Yin Na was furious.
Just seconds after mocking the righteous cultivators who buried him so haphazardly, he realized that they also stripped his body of all his belongings. Most importantly, his void ring and the Jade brick.
“How dare they take what is mine!” Yin Na howled.
All his artifacts; treasure weapons and gathered herbs; his horde of spirit stones— were all taken away. He might as well have been robbed. His net worth was a flat zero!
He was two breaths away from coughing blood. Yin Na wanted to kill something innocent, his killing intent soared to the skies.
Take my benefits?! I’ll take your life!
Yin Na kicked up a storm of dust and dirt, before settling down in awkward stillness.
“Hmm, no good. This is no way for a one trillion-year to be acting!”
How old was he, really? He was forty when he took the rebirth pills to save himself from Tian Ji Han’s self destructing Golden Core, which restored his body to that of a twenty-year old. His physical body then died, but his consciousness existed in the realm of the Jade Brick where it devoured souls for one trillion years. Then he just threw a tantrum like a eight-year old!
“I guess I really haven’t absorbed the wisdom or experience from all those souls I’ve devoured,” Yin Na said. “I feel like someone who has been through a hundred dream realms and a few dozen lifetimes, only to wake up and realize it was a dream. Anyway, it’s time to get serious and back on track.”
It had been so long since he had wandered the world with literally just the ragged clothes on his back. He was free of the burden of worrying over material loss. He could now devote his mind wholly to cultivation, free of clutter, right?
“Wrong!”
This was loser talk. This is the type of rot losers told themselves to rationalize their fear of putting themselves through difficulty and hardship to climb back to where they were again.
“As long as you have the right personality and knowledge, you can build back from nothing,” Yin Na believed.
The legendary Immortal Liu Bei was a slacker as a mortal, having wasted his entire youth and prime as a peasant sandal-maker, until one day a fire erupted and destroyed his house and killed his family. While the vast majority of people under Heaven would have given up, having either succumbed to suicide or depression, traumatizing loss awakened a latent fire of inspiration within Liu Bei. It forced him to focus on the things that mattered, which in the back of his mind all along he knew was the long, hard road of cultivation to Immortality.
Such examples were cited often by common mortals, expressing a longing for a life-changing event and trauma to also alter their personalities as well.
Such mortals had a tendency to forget or even dislike success stories such as the legendary Merchant Immortal Li Ba Ba.
Li Ba Ba was born into wealth and comfort, and educated in the economic Dao of Heaven and Earth throughout his entire life by his upbringing. One day, a joint attack on his Sect caused him to lose his family, which also was quite similar to how Yin Na’s father died. In the blink of an eye, Li Ba Ba lost not only his family and wealth, but even his cultivation base as he dropped multiple levels down to a mere mortal again. However, due to his education and resilient personality, he not only cultivated himself to an Immortal Venerable but grew his wealth threefold than what his clan enjoyed at its peak.
This example was a much better illustration of people like Yin Na.
He was blessed with the right personality.
Individuals preprogrammed with the right personality ensured their road to success! It was far more reliable than relying on RNG principles to instill a healthy motivating personality into people like Liu Bei. People with the right personalities had a headstart in life!
“Equipped with my Dao of Benefits, I went from a single li Soul Orb to a Billion. Equipped with my Dao of Benefits, I will take back my wealth, and then some!”
He was cheerful and carefree on the surface, singing a muffled, ghastly tune through his bandaged lips which were mutilated from Chen Zixi’s punch.
However, he was thinking to himself the entire time: “I wonder how my Golden Core can further assist in my martial arts training at the Qi Refining stage. Will it counteract and interfere with the traditional cultivation progress? What kind of approach or appearance am I leaning towards in the Jiang Hu: am I openly declaring myself as Demonic or am I playing a Righteous facade? Am I going to make my deeds known or am I going to keep my traces and existence shrouded in mystery? I wonder who it was that buried me? Where did Mao Shiqi and the Spicy Oil Boar end up flying to?”
Yin Na headed towards the direction of Spring Wind Village. This was where he originally intended to head off to with Mao Shiqi on top of his mount the Spicy Oil Boar before they got intercepted by Chen Zixi.
Yin Na vaguely told Mao Shiqi that he had to plunder treasure left behind by Deng Taifan that he had learned from the Jade Brick.
It had been only two days since Yin Na had died and came back to life. If Mao Shiqi were opportunistic, she’d have plundered the inheritance left in the Bear Yaoguai cave of the village and left herself. Ideally, she was simply waiting for him back at Spring Wind village, but Mao Shiqi was a resourceful, cunning Yao Guai cultivator. She wouldn’t be able to resist poking her nose around and looking for the treasure herself.
Yin Na trekked hundreds of li until he was finally out of the Green Bamboo Valley. He tried to remind himself that these few hundred li on foot were nothing compared to the light years’ worth of traveling he did as a Soul Orb, but it didn’t work that way. Even though that realm took one trillion years to beat, only two nights passed in the real world. His feet got tired and he racked up exhaustion in his body.
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Along the way, he ate wild fruit, cooked small wild game (hard to eat larger red meat with caved-in teeth), and seasoned them with the wild herbs he learned from the vast compendium of knowledge obtained from Deng Taifan.
He lost count of how many days it took for him to find the nearest village. The valley was vast, and once he found a stream he had to go against the flow towards a river in the East direction in the hope of finding a nearby human settlement.
Ma Da Ming village was an unremarkable village that settled near a river.
