Around noon, Alexei pulled a grilled fish from his inventory, ate it to top off his hunger bar, and washed it down with some mushroom stew.
Lunch: accomplished.
The weird thing about Minecraft hunger mechanics was how slowly the bar depleted when you weren't doing anything strenuous. His last real meal had been two days ago.
"Immortal cultivation," he muttered to himself, watching his bobber float on the water's surface. "So much more boring than the novels made it sound."
Though there was some good news on the horizon.
Qingxue had mentioned that in about a week, she'd be taking him down the mountain to Verdantree City for a recruitment ceremony where the sect tried to convince people to join their obviously struggling organization.
Which meant: shopping trip.
He could buy coal, iron ore, maybe even some of this world's equivalent of redstone or lapis lazuli. Actual mining resources instead of punching dirt for eighty hours straight.
The currency system here was pretty straightforward once you got past the cultivator/mortal divide.
Regular people, like merchants, farmers, martial artists who couldn't cultivate, used a three-tier system: copper, silver, gold.
Exchange rates were fixed: a thousand copper coins to one silver, a hundred silver to one gold piece.
One copper coin had roughly the same buying power as ten rubles back home. But everything here was dirt cheap by modern standards. A single silver piece could comfortably support a family of five for a month. Gold rarely circulated among common folk. That was mainly for martial artists and rogue cultivators.
Cultivators, meanwhile, used spirit stones.
Four grades: low, mid, high, and top.
Each tier worth a hundred of the previous. One low-grade spirit stone equaled about one gold piece in the mortal economy.
Which meant the Aureate Summit Sect, despite being a joke in cultivation circles, was obscenely wealthy compared to normal people.
Case in point: when they'd... acquired... those spirit stones from the bandits who'd attacked them on the way to the sect, they'd gained three hundred low-grade stones and twelve mid-grade ones. That translated to roughly fifteen hundred gold pieces.
Enough to buy a small town.
He shook off the thought and focused on his bobber. Afternoon meant Qingxue would be in deep cultivation, which gave him free time.
Free time meant fishing.
He was still two water bottles short of having enough glass for proper windows, and he'd be damned if he was living in a building with wooden shutters when he could have transparent panes.
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Bowl ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Tropical Fish ×1]
[...]
Three hours later, he was starting to question his life choices.
"This is bullshit," he announced to nobody. "Absolute bullshit. When I don't need bottles, I pull them up every five minutes. Now that I want them, I get nothing but fish and garbage?"
He cast again, glaring at the water like it had personally insulted his mother.
[Water Bottle ×1]
"...you've got to be fucking kidding me."
The moment he complained, Murphy's Law activated. Of course. He cast again.
"Come on. One more bottle. Just one more."
[Raw Cod ×1]
"Goddamn it. Fine. Last try. If this doesn't work, I'm building a mob grinder instead."
[Raw Cod ×1]
"BLYAT!"
[Lily Pad ×1]
He stared at the lily pad now sitting in his inventory.
---
Around five in the afternoon, just as Alexei was contemplating whether drowning himself would be faster than continuing to fish, a cultivator descended into the courtyard on a flying sword.
The man was dressed like a scholarly gentleman, flowing robes, neat hair, the whole aesthetic package that screamed "I read ancient texts for fun." He looked to be in his thirties, though with cultivators that could mean anything from thirties to three hundred years old.
This was Zhi, the other disciple Yan had mentioned would be taking over literacy lessons while she was in seclusion. Except Zhi wasn't looking at Alexei or even at the buildings. He was staring at the Brightglow Fruit bush.
The man landed near the plant, stumbling slightly, and just stood there. Mouth slightly open, eyes wide. The universal expression of someone whose worldview was currently being beaten to death with a hammer.
"Is this..." His voice came out hoarse. "This can't be real. I'm hallucinating. I got up too fast this morning and now I'm having a stroke."
Alexei watched with mild amusement as the cultivator circled the plant, occasionally reaching out like he wanted to touch it, then pulling his hand back like it might bite him.
"When did..." Zhi turned to stare at Qingxue's building. "How is there a two-hundred-year-old Earth tier spiritual plant in this courtyard?!"
His eyes suddenly flared with golden light and he spun in a circle, checking for illusions or formations.
