The morning mist clung heavily to the cobblestones as Shen Jietian navigated the bustling alleys of Black Mist City.
The mysterious girl’s handwritten list rested securely against his chest, the weight of it a silent reminder of the premium bottle of Qi Gathering Pills dangling just within his reach.
To a casual gatherer, tracking down the precise locations of such rare, volatile herbs within a single day would be a fool’s errand.
But Shen Jietian did not intend to climb the treacherous peaks himself.
He understood that the answers he sought were already inside the city, trapped within the minds of the people who bled for a living.
His first destination was the eastern gate’s loading plazas, where the heavy mountain transport wagons processed their cargo.
The air here was thick with the scent of damp earth, crushed foliage, and coarse beast sweat.
Shen Jietian stepped up to a weathered stone platform where a group of independent mountain porters were untying heavy hemp ropes from a flatbed wagon.
Among them sat an old, one-eyed man smoking a pipe of cheap, pungent tobacco leaves.
His hands were stained dark purple—the telltale mark of a harvester who frequently handled caustic mountain flora.
Shen Jietian walked over, cupping his hands politely.
“Greetings, Old Liu.
May the heavens grant you a smooth harvest.”
The old porter squinted his solitary eye, blowing a thick ring of smoke.
“Ah, Little Brother Shen.
Come to fish for more gossip?
If you’re looking for the price of spirit rice, ask the merchants.”
“Actually, I came to ask about the changing terrain of the southern crags,” Shen Jietian replied smoothly, leaning against the wooden framework of the wagon.
“I heard a rumor at the tea house that a hidden patch of Ghost-Crying Fungus was uncovered near the weeping caves last week.”
The old man snorted, knocking the ash from his pipe against the iron wheel.
“Ghost-Crying Fungus?
Absolute nonsense.
The yin energy in the weeping caves has been far too unstable since the spring thaws.”
“if someone is looking for deep yin materials, they’d have better luck tracking the blood-moss near the black water pools.
A gatherer from the third courtyard brought back a small batch three mornings ago, but his legs were nearly frozen through by the miasma.”
Shen Jietian’s eyes narrowed slightly as his mind logged the piece of information.
The black water pools.
High yin density, shifting thaws.
He didn’t ask further, choosing instead to smoothly steer the conversation toward the secondary items on his list, blending his queries seamlessly into standard market chatter about logistics and wilderness dangers.
By midday, his footsteps had carried him through three separate trading halls and two low-end apothecary basements.
He spoke with crippled hunters who could no longer tread the paths, caravan scouts nursing wounds from rogue ambushes, and low-level store apprentices responsible for sorting the raw, unrefined stalks brought in by the daily harvesters.
He didn’t ask anyone for the direct location of a rare herb.
Instead, he asked about the current movement of the beast packs, the smell of the mountain winds, and which specific shops were quietly buying up preserving jade boxes.
By connecting the fragments—matching a report of an avoided valley with a rumor of an unusual spiritual fragrance noticed by a traveling scout—the true layout of the mountains began to crystallize within his mind.
By the time the afternoon sun began to dip beneath the city walls, casting long, amber shadows across the East Market, Shen Jietian returned to his simple wooden table.
He sat down, drew a fresh sheet of paper, and began dipping his brush into the dark ink.
The terms floating inside his mind were precise, structured, and strategic—the analytical processing of Jiang Wei adapting to the harsh rules of the Azure Cloud World.
He did not write down complex modern diagrams; instead, he translated his conclusions into the timeless language of the immortal path.
When the final stroke of his brush dried, the document before him was no longer a chaotic list of rumors.
It was a precise, verifiable guide to the hidden bounties of the Black Mist peaks.
As the market lanterns were illuminated one by one, casting a warm, flickering glow across his table, Shen Jietian slowly rolled up the parchment and slipped it into his sleeve.
He leaned back against the mud wall, his hand resting calmly near the hilt of his iron sword as he watched the evening crowd begin to thin.
The hour of their appointment was rapidly approaching, and his heart remained perfectly still, ready to claim the resources that would fuel his ascent.
Eventually, after the sun had fully dipped beneath the massive walls and the sky had turned into a deep, ink-black velvet, the familiar black-robed figure materialized from the shadows.
The mysterious girl brought her silent footsteps to a halt right before his simple wooden stall.
Neither of them spoke immediately, the ambient noise of the closing market serving as a low hum between them.
