"Aaaah!" Wang Rong screamed as a twig as thick as a pinky dashed out of the grass and wrapped around her left leg. The twig was covered with barbed pricks, which all stuck into her skin simultaneously.
"Ah!"
She fell to the ground at the tug, and her left leg felt as if it was surrounded by countless giant mosquitoes that had buried their mouthpieces into her flesh. She could distinctively feel her blood being sucked out of her.
"Help! Help!"
"Wait, wait… I'm coming, I…"
Guo Yu was petrified, for he saw that not far from where he was standing, a strange plant about waist high had stood up, waving its branches as if it was some sort of animal.
"Help her! Quickly!" An Susu nudged Guo Yu repeatedly, but the latter stood there frozen.
As a kid growing up in the countryside, she was a fearless little thing. She snatched the sword from Guo Xu's hand, and ran towards Wang Rong.
"Don't panic, Sister! I'm coming!"
She hacked at the twig with the short sword, and the blade cut into the plant like a knife into tofu. The thing twitched as if it could feel pain, then two thorny twigs flipped to life, coming right at An Susu.
The little girl had no time to dodge and closed her eyes before the seemingly inevitable death, only to be startled by a few thuds as a transparent film rose up around her.
The twig hit the shield and bounced back at the impact. Its movement then slowed down as if it was injured in some way. An Susu opened her eyes, and reacted quickly to this, shouting, "Come and help me!"
"I, I, but…" Guo Xu stayed frozen on the spot with shaking legs.
An Susu was trying to drag Wang Rong away with all her effort. A little help from Guo Xu, and they would be all out of danger. Unfortunately, he did not move. The window of opportunity closed in a split second, and the blood-sucking grass recovered. The twig shot out rapidly all at once as if it was going to swallow them whole.
Clunk!
Just then, the little girl heard the sound of drawing sword that reminded her of a roaring dragon. Before she had time to think, a long sword had pierced the tip of that plant, and stayed there as if it had fallen down from beyond the highest heavens.
"Why, you're from Phoenix Mountain?"
Right after that, a figure landed lightly. Her posture was refined, elegant, and graceful—what a pretty big sister!
"We're here on a quest. Please help her," An Susu pleaded.
"Don't worry. She'll be fine."
The young woman crouched down and fed the passed out Wang Rong a pill, then asked, "Are you looking for the blood-sucking grass?"
"We have been searching for it the whole day. Sister, is that the grass?"
"Yes, but although it is called grass, it actually looks like this…"
The woman waved her hand and the long sword disappeared. The plant then quickly sagged like a deflated balloon until it was only a dozen centimeters long. It now looked like a withered old tree root.
An Susu watched it with surprise. The next second, she opened her eyes widely as that tree root cracked open and a fat red worm crawled out.
The worm made its way into a thick growth of grass, trying to escape among all the flurry. However, a chubby little kid cut it off. The kid then picked up the worm and ate it with a slurping sound, then clapped its hands with a big grin.
"Retch…"
An Susu and Guo Xu felt their stomach churning—that looked disgusting.
"This is a roundworm. When it lives inside a plant, it turns the plant into blood-sucking grass. Although it is a harmful insect, the plant that it has lived in becomes an excellent material."
The woman picked up that tree root, which was dripping blood, and smiled. "This thing can be used for making Dan pills that could rapidly recover your health. It's a pill you can use as well."
"F-fairy…" Guo Xu reacted to that, and said, "Could you leave it to us so that we can complete our task?"
"I killed this one. Why should I give to you?" the woman asked, surprised.
"You're the superior fairy... I'm sure you won't care about petty things like this. We, however, have just joined the mountain, and could really use this as an accomplishment. If you could show some mercy…"
"You're not making sense. The quests are part of your training, and you can only be trained by obtaining them by yourself." The woman was as good-tempered as she was sensible.
"You have ignored the practicality and almost got us killed for nothing! Are you going to take responsibility for that?" Wang Rong woke up while they were talking, and she began to yell at the woman after getting to know what had happened. "You know perfectly well of how dangerous the blood-sucking grass is. Why did you put it on the quest list?"
"..." The woman blinked, and opened her palm. "Is this your turtle shell? Why weren't you wearing it?"
"I, I dropped it accidentally!"
"Have you forgotten what place this is? The woods are ridden with crises; these things are there to keep you alive, not something for you to play with!" The woman straightened her face, and said sternly, "The blood-sucking grass might look ferocious, but it has a limited attacking range. You have the turtle shell as protection and the short sword to attack. As long as you can work together and stay sharp, with some courage, you are perfectly capable of killing it. But you… how could you blame someone else?"
"I..." Biting her lips, Wang Rong wanted to retort, but couldn't find anything to say. She was your average urban college student, and was still irascible after only just joining the mountain. One couldn't exactly call her evil or anything.
"Prove yourself if you're not convinced. Your capability is the only thing that'll make you confident. Now, I should go…" With that, the woman shifted a little, and was miles away.
"Sister, what's your name?" An Susu called eagerly after her.
"I'm Long Qiu…"
"Senior Brother!"
"Oh, you can go in." You Yu hesitated for a second before uttering the two words—he had yet to get used to addressing others with that title. Those on duty checked their jade tag and the quest plate, then waved them in.
In a mere three days, the twelve people felt they had gone through so much. Dishevelled, exhausted, and starved as they might be, there was something subtly different about them. Modern people all had common defects such as sloth, restlessness, aimlessness, or lack of reverence. Once they became part of the cultivation world, they had to correct them gradually.
They headed straight for the Service Hall halfway up the mountain without any rest. The area outside the hall was crowded as always; some even walked around holding advertisement plates, which read, "Quest in Longkou Village, looking for a teammate. The ideal candidate has to run fast! Very, very fast!"