Nothing happened.
The plant remained real.
"This shouldn't... the growth rate alone... and the spiritual energy output..." he muttered, looking like he was having a crisis.
Alexei decided this was a good time to go back to fishing and let the man process his existential breakdown in peace.
---
By dusk, after Zhi had finished today's literacy lesson, which had been noticeably distracted, with him constantly glancing at the Brightglow Fruit like it might disappear if he looked away, Qingxue and Alexei walked him to the courtyard gate.
"Thank you for coming on such short notice," Qingxue said politely.
"Yes. Of course." Zhi was still staring at the plant. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to explain how..."
"It's complicated," Qingxue said. "Perhaps another time."
After he left, Alexei turned to her. "Is he going to be okay? He looked like his brain broke."
"He'll recover," Qingxue said with a slight smile.
---
Two days passed in blessed, peaceful routine.
Qingxue stopped dragging Alexei out of bed at dawn for qi-sensing practice. Apparently she'd decided there was no point until the Brightglow Fruit ripened and could potentially improve his spiritual roots.
Which meant his quality of life improved dramatically overnight.
He could sleep as long as he wanted.
The two-story building was nearly done. Glass windows installed yesterday, finally, after that fishing marathon from hell, and it just needed furniture. Well, and a solution to the spiritual energy problem, but he'd worry about that later. The issue was that MC blocks, while great for insulation and keeping things out, also blocked spiritual energy flow. Once the qi inside a room was used up, it couldn't replenish unless you left a gap in the walls. Which defeated the purpose of having walls.
It was like in vanilla Minecraft how an open door could still block water. Game logic didn't always translate cleanly to reality.
On the morning of the third day, Alexei stepped out of his room around noon and was immediately blinded by golden light.
The wheat field was fully mature. Every single stalk glowing that perfect Minecraft golden color in the sunlight. No self-respecting Minecraft player could see a field of mature wheat and not immediately harvest it. It was impossible. The compulsion was hardwired into the brain.
He sprinted over, harvesting with one hand and replanting seeds with the other in smooth, practiced motions.
Break, plant, break, plant, break, plant...
"There. Much better."
The field was bare again, neat rows of freshly planted seeds already starting their growth cycle. He wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead and carried his harvest to the composter.
Sixty-two wheat this time. He dumped them all in, watching the green particles swirl as the organic matter broke down.
[Bone Meal ×1]
[Bone Meal ×1]
[Bone Meal ×1]
[Bone Meal ×1]
[Bone Meal ×1]
Five bone meal should be enough to ripen the Brightglow Fruit.
He was about to start applying it when he felt someone step up directly behind him, close enough that he could smell that subtle fragrance that always seemed to follow Qingxue around. He leaned his head back and found himself looking up at her upside-down.
She was staring at the Brightglow Fruit bush, and she poked him in the back without looking away. A clear message: hurry up and do the thing.
"Bossy," he muttered, but pulled out the bone meal.
He applied the first charge. Green particles erupted, and the plant grew slightly, flower buds swelling.
Second charge. More growth.
Third charge. The flowers reached their peak bloom, then began to shed petals.
Fourth charge... Nothing happened.
"That's it? Four bone meal and it's done?"
The plant's transformation continued even without more input. The petals fell away completely, revealing dozens of tiny white fruits forming where the flowers had been. Each one about the size of his thumb.
Then they started growing.
The fruits swelled rapidly, expanding from thumb-sized to roughly the size of plums in less than a minute. As they grew, their skin began to change, the milky white fading from the stem downward.
Within three minutes, the transformation was complete.
The tree was now covered in dozens of fruits that looked like they'd been carved from pure crystal. Translucent flesh shot through with hair-thin veins of gold. Even the pits were transparent, though the seeds inside remained opaque.
"So this is the Brightglow Fruit."
He'd seen a lot of weird things since getting Minecraft powers in a cultivation world, but these fruits were something else. They looked less like food and more like gemstones. Like you could cut them into jewelry and sell them for a fortune.
He reached up and grabbed one of the fruits, trying to pull it off the branch. It didn't budge at all.
He pulled harder, putting his back into it, yanking with both hands. The fruit remained firmly attached. The branch didn't even bend.