Shen Jietian calmly reached into his wide sleeve, retrieved a neatly rolled bundle of thick parchment, and placed it onto the wooden tabletop.
It was far more substantial than the single, wrinkled page of names she had handed him the night before.
The cloaked girl accepted the documents without a word and immediately unrolled the first sheet to begin reading.
At first, her physical posture remained entirely relaxed, her head tilted slightly downward beneath her deep hood.
But the moment she turned to the second page, her shoulders locked.
By the third page, her frame had gone entirely rigid, and by the time she reached the fourth sheet, Shen Jietian keenly observed that her reading speed had slowed to a meticulous, character-by-character crawl.
His compilation was exceptionally thorough, leveraging his meticulous data-sorting habits to structure the presentation.
For every single rare herb she had requested, Shen Jietian had not merely provided a vague geographic coordinate; he had systematically mapped out their entire local commercial ecosystem.
The sheets detailed their current verified suppliers within the city, estimated quantities circulating in the black market, recent purchasing prices, expected price fluctuations based on regional logistics, known merchant caravan shipments scheduled to arrive, viable lesser-grade substitutes, and explicit warnings regarding sophisticated counterfeit products.
Some of this cross-referenced intelligence had taken him nearly an entire day of relentless interviewing in the apothecary basements to firmly verify.
The girl’s slender fingers tightened slightly around the edges of the parchment, the paper rustling softly under her grip.
When she finally lowered the documents, her hidden gaze lingered on Shen Jietian for several long, silent seconds.
“How did you manage to gather all of this verified intelligence within a single day?” Her voice carried a trace of genuine, unmasked curiosity this time, completely stripped of its previous cold detachment.
“Every trade has its own hidden channels, miss.
Information is no different; it has its own methods of flowing into the right hands.”
The cryptic answer clearly dissatisfied her, her hood tilting back slightly as if she were trying to pierce his calm facade.
Yet, recognizing the unspoken boundaries of an information broker, she pressed no further.
Instead, she carefully slid the valuable sheets into the protective folds of her robes before producing a small, unblemished jade bottle from her sleeve.
Shen Jietian’s eyes immediately locked onto the vessel, his focus sharpening.
Qi Gathering Pills.
The small bottle landed softly on the wooden table with a dull, muffled thud.
The moment it left her hand, his heartbeat accelerated slightly.
It wasn’t the chaotic thumping of simple material greed, but a profound resonance born of what those ten pills represented to his immediate destiny: accelerated cultivation, steady progress through his bottlenecks, and a tangible, realistic hope of reaching the Seventh Layer.
Without a single shred of hesitation, he swept the jade bottle off the table and slipped it securely into his storage pouch.
The movement was so fluid, natural, and remarkably quick that the cloaked girl blinked in brief surprise behind her hood.
“You’re not even going to open the seal to check the quality?” she asked, her tone carrying a hint of amusement.
Shen Jietian slowly shook his head, his expression completely relaxed.
“If a high-status individual who can casually pay for intelligence with premium Qi Gathering Pills truly wanted to cheat a low-tier gatherer like me with counterfeit medicine, I wouldn’t possess the strength to stop them from walking away anyway.
Since I cannot enforce a penalty, checking now is merely displaying a lack of grace.”
For a brief moment, a heavy silence filled the dim street.
Then, the girl let out a soft, melodic laugh from beneath her hood—a genuine, unburdened sound.
It was the very first time Shen Jietian had heard her express a true human emotion.
“Fair enough,” she murmured, her tone laced with approval.
A few moments later, she spun around on her heel, her dark robes fluttering as she seamlessly disappeared back into the absolute darkness of the night.
The very millisecond her shadow vanished from his perception, Shen Jietian began dismantling his stall, packing his ledger and ink stone with a physical velocity that was much faster than his usual routine.
Normally, he would linger for another hour under the lamp to gather the late-night gossip of the clearing merchants or listen to the final rumors of the day.
But tonight was fundamentally different.
He held premium alchemical pills in his pouch, and in the Azure Cloud World, pills translated directly into raw cultivation.
The long journey back to the squalid South District felt significantly longer than usual.
It wasn’t because the physical distance had altered, but because the intense anticipation of his breakthrough made every single passing minute drag like an eternity.
Several times during his trek through the dark thoroughfares, he instinctively checked his blind spots, his hand never straying far from his weapon.
Cultivators carrying unrefined resources through the outer city frequently became high-value targets for desperate thieves.
