Feeding the kids hot, fresh food from the street vendors of Sixth Flawless Flowing City was one of the most satisfying experiences of either of Benton’s lives. Considering that the kids had never seen a spatial ring, the fact that they were more excited by the food coming out of it than the spectacle of its very existence was a bit sad, but their enthusiasm for the amount and variety of dishes trumped Benton’s ability to experience any emotion besides sheer joy.

He had great fun providing one meal after another and watching as the children all tasted various items off of each other’s plates. The smiles on their faces warmed his heart.

Thus, he was in a much better mood upon leaving the orphanage on his second visit than he had been on his first, and the same attitude applied upon his third visit to the palace in little more than a day’s time.

Fatty Ren was excited as well. “I have done as you advised, Friend Su! I expect to hear back from my sect brothers and sister soon that their task is done, and the message talisman has been sent.”

“Great job, Town Lord.” Benton cupped his hands and bowed lower to the man than he had on any previous occasion. “Let’s have lunch and then we can get down to other business.”

Stocking up on the street vendor meals had been Benton’s best decision since transmigrating to the cultivation world. Everyone loved it. His disciples. The children. And Fatty Ren most especially.

“This is fantastic, Friend Su! How did you do this?”

“It’s nothing special. I just bought some meals and put them directly in my spatial ring. It’s no big thing.”

“Friend Su, you are definitely not simple. I’ve never seen or even heard tell of a spatial ring that kept food this fresh. Depending on the quality of the device, there are definitely preservation effects, but look at the steam rising from this dish. It looks and smells like it came straight from the vendor, but it’s been in your ring for weeks.”

Benton scratched the back of his neck. He’d assumed that all storage devices shared that feature. Once again, the System proved it provided only the best.

When lunch was over, the two moved on to business.

“Honestly, Friend Su, you’ve been a great help to me. You can just take what you want from the sect grounds.”

Looking at things from Fatty Ren’s perspective, he probably wanted to keep in Benton’s good graces just as much as the other way around. After all, the Town Lord had no idea how powerful Benton was, a cultivator whose realm could not be read and who was a friend of the respected Poison Claw Sect and who casually suggested reaching out to an elder of that sect for help. Fatty Ren was probably just grateful he hadn’t been curb stomped yet.

“Nonsense,” Benton said. “The buildings there are perfect for my needs, and I am not a pauper that I need to take things for free.”

“How about you suggest a price, then?”

Normally, Benton would hesitate to be the first to put an actual number out there as it was a lousy negotiating tactic. Making the other guy go first conveyed so many advantages. But he really felt that Fatty Ren would accept just about anything that was put on the table.

Benton’s great benefit in the situation was that he could use resources he had in plenty in order to obtain those he desperately needed.

First, though, he needed to set the record straight.

Benton pulled the leather cord with the eleven spatial rings on it from underneath his robe. “Just to be clear, I need a lot of building materials. The amount that I will take will be noticeable.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so keep that in mind when I set the price.”

Fatty Ren nodded.

“You are poor in cash, and I find my stores being depleted more than I like as well. One thousand taels should help you manage your payroll for your servants, however, and I can spare that much. I can also give you three spirit coins, which obviously you can easily convert to taels should you choose to do so.”

Giving away three coins still left Benton with two from looting the Chameleon Jade Sect cultivator, so it was all found money as far as he was concerned.

Fatty Ren was looking a little disappointed, though, so Benton hurriedly continued.

“Cores are always handy to have around for formations and what have you, so I’ll throw in ten assorted rank ones and ten assorted rank twos.”

That addition perked the Town Lord up a little. Time to seal the deal.

“Finally, I’ll give you two hundred pounds of rank two spirit beast meat.” That quantity represented almost the remainder of that rank of meat that Benton had in his ring. He wasn’t too worried about running out, though, as they were soon to be back in the village where he could easily restock.

As he’d suspected, there was nothing that excited Fatty Ren like food, and he only had one request—that Benton throw in twenty of the vendor meals. Considering that quantity represented only about ten taels worth of food, he was more than happy to comply.

The two exchanged pleasantries, and Benton was off to the sect grounds, running flat out in contrast to the first time he had visited. It took him only a short time to reach his destination.

He was going to have so much fun!

First on his shopping list, houses. Figuring around a hundred sect members living in his compound seemed reasonable, but he probably needed to supply housing for at least twice that many to account for growth.