"What the—" He braced his foot against the trunk and pulled with his full body weight.
Nothing. The damn thing was welded to the tree apparently.
"You can't harvest spiritual fruits with brute force," Qingxue started to explain, her tone shifting into lecture mode. "There's a proper technique that prevents damage to the fruit's spiritual structure, and even then, improper harvesting can cause the medicinal properties to—"
Crunch.
She stopped mid-sentence.
Alexei had given up on pulling the fruit off and simply bit directly into it while it was still attached to the branch.
"Mmm." He turned his head to look at Qingxue. "Sorry, what were you saying?"
Qingxue just stared at him. Her mouth was still open from where her explanation had been interrupted.
"...nothing," she finally said. "Never mind. Just... keep eating."
Alexei chewed thoughtfully on the Brightglow Fruit, barely registering whatever Qingxue had been saying before he'd bitten into it. His full attention had been on wrestling the damn thing off the branch, and now that he'd succeeded... well, sort of succeeded by just eating it in place, he could properly appreciate the flavor.
It was actually really good. Crisp and juicy, unexpectedly refreshing. Sweet with just a hint of tartness, and carrying this subtle aroma that reminded him of... apples mixed with grapes? Something like that. Hard to describe.
"Hey, you should try one," he said to Qingxue, gesturing at the tree while finishing his fruit in three bites. "Seriously, it's way better than I expected."
The pit he left behind stayed attached to the branch, hanging there.
He waited.
And waited.
"...okay, so where's the dramatic power-up scene?"
According to every cultivation novel he'd ever read, eating a spiritual treasure should trigger something. Heavenly phenomena. Thunder rolling across a clear sky. Maybe some kind of vision of ancient cultivators nodding sagely at him.
At minimum, he should be experiencing "impurity expulsion," that classic scene where cultivators ate spirit food and then immediately started oozing black sludge from every pore while smelling like a backed-up sewer.
Instead, he felt fine. Completely normal. The fruit had tasted good, filled maybe half a hunger unit, and that was it.
"Bullshit," he muttered, and grabbed another fruit.
This one he managed to pull off the branch, probably because he'd already eaten the first one and weakened the stem somehow. He bit into it, chewed, swallowed.
Still nothing.
Meanwhile, Qingxue was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read.
"Maybe you should..." She reached out like she was going to stop him from eating a third one.
"What? It's fine. They're just fruit." He waved off her concern.
She looked uncertain, which was unusual for her. She generally projected an aura of confident competence.
Seeing her worried made him pause.
"Is there some kind of cultivation technique I'm supposed to use while eating these?" he asked. "Because nobody explained that part."
"I... don't think so?" She frowned. "But I've never seen anyone consume a spiritual fruit this valuable. We should probably ask Yan. She'd know the proper method."
"Proper method..." He sighed. "Sure, we can ask her when she comes out of seclusion. But seriously, try one first. Even if they don't do whatever they're supposed to do, they taste amazing."
He pulled another fruit from a nearby branch, wiped it on his sleeve out of habit even though it was already spotless, and held it out to her.
Qingxue hesitated.
"There's like seventy or eighty fruits on this tree," Alexei pointed out. "One fruit isn't going to bankrupt us."
That logic seemed to win her over. She took the fruit, though unlike him, she properly severed it from the branch with a thread of spiritual energy instead of just yanking on it like a barbarian, and brought it to her lips.
The moment she bit down, her eyes went wide. Her breathing hitched. And then she was swallowing the rest of the fruit in one go, dropping to sit cross-legged on the nearest meditation cushion, and cycling her cultivation technique.
"...huh."
So apparently the fruit did something for cultivators. Just not for him.
Probably because his spiritual roots were trash-tier.
He waited for a few minutes, but Qingxue showed no signs of stopping her meditation. Her breathing had fallen into a deep, rhythmic pattern, and her spiritual energy was circulating strongly enough that he could almost feel it in the air around her.
He ate another fruit while waiting. Then another one.
Still no effect beyond "this tastes good."
Actually, now that he thought about it, these fruits were functioning almost exactly like golden apples in Minecraft. You could eat them even at full hunger for the status effect buffs. Except in his case, he wasn't getting any buffs at all. Just the minor hunger restoration.
