Chương 18: 14.1. Selling and Trading

"Huuu…" Faust exhaled, seeing the Clear Mirror Sect come into view, finally letting the tension drain from his shoulders. The afternoon sun shone bright yellows across the mountains, warming up Faust's clothes pleasantly like a soft blanket. A far cry from the dull gray skies of Dark Petal Valley. Faust bemoaned that it had taken a near two week round trip since it took so long to harvest the flood dragon's corpse and transport everything. He sighed deeply.

If only the flood dragon had just been less than half transformed like they initially thought, they wouldn't have been even a fraction as thorough with the corpse. The sect merit they could earn in that time would have outweighed any gains of selling a better than average serpent corpse.

"Hehe…" Sirius giggled.

"What's so funny?" Faust asked lightheartedly.

"This team worked well." Sirius answered, beaming proudly and turning her nose to the heavens at her decision.

"Indeed!" Satheon added jovially, "While body tempering is the only true way to strength. I see the versatility in spellcraft!" Faust raised his eye at that, but didn't comment. Satheon was a well known body tempering crazed fool. Nothing to do about it.

"Sorry. I wasn't helpful." Phalecia apologised for at least the third time.

"We told you already. This time it was just out of your league. With more experience, you'll get better." Faust assured her calmly.

"Yeah! Just don't say no next time!" Sirius chimed in. Phalecia's face still looked blank, so Faust couldn't tell what emotion she was feeling, but seeing how her shoulders weren't tense and she wasn't averting her gaze, he guessed she was feeling alright. The group came in front of the mission hall. People were already gathering around, passing through the markets on Diamond mountain, catching sight of them and stopping to stare at their group. Bang!

The shoddy wooden platform of dragon bones landed in the open space in front of the mission hall. Hushed whispers and murmurs started all around.

"Huh? I expected someone would have recognised these by now?" Sirius tilted her head.

"Wait for it." Faust said enigmatically.

"DRAGON BONES!" Someone shouted. The crowd erupted. Not in cheers but in whats and impossibles. Faust and the group landed in front of the bones, walking forward into the mission hall under everyone's fervent gazes of admiration. As they entered the relatively more calm mission hall, Faust had to fight to keep his expression neutral. This is what he had been missing.

This was what he was aiming for when he painstakingly polished his foundation, spending almost 15 years planning and working to make himself into a prodigy. Seeing the group approach, one of the deacons, a middle aged man with a thick brown beard, snapped up to position from leaning lazily against the counter.

"Hey you!" Sirius immediately ran up to the counter with the mission slip.

"Your information was terrible! We almost died!" She complained, slamming her hands against the table and pulling herself up to make herself seem taller, glowering at the startled deacon.

"I see…" The deacon squeezed out after a moment, quickly recovering.

"The mission hall can only be so accurate with these things." Sirius was about to say more but Faust picked her up by the waist and set her down on the side, sparing the deacon from any more undeserved rebukes. Misleading or incomplete information was the norm for the mission hall and not by any fault of the deacons who handled its management.

"The mission is complete. But it needs some revisions." Faust began.

"Of course." The deacon calmed in the face of Faust rather than the more explosive Sirius. As the deacon turned to fetch his quill and other instruments, Faust and Sirius met eyes, she winked at him and he suppressed the slight smile on the corner of his lips.

"The original information was to find and eliminate a six hundred meter black serpent attempting to transform into a flood dragon in Dark Petal Valley." The deacon began, "How was the mission different?" He prepared his pen.

"For starters, it wasn't beginning to transform and was around half or more transformed into a flood dragon—" Faust was interrupted.

"Half!? HALF!" Sirius' voice escalated as she climbed up Faust's arm, shouting into his ear.

"That thing was practically a flood dragon already! Are you blind!" She turned from Faust to the deacon.

"Look outside!" She squealed.