The Righteous Rain Sect had three options for living quarters—single person huts that ranged from a single room for outer sect disciples to much more luxurious affairs with dedicated cultivation rooms for those in the inner sect, single family houses with two to four bedrooms and various floorplans that all included a cultivation room, and multi-tenant facilities that were basically apartment buildings in the shape of pagodas.

Well, if the Righteous Rain Sect had offered all those options, Benton didn’t see why his sect wouldn’t have the same. First, he wanted a really big building for all the younger sect members to live in under Mistress Zhong’s supervision, and he found the perfect structure—a eleven-story tower with six apartments per upper floor, the ground level being reserved for communal spaces. Since each apartment could easily house two or three youngsters, that would take address most of his needs right there.

With a gesture, he transferred the entire thing into his storage, from foundation to roof. It was quite neat to watch as the biggest thing he’s stored yet just disappeared into a tiny piece of jade wrapped around one of his fingers. Living in a cultivation world was cool.

The building would have also taken care of most of the volume of his ring if not for how the storage space treated void space. As it was, the essentially flattened materials still took up a chunk of volume. He still had plenty remaining, though, so he added another smaller apartment building just in case he found a need for it.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Benton definitely seemed to be collecting families lately, so he added twenty houses of various sizes and configurations. He also figured that single dwellings would be popular with some sect members, so he grabbed thirty of those as well.

There. His sect had plenty of room to grow, and his sect members would be spoiled for choice.

Benton decided to save the really fun part, the pavilions, for last, so he contemplated what support structures were needed. Well, what sect wouldn’t be complete without a library? And as luck would have it, the grounds had many, five in fact. All had been stripped of books and scrolls over the years, but the shelves were all in place. He chose a five-story building that featured several built-in reading nooks that tickled his fancy.

Next came dining facilities. The sect grounds contained numerous restaurants and cafeterias. Benton selected two of the former and rather large version of the latter. He also grabbed a few shops and the building the sect apparently used for issuing jobs.

An important addition was a large lecture hall and also an amphitheater. Benton smiled at the thought of standing in front of a hundred disciples giving a lecture on cultivation.

Administrative space was also important, so he added a four-story pagoda filled with office space. He could see himself taking over the top floor as the sect leader.

Benton walked past a bathhouse and barely resisted slapping his forehead. He actually needed two of those—one for cleanliness and one for body cultivation. A quick search yielded exactly what he needed, and he was able to store both in his ring.

And of course, he couldn’t forget the cultivation rooms with arrays to increase qi density. He grabbed a building that looked appropriate.

The only thing left in the ancillary building category was maybe some type of social gathering spot? He didn’t know what that should be, though. Besides crafting, cultivating, and fighting, sect members didn’t do much for pure entertainment, so he just grabbed a couple of random buildings that could be purposed into whatever he eventually needed.

The Righteous Rain Sect had been massive. There were multiple buildings dedicated to each pavilion, and Benton didn’t need the biggest one for his tiny sect. Instead, he chose reasonable sized pagodas that varied from three to five stories, depending on the discipline.

First and largest was the martial pavilion, which had lots of different areas to train with various weapons, including a room with dimensions much larger inside than out for an archery range and arrayed rooms for sparring. Perfect. And of course, he had to have an arena for sect members to show off their prowess in front of a crowd, so he selected the smallest one of those available, though it still looked like it held several hundred spectators.

Next, alchemy. There were lots of arrays in that building, and Benton had no idea what they did. He figured that three floors filled with labs would be more than enough for the immediate future, though.

He also found an area he believed to have previously grown herbs, but all of them had been picked. There was a shack in the middle though, and he grabbed it just in case it had any control arrays for that purpose.

Finally, he found a nice four-story pagoda dedicated to formations that was broken into private work areas, communal labs, and classrooms. He wasn’t sure how it differed from any normal building, but with sects, there were probably some arrays or something set up, especially considering the topic researched and taught there.

The last important need he determined were areas for crafting the Orange Vigor Spirit Wood. Transporting the raw materials was fine for now, but he both needed to outfit his sect with weapons and to gain a greater share of the profit by selling a finished product. To that end, he found a forge for the blacksmiths and a woodworking area. While searching for the latter of those, he came across a small building just for fletchers and decided it was also a must have.

By the time he crammed in the last building, his ring was actually getting a little tight on space, and considering that the town wasn’t that far from the village if he ran, Benton decided he had enough for the moment.

He’d checked off a lot of his wish list for the visit to Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town. Find out what happened to the Righteous Rain Sect. Check. Fatty Ren had confirmed Benton’s suspicions that the attack had almost certainly been by demonic cultivators.

