Looking at Lin Yi, who wore an expression that plainly said "come on, price it up a little for me,"
Shen Danruo—long since used to her old friend's ways—picked up the storage pouch and swept it with her divine sense.
After a while,
she set the pouch back on the table and lifted her head to look at Lin Yi.
"Fellow Daoist Lin, there was only one Pupil Hub?"
"Mm." Lin Yi sketched a few gestures in the air like a man possessed by an Italian, cobbling together an excuse. "That battle was fierce and deadlocked to the very end. Barely a pair of Pupil Hubs came through intact."
"This time I plan to cash in half first. The remaining one stays in the sect, against the disciples' future needs."
Shen Danruo gave a slight nod. "So that's how it is..."
As the core organ of a late second-rank demon beast, the big eyeball was indeed worth a considerable sum—it would be no stretch to class it at the third-rank level.
For a small, minor sect like the Guihua Sect, having it count among their deepest reserves—the sort of treasure kept at the bottom of the chest for the funeral—was more than enough.
Lin Yi's arrangement was reasonable enough.
Then she pondered briefly, ran the materials' values through her head, and soon reached a decision:
"Fellow Daoist Lin, most of what's in the pouch is flesh-and-blood material from the Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beast. Aside from that Pupil Hub, the only pieces that will fetch a price are a few organs and half a pair of damaged wings."
"Here's what I'll do: I'll take all of these materials, regardless of grade, at fifteen hundred low-grade spirit stones. Does that suit you?"
Fifteen hundred low-grade spirit stones?
At that number, delight rose at once in Lin Yi's heart.
Before coming to Jiuwu City, he had made his own estimate of this batch's worth.
Taken together, the materials in the pouch should have drawn a little over twelve hundred spirit stones, somewhere under thirteen hundred, at an ordinary trading house.
Shen Danruo's offer ran nearly twenty percent above his expectations.
Converted into medium-grade spirit stones, that came to exactly thirty!
And keep in mind,
a single full-load transmission through the light ring consumed spiritual energy worth roughly seventy percent of one medium-grade spirit stone.
Meaning that, setting aside for now the cost of supplies he would still need to buy,
these fifteen hundred low-grade spirit stones could fund forty-odd full transmissions.
With that thought,
Lin Yi put away his habitual shameless grin and cupped his hands to Shen Danruo with genuine sincerity:
"Tower Master Shen, it seems Lin will owe you yet another favor."
Though Lin Yi had helped Shen Danruo many times over the years—and counting sheer number, perhaps his tally was the larger—in the weight of a favor, he fell far short of her.
Other examples aside,
the Small Three Talents Array that guarded the Guihua Sect had been purchased through Shen Danruo. Its grade wasn't high, but among low-grade arrays it ranked in the top five for value; without the right connections, it was by no means easy to acquire.
And the price she had quoted back then was nearly level with her own procurement cost—roughly thirty-five percent below the market rate.
There were several more instances like that.
If not for that,
Lin Yi would not have made straight for the Drunken Moon Tower the moment he reached Jiuwu City.
Yet faced with Lin Yi's thanks, Shen Danruo only smiled faintly and picked up a second list.
Several minutes later,
she set the list gently down, her willow brows knitting slightly, a touch of puzzlement entering her voice:
"Fellow Daoist Lin, why do you want to buy these things?"
The list he had handed her recorded over a hundred items—a substantial quantity indeed.
But strangely,
the items were mostly of modest tier; some didn't so much as touch the threshold of cultivation.
For instance, Lin Yi wished to purchase books introducing the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty and the Tianling Realm as a whole—local gazetteers, biographies, and even unofficial histories and gossip.
And the unofficial histories carried a special annotation: the wilder and more sensational, the better...
That was a request Shen Danruo was seeing for the first time.
"Oh, that?" Luckily, Lin Yi had prepared a justification before coming. He answered with easy composure: "Tower Master Shen, you know how it is—I've paid plenty of prices for my ignorance in this life."
"Never mind the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty—I haven't even seen all of Qingzhou. Most of what I know about the outside world, I learned from you."
"So I thought I'd stock up on books for the juniors. Even if they can't travel far for now, at least they'll learn something of the world from the pages, and won't be left groping in the dark when they do step out someday."
"As for unofficial histories—wild they may be, but they often chart the lower depths of things. So long as you only look and don't believe, it's hardly ever a bad thing."
Lin Yi's words were not entirely an excuse.
He—or rather, that whole batch of transmigrators—had nearly all paid a price, in one form or another, for knowing too little of the Tianling Realm. A few times, it had nearly cost them their lives.
And in truth, if not for the matter of the Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beast,
Lin Yi had planned, before passing away in meditation, to buy books of that kind—gazetteers and the like—to leave for his disciples.
Just not quite so many.
As an old friend of many years, Shen Danruo naturally knew his past, and she nodded in understanding before long:
"Fair enough. Nothing hampers a traveler more than shallow knowledge. Reading more books will spare them many detours."
So, shortly,
she set the matter of the books aside and pointed at the list:
"Then what about the Primordial Origin Pills? Why five hundred bottles at once?"
"If I recall correctly, the Guihua Sect has barely a dozen or so disciples at the Awakening stage?"
In the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty, Primordial Origin Pills were of a fairly uniform standard: every bottle held a full ten pills.
In transactions of modest size,
the pills were often treated as a lesser stand-in for spirit stones—five bottles of Primordial Origin Pills roughly equaled one spirit stone.
The five hundred bottles Lin Yi wanted totaled exactly five thousand pills—by the consumption of an ordinary sect, roughly enough to serve a hundred-odd people.
"Mm, it is rather a lot. But it's a necessity." Hearing her question, Lin Yi put on a helpless look and sighed softly. "For one thing, my dissolution into the Dao draws near. I must lay in some supplies for the disciples who'll come after me."
"This old face of mine still carries some thin favor with you, after all. Whatever discount I can get—even a mosquito's leg, however small, is still meat—I naturally want to buy as much as I can. The Primordial Origin Pill keeps for ages anyway."
"For another, while I still have some time, I want to try piling resources into pushing out a few entering-the-realm cultivators."
"So long as the sect gains four—no, even three more such cultivators, and once Su Qing breaks into mid Foundation Establishment, the Guihua Sect should have nothing to fear in the short term."
Like the matter of the materials above, Lin Yi's justification this time was also, for the most part, the truth.
In his original plan,
he had intended to pour out every spirit stone he carried to secure new cultivation resources for two people: Wei Chongshan—Senior Brother of the third generation and its only disciple to reach Qi Condensation Late Stage—and Su Qing.
So long as those two four-spiritual-root cultivators could each break through, the shock of his own passing away in meditation would be blunted by more than half.
Now that he had the Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beast materials in hand, Lin Yi's arrangements gained a little more room to breathe.
In fact,
the storage pouch still had capacity for about a thousand more bottles of pills. He planned to seek out several other trading houses after leaving the Drunken Moon Tower and buy in batches—after all, Shen Danruo was no mindless NPC in some video game, swallowing whatever he told her.
Once his purchases passed a certain limit, it would only invite needless trouble.
"......"
Watching Lin Yi so candidly settle his final affairs, Shen Danruo lowered her eyelids, her expression as blank as ever.
Half a minute later,
she lifted her head again and spoke:
"In that case, Fellow Daoist Lin, leave the materials on this list to me to procure."
"And one more thing..."
With that,
she mused a moment, drew an object from about her person, set it gently on the table, and slid it across to Lin Yi:
"Take this. Consider it my gift."
Chapter 40