so much as a shallow white scratch.
The middle-aged man fell completely silent.
He slowly set down the knife.
Then he picked up the snake molt with both hands,raised it back to eye level...
And turned it over and over,examining it for a long while.
A moment later...
He finally lifted his head.
Deep in those originally murky,indolent eyes,there was now a sharp glint he couldn't quite conceal.
"Fellow Daoist."
The man lowered his voice.
"This thing..."
"How much of it do you have?"