"Quest in Haojia Village: a dormitory of lovely girls seeks a cute guy that can climb trees."
"Quest in Xiche Village, going into a river: candidates of either sex are welcome; one has to be able to hold breath for over two minutes under water."
...and so on, and so forth. Each person holding the ad had drawn out their own territory, and quite a few people were going up to them and asking around.
"..." You Yu and the others watched this with a puzzled look; why did they feel they had just been sucked into a virtue sandbox game?
They went into the hall with the birds. Three teams had come in before them; two failed their quests, and one succeeded. Zhou Zhiming put the birds on the counter, and handed over the wooden plate. The man in charge examined the birds closely.
"They're indeed a pair of green-feathered red-beaked sparrows, alive and with a minor damage to the wings' feathers. You'll get an 'outstanding'." The man took over the wooden plate and recorded the result.
Zhou Zhiming then handed out the twig of a blood-sucking grass with an explanation.
"Well, we'll count that as the discovery of a lead. That's a pass for your team. You can go now!"
The man waved them away, and kept his sarcastic comment in his head. 'Had it not been for Miss Qiu passing through, your team would have been finished!'
'WTF?'
The team was utterly baffled. That was it? Uncle, you had to be kidding, right? Where was our reward?
They confirmed repeatedly, and only gave back the short sword dispiritedly after they got the same answer over and over again. They were about to leave when there was a hubbub outside the hall. Three people hurried in, carrying a giant lake clam.
The clam was the size of a millstone, and the silver-white shell was tightly shut. An intense fluctuation of water was coming out of it. One did not need to be an expert to tell that it was an exceptional creature.
"Oh my, they have indeed dug it out. They're not called the 'threesome team' for nothing."
"They have been trained before coming here, and are capable enough to kill. We're not in the same league."
You heard it right. "Threesome team" was the sobriquet the others gave to the three teeangers from the families of Zeng, Lei, and Yuan—of course, they were only using it behind the three's back.
The man in charge was also surprised. After a thorough inspection, he said, "The lake clam is perfectly intact. Because of your capability… you'll get an 'extraordinary'."
"Any reward for that?" asked Zeng Ke.
"Nope!"
"Tsk!"
Zeng Ke rolled her eyes, but dared not lash out.
"Wow! Check it out! Check it out!"
"His dormitory is right next to mine. How did I never notice him before? There're so many hidden talents!"
This was meant to be a noisy day. Accompanied by a bustling crowd, another extraordinary one had returned. He was in his early twenties, quite tall, and had handsome features with a casual hippieness about them.
In his hand, there was a bag, which he untied to reveal a small scorpion about 10 cm long.
The scorpion had the shape of a pipa, 1 and was jet-black from head to tail. There was a pair of central eyes in the middle of its back, and three pairs of side eyes lined its body on either side, giving it the most bizarre look. It had a seven-segment anterior, a five-segment posterior, and a barbed stinger.
The tip of the stinger was deep red, and seemed to glint coldly.
"An eight-eyed scorpion? He caught one alive?"
The man in charge was amazed as well. This type of scorpion lived in a mutated swamp to the west of Bai Town. It had nothing special about it, apart from the fact that it was extremely venomous. What was more, that swamp was infested by miasma and all sorts of snakes and insects, making the task all the more difficult.
The quest was to find a way into the swamp and observe the behavior of the eight-eyed scorpion. The tools provided were pills to keep off the poisonous miasma, two pieces of turtle shell, and a short sword.
"If I remember it right, female eight-eyed scorpions oviposited on their back. How did you manage to get one?"
"It's breeding season for the eight-eyed scorpion at the moment. I began to watch their activities after I entered the swamp. I then discovered that the female scorpions would give birth to an embryo every 30 minutes, which they would keep on their back and look after with care." The man stood there, recounting his story in an unhurried tone. "But I then found out that if the female scorpion was greatly disturbed during labor, it would abandon the young scorpion.
"Therefore, I stayed outside its den for two days, and tried various ways to harass it. It cost me two turtle shells in the end to get this small scorpion."
'!!!'
The man in charge frowned slightly. From the way he told the story, everything was done so effortlessly, but the actual process must have been ridden with peril.
He put away the scorpion, then pondered for a moment, and announced loudly, "Tang Bole, most excellent. He is to be rewarded with a bottle of Small Spiritual Dan."
Phoenix Mountain used to have three Dan recipes.
Evil-expelling Dan: two-transformation Dan, mainly focused on expelling evil energy and recovering one's strength; it had little effect on cultivation itself.
Body-refining and Mind-enhancing Dan: three-transformation Dan, usable by innate state cultivators and above, immensely effective.
Essence-gathering Dan: four-transformation Dan, usable by Human Immortals, and not refined yet due to the absence of necessary materials.
There was also an Essence-gathering Incense that was usable by acquired state cultivators, but the effectiveness was very limited.
Considering how green these probies were, Gu Yu made some modification to Evil-expelling Dan, and came up with a basic Dan that was suitable for these newly admitted pupils, which was that Small Spiritual Dan.
"Tang Bole? Oh, I do remember that name…" He was a little intrigued after hearing the report from the subordinate. Back then, after the formation was set up in Phoenix Mountain, several people tried to break in by force, but ended up almost losing their mind.
When everyone else was shaken by the power of the immortals, a man ran out of the crowd and prostrated at the mountain gate, saying he was Tang Bole from Binzhou, and was earnestly hoping to enter the cultivation world.
That was the man.
"He has an above-average natural endowment, but I didn't expect him to be this resolute. That's very good!"
TL/N: a four-stringed Chinese musical instrument, sometimes also known as Chinese lute.