Over the next several days, Shen Jietian became the busiest unemployed cultivator in the entirety of Black Mist City.
Every morning before the first rays of dawn could clear the city walls, he would quietly slip out of his small courtyard in the South District.
Every night long after sunset had given way to starry darkness, he would drag his exhausted frame back across the threshold.
Each day passed in an almost identical, grueling loop.
At the start, even Shen Jietian harbored subtle doubts about whether his current actions truly made mathematical sense.
The theoretical framework had sounded incredibly flawless inside his head: information possessed intrinsic value, a foundational truth that the economic models of modern Earth had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Yet, after transitioning from abstract theory to boots-on-the-ground labor, he stumbled upon a massive structural obstacle.
Praising the value of information was easy; systematically gathering it from a volatile, disorganized environment was an entirely different beast.
On the first morning of his venture, Shen Jietian headed directly into the dense crowds of the East Market.
He spent nearly six continuous hours walking methodically from one wooden table to the next, targeting herb vendors, beast material traders, talisman apprentices, raw ore merchants, and weapon repair smiths.
Everywhere he stopped, he carefully injected casual questions into the conversation.
The immediate market response was dismally inefficient.
The vast majority of the busy traders completely ignored his presence, treating him like air.
A small fraction offered brief, impatient answers, while others intentionally fed him absolute lies to protect their margins.
One particularly unscrupulous merchant quoted three vastly different purchasing prices for the exact same grade of spiritual herb within a short thirty-minute window.
By the time Shen Jietian returned to his rented shack that evening, his handwritten notebook contained several dense pages of raw data, but the vast majority of the entries were completely contradictory and riddled with noise.
The second day proved to be even more structurally discouraging.
He shifted his operations to the West District, navigating the respectable shops and official commercial dispensaries where baseline prices were traditionally more stable.
However, his lack of purchasing intent did not go unnoticed.
Several sharp-eyed store attendants tracked his movements with open suspicion.
Eventually, one prominent shopkeeper confronted him directly, slamming a ledger onto the counter.
“Young man, are you actually planning to purchase something today, or are you merely standing here to waste my business time?”
Shen Jietian maintained a perfectly polite, unbothered smile, bowing slightly.
“I am currently gathering localized market information, shopkeeper.”
The merchant stared at him in unblinkingly dumbfounded silence for a few seconds, then threw his head back and let out a booming laugh so intense that he nearly knocked over his own cup of premium tea.
Undeterred by the mockery, Shen Jietian persisted through the week.
The third day was spent entirely in crowded tea houses, filtering through the ambient gossip of loose gatherers.
The fourth day was spent embedded among beast hunters at the staging squares, logging safety reports.
The fifth day was dedicated to following weary herb gatherers as they weighed their hauls.
The sixth day found him tracking transport caravans entering and leaving the massive city gates to log import volumes.
On the seventh day, he was forced to meticulously compare the baseline prices all over again from scratch, simply because the volatile dynamics of the market had already shifted multiple metrics overnight.
Only then did Shen Jietian finally parse the foundational reason why absolutely nobody in the Azure Cloud World had ever attempted to centralize this data before.
The manual gathering of unstructured information without digital arrays was an incredibly exhausting, soul-crushing labor that yielded no immediate spiritual return.
By the conclusion of the first week, his daily routine had hardened into a strict, mechanical discipline.
Wake before the dawn, leave the safety of the courtyard, systematically gather raw information through observation, return after dark, eat, sleep, and repeat.
His physical meals remained completely unvaried, consisting of a single bowl of cheap, husk-filled yellow spirit rice, occasionally supplemented with wild vegetables, and rarely ever containing spiritual meat.
It was a minimalist, cheap diet—just enough to satisfy his basic biological hunger, nothing more.
At night, a solitary, flickering oil lamp provided the only illumination within his cramped room.
Shen Jietian sat completely alone beside his rickety wooden table, surrounded by pages of coarse paper scattered across every available surface.
There were frantic ink notes, fluctuating market prices, geographic coordinates of danger zones, life-saving warnings, unverified rumors, and half-finished ecological observations.
His hand cramped continuously from the physical strain of grinding the ink and driving the brush across the sheets.
Several times during those quiet midnights, the old, fragile part of his psyche considered giving up the entire endeavor.
The temptation to quit didn’t arise because the physical labor was difficult, but because there was absolutely no immediate, tangible reward.
Every single day spent gathering raw market information was a day he could not spend in the mountains earning immediate spirit stones.
Every single hour spent organizing notes was an hour completely subtracted from active meditation.
For a low-tier cultivator whose cultivation resources were already dangerously scarce, this felt dangerously close to financial suicide.
Yet, whenever those insidious doubts surfaced within his mind, his analytical faculties would immediately counter with a vivid, chilling image: Old Zhao.
The weathered, desperate face of the veteran cultivator emerged with absolute clarity in his mind’s eye—an aging man, permanently trapped at the Fifth Layer of Qi Refinement, still frantically scrambling for crumbs of capital, and still forced to risk his fragile life against apex monsters in the mud just to survive another month.