He could probably eat them until he got sick of the taste, and nothing would happen.
"Well, this is disappointing."
After sitting next to Qingxue's meditation cushion for another ten minutes with no signs of her finishing anytime soon, he stood up and stretched.
"Right. Back to productive work, then."
---
His "Secret Base" project, he was mentally calling it that even though it was technically just a mob spawner, had barely started. He had a lot of mining to do.
The entrance to his underground complex was hidden in plain sight inside the two-story building. Anyone walking in would see it immediately, but they wouldn't recognize it as a door unless they knew what they were looking for.
It was disguised as a painting: a 2x2 wool tapestry depicting a cake, a jar, and a sunflower in simple blocky style.
Every Minecraft player on Earth had used this trick at some point. The classic hidden-door-behind-a-painting setup.
The recipe was simple: one door plus one painting, which itself was crafted from eight sticks arranged in a square with wool in the middle. The painting occupied the same block space as the door, but you could walk right through it.
He approached the "painting" without slowing down. Even when his nose was touching the wool, he didn't stop.
Then, he passed straight through it and into the tunnel beyond.
The passage was two blocks wide and three blocks tall, stretching twenty-five meters into the mountain. Torches placed every five meters kept it well-lit.
He jogged to the end of the tunnel where his current excavation project waited: a partially dug chamber that would eventually become his mob spawning area.
He pulled an iron pickaxe from his inventory and got to work. The upgrade from stone to iron tools had cut his mining time significantly. What used to take twenty seconds per block now only took fifteen. Still not instant like in the game, but good enough.
Four blocks per minute. Two hundred forty cubic meters per hour if he kept at it non-stop.
With a whole afternoon ahead of him, he should be able to hollow out a decent-sized spawning room.
Swing. Break. Collect. Move. Swing. Break. Collect. Move.
His mind wandered as he worked, thinking through the logistics of mob spawner construction. The ideal solution would be using the modded combo of spawner cages plus spawn eggs. But that required materials he simply couldn't get.
The spawner cage itself was easy enough, just eight iron bars arranged in a square with a chain in the middle. The real problem was spawn eggs.
Every single spawn egg recipe required one critical component: a nether star.
And getting a nether star meant completing one of Minecraft's most tedious questlines.
First, build a Nether Portal. Travel to the Nether, which he had no idea how to access in this world.
Second, find a nether fortress. Navigate through the hellish landscape filled with ghasts and magma cubes and endless lava oceans.
Third, farm wither skeletons. Each one had only a 2.5% chance of dropping the skull you needed. You needed three skulls total.
Fourth, build the Wither. Place four soul sand blocks and three wither skeleton skulls in the correct pattern to summon the boss.
Fifth, kill the Wither. An enemy that flew, regenerated health, shot explosive projectiles, and could destroy most blocks. Just a fun, relaxing boss fight.
Then, and only then, you'd get your nether star.
Back when he'd still been playing on his old save file, he'd spent three days grinding for a single nether star just to build a beacon like some kind of masochistic job.
"Yeah, that's not happening," he muttered to himself, breaking another block of stone. "Spawn eggs are officially off the table."
Which meant he'd have to rely on natural mob spawning.
He mined for what felt like hours, slowly expanding the chamber. By the time he finished, he'd hollowed out a 16x16x4 meter room. Plenty of space for mob spawning.
He checked his internal clock. Six hours of mining. Way longer than he'd estimated.
"I should've known better than to think this would be quick."
When he climbed back out through the hidden passage, the sun was still up, mid-afternoon, maybe three PM. Plenty of daylight left.
But a new problem had emerged.
For mobs to spawn, the floor needed to be made of MC-ified materials. Regular stone wouldn't work. He needed at least four stacks of converted blocks just to cover the floor.
And he'd used almost all his materials building the house.
Current inventory: twenty-two MC logs from the last two days of conversion, and half a stack of cobblestone.
Not nearly enough, even mixed together.
"Goddammit. I really do have to fish."
At his current rate, he could probably MC-ify about five blocks per hour. Four hours of fishing would get him half a stack of logs. Split those into slabs to cover more area, and he'd just barely have enough flooring.
He trudged back to the wheat field next to his infinite water source, sat down with his fishing rod, and cast his line.
The bobber hit the water.
