"Kid, you folks must be from the north, right? It's not like the north around here. There are plenty of deep ravines, and if you're not careful, one slip and you're gone."
To such advice, Fang Zhiyi merely nodded to show he understood, but then continued to do exactly as he pleased.
Seeing that he wouldn't listen, the locals stopped trying to persuade him, only hoping that this boss wouldn't end up falling to his death in the mountains.
Fortunately, the few men accompanying him seemed to have backgrounds as hunters, so they weren't afraid of venomous snakes or fierce beasts.
Peng Huan'er stayed behind in the city to watch the shop. She discovered that her young master truly had a talent for business. Ordinary wood, modified according to his instructions into exquisite ornaments, was actually quite popular with many people.
However... such income was nowhere near enough to cover their expenses. Every few days, Fang Zhiyi would send someone with a message asking her to buy grain or tools, and she had no idea what he was actually trying to do.
But thinking about how the young master had more money on him than he could spend in a lifetime, Peng Huan'er stopped worrying about it.
Her only concern was that nothing bad would happen to him.
Covered in dust and dirt, Fang Zhiyi looked at the map in his hands. Little Hei was beside him, pointing things out, and Fang Zhiyi began to sketch based on its descriptions. Finally, he held up the map and laughed heartily under the moonlight.
On his hand-drawn map, this place was a sunken valley, surrounded by sheer cliffs that looked as if they had been carved by swords and axes. If it were anyone else, they would surely marvel at the uncanny craftsmanship of nature.
Only Fang Zhiyi had a face full of excitement.
"Begging for food while sitting on a treasure trove. Tsk, how should I evaluate them?"
The next day, the loggers noticed that the wandering refugees who usually worked alongside them had disappeared. But they didn't think much of it. People working for Fang Zhiyi came and went; who had the time to pay attention to where they went? They just felt the boss was generous and didn't cause trouble, so they just kept their heads down and worked.
"Young Master Fang, dig here?" a man wearing an animal skin vest asked with a frown. If Fang Zhiyi hadn't led the way, he wouldn't have dared to come into these deep mountains. He never expected there to be a valley like this.
Fang Zhiyi nodded, and the man and his companions began digging. They dug down for more than ten feet, but aside from dirt and crushed stone, they found nothing, and progress was somewhat slow.
No one knew what Fang Zhiyi was looking for, but since he didn't tell them to stop, they kept digging.
Li San craned his neck. "Young Master, out in this desolate wilderness, what good stuff could there be?"
Fang Zhiyi cast a meaningful glance in the direction where Little Hei was. Li San followed his gaze, but there was absolutely nothing there.
"The absolute best stuff," Fang Zhiyi smiled.
Suddenly, someone let out an exclamation. Fang Zhiyi stopped his idle chatter and leaned over to look down.
Then he saw a flat piece of metal lying in the dirt.
"Did we dig up an iron mine?" someone asked excitedly.
Li San leaped down. "Does your family's iron mine produce finished products directly?"
"Huh? Then what is this?"
Fang Zhiyi stood up. "Keep digging along this line!" He began calling the others over to start working together.
"Not going to hand-craft technology this time?" Little Hei watched as the thing before them was gradually unearthed.
"Hand-crafting isn't nearly as fast as picking up something ready-made," Fang Zhiyi laughed. "After all, this valley was literally blown open."
"With the current production capacity, I'm afraid this kind of material couldn't possibly be manufactured." Fang Zhiyi looked at the massive metal again.
"Is it possible that the divine weapons of those Dou Qi warriors are just scavenged pieces of this synthetic metal?"
Little Hei and he exchanged a smile.
Meanwhile, the remnant soul inside the jade pendant was already dumbfounded.
"Oh, oh, oh! Ten-thousand-year meteoric iron! And so much of it! Combined with the cultivation method I taught you, you could even fight against five... no, ten ninth-tier Dou Zongs!"
"I'd have to be sick in the head to go fight them," Fang Zhiyi cursed, then looked at the jade pendant. "But we can have a good discussion about your line of thinking. For example, how did you come up with the principle of sucking Dou Qi out of someone else's body and converting it for your own use?"
Peng Huan'er felt inexplicably uneasy. Recently, not only had the young master not returned, but even his companions rarely showed up. Only Bold Wu frequently brought messages with a face full of exhaustion, asking either for food or tools.
"The shovels you took just a few days ago are already broken? What on earth are you guys doing?"
Although Bold Wu looked exhausted, his eyes were filled with irrepressible excitement. "Hehehe, big secret, it's classified!"
These activities didn't attract much attention. Everyone knew the timber shop was logging deep in the mountains, so transporting food and tools was perfectly normal.
In the valley, over a dozen men worked together to pry open a twisted door, with dozens of broken tools tossed to the side.
The moment the door opened, Li San and the others were stunned. Behind this bizarre door was an inexplicable space. The things inside were items they had never even heard of, let alone seen.
Fang Zhiyi, on the other hand, finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Seeing Fang Zhiyi walk in completely unguarded, Bold Wu tried to stop him, but Fang Zhiyi waved his hand, acting as if he were very familiar with the place.
"Young Master, what exactly is this place..."
"The future."
Watching Fang Zhiyi tinker with those things that looked like torture devices, the jade pendant panicked.
"Great hero, big brother, ancestor! Please don't mess around! Whatever you want to ask, I'll tell you everything I know without holding back! When I was three, my mother remarried; when I was four, my father took a new wife; at five..."
"Can you shut up?" Fang Zhiyi interrupted impatiently. "You don't understand science."
He looked at the damaged laboratory before him, his heart filled with mixed emotions. He never expected that after he had merely started things off, those future generations would be able to achieve such a level.
Even he would have to spend time studying it.
Little Hei, meanwhile, was being used as a detector, reluctantly helping him search around for other usable items.
"Humans are truly terrifying..." Fang Zhiyi flipped through a notebook filled with notes, unable to help but sigh. "It's hard to imagine that after reaching such heights, they actually managed to wipe themselves out."
His finger stopped on the last page of the notebook.
The schematics and concepts on it were clearly things that only existed in sci-fi movies.
"A starship..." Fang Zhiyi stared intently, not even noticing that Little Hei had returned to his side.
"What, are you going to build a starship?"
He didn't even turn his head. "Nonsense. At our current level, building a car is a struggle, let alone a starship. Technological progress cannot happen without the support of massive resources... Besides, I can't even understand it." He closed the notebook. "But I think I understand why this world turned out like this."
"Hmm? You guessed it again?"
"It's not a guess, it's a deduction." Fang Zhiyi looked around. "The development of technology constantly depletes energy. This war destroyed the vast majority of things, leading to the current scarcity of resources. Just the existence of Dou Qi is enough to make humans fight over it endlessly."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
. As long as he maintains the villain image and follows the plot to the grand finale, he can obtain generous rewards and return to the real world. So Gu Chen'an entered the role and began to act as a scumbag villain, but who would have expected that the female leads could hear his inner thoughts. Miss Su from the Su family was shocked: "I originally thought Gu Chen'an was a scumbag, but I didn't expect he turned out to be a gentleman! What? You said I have to call off the engagement? I definitely won't, I'll piss you off!" Bai Yuan Tian was dumbfounded: "Young Master Gu is usually unreasonable and a complete brat, but he actually calls me little sweetie in his heart? What, Young Master Gu even said he likes me?" As the female leads' images collapsed more and more, the plot also collapsed with it. Gu Chen'an looked at all this chaos. "Ladies, don't aggro me, if you keep this up the male lead really will stab me, I still need to survive to the grand finale!"