Yin Na took the opportunity to rest and gather information in Ma Da Ming village.
He decided that he wanted to keep his identity a secret. He liked the original aliases that he came up for Mao Shiqi and himself (Lin Hao Tian and Lin Jiao Jiao respectively) too much, and didn’t want to “spoil” their names yet.
“If I have to give a name, I will be Wayseeker Crow.”
Yes, a good name! “Wayseeker Crow” gave off a healthy sense of arrogance and simultaneously the age and wisdom to back up that arrogance. It certainly sounded like a traveler from foreign lands that had lost an arm and a face for the right to earn that title.
“Although it is a lofty name, I must be careful. There are a few rare examples in history of stupid Immortals who got arrogant when they got rebirthed or reincarnated as a mortal. They thought that because they once lived in a plane of existence where people could fly with Spirit Beasts, and use explosive and dangerous magical techniques that this world of fist and bone cannot somehow hurt them. Their underestimation of the wit and power of mortals in the Jiang Hu cost them face, benefits, and their lives.”
Yin Na restarted his cultivation journey from the mortal plane of the Jiang Hu in order to refine his basic martial skills and aptitude, so that they would have a multiplicative effect upon all of his skills and abilities upon him achieving Qi Foundation and turning into a proper cultivator again. To lose his life due to self-lead calamity would be nothing short of embarrassing.
“Spreading infamy and killing wantonly will lead to calamity.”
Yin Na thought these words aloud, as the mortal villagers on the streets of Ma Da Ming looked at Yin Na with fright.
“Hehehe,” Yin Na chuckled through his bandages. “Would anyone here be kind enough to offer leftovers to a wandering man?”
“He is a portent of evil,” said one elderly man. “He clearly belongs to the Jiang Hu.’
Yin Na did not bother to even rebuke the old man, and paid no further attention to their stares. The mortals were too scared to raise a voice at him; his one-armed, bandaged face was too menacing.
Yin Na allowed the mortals to stare and follow him as he shuffled around the village.
“Foundation establishment cultivators eliminate the need to rely on caloric needs. Even though I’m breaking the rules with having a Golden Core as a martial artist, my body is still in the Qi Refining stage. I feel hunger and thirst again.”
The village was so small that it didn’t even have a restaurant, so he had to go door to door knocking.
Not a single door opened to Yin Na. Word traveled remarkably fast in a tiny village. The few mortals who were unfortunate to open their doors or were toiling in their fields immediately shut them or ran back inside.
Only one nearly-blind, grumpy grandmother gave Yin Na vegetables.
“A holy man?” was the first thing she asked Yin Na.
“Nay, a Daoist.” Yin Na answered, which was sort of the truth.
The old woman harumphed, but she didn’t give any impression of wanting the conversation to end. From the air within her house Yin Na could smell dust and urine.
Finally, she said: “I don’t have anything to give you. I am poor, and my children have abandoned me, as have the bastards in this village.”
Yin Na smiled.
“Okay, you have no food either. But surely, you have a stone, right?”
The old woman was perplexed: “A stone? Can’t you just grab any from the fields around here?”
“Okay, I will. But can I use your pot and some water?”
“Why would a Daoist need those?”
“I will make soup using nothing but a stone and water, if you’d be kind enough to just lend me your pot.”
The grandmother took a few breaths before sighing. “Alright.”
And so, Yin Na followed the steps in a common fable passed around mortals, where he began by asking for salt and pepper, carrots and onions, then gradually onto leftover bones and rice.
What made it easy was that the old woman let herself be fooled, it was clear how lonely she was. Yin Na endured her long, boring stories during the entire cooking process, without making any sign that he was annoyed. On the contrary, he was laughing and joking alongside the grandmother, all while his mind was thinking about Mao Shiqi and the soup.
By sunset, Yin Na had prepared a humble, delicious-smelling bubbling cauldron of bone and rice stew.
The villagers were more open to Yin Na the next morning. Not only was he able to invite several of them into the Granny’s house, he also displayed benevolence in entertaining and winning over that grumpy “Grandmother,” whom Yin Na actually learned was a spinstress and therefore had no children at all.
Now that the villagers were more receptive to him, Yin Na continued his persona as a morally ambiguous Daoist.
“Would you happen to have seen a Spirit Beast, a flying pig dripping fiery oil or a Cat Yao Guai pass alongside this way?”
“No, you mean there are actual Monsters in this world?!” a village teenage girl asked.
“He’s a Daoist, he must have seen things!” said a nearly toothless middle-aged farmer.
“Yao Guai? A-aren’t those dangerous? You mean a Yao Guai is coming here?”
“I told you he was a portent of evil!”
Yin Na sighed.
“Where is the nearest neighboring village to the East?”
“Eh? You’re going to leave already? Don’t leave us, Daoist!”
“Yes, show us some magic, show us some martial arts!”
“Give us miracles! Give us benefits!”
With great restraint, Yin Na awkwardly made the cupping of hands motion with his one left hand, as he tried to answer with the dignity of a Daoist: “Alas, I have to be on my way.”
One villager answered:
“If you follow the river, Three Dog village will be about a week’s worth of travel by boat. Please, kind Daoist, what is your name?”
Yin Na smiled, not bothering to give a response. “Thank you, I will go by foot.”
Yin Na realized that there were no gains to be made in spreading his false identity of Wayseeker Crow here. He rapidly contemplated the ramifications of killing the villagers.