"We have the bones to prove it! That was not a partially transformed serpent! We almost died!" Sirius's voice was so loud and high pitched the entire mission hall turned their heads to her, rubbing their ears. The deacon's smile faltered as he reached one hand to try covering his ear while the other was forced to write down the details. Faust cleared his throat, "It was also more than eight hundred meters long, late stage Open Palace equivalent—""EIGHT HUNDRED!!!" Sirius gaped in indignation.

"IT WAS EIGHT HUNDRED AFTER WE FORCED IT TO SACRIFICE SOME OF ITS CULTIVATION!!!" A few of the newest disciples were forced to flee the hall at the grating sound of her purposely high pitched and childish voice. Faust held back a smile as he saw the deacon shaking in raw frustration. Now was the time for Faust to push Sirius down, cutting off her highest pitch voice.

"Sorry. It was difficult to tell in the middle of combat. We lured it into a formation and hit it with the power of a pseudo golden core level attack, after which it appeared to be around eight hundred meters long." Faust continued. Sirius quickly ducked out to where the dragon bones were.

"Between the four of us, while we've mostly healed on the way, we also lost two life saving artifacts in the fight. The black flood dragon was also already injured by a fight with an Iron Spine Crocodile…" The deacon exhaled deeply, relaxing under Faust's calm and steady voice as he wrote. BANG! There were more oohs and aahs, another yell about dragons and Faust knew without turning around that Sirius had dumped the flood dragon's skull in the middle of the mission hall.

"Does this look like a serpent to you!?!?" Sirius shouted, leaping over to the counter and splintering the wood of the counter slightly. The deacon's face fell even as he grumpily turned to look at the new decoration taking up the center of the hall.

"I see…" The deacon spoke, eyeing the skull and writing something down. Faust made a show of pulling Sirius back and covering her mouth as the deacon continued writing some more down.

"After reevaluating the mission, the rewards will be increased by fifty percent." The deacons spoke. Faust raised a brow and let Sirius escape.

"Fifty percent! FIFTY PERCENT!" She screeched like a banshee, before launching into a loud recounting of the battle that surprisingly wasn't that far removed from what actually happened. Halfway through the story the deacon was rubbing his temples while trying to cover his ears. Despite Sirius's voice, she had a storytelling bone inside of her somewhere and people moved from admiring the bones outside to crowding the mission hall as they listened to the retelling.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. While not quite getting what he and Sirius were trying to do, Satheon also began joining the recounting of the battle enthusiastically, much to the group's benefit.

"... So I think if it's just brought up to eighty percent then it would be closer to the sects standard metrics for mission reward versus danger." Faust didn't forget to prod the deacon in a calm voice. Eventually, as Sirius's story was reaching its climax, the deacon broke.

"FINE! FINE!"The deacon finally shouted.

"Stop! Eighty percent! The sect can provide an eighty percent bonus due to the misinformation at most!" He conceded. Faust bowed, cupping a fist in his hand.

"Thank you for the generosity despite my junior sister's antics." He smiled, before catching Sirius and covering her mouth with a hand once again, beginning to drag her out of the mission hall. As they walked away, Faust let Sirius go.

"Heh. It worked like a charm. They never raised it this high when I was by myself." Sirius beamed happily, bouncing ahead.

"There needs to be a good judge to complement the bad one. Otherwise it's just annoying." Faust agreed. They had discovered this method of haggling with the mission hall deacons within their first year at the sect together. Phalecia had a blank look on her face while Satheon continued the regaling of the tale even as they walked, his nose pointing through the ceiling as he laughed boisterously." FAUST!" The hall went silent.

From the peripheral disciples and merchants, to the most senior outer sect disciples and even the deacons. The entire hall collectively turned their heads to the source of the voice. At the entrance of the mission hall, people rapidly shuffled and pushed out of the way, revealing Long Tao standing proudly, a bit bruised with a few cuts and scrapes, but otherwise healthy.

