Approximately half a day later, a young girl was working in the field near which the ritual had taken place. Harvest season had come, so she and her family were using their sickles to chop down the stalks of rice. Grab a handful, other hand sweeps across, and the top portion with the grains comes off. After repeating that a few times, she has a full bundle of rice. She flattens down some of the already harvested stalk, and places her load in the indentation.

This is how she has been spending her days for about a week. There are only a few more plateaus to strip before the harvest is complete, and the workers will be paid for their labor. Pausing a moment to wipe sweat from her brow, the girl adjusts her tunic and ten liter hat before hefting her sickle to mow down the stalks of potential food surrounding her.

Before she could get back to work, she randomly noticed there was a depression in the uncut stalks ahead of her. Curious, she cut her way toward it. Beyond simply bending stalks of rice to the ground, a sphere of perfect blackness had dug a furrow into the ground. She looks harder, and upon closer inspection, finds it is not actually a sphere. Spiked ridges flare from a distinct front around the side of the object, and some sort of goopy mass drips from a large hole in the bottom. Apparently, this object has a cavity within it that holds some sort of secret.

In this world, where the three great sects plunder the resources of the entire continent to raise their members to greater heights of power and lay claim to more territory to do the same, the common people could only hope that some lucky chance would fall from the sky for them to take advantage of. As it so happened, this is exactly what the girl was thinking when she picked up the object.

Being of a material never before seen in her life, she uses her sickle to hook into the cavity and draw it up from its resting place amongst the stalks, lest she discover only too late that it was some sort of demonic artifact that drained souls, or something else along those lines. The Chaotic Demon Sect was not above using treasures of that kind, and woe betide any who attempted to use them without proper cautions. Some of these treasures could do things like summon devils, create barriers, or unleash powerful attacks, but they would all require a sacrifice of some sort to activate. Unlucky people would find that the artifact took what it needed automatically, and it was fatal… Or that they were holding it with the blasting portion toward their own head.

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Were she to be adequately cautious, the farmer would travel the three days to the city, where the Demon Sect had a branch office. Rarely, one could even find a rank two cultivator there, out on some collection mission or other. Local talents who had the potential to reach rank one would be nurtured there, to act as secretaries or receptionists. One of those practitioners would be able to navigate the tools of the sect’s office to determine the functions of this mysterious treasure.

However, this would lead inexorably to the item being taken from her. The amount of money charged for appraisal was a significant figure for a common day laborer, and should the treasure truly be such, the cultivator in charge would simply not allow it to slip from their grasp once it was in sight.

All of this combined meant that if she wanted to gain any benefit from this lucky chance, the laborer would need to examine it carefully, in secret. Estimating that the object would fit neatly in her hat, she removes her headgear and maneuvers the black object into the cone. To keep the random passerby from noticing, she fills her sun blocker with cut rice from her basket. Wrapping a strip of cloth around her neck and the hat, she arranges her load such as that the hat is atop the basket she wears on her back, the cone covering her load’s intake, with the additional rice giving the impression of a full load.

With a clever disguise in place, she makes her way slowly toward home. As long as a worker had finished harvesting their basket, they could go wherever they pleased to winnow the stalks. Until that was done, they could not turn in their harvest for pay, since the owner required their offerings be nothing but the grains, and paid by weight.

Instead of performing her work, the girl would be taking this treasure back to her family’s hovel. There wasn’t much there, and none of her relatives were cultivators, or even knowledgeable about cultivation, but at the very least she could trust the place to be empty for the rest of the day, while everyone continued to work.