Chapter 178 – Eternal Lament (IV)

Chapter 178

Eternal Lament (IV)

Long Tao came back in a rather good mood.

I’m guessing.

I can’t really tell, to be honest. I’m just sort of assuming since I kind of saw how he looked when he came back from someplace in a bad mood, and since he’s not like that this time, he might be in a good mood.

Anyway, it was rather deep in the night by the time he returned, and all the kids were far off in their cultivation dreams. Just as I thought he’d pass by me and join them, he actually sat down at the table, eyeing me with a faint smile.

“… what did you do?” I asked.

“I made us some money.”

“By…?”

“Offering our services.”

“We don’t offer any services.”

“We offer all kinds of services,” he said. “For the right price, of course.”

“And, pray tell, what kind of a service are we offering and for what kind of a price?” I don’t dislike that I have an ancient monster tagging along, but boy, he has a propensity for taking us places with trouble.

“To hunt down a rather evil, corrupt Shaman that has been evading their order for decades, it sounds like, in return for three particularly… beneficial items.”

“…”

Right, right.

To hunt down someone I was desperate to get away from.

But, seeing as he said all that, it’s likely that the woman who gave me the iffy wasn’t it.

“What items?” I asked, relenting. Ultimately, I wasn’t opposed to increasing our wealth. Believe it or not, there wasn’t a lot of it left, especially as kids broke through into the Foundation Establishment Realm.

For reference, I had around 300,000 mid-grade Spirit Stones and about a million low-grade ones stored in three spatial treasures that were on my person–two from Elder Qin and one from Light–when we escaped the Spirit Sword Sect.

A massive wealth, right?

Yeah, I thought so! I thought it would last us years! That we could just coop up in some distant mountain and cultivate until my little gremlins here were all Demigods!

Brrt! Fat chance!

I’m down to about 60,000 mid-grade ones and about 300,000 low-grade ones… and they can’t even use the latter ones anymore! Especially with the Spirit Stone Augmentation Art, the amount of effort it takes to extract the small trace of pure Qi from the lower-grade stones just isn’t worth the time, so they’ve all been collectively and exclusively using mid-grade ones since breaking through.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

And even if 60,000 sounds like a lot… yeah, it’s really not.

Per my estimates, if we don’t have a windfall in the meantime, I won’t be able to supply them the stones within 4 months’ time–and that’s supposing this here monster doesn’t break through into the Spirit Manifestation Realm… which I’m guessing he will, sometime soon.