[Water Bottle ×1]
"...of fucking course. Now it works."
---
Around five in the afternoon, Zhi showed up for the daily literacy lesson.
He descended on his flying sword, spotted Qingxue still deep in meditation beneath the Brightglow Fruit tree, and wisely decided not to disturb her. Cultivators took their breakthroughs seriously, and interrupting someone mid-meditation was considered anywhere from rude to potentially dangerous depending on what technique they were using.
After the lesson, which Alexei mostly tuned out, his mind still on construction plans, Zhi lingered awkwardly by the courtyard gate.
Alexei plucked a Brightglow Fruit from the tree and held it out.
"Here, try one."
Zhi stared at it like Alexei had just offered him a live grenade.
"This is... you can't just... these are Earth tier spiritual treasures!"
"And there's enough on the tree. Take it. If you don't want it, give it to someone who does."
The cultivator took the fruit, and left looking thoroughly bewildered.
"Cultivators are weird," Alexei muttered, and went back to his fishing.
---
By eight PM, after hours of grinding fish and converting materials, Alexei had four stacks of wood slabs ready to go.
He descended back into his secret tunnel, navigated to the spawning chamber, and got to work laying the floor.
The placement only took a few minutes. Slabs snapped into position, covering the rough stone floor in neat wooden planks.
He'd originally wanted to build a more efficient design, one of those boat-and-water-current farms that automatically collected mob drops. But that design required tons of pressure plates and trapdoors, and trapdoors ate through wood supplies like crazy.
The pressure plates could be stone, sure. But the trapdoors? All wood. And his inventory couldn't support it.
Another limiting factor: he still hadn't found a new source of harvestable trees.
His Minecraft ability only dropped regular sticks when he broke trees smaller than one meter in diameter. And in Qingxue's courtyard, only one tree near the stone table met that size requirement.
So the classic slab-pathing mob grinder was his only real option.
The design itself would take several more hours to complete. That would have to wait for tomorrow.
For now, he broke all the torches in the spawning area, plunging it into darkness. Then he sealed the entrance with a regular fence gate and exited through the hidden passage, emerging back into the building.
When he emerged from the building, moonlight had already flooded the courtyard. Near the wheat fields, a faint golden glow touched the buildings. He walked over to check on Qingxue. She was still seated cross-legged on her meditation cushion.
"So I'm the only one who ate these with zero effect," he muttered, plucking another fruit and taking a bite. "I love being special."
He understood enough about cultivation, despite thinking most of it was nonsense, to know you didn't interrupt someone mid-meditation.
So he settled in to wait, munching on fruits.
---
After most of a day spent refining the spiritual energy from the fruit, Qingxue had absorbed nearly all its effects.
Her cultivation realm hadn't changed, the Brightglow Fruit was never meant to boost raw power. Its value lay in talent enhancement. By her estimate, her spiritual root aptitude had increased by roughly ten percent.
It didn't sound like much. For someone with half-step Immortal-grade roots, though, that ten percent translated to a significant improvement. That same boost given to an ordinary person would be enough to make them a genius-level talent in a minor sect.
Unfortunately, her spiritual roots still showed no signs of breaking through to true Immortal grade. She was stuck at the same threshold, just slightly better at being stuck there. When she finally opened her eyes, the moon hung high overhead.
Throughout her meditation, she'd been peripherally aware of sounds around her, including a persistent crunching noise that had been grating on her nerves for the past hour.
She turned her head, tracking the source.
A white-haired figure was standing on tiptoe, head buried deep in the tree's foliage, making eating noises.
She rose silently and walked over. When she peered through the leaves to see what he was doing, she felt a vein pulse in her temple. The boy had wedged himself into the branches to reach fruits that were somehow harder to access than the ones hanging on the outside of the tree.
Wait.
She distinctly remembered plenty of easily-reachable fruits on the outer branches. Why was he contorting himself like this?
She looked at the tree more carefully and froze.
Where were all the fruits?
More than half were gone, leaving only translucent seeds hanging from the stems where ripe fruit had been. The culprit was obvious. She didn't know whether to laugh or strangle him. She hadn't even figured out why the fruits didn't affect him properly, and he'd already devoured most of the tree's yield.