"..." Faust felt his eye twitch. The flood dragon would have had a better sense for time and place. Probably by several magnitudes as well. Under everyone's gaze, Long Tao walked up to Faust and pulled a giant bear's head out of his spatial pouch, one covered over the top by sharp iron hairs, holding it in front of him, practically shoving it in front of Faust's face.

"Am I worthy now?" Long Tao asked, his gaze resolute. Faust raised a brow, then looked at Tao closely. He knew he was referring to what he said when he dragged Foria off, but he was wondering how to phrase things to save Tao's reputation.

"You're not in the body tempering realm though. The challenge was to do it with just your first realm of Body Tempering." Faust responded calmly after a moment.

"Hmpf. Fine then. Give me another challenge then. I'll show you I'm worthy." Long Tao humphed, before walking past Faust. The entire hall, a massive crowd watched Long Tao go, mouths agape once again at his sheer arrogance and luck. Faust wasn't certain about everything Long Tao had done in the sect, but he was pretty sure he had pissed off at least half of it in some way somehow. His name at least was most certainly becoming a resident name though.

Faust could hear the whispers and rumors already, the exchange of names as the words Long Tao spread like wildfire through the crowd.

"Hey, Junior brother. Are we going to beat him up?" Satheon suddenly asked.

"..." Faust stayed silent and considered the offer, bobbing his head slightly from side to side as a voice told him to do it. Faust shook his head after a few moments, holding back.

"Not today. We still need to deal with the flood dragon's corpse." he led the group out of the mission hall as the deacon at the counter blankly took Long Tao's proof and took his mission slip. With a wave of Faust's hand, the flood dragon skull floated into the air and flew through the mission hall's large doors before being deposited back onto the pile of bones. It took the rest of the day to sell off all the spirit plants, Living Iron hide and flood dragon parts across the market.

The sun had set and the Diamond Mountain market was lit up by dancing golden flames in the air and paper lanterns hung across strings as if it were a festival. A cool wind blew through the market before breaking against the crowd of cultivators and merchants. Cultivators could go days or weeks without sleep and the Diamond Mountain market was always open and always crowded no matter the time, weather or day.

Haggling and chatter sounded from across the market, only far louder in the nighttime air, when people got drunk on spirit wine before morning.

"Sold! To the alchemy hall deacon on my left! Two hundred and seventy Imperial Gold!" Faust shouted out. An old man with a white beard in plain unadorned purple robes smirked at the similarly dressed old man with a black beard on the other side of the small crowd in the market. The older deacon came up to the small wooden stage Faust stood on and pulled out hundreds of golden coins from a spatial pouch, letting them float into the air.

Faust floated over the massive barrel that smelled of blood which contained the flood dragon's liver. They exchanged the items and Faust stowed everything into his now much emptier spatial pouch. Faust pulled out a few pieces of paper where he had recorded all the things the group had gained from the mission to Dark Petal Valley. He crossed off Flood Dragon Liver. Looking the list over and then to the rapidly dispersing crowd in front of him, Faust sighed and decided to call it a day.

"Thats all!" Faust called, signaling the end of the small auction he had held in an empty space on the side of the Diamond Mountain market. It was a bit wasteful, but Faust didn't think the slightly better price he could get by selling at the market was worth the additional time and effort he would need to spend. The moon was high up and he decided he should get some sleep after the long mission. The rest of the unsold materials would be exchanged at the merit hall.

"Haaah…" Faust yawned and stretched as he walked between the crowds and market stalls, leaving his impromptu little stage and letting someone else step up in front of the crowd. Someone looking to set up a stall would clear the stage eventually. Entering the marble appraisal hall, there were several deacons at wide desks along with a few people showing the items they had found on them, older deacons appraising them.

Faust came up to one of the empty desks, unloading the last of the flood dragon parts and letting the aged deacon inspect them. Eventually he filled out several forms and handed them to Faust.