Shen Jietian quietly lowered his ink brush, his gaze drifting upward toward the dark, unpolished ceiling of his shack.
“No,” his voice resonated with a calm, freezing certainty through the empty room.
“I completely refuse to accept that stagnant future.” The following morning, he picked up his notebook and walked back out into the streets.
Another full week trickled by, and then another.
He successfully synthesized the raw noise into a proper, legible document—a concise market bulletin, a comprehensive guide for the independent harvester.
The finalized output occupied several neatly aligned sheets of coarse paper.
He carefully inked the title across the cover page: Black Mist Market Bulletin.
Issue One.
The contents were neatly categorized into distinct data blocks: Current Herb Purchasing Prices, Common Beast Material Values, Popular Talisman Demand, Critical Market Warnings, Known Scam Reports, and Recent Supply Fluctuations.
The information wasn’t perfectly exhaustive, but Shen Jietian knew with absolute certainty that it was incredibly useful.
The data compressed within those sheets represented countless hours of physical exhaustion, hundreds of verbal conversations, and weeks of meticulous observation.
Surely, any rational rogue cultivator looking to optimize their daily income would gladly purchase it.
However, raw reality immediately proved otherwise.
On the first day he attempted to display the papers at the edge of the East Market, the busy crowds simply walked right past him.
Nobody even bothered to slow their footsteps to inspect his product.
On the second day, several passing independent guards glanced at his handwritten sign and openly laughed at his eccentricity.
By the third day, a wealthy merchant agent traveling through the thoroughfare openly mocked his setup.
The man stopped before the table, pointing a fat, ring-adorned finger at the loose sheets in Shen Jietian’s hands.
“What exactly is this garbage supposed to be, kid?”
“It is a centralized log of current market information,” Shen Jietian explained calmly.
The merchant blinked in utter confusion, then burst into a harsh, condescending laugh.
“You actually spent your precious time writing standard market gossip on expensive paper?
And you expect people to buy it?”
The agent’s laughter grew significantly louder, drawing the attention of the surrounding crowd.
“Young man,” the merchant gasped, wiping a tear of pure amusement from his eye, “you independent loose cultivators really do invent the most bizarre, creative hobbies just to avoid doing actual, honest labor in the mountains.”
Several nearby vagrants joined in the mockery, chuckling at the youth’s apparent foolishness.
Shen Jietian merely offered a slow, composed nod.
He had experienced the corporate rejections of Earth and the cold dismissals of the cultivation world; his mind had expected far worse than simple insults.
Shortly after, a rugged beast hunter carrying a blood-stained iron spear paused briefly before his station, his eyes sweeping across the text.
“What’s the purpose of this paper, little brother?”
“A market bulletin,” Shen Jietian replied.
“It tracks the highest-paying buyers and lists hidden wilderness hazards logged this week.”
The hunter merely shrugged his massive shoulders, looking completely unimpressed.
“Why on earth would I spend my hard-won currency to buy a piece of paper when I already possess two perfectly functional eyes to check the stalls myself?”
Without waiting for an explanation, he adjusted his spear and walked away into the dense crowd.
Another full day passed with absolute zero sales.
Then another day yielded the exact same empty result.
Another morning arrived, and his pockets remained completely stagnant.
The retail price he had set for the bulletin was a mere three pieces of Spirit Sand.
Not three proper spirit stones, and not even a single low-grade spirit stone—merely three tiny fragments of Spirit Sand.
It was an incredibly microscopic sum, so structurally insignificant that the vast majority of low-level cultivators regularly spent more than that on a single pot of basic tea at a rest stop.
Yet, despite the negligible cost, absolutely nobody was willing to complete the transaction.
If this failure had occurred to the old, prideful Shen Jietian, or even to the image-conscious corporate worker Jiang Wei of his past life, he might have felt intensely embarrassed or driven to retreat by the public ridicule.
But the current, re-forged Shen Jietian no longer cared about such superficial constructs.
After looking directly into the cold, intelligent eyes of the white wolf king and nearly dying on his bedroom floor from cultivation deviation, many worldly concepts had completely lost their psychological weight.
Personal pride, social face, and superficial dignity were completely useless commodities that could never be exchanged for the actual alchemical resources required to survive the immortal path.
If standing in the dirt of a chaotic market with a stack of papers could help him secure a path forward, then he would stand there until the stones cracked.
If it failed entirely, he would simply dust himself off and engineer another method.
It was that simple.
Still…
the psychological weight of continuous, unyielding failure remained thoroughly unpleasant.
That evening, Shen Jietian sat completely alone on the small stone steps outside his courtyard.
A crude clay bowl filled with cold, yellow spirit rice rested undisturbed beside his boot, entirely untouched.
The vast sky gradually darkened from deep crimson to a heavy midnight blue.
His market bulletins remained stacked beside his sash, unsold and ignored; his leather spirit stone pouch remained hollow and nearly empty; and his personal cultivation base remained rigidly anchored at the entry layer of Middle Qi Refinement.