At least her spiritual sense detected no chaotic energy fluctuations in his body. Luckily, these weren't cultivation-boosting fruits, if they were, he would've exploded from overconsumption by now.
Alexei, focused entirely on extracting a particularly stubborn fruit, felt someone's gaze on him. He swallowed quickly, turned around, and walked directly into... He stumbled backward, nearly losing his balance. Qingxue had moved close enough that he'd almost collided with her.
"Uh. Qingxue." He straightened, trying to look like he hadn't just been caught raiding the magical fruit tree like some kind of overgrown raccoon. "Done with your meditation?"
Qingxue stared at him.
"From now on, if you don't know what a spiritual fruit does, you don't eat it. Understand?"
Alexei blinked. "I mean, these ones seemed pretty harmless—"
"These ones had special properties that made them safe for you," she interrupted. "But if someone at your level ate a Profound-grade or higher spirit fruit meant to boost cultivation directly? It would be no different from swallowing poison."
She stepped closer, making sure he was paying attention. "At best, your meridians would be damaged. At worst, you would explode. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
The mental image of himself popping like an overfilled balloon was vivid enough to kill his appetite instantly.
"Yeah, I get it."
Some of the tension left her posture. She glanced at the depleted tree, then back at him. "Now come on. It's late, and you should sleep."
As they walked back toward the residential buildings, Alexei couldn't help but feel like he'd just been scolded by a disappointed older sister. Which was weird, because Qingxue wasn't his sister, and he barely knew her.
"Could be worse," he muttered.
"What was that?"
"Nothing. Just talking to myself."
---
Ghost Sect.
The entire upper leadership of the Ghost Sect had spent the past week and a half in a state of paranoia.
The two corpse puppets had been destroyed by righteous sect cultivators, as expected. But the skeleton variant had been preserved for study. If they could understand how these things attacked the soul directly, bypassing the grey mist protections...
At this moment, inside the Ghost Sect's council hall, the Seventh Elder looked like he wanted to sink through the floor. The corpse puppet incident hadn't been intentional on his part. He'd been manipulated. And listening to the other elders' deductions now, he felt a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient spiritual energy.
What a vicious plot.
If the sect leadership hadn't been cautious, and detected the anomalies and unraveled the threads of conspiracy layer by layer, the consequences would've been catastrophic.
After days of discussion and investigation, they'd reached a conclusion: the mastermind behind the corpse puppets likely wasn't from the Eastern Territories at all. Because if things had spiraled out of control, the already spirit-depleted land could have been transformed into a second Ashen Wastes.
The Ghost Sect would've been reduced to a crater like the Silkspore Basin.
And the survivors? They would've become enemies of the entire Eastern Territories. The sect's name would be cursed for hundreds of thousands of years. Forever, perhaps.
You only had to look at the Myriad Demons Sect for a cautionary tale. Every cultivator in the Eastern Territories still cursed that sect's founder whenever their cultivation hit a bottleneck, and that disaster had been millennia ago.
The Myriad Demons Sect had also originated from another domain before rising to power here. And in the end, it was the Eastern Territories that suffered all the consequences.
At least the scheme had been identified. Research into how the corpse puppets could bypass grey mist auras and attack souls directly was progressing, albeit slowly. The enemy's methods were too sophisticated, so far, they'd found nothing conclusive. Still, cultivators believed that where there was will, there was a way.
For now, the greatest problem was the righteous sects stationed outside the Ghost Sect's borders.
"Sect Master," a previously silent elder spoke up, "we cannot delay the matter of the Hundred Ghost Banner any longer."
"Elder Xue is correct," another elder agreed, slamming his armrest. "Our sect has been besieged for months. Nine out of ten disciples who venture outside never return. If we don't teach these sanctimonious bastards a lesson, they'll think the Ghost Sect is an easy target!"
The other elders bristled with anger.
All this fuss because their Sect Master's personal disciple had killed some other sect's heir. Was it really such a grave offense?
Cultivators were supposed to believe in fate. If someone died in a fight, it was because they were weaker. Who else was there to blame?
"And that Tu Kun," one elder continued. "Spoiled rotten within the sect walls. I warned him repeatedly to be cautious when venturing outside. And what does he do? His very first expedition beyond our borders, and he causes this disaster."
