Aspiring to the Immortal Path
chapter-632

After the banquet, when Weng Tongrang learned that Tang Jie had just entered the city and didn't have a place to stay in Changping Prefecture yet, he asked what sort of place Tang Jie preferred, ending up granting Tang Jie a mansion to serve as his residence.

The mansion was located in the suburbs of Changping, facing a city and backed up against a lush hill, which made it quite the beautiful spot. The mansion covered a large area, with six gates and eighteen buildings. In the center was a house on stilts, and to the left was a beautiful and secluded garden.

He had also been offered twenty-some servants, but Tang Jie refused them with the excuse that he preferred peace and quiet.

The next day, Weng Tongrang sent over another gift: a list of the Bai Estate's assets.

The Bai Clan's people weren't executed over the incident, but Yiyi had declared the seizure of most of their assets. Changping had accepted her verdict, so they naturally carried it out, and the seized property was subsequently delivered to Tang Jie.

Tang Jie took this gift.

Several days later, the villagers of Daoxiang came to visit. The old village chief had tears on his face as he thanked Tang Jie for upholding justice. The fully-recovered Er Hu even prostrated on the ground and insisted on following Tang Jie as a servant. Tang Jie wasn't able to convince him otherwise, so he had him pick a house to stay in. This mansion was too big to not have someone to clean it up.

Every morning, Tang Jie could see that simple and honest youth quietly getting up and earnestly cleaning up the courtyard, and once that was over, he would go off to the side to practice and train on his own.

When he saw him, Tang Jie couldn't help but think about how he was when he followed Xu Muyang.

These scenes were so similar, but the positions were reversed this time. The page boy from before was now the illustrious figure admired by all.

Not long afterward, the new magistrate for Changping Prefecture arrived.

The first thing he did was to come and visit Tang Jie, speaking meekly and respectfully. Only when he received Tang Jie's blessing did he wipe the sweat from his brow.

As the days went by, the news of how Tang Jie had massacred Hundred Battle City gradually began to spread, and every day, people would come to pay their respects to this celebrity. On account of the gifts they brought, Tang Jie accepted the visitors at first, but he gradually grew impatient and decided to stop seeing all guests other than Weng Tongrang's group, spending every day in cultivation.

With a fixed residence, he was now able to also bring out his avatar from the diagram to cultivate in one of the buildings, no longer needing to waste the spiritual energy of the diagram. He continued to temper his original body within the Astral Winds, but not as maniacally as before.

Tang Jie's resistance to the Astral Winds gradually increased, and he went from being able to endure for seven to eight minutes to around fifteen minutes. But his store of fiend meat was dwindling, soon to run out.

Besides that, he exchanged the fiend pellets he had obtained for some herbs, and after a bath, he finally made some progress, his body growing to 21 meters in height.

Even though the boost wasn't great, it was still progress worth celebrating. Every step in the later phase of the Diamond Body was more difficult than the last, demanding many more resources. The Parting Classic's cultivation was a glutton that could never be satisfied, always looking for more and more.

This also meant that if he didn't find new resources, his original body's cultivation would stop again.

At this moment, Weng Tongrang came to find him.

―――――――――――

In the main hall of the Tang Estate, Weng Tongrang first drank of the tea Er Hu had served and then casually said, "Sir, have you been doing well?"

Tang Jie blew on his hot tea before replying, "Thanks to General Weng's care, I am living very comfortably in this place. I will probably miss this place when I'm gone."

Weng Tongrang was alarmed. "Sir wants to leave?"

Tang Jie shrugged. "Not exactly leaving, but too much peace makes one itch to move. Moreover, cultivation takes money, and I need to go looking for resources."

"I see," Weng Tongrang sighed in relief. "Yes, cultivation requires immense resources, which is why I have no choice but to run around for the sake of five pecks of rice."

"Exactly!" Tang Jie put down his tea. "But five pecks of rice in the cultivation world isn't that easy to obtain."

Weng Tongrang laughed. "What a coincidence! This one just so happens to have a minor matter that would make one a few pecks of rice. Would Sir be interested?"

"Tell me."

Weng Tongrang explained that a group of fiends had recently intruded into the mountain forests to the south of Changping Prefecture. They were very strong and were wreaking havoc all over the place. Changping Prefecture had dispatched people to exterminate them, but these fiends were cunning, hiding the moment they saw that they were outnumbered. Once the number of opponents had fallen, they rushed back in. Changping Prefecture also had the duty of defending the city, so its cultivators couldn't keep wasting time like this. But as they couldn't determine exactly how strong these fiends were, they found themselves at an impasse, until they thought of Tang Jie.

Tang Jie was strong enough that he could basically kill any fiend below Divine Division, and there was no need for him to worry about how strong his opponent was. Moreover, he was alone, so there was little chance of the fiends running at the sight of him.

Tang Jie asked, "How should we calculate the price?"

"We'll calculate the price per head as you previously stated, and there will be an additional thirty thousand spirit coins as a thank-you gift after the job is done."

"Deal!" Tang Jie immediately agreed.