For the first time in many weeks, a trace of deep, bone-deep fatigue finally manifested within his eyes.
Perhaps the cynical merchants and the mocking hunters were completely right.
Perhaps this primitive Azure Cloud World simply had no conceptual need for structured data. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Perhaps he was merely wasting his limited lifespan on a delusional, incompatible dream from a dead world.
The following morning, despite the heavy existential doubts weighing on his shoulders, Shen Jietian adjusted his patched sleeves, picked up his bulletins, and returned to his designated spot at the East Market anyway.
The marketplace bustled with the exact same frantic energy as always.
Shrewd merchants shouted their daily advertisements, loud customers argued over coppers, and dense crowds of cultivators moved fluidly between the temporary stalls.
Absolutely nobody paid any attention to the youth standing quietly near the thoroughfare, and nothing unusual manifested for the vast majority of the day.
Then, as the sun began to slowly sink beneath the jagged city walls, casting long, dramatic shadows across the dirt, Shen Jietian noticed a sudden shift in his immediate space.
A solitary figure had brought his footsteps to a halt right in front of his wooden table.
The newcomer was a thin, slightly hunched man of middle age, wearing a set of heavily faded, patched cultivation robes.
A large, woven wicker basket filled with low-grade wilderness herbs hung from his broad back, and his rugged face looked intensely, unforgettably tired.
It wasn’t the temporary physical exhaustion born of a hard day’s march; it was that permanent, structural depletion that accumulated silently over years of unrelenting, unrewarded struggle against destiny.
It was the exact type of look that Shen Jietian recognized instantaneously—because he had seen its identical image reflected in mirrors across both of his lifetimes.
The weary herb gatherer looked down at the handwritten sheets of paper displayed on the table.
Then, he raised his eyes to scan Shen Jietian’s face, before lowering his gaze to study the text once more.
Neither of them uttered a single syllable for several long, quiet moments as the noise of the market swirled around them.
Finally, the man broke the silence, his voice raspy and low.
“How much are you charging for this?”
“Three pieces of Spirit Sand,” Shen Jietian replied, keeping his voice perfectly even.
The gatherer offered a slow, understanding nod of his head.
His sharp, experienced gaze lingered briefly on the structural state of Shen Jietian’s robes—the twice-patched sleeves, the faded quality of the cheap fabric, and the severe wear tearing at the seams of his leather boots.
In the cultivation world, the sharp teeth of absolute poverty were incredibly difficult to conceal from one’s peers.
A bitter, knowing smile touched the older man’s lips.
“Business hasn’t been particularly kind to you, has it, little brother?”
Shen Jietian let out a soft, genuine chuckle.
“Not particularly, no.”
The gatherer nodded once more, his shoulders dropping slightly.
“As expected of our kind.”
For another brief moment, neither of them spoke a word.
Yet, a deep, unspoken layer of psychological understanding instantly established itself between them in the fading light.
Both individuals were desperately clawing at the margins of a ruthless world, both were straining every sinew to find a way forward through the fog, and both were searching for any minor variable that could tip the scales of survival in their favor.
The mature gatherer eventually reached deep into his personal resource pouch.
His fingers moved with extreme care and deliberation, as if every single fragment of currency he possessed carried an immense weight.
Because to a loose cultivator in the slums, it absolutely did.
He meticulously counted out three pristine grains of low-grade Spirit Sand into his palm, checking the weight before handing them over across the table.
Shen Jietian stared down at the small grains resting in his palm for a fraction of a second.
It was his very first official payment—a microscopic, almost meaningless sum within the grand hierarchy of the city’s commerce.
Yet, as his fingers closed around the sand, it felt infinitely heavier and more significant than any currency he had ever handled before.
The gatherer accepted the coarse sheets of the market bulletin, tucking them loosely into his hand.
He glanced briefly at the handwritten lines of data, then let out a soft sigh, shaking his head.
“Truth be told, little brother, I don’t have any real idea if this strange creation of yours will actually help my harvest tomorrow.”
“To be completely honest with you, friend…
neither do I,” Shen Jietian admitted, his smile widening.
The older man paused, staring at the youth’s unvarnished honesty, before breaking into a sudden, genuine laugh—a warm, human sound that was entirely devoid of the previous bitter exhaustion.
With a smooth motion, he tucked the paper bulletin securely into the dry center of his herb basket, turned around on his heel, and seamlessly disappeared into the flowing mass of the evening crowd.
Shen Jietian remained standing perfectly still behind his empty table as the twilight settled over the South District.
Three grains of raw Spirit Sand rested quietly against the skin of his palm.
His very first validation.
His very first conversion.
His very first tangible, mathematical proof that perhaps…
just perhaps…
this revolutionary path he had carved out from his dual lives wasn’t a completely impossible dream after all.
End of Chapter 13
I’m a reader trying to become a writer.
If you have any suggestions on how I can improve the story, please let me know.
Thanks for reading!