Chapter 305 – Secrets of the Lake (II)

Chapter 305

Secrets of the Lake (II)

The word must have spread, as, from what I could pick up from the kids, nobody bothered them since Xi Zhao demonstrated his blade. Not necessarily because he truly was that strong, but because everyone just sort of assumed that only some super-duper ancient power could properly rear someone so young to be so strong.

… would their brains fry if they knew it really was just me? Well, it was the system, but they don’t know about that.

Regardless, even with the free rein, they stopped going to the lake by the time a week had passed since the ‘festival’ started–there really were just some random knickknacks in there, and not much else. Though to me they all mattered as I kept selling them for the Spirit Stones, the kids were, well, kids. They didn’t really particularly care about the value of anything, just that it got boring to do.

As such, they all locked themselves up in their rooms and started cultivating, preparing for the competition.

In the meantime, my ‘being haunted meter’ is sort of shooting off the charts; yesterday, I kept slipping on a piece of seaweed that kept following me around. Rational thought was that it wasn’t seaweed, that it wasn’t the exact same piece, and that it wasn’t following me around–but I’d tossed out rational thought about seven hauntings ago.

Then there was the chair incident–I was just minding my own business, happily nibbling away at some fruit, when my chair squirmed. As though alive.

But as I yelped and shot up, and others came in with worried expressions, I couldn’t really outright say that I felt my chair move–so I just made up a lie that I was testing their reaction times.

… not that they bought it, of course, but they at least pretended. Which was good enough for me.

Which brings me to now; there’s a plant on the bedside desk that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s reminiscent of a sunflower, and I’m pretty sure it’s looking at me.

Will I acknowledge it? Only in my most paranoid depths.

Who knows? Maybe I am going nuts, for better or worse, and this is just the first step of it.

Aah.

On the ninth day, there was a succession of breakthroughs–Xi Zhao reached late Foundation Establishment, after which Dai Xiu reached the peak of late Foundation Establishment, and lastly Xing Feng reached the Eight Stage of Qi Condensation.

I got nothing for any of them, once again, but the kids beamed with pride, so I tried digging around for something in the spatial rings to reward them with. Truthfully, there wasn’t much; just random pills and pastes and some herbs and ores, but nothing that they would value all that much.

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The only thing left was creating Arts for them, or one for them all, but I’m kind of stumped at the moment and not sure what to create.

I don’t think I can afford to create one for each of them individually, as even with over 3,000 points that I have at the moment, I really can’t afford to ever go back to 0, as that was miserable.

–hey, the Quests! I’d completely forgotten about them! Maybe there’s something there?

As it turns out, there actually is–most of them were kind of garbage, in that they were either monstrously difficult (have 1 Disciple reach Demigod Realm within 3 months), or just outright made no sense as they would require me to travel tens of thousands of miles just to get to them.

Two, however, were appropriately located and weren’t too difficult, but as both cost 1,500 points to purchase, I could only ‘afford’ one, so I settled on the more difficult one.