Beast Garden

Back at the original medicine garden site, Lin Xiao stared worriedly at the vast empty valley before him.

How was he supposed to build this?

He stood in place racking his brains for a while, but no good ideas came to mind. In the end, he could only pick up his peach wood sword and head back to where he had previously dug up the wild mountain.

No good plan available—might as well just improvise.

He spent a whole day alternating between meditating and chopping, expending a tremendous amount of effort before he managed to split several massive sections of the mountain wall and store them away.

After that, he returned to the sect and went to the Formation Hall, where Mo Yuanjiao was busy carving arrays. He requested a few illusion arrays, isolation arrays, and temperature-regulation arrays.

When he came back to the original medicine garden site in the back mountain, ready to start the fusion process, he took a look at his private storage and realized that the spirit stones he had dug up all night just two days ago had already been mostly used up when he had been fusing the Scripture Library.

So he had no choice but to run back to the spirit stone mine and bury himself in digging for another night.

Finally, with everything ready, he returned to the medicine garden site and tossed in the mountain walls, the arrays, the spirit stones, and a few specimens of each type of the spirit beasts' feed plants all together.

After successfully stuffing a huge pile of materials into the fusion device, Lin Xiao selected "Begin Fusion."

[Ding—Spirit Beast Garden fused successfully. Please choose a placement location for the host.]

Then, a translucent, massive valley surrounded on three sides by mountain walls appeared before his eyes.

Inside this great valley were many smaller sections, each one generating different vegetation environments based on the feed plants needed by the various spirit beasts.

The overall valley area was enormous—many times the size of the original medicine garden—yet when he targeted the empty medicine garden plot, it showed "Placeable" rather than "Cannot place due to insufficient area."

So Lin Xiao didn't hesitate and directly placed the Spirit Beast Garden down in the location of the original medicine garden.

The moment the Spirit Beast Garden landed, the entire empty plot was instantly filled.

But from the outside, it looked like just an ordinary little valley, completely different from the translucent appearance he had seen earlier.

However, when he walked inside, he discovered that it was just like the Scripture Library—plain to look at from the outside, but once you entered, it revealed a hidden world within.

Once inside, what appeared before Lin Xiao was the same sight he had seen before placement.

Inside were many fully grown spirit beast feed plants, more than enough to feed all the beasts he carried with him. In the future, he would just need to plant some extra reserves outside.

After taking a tour around, Lin Xiao was very satisfied with the area and the sections of the generated Spirit Beast Garden.

But he didn't rush to release the spirit beasts into it immediately. Instead, he thought of a question.

Were the barriers and such for this Spirit Beast Garden activated?

If they weren't, then once the beasts were released, they might all just run away.

However, this Spirit Beast Garden wasn't like the floating island, where the system would generate a control console for him.

Still, he figured that something produced by the system wouldn't have such an obvious flaw, so he carefully searched both inside the garden and all around it.

Sure enough, he found a special spot near the entrance of the valley.

There was a small recess in the mountain wall. Lin Xiao reached out and touched it, and the system emitted a notification:

[All access and settings changes to the Spirit Beast Garden require different identity tokens to operate.]

Identity tokens?

That thing... did their Lingxian Sect even have any?

Lin Xiao was a bit puzzled.

But the system wouldn't give him something he couldn't use, right?

As he pondered, he opened his private storage and glanced through it.

Sure enough, a new item appeared.

[Identity Token Generator]

So this was one of the rewards granted after the Scripture Library had been completed.

Appraisal:

[Identity Token Generator: Insert spirit stones to generate identity tokens of different ranks and functions based on requirements. The identity tokens can have different permissions and functions set by the Sect Master. The identity roles can be modified in the sect member position panel. Each generated identity token requires one spirit stone input. As the sect upgrades, this generator will also upgrade, and the identity tokens it produces will gain more functions.]

That actually looked pretty good.

Lin Xiao took the Identity Token Generator out of his private storage.

It was a white jade square box with a side length of only about twenty centimeters.

When he opened it, several identities were displayed inside.

Roles like Apothecary Elder, Affairs Elder, Farming Elder, Infrastructure Elder...

These were all sect positions he had casually set up in the past.

Clearly, things couldn't be that casual anymore. These identity tokens were all going to be useful, so he would need to reorganize everything properly.

Since he was already preparing to formally recruit disciples anyway, these things really should be tidied up and put in order.

So Lin Xiao had no choice but to sit down right there, scratching his head as he started planning.

The most important parts boiled down to a few areas. First was financial management—that went without saying, it was a must-have.

All income and expenditure of the sect's money and items, overall resource coordination, and external business dealings would need a dedicated department to handle.

Then there were law enforcement and oversight. Once there were more people in the sect, a supervisory department would definitely be needed to handle various disputes and discipline issues, as well as to oversee the disciples' conduct, and so on.

Even though the Heart-Testing Path ensured that disciples wouldn't be great villains, with more people, petty schemes were bound to appear, so this was also essential.

This department would also handle arranging patrols and defense matters for the sect.

After that, there would eventually be a place to issue sect missions, and they'd also need to manage leading disciples in their daily cultivation and other miscellaneous tasks—so a Miscellaneous Affairs Hall would be needed.

With that, the sect's daily operations would basically be all arranged.

In the end, based on the current setup of the sect, Lin Xiao set up the following positions:

Treasury Hall Master, Law Enforcement Hall Master, Miscellaneous Affairs Hall Master, Alchemy Elder, Artifact Refining Elder, Talisman Elder, Formation Elder, Scripture Library Master, Spirit Cuisine Elder, Spirit Beast Garden Master, and Spirit Field Elder.

These positions had no rank difference among them—all were directly managed by Lin Xiao.

Below them were the overseers within each department, and these overseers were directly managed by each department's head.

Below that were the disciple staff members.

From now on, everyone's salary would be distributed based on their position rank and their contribution merit for working actively—simply put, a base salary plus commissions.

After entering these positions and their respective responsibilities into the system's position panel, Lin Xiao also took a look at the sect status section.

It still had the four ranks: Direct Disciple, Elite Disciple, Inner Disciple, and Outer Disciple.

He didn't plan to change them.

Anyway, this was something only he could see.

As for cultivation resource quotas for different disciples, Lin Xiao didn't intend to change those either.

From now on, every disciple's cultivation quota would be treated equally, with the same starting value. If someone wanted more, they'd have to work hard to raise their contribution points to earn it.