"If you leave these with me and take them to the merit hall, they'll record it." The deacon said. Faust nodded, bowing slightly and cupping a fist. The aged deacon returned the gesture and the two went their ways. The procedure was familiar and Faust soon entered the merit halls splendid, polished white halls where he handed the forms over to another deacon over a glass desk before paying respects and leaving for Purple Gem mountain.

By the final bridge that led to Purple Gem mountain, the path had gone quiet, leaving Faust alone under the pale blue moonlight with his thoughts.

"Huuu…" Faust exhaled, walking slowly, leisurely. There was still a lot to do and prepare for. Faust was still waiting on the Roze clan's exchange. Afterwards he'd finish collecting the items to help Sirius with her foundation as well as items to complete his own Inner Palace's foundation, finishing the next two layers. He also needed to check on Foria, have a niiiice loooong chat with Long Tao and then…

If only Mue Dian and Persius had followed his advice before, he could have helped them aim for the Golden Core at the least… Faust let out a remorseful sigh. Faust wandered the bridge silently, pausing to look down at the deep river hundreds of meters below which reflected the moon and stars. He hadn't understood properly before… But Faust realised he would have to leave people behind in his journey. At least… Sirius's face passed briefly. Faust smiled.

Foria's face and a few others who planned to break through and enter the Inner Sect this year. Even that eccentric Rozaline who would most certainly reach the Nascent Soul realm at the least, was a welcome distraction. Faust ripped his gaze from the sight before he fell too deep in contemplation. After walking quietly across the bridge, Faust continued his planning, the crash of a nearby waterfall in the backdrop.

After sorting out everything else, Faust wanted to study at the Grand Archive in the empire's capital for two years before continuing his cultivation journey. The thought made Faust smile to himself while a cool breeze passed over his robes. Many would scoff at the idea of "wasting" two years of cultivation time on study. But it was that exact kind of restraint and risk that had made Faust the whole outer sect's senior brother.

It was patience and restraint that would propel him to the lofty and deeply respected Nascent Soul realm, an elder of the Clear Mirror sect. But could he go further? The voice came again. The wind blew, trees rustling as Faust crossed the stone bridge and stepped foot on Purple Gem mountain. Faust shook his head. He didn't have the clan backing, the foundation needed or access to the arrays, formations, holy lands and materials he would need in order to go beyond the Nascent Soul realm.

Even if Faust became an elder, he would just be a lucky commoner still with no backing, fully reliant on his own strength when it came to sect politics and resource distribution.

"Haaa…" Faust exhaled deeply, trying to calm that overarching, arrogant part of his mind. Just a bunch of nepotists who couldn't match their ancestors in a million years. Faust felt his hands tremble, his heart beating like a war drum. All powers started from somewhere. He could make connections, force them, trick them, steal it, fake it, deceive them, manipulate the story… He could go all in and reach further, to the Essence Unity realm, to the Deity Transformation realm… To the Void returning realm…

So was it really impossible to suppress those families with your own power? Faust suppressed the thoughts that flew through his mind with all he had. He didn't want to risk it. He would settle for the Nascent Soul realm. He would build a clan, recruit people, forge connections, start business and expand his influence. Then, then he could offer the opportunity for higher heights to his descendants, who would do the same for their children…

After many deep breaths and gritting his teeth, Faust managed to suppress the thoughts swimming through his head, pushing them into the deepest recesses of his mind. He didn't dare have thoughts about overthrowing the current powers. The grass and weeds sprouting through the overgrown stone path swayed in the wind, Faust took several long moments to collect himself, before he began walking again. When had it started?

Faust wondered as he felt the crunch of dry leaves beneath his feet, wandering up the stairs that winded around Purple Gem mountain. Was it after the sect recruitment mission? Or was it before that? Around his breakthrough? Faust looked up to the skies. Tens of thousands of bright lights greeted the eyes, contrasting against the near pitch black landscape and the brightness of the moon. Faust didn't stare at the sky though, he looked deeper, as if trying to pierce the heavens with his gaze.

For a while, Faust stood still at a minor peak of the larger Purple Gem mountain.