Fortunately, Black Mist City’s public magistrate patrols remained effective along the main lines, and no one bothered his retreat.
By the time he pushed open his wooden gate and entered his small courtyard, the silvery moon had already risen exceptionally high above the city skyline.
He slid the heavy iron bolt into place, hearing the lock click shut with absolute relief.
Only then did Shen Jietian allow his tense shoulders to drop.
He retrieved the cool jade bottle, holding it up beneath the moonlight.
For several quiet moments, he simply stared at its polished surface.
A single bottle containing ten pristine pills.
It was a standard commodity that a wealthy clan scion or an inner sect disciple could purchase from an apothecary without a single second thought, yet it was a treasure he had been forced to work for weeks, bleeding and scheming in the dirt, just to obtain.
Slowly, deliberately, he popped open the wax lid.
A faint, incredibly crisp medicinal fragrance immediately escaped the bottleneck, washing over his senses.
It smelled remarkably refreshing and pure, entirely devoid of the toxic dregs common to black-market concoctions.
Inside the vessel rested ten green pills, perfectly round, smooth, and physically identical.
Shen Jietian let out a soft, emotional chuckle.
He crossed his legs, settling firmly onto his worn cultivation mat at the center of the room.
He straightened his spine, closed his eyes, and initiated the Five Elements Circulation Technique.
The surrounding atmospheric spiritual energy responded to his breath, tiny, microscopic wisps of Qi slowly filtering inward through his open pores and his meridians.
The process was painfully, brutally familiar to his consciousness—it was slow, too slow, resembling the tedious labor of gathering an entire ocean one solitary drop at a time.
Every single strand of worldly energy had to be painstakingly dragged through his pathways before eventually trickling down into his lower dantian, where the reservoir absorbed it quietly without a ripple.
For ordinary mortal peasants, this slow accumulation might seem like a miracle, but for an ambitious cultivator trying to outrun time, it was nothing short of absolute torture.
Especially for an independent loose gatherer.
They spent entire years, sometimes decades, blindly gathering energy little by little just to staved off stagnation.
Opening his eyes, Shen Jietian tilted the bottle and poured a single green pill into his open palm.
Without a moment of hesitation, he tossed it into his mouth and swallowed.
The alchemical effect was instantaneous and explosive.
A sudden wave of intense, concentrated warmth detonated inside his stomach, causing his eyes to snap wide open in sheer shock.
A massive surge of pure spiritual energy burst forth from the rapidly dissolving medicine.
This wasn’t a collection of thin drops or fragile threads; it was a roaring, continuous stream of dense Qi that flooded directly into his primary meridians.
His cultivation technique accelerated completely on instinct, his pathways expanding to accommodate the sudden deluge.
The refined energy flowed fluidly through his body, and his dantian began to desperately compress and absorb every single drop it could hold.
Shen Jietian quickly forced his mind into a state of absolute calmness, suppressing his excitement.
In his financial condition, allowing a single strand of this premium energy to leak outward or dissipate would be a catastrophic waste of capital.
Hours trickled past in the dark room as the night deepened and the silver moon traced its slow arc across the sky.
The spiritual fire released by the pill continuously fed his core, where it was meticulously refined, compressed, and permanently stored.
The high-velocity absorption process continued uninterrupted until the first rays of dawn.
When Shen Jietian finally opened his eyes, the morning sunlight was already entering through the cracks of his window shutters.
He sat in absolute silence for several minutes, simply feeling the altered density of the Qi circulating within his flesh.
Then, a slow, profound smile broke across his face.
The energetic difference was glaringly obvious.
It had been a single night of meditation—just one single night—yet his spiritual progress easily exceeded several days of normal, backbreaking atmospheric cultivation.
Perhaps it even equaled a full week of regular gathering.
No wonder alchemists command such absolute, unyielding respect across the continents, he thought, his mind parsing the structural reality.
No wonder high-value resource veins are fought over with such savage brutality by the great clans.
No wonder the powerful sects grow exponentially stronger every generation while the loose cultivators remain permanently trapped in the mud.
Resources changed absolutely everything about the mathematical equation of immortality; effort was merely a baseline, but capital dictated the velocity of growth.
Over the next several days, Shen Jietian settled his life into a highly efficient, clockwork routine.
His mornings were strictly dedicated to intensive information gathering across the city districts; his afternoons were spent operating his simple wooden stall to maintain his presence; his evenings were reserved for analyzing custom customer requests; and his nights were exclusively locked for cultivation.