Gather building materials. Big check. He could plop down an entire sect ground well in excess of his needs in minutes.

Finally, recruit. Almost a check. He’d arranged for ten orphans to serve as rank and file, and he’d added a family of three, including a new head of the contribution point store and a kid with an intriguing qi aspect.

There were two problems, though. One, adding all thirteen people he’d recruited in the town as disciples would bring him to forty-nine total. That number was way too close to fifty without being fifty. He had to find at least one more person or that would bother him. Concern two was a more significant issue. Considering his soon to be formed sect would be located in an area beset by spirit beasts, his membership was skewed toward non-combat, with twenty-nine disciples, compared to only twenty who were designated to defend the sect.

Benton needed more fighters.

There was also that quest to recruit Foundation Establishment cultivators. He and Fatty Ren were on pretty good terms, and surely, letting go of a good chunk of his former sect’s buildings had to be an indication the large man might be ready to move on to a new sect.

Benton wasn’t quite ready to present that proposition, though. For one, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wasn’t being scammed about the whole Town Manager being the bad guy thing. Sure, his instincts were telling him that the greedy mortal was the problem and the overseeing cultivator was simply too lax with oversight, but Benton couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

Second, he didn’t have the leverage he wanted yet. Asking a Town Lord to join a sect that hadn’t even been properly founded yet wasn’t the same as asking a mortal the same thing. Besides, Benton could just imagine the enticement it would be if the Shop offered a solution to the bottleneck problems the five former Righteous Rain cultivators were experiencing. It would be nice to have that possibility in hand when he approached the former Righteous Rain Sect members.

Finally, the quest only returned Shop Points, and Benton literally had no idea how beneficial those were. Considering his experience with the System so far, he believed that the access would present heaven defying opportunities, but he wasn’t ready to go too far out of his way to gain a few more of those points until he had a definite need for them.

No, that bit of recruitment was a goal for the future not the present. Better to stick to filling a definite immediate need—more fighters.

He spent the evening walking through the poorer areas of town dressed in his roughest robes, no weapon visible, with a coin pouch hanging from his belt. A few kids tried to steal the pouch, but he basically thwarted their efforts by grabbing their hand and kept on walking. They were not who he was looking for. After all, trying to rob an obvious cultivator, even one down on his luck, was stupid for a mortal, no matter how desperate they were.

An hour or so into his searching, he got a notification.

Host’s Disciple, Zhong Wen, has reached Qi Gathering – Minor Realm Four

Host is awarded one Sect Point.

Host has forty Sect Points available.

Nice. Way to go Mistress Zhong. The out of the blue increases were totally the best ones. Even better though were two more that followed later as Chang Xiaodan and Xiao Rong, Mistress Zhong’s helpers, achieved the same feat, bringing his total Sect Points to forty-two.

Those popups were the only bright spots in his wandering, though, as he had exactly zero luck finding the recruits he wanted. He almost gave up, but taking what he resolved to be one last look down another crowded street, he finally got what he wanted when his ears picked up a whispered conversation from an alley.

“Are you crazy? He’s obviously a cultivator,” Smart Street Rat said.

“Not a very good one,” Dumb Street Rat said. “Look at his robes. They’re as dirty as my clothes and torn as much besides.”

“Idiot! Look at his face. It’s perfectly clean. He took a bath before his walk but somehow didn’t change his clothes? And if he’s too poor to buy new ones, then what is in that fat coin pouch? It’s obviously a trap.”

Lack of talent could be overcome with pills and heavenly cultivation methods and techniques—to an extent anyway—but street smarts couldn’t be taught. Benton needed people who he could eventually give a mission to and expect that mission to be carried out with little or no handholding. He felt very lucky to have found the twins, Zou Tian, and Ye Zan. One more group with such a person as a leader would be fantastic.

Benton walked until he was out of sight of the two boys before using a deserted alley to ascend to the rooftops. He backtracked until eventually spotting his quarry down below and following them all the way back to what looked like an abandoned warehouse where they met four other boys.

None of them were special at all according to Benton’s spiritual sense. The only reason he had any interest at all was the leader’s acumen.

Suppressing a sigh at not hitting the jackpot by finding talent and intelligence in the same place, Benton channeled his inner Zou Tian, finding a glassless opening for ventilation and climbing inside.

Using the joists, Benton silently maneuvered himself until he was right over the young men.

Time to make an entrance. Benton dropped down right in the middle of them.

“Boys, I have an offer you’re not going to want to refuse.”