“Does it have anything to do with you?” Li Tan asked somewhat impatiently.
The woman also realized her inappropriate behavior, apologized, sat back down, and then activated her golden card with spiritual energy, transferring twenty-five gold coins into Li Tan’s card.
“The auction will be at eight tomorrow night. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to come and take a look.”
With both hands, the woman respectfully handed the card back to Li Tan.
After receiving the card, Li Tan left Nolan Auction House directly.
“Should I go to the auction?” He strolled slowly down the road, contemplating the auction event. To be honest, he was somewhat curious. Chi Ze, located at the border between humans and monsters, had been in constant warfare since ancient times. Occasionally, people discovered powerful relics buried in the desert sands, which were then auctioned off at Nolan Auction House.
There might be something useful for him, such as treasures beneficial to one’s spiritual soul. In the end, Li Tan decided to attend the auction the next day. That entire night, he cultivated in the training room provided by Dan Pavilion.
The next morning, after a simple wash-up, Li Tan headed again toward the market.
When he arrived the previous day, it was already too late. At least half of the merchants and desert-returning mercenaries had packed up and gone home. The remaining vendors had also sold out most of their quality goods.
In the morning, the mercenaries returned from the desert with their findings, and the merchants had just opened their stalls, so the goods were most plentiful at this time.
“Beast cores! Fresh second-grade sand crab cores! Three gold coins, no haggling!”
“A sword left behind by an unnamed ancient sage, capable of cutting through metal and stone effortlessly. Blood-selling price, ten gold coins!”
“Master Liu from Chi Ze’s handcrafted top-grade blood pill, an essential item for missions outside. Only two hundred silver coins each! Come and see!”
The vendors spared no effort in promoting their goods. One could even see some shameless merchants clinging desperately to customers’ legs, crying about having elderly parents and young children to support, or swindlers praising a piece of broken rock as something heavenly.
Li Tan ignored their cries, slowly walking while rapidly filtering out most useless items with his spiritual sense and eyesight, selecting only a few potentially useful ones.
However, most of the items were merely herbs for simple pill concoction or beast cores, which made him somewhat disappointed.
However, just as he was about to leave, an unremarkable item caught Li Tan’s attention.
It was a broken stone tablet covered in strange characters.
Li Tan approached the stall with the stone tablet, pretending to buy other items back and forth before finally, with a puzzled expression, pointing at the tablet and asking, “What’s the use of this?”
The vendor, delighted by Li Tan’s previous patronage, replied, “I picked it up from the sand a while back, was quite excited thinking it was a treasure. But after appraising it at Nolan Auction House, it turned out to be just a piece of junk. If you find it interesting, you can take it along.”
Nodding as if half-understanding, Li Tan grabbed the stone tablet into his tower, stood up, patted the dust off his clothes, thanked the vendor, and left.
As soon as Li Tan left, the vendor’s beaming smile vanished, replaced by disdainful muttering, “Another rich kid, doesn’t even realize he’s been scammed.”
Looking at his stall with one item missing, the vendor smiled again, “But it would be great if there were more fools like him.”
Meanwhile, Li Tan, who had just left, happily muttered to himself, “It would indeed be great if there were more fools like him.”
With a simple spiritual scan, Li Tan understood the origin of the stone tablet. It was a special type of stone used in ancient times to record martial arts techniques or cultivation methods. After thousands of years of wind and rain in the desert, its edges had been worn down, leaving it now as an ordinary-looking flat stone.
That nobody, including the appraiser, recognized its origin wasn’t strange, after all, Chi Ze was a small place with extremely limited knowledge.
Li Tan quickly returned to the inn, took out the stone tablet, carefully infused it with spiritual energy, and observed the patterns on the tablet, gradually adjusting the flow of energy. Finally, with an unparalleled sense of exhilaration, complex characters appeared in Li Tan’s mind.
After a rough read-through, Li Tan understood the tablet’s content.
It was a cultivation technique called “Weak Water Jue.”
“D.”
Li Tan’s face darkened. He slapped the stone tablet hard.
“Why did it have to be a cultivation technique? Any other item would have been fine, but what use do I have for Weak Water Jue?” The Weak Water Jue had a prerequisite: it must be cultivated by a female with the Weak Water Divine Constitution. In short, although this technique was powerful, ranked as high-grade Earth-tier, for Li Tan, it was barely better than a few scraps of paper.
“Worthless item.”
Greatly disappointed, Li Tan grabbed the stone tablet and threw it directly out the window.
Thud! The tablet hit the ground, cracking a piece of the floor tile, but the tablet itself remained intact.
Beside the tablet sat a little girl who nearly burst into tears.
The tablet had nearly fallen right onto her forehead.
The girl held back her tears, curiously picked up the tablet, and suddenly, a warm current surged into her body.
The girl froze, her expression blank.
“Hey, what are you doing there? Do you want to eat or not? Hurry back and work!” A rough voice shouted from behind.
The girl snapped out of her trance and hurried away.
At that moment, Li Tan didn’t know that this casual action of his would, in the distant future, almost change the entire structure of the Nine Provinces!
Time quickly reached evening. Li Tan, who had just returned from “exercising” in the desert, was sitting on a stone bench by the roadside, panting and resting.
It was about six-fifteen. There was still some time before the auction began. Li Tan, feeling bored, patted the shoulder of a mercenary beside him who had also just returned from the desert. “Hey, brother, looks like you had a good haul.”
The mercenary grinned and nodded, “Yeah, I encountered an injured third-tier beast. I struck gold. Now I can finally get my son into Tian Lang Sect.”
A third-tier beast equated to a human cultivator at the middle to peak stage of innate cultivation.
Tian Lang Sect was the only cultivation sect near Chi Ze. Its strength was incomparable to Fei Yu Sect, having experts above the Master level within the sect—true powerhouses capable of dominating a region.
But, “Brother, you mean you’re going to exchange this for spirit stones to buy an entry?”
The mercenary nodded, “Right. Although it’s just a servant disciple, it’s still better than living a life like me, scraping a living on the edge of a blade. It’s getting late, young man. See you around.”
The mercenary stood up and departed, walking toward the sunset. He was making his way to the Cultivator Alliance—the Loose Cultivators’ Union.
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