That afternoon, Tang Jie had Yiyi ride Tutu at the head of the bean soldiers, not even sending out the ghost guard. One day later, these fiends disappeared. Without doing anything, Tang Jie had easily made a bunch of spirit coins, as well as a pile of fiend corpses.

An auspicious beginning served as the foundation for close collaboration, and starting from that day, Tang Jie began to draw closer to Changping Prefecture.

As the Chief Commander of Changping Prefecture's Celestial Pivot Guard, Weng Tongrang would frequently encounter problems that were difficult to resolve. The most frequent involved some powerful cultivator who was passing through, so proud of their strength that they refused to be bound by the rules. The Celestial Pivot Guard had been established mainly to deal with people like this. But even though Weng Tongrang was at the Heart Demon Tier, there were still some people he couldn't deal with.

Tang Jie's existence allowed them to be extremely proactive. Whoever it was, if they wanted to flaunt their strength, they would first have to defeat the strongest person here. In the past, this had been Weng Tongrang, but now, it was Tang Jie, which was no minor increase in difficulty. For this reason, Tang Jie ended up beating up quite a few of those proud cultivators who always had their noses pointed upward. Of course, each tyrannical cultivator was like a walking moneybag for Tang Jie. Tang Jie liked these missions, because he could complete them without taking one step out of the city.

Besides that, there was dealing with the various fiends that infiltrated Fengshan. The battles between humans and fiends had been going nonstop for quite some time. If it wasn't massive wars involving tens of thousands of individuals, it was a constant flow of small-scale battles. Powerhouses disdained to deal with such things and the weak couldn't deal with such things, and this in addition to the cunning of fiends meant that fiends were constantly coming in to replace the fiends that were exterminated, creating a big problem for Fengshan. But now Tang Jie had appeared and resolved many of these problems. Tang Jie also liked these missions, because he could reap double the rewards.

There were also commissions from rich clans, which covered a variety of topics and varied in price. There were rescue missions to save clan members who had been enslaved by fiends, escort missions, and also just requests for Tang Jie to show his face so that the requestor could share a little in his limelight. Tang Jie also liked these missions, for people often offered a very high sum to do something extremely simple.

Other than the commission from Changping Prefecture, there were also many commissions from outside of it. So long as Tang Jie could do it without going out of his way to do so, he would take any job. This made it so that he quickly became one of the most famous and most welcomed people in all of Fengshan.

Tang Jie naturally managed to alleviate his capital problem.

With enough money, he could go on a spending spree for resources to improve himself. With his bags of spirit coins, he began to clean out the cultivation resources and spirit medicines of Changping Prefecture.

Tang Jie quickly showed how much of an effect a powerful cultivator could have on the marketplace.

Over a few months, Changping Prefecture was basically emptied of cultivation resources, with the price of all herbs more than doubling. Changping Prefecture had no choice but to import resources in order to fulfill the needs of the market.

In the face of the exploding prices, Tang Jie could only bemoan the consequences of his terrifying digestive powers: anything he bought would grow more expensive while anything he sold would grow cheaper. Over time, the value of his commissions had begun to slide downward, too.

After spending all that money, Tang Jie steadily rose in strength. In only five months, Tang Jie had reached a height of 24 meters. Although this speed was still rather slow compared to what it had been right after Hundred Battle City, it won out in terms of steady progress. After all, he had taken the fiends by surprise back then, so there would be no second Hundred Battle City.

If this continued, Tang Jie would only need ten years to reach the peak of Diamond Body. If he considered price inflation, then twenty years would be enough.

Twenty years to go from the initial phase of Soul Transformation to the peak of Soul Transformation was a shocking rate of growth for anyone. This was the power of the Parting Classic.

While busying himself with commissions and gathering resources, Tang Jie didn't forget his other important mission: finding materials for the teleportation formation.

But on this matter, Tang Jie ran into a major roadblock.

Creating an extremely long-range teleportation formation required some extremely rare materials, ones that were hard to find even if one scoured the entire Great Stellar Chiliocosm. The Verdant Cloud Domain clearly wasn't some world that was rich in resources, and humans controlled only a little corner of it. Even though he looked all around Changping Prefecture, Tang Jie found no leads on any of them, let alone buying anything.

Tang Jie started to use his commissions to extend his feelers outward.

But no matter how he looked, he failed to find a thing. It was like these materials simply didn't exist in this world, with the local cultivators having never even heard of some of them. Even though he offered to buy them at high prices, or even pay for a sliver of information on them, all that awaited him was disappointment.

Time slowly passed, everything seeming to tell him that this place didn't have the materials he required, let alone an opportunity to go back.

The hope of going home was ground to nothing by failure after failure, but everything on the path of cultivation went smoothly, and Tang Jie got stronger and stronger.

This Immortal path was seemingly destined to be that of a solitary traveler, going farther and farther away from home.

Tang Jie cultivated as hard as he could, hardening his heart and using this method to drive out that sense of solitude.

But deep down, that graceful figure occasionally appeared in his mind.

Do you know that I'm thinking of you?

I'm not dead. I just haven't returned from a very faraway place…