"Exactly," another chimed in. "He is like one of the young masters from those old cultivation novels my son liked to read… If the Sect Master weren't so merciful, remembering the late Eighth Elder's contributions, how could he tolerate that brat swaggering around and abusing his authority?"
"The Eighth Elder's widow carried him for two and a half years, we all thought a prodigy would be born. Instead we got that. All the Sect Master's painstaking resources, wasted on a coward."
As the first elder opened this line of criticism, others joined in, the meeting devolving into a litany of complaints about the source of their current troubles.
Seated at the head of the hall, the Ghost Sect Master remained silent. His expression grew darker with every passing moment. Because the "beloved son" of the late Eighth Elder, the personal disciple who'd killed a first-rate sect's successor, was in truth his own illegitimate child.
The Eighth Elder had been dead for two and a half years when the boy was supposedly born. The whole "two-and-a-half-year pregnancy" story was a convenient fabrication to explain the timing. For ordinary people, it would be hard to believe, but in the cultivation world, stranger things than an extended pregnancy could exist.
Cultivators rarely had children. He had never publicly acknowledged the boy, but he'd poured massive resources into the child's development, grooming him to eventually inherit the sect.
The elders below, oblivious to their leader's darkening mood, continued their complaints.
"Enough!"
The Sect Master's slammed his armrest, the sound echoing through the hall.
"Our sect faces external threats. This is not the time for idle gossip."
The elders shrank back, properly chastened.
Their Sect Master possessed half-step Dharma Aspect cultivation. After a thousand years of nurturing his grey mist, he could wield power far beyond ordinary Dharma Aspect experts. With an immortal, undying grey mist body, he could challenge even Tribulation Realm powerhouses, and at minimum, retreat unharmed from any confrontation.
Of course, the grey mist technique had its drawbacks.
It had been created by the sect's founder after studying Dharma Aspect manifestations. It allowed Foundation Establishment cultivators early access to Dharma Aspect–level combat abilities, but at a cost: it almost completely cut off their path to becoming true Dharma Aspect cultivators.
Still, the technique offered something even Dharma Aspect experts lacked, Soul Transference.
A practitioner could transfer their soul into the grey mist body. With a suitable yin-aspected territory, the wraith could continue cultivating like a ghost cultivator, effectively achieving immortality. This was precisely why the righteous sects surrounding them didn't launch a full assault. As long as the Ghost Sect held their yin-saturated lands, they were unkillable.
Unfortunately, launching a counterattack was equally impossible. Prolonged time outside yin-aspected territories required special puppet vessels. Without them, the soul within the grey mist would suffer irreversible damage.
"Regarding the half-demon," the Sect Master said, turning his attention to the disheveled Seventh Elder, "you will continue handling that operation. This time, there can be no mistakes."
"Rest assured," the old man replied, straightening. "If I fail to bring back that half-demon, I'll die trying."
By his calculations, his grandson should have already captured the target and begun the return journey.
"One more thing." The Sect Master's tone shifted. "How is the research on the bead that fell from the corpse puppet progressing?"
The hall fell silent.
The elders exchanged uncomfortable glances.
"Elder Long," the Sect Master said flatly. "Report."
The elder in question looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Ah... the truth is..."
The bead that had fallen from the corpse puppet's body had vanished some time ago. Each elder had assumed someone else had reported it to the Sect Master. None of them had realized he still didn't know. They suspected the glazed bead was precisely what had allowed the corpse puppets to bypass grey mist protections and attack souls directly. Its disappearance almost certainly meant the puppets' creator had built in a contingency, remotely retrieving the bead once the corpse was destroyed.
Elder Long cleared his throat nervously. "The bead is no longer in our possession. It disappeared shortly after the corpse puppet was destroyed. We believe it may have been..."
"Remotely retrieved," the Sect Master finished. "And none of you thought to inform me immediately? We will discuss this failure later. For now, double all security measures. If our enemies can retrieve artifacts from within our sect grounds, they may attempt other incursions. Dismissed."
The elders filed out quickly, none of them eager to face their leader's displeasure any longer than necessary.
Alone in the hall, the Sect Master stared at the empty seats and wondered, not for the first time, if his tolerance for incompetence had finally become a liability.