One premium pill disappeared into his throat.
His internal cultivation foundation advanced with a steady, visible momentum.
This localized progress wasn’t nearly enough to trigger a full breakthrough to the Fifth Layer—not even close—but for the very first time since he had recovered his past-life memories, he could clearly see a structured, luminous path stretching forward into his future.
One afternoon, as the market traffic began to slow, the imposing frame of Old Liu appeared before his table, carrying two steaming cups of ordinary tea.
Without bothering to ask for a formal invitation, the veteran herb gatherer sat down heavily on the stool opposite Shen Jietian, a knowing glint in his sharp eyes.
“You’re looking remarkably happier than you did last week, little brother,” the old man noted, sliding a cup across the wood.
Shen Jietian accepted the tea, offering a polite nod.
“My luck has shifted slightly, Old Liu.
I recently managed to secure a much better, high-volume customer in the commercial district.”
Old Liu let out a hearty chuckle, taking a slow sip.
“That’s a good development for your business, kid.
Just ensure you don’t completely forget about your loyal old customers when you become a wealthy broker.”
“Naturally,” Shen Jietian smiled.
The two spent the next hour comfortably discussing the changing dynamics of the local herb trade, parsing the recent market shortages and comparing the day-to-day purchasing rates of the major medicine halls.
As they sat there conversing, other familiar faces from the market naturally began to drift toward the table.
A young talisman apprentice stopped by to check on paper supplies, a weary caravan worker shared a rumor about a regional guard contract, and a scarred beast hunter paused to grab a cup of water and discuss monster sightings near the crags.
People continuously came and went, their casual conversations overlapping fluidly over the wooden table.
Raw information was being transmitted and shared naturally within the clearing, and without even consciously realizing it, Shen Jietian’s small, localized information network was slowly but surely beginning to form a permanent structure in the East Market.
However, exactly ten days after his transaction with the mysterious girl, the final green pill was consumed, and the jade bottle sat completely empty on his shelf.
The moment the medicinal influence faded from his system, his daily cultivation velocity dropped like a stone, returning instantly to its sluggish, ordinary baseline.
The sudden energetic contrast felt intensely, physically painful to his consciousness.
It resembled the psychological shock of flying high through the clouds on a spiritual treasure, only to be violently brought down to the earth to resume walking through the mud on foot.
That night, Shen Jietian let out a deep, heavy sigh in the dark.
At his current rate of daily income from selling three-sand bulletins, accumulating enough hard currency to purchase another full bottle of Qi Gathering Pills from the commercial shops would take far too long.
He was still earning mostly fragments of Spirit Sand—nowhere near the level of capital required to sustain a high-velocity advancement.
For a brief second, a flash of deep frustration surfaced in his chest, but he quickly shook his head, clearing his thoughts.
Complaining was a useless action that resolved absolutely nothing.
Tomorrow morning, he would simply return to the streets, continue gathering information, continue building his social connections, and continue cultivating with whatever scraps he controlled.
Five days later, just as twilight was settling over the lanes and Shen Jietian was preparing to pack up his display table for the night, a familiar, silent shadow suddenly materialized beneath the flickering amber glow of the lantern light.
A set of heavy black robes, a completely hidden face, and a calm, deliberate step.
The mysterious female client had officially returned to his stall.
Without uttering a single word of greeting, she reached into her wide sleeve and placed another folded slip of high-grade paper flat onto the wooden table.
It was a brand-new ingredient manifest.
Shen Jietian calmly picked up the paper and unfolded it, his eyes methodically scanning the handwritten herb names written across the sheet.
Rare, highly valuable, and exceptionally difficult to locate within the regional peaks—it was exactly the same caliber of high-tier alchemical ingredients as her first list.
He lifted his gaze to look directly at the dark void of her hood.
The girl remained deathly silent, standing perfectly still as she waited for his operational verdict.
Slowly, a faint, deeply calculating smile broke across Shen Jietian’s face.
The hooded girl likely believed she had merely stumbled upon a remarkably useful, efficient low-level information broker in the slums.
But sitting behind his table, Shen Jietian was thinking along a completely different mathematical line of analysis.
If their transaction parameters continued to progress like this…
this mysterious alchemist was going to become the primary engine that fueled his rapid ascent to the Fifth Layer of Qi Refinement.
End of Chapter 17
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