Fifty Buildings

It was obviously impossible to send these informants out to reclaim wasteland right away. They still had no clear understanding of their current situation, and would certainly continue waiting for Wanwantong to come rescue them. How could they willingly lower their heads and start working now?

They would need to go through a period of coercion and inducement before they adapted.

Lin Xiao left this matter to Senior Liao Pantu, whose experience and worldly wisdom were both considerable.

Since these informant cultivators were prisoners, they naturally could not receive the same treatment as the residents and visitors of Xiushui City. Their freedom was severely restricted.

Xiushui City had set aside a special area for them to live in, located in the underground city. It was not far in a straight line from the trading affairs center aboveground, but a barrier separated it from the auction venue, so they could not go there for now.

It could be said that the residential area arranged for the informant cultivators by the Lingxian Sect was an isolated zone within the underground city.

However, that did not mean they were imprisoned underground. They could still go aboveground, but their only passage led to the hundred mu of farmland by the trading center and the vast stretch of desolate wilderness behind North Mountain.

Before the informants arrived, Xiushui City had already isolated this entire area from everywhere else with barriers.

Thus, apart from the disciples of the Lingxian Sect assigned to manage them, these informant cultivators would not see anyone else. Nor could they hope to secretly send any messages out.

Their only destination was to reclaim wasteland and farm it.

Of course, they could also choose to resist and refuse to do anything.

Unfortunately for them, Liao Pantu had already prepared for that.

During the first few days after the informant cultivators arrived in Xiushui City, they discovered that although this place could not compare to the cultivation world, it could certainly be considered rich in spiritual energy compared with the mortal realm as a whole. Moreover, no one seemed to be beating or interrogating them. They had merely been locked up, one person to a room, inside a series of high-rise buildings.

These rooms did not really look like prison cells. Each one was a one-bedroom apartment, furnished with all the basic necessities, including beds, tables, and chairs.

The only problem was that they were rather densely packed. Each high-rise had twenty-five floors, with sixteen rooms on every floor, and there were fifty buildings in total.

Even after all of them had moved in, thirteen buildings remained empty.

The people in charge of guarding and managing the informant cultivators had them choose their floors according to their cultivation levels, from low to high. The reason was simple: none of these buildings had stairs or anything similar. Every door opened directly onto the building’s outer wall.

If a Qi Refinement cultivator were placed too high up, they might open the door while still half-asleep, take one step, and fall to their death.

After all, Qi Refinement cultivators were not yet capable of flying through the air, and their bodies were not strong enough to survive a fall of nearly a hundred meters without so much as a scratch.

It would hardly be reasonable to make these Qi Refinement cultivators take a tumble every time they left their rooms. Therefore, the lower floors had to be reserved for them.

For the first few days, Liao Pantu simply kept them there without paying them any attention. At first, the informant cultivators thought the cultivators of this mortal realm were laughable. They had captured so many of them, yet had not even bothered to keep them under strict guard.

Thus, with Venerable Gui Jia taking the lead, they gathered everyone in the broad open space in front of the fifty buildings.

He figured that no matter what sort of place this was, with so many cultivators among them, they should at least be able to fight their way out by blowing it apart.

Afterward, he would hurry back to headquarters and exaggerate the account of what had happened. He could claim that the cultivators here had joined forces and that an unknown Nascent Soul cultivator had appeared—perhaps secretly sent over by another faction from the cultivation world. That way, he could shift the blame elsewhere. Perhaps he would not only escape punishment, but might even receive credit for bringing back intelligence from a Nascent Soul cultivator.

When all the informant cultivators heard Venerable Gui Jia’s proposal, they agreed wholeheartedly. Clearly, none of them believed that the barrier of this mortal realm could hold so many of them prisoner.

They had been captured earlier because their enemies had caught them off guard, and because their forces had been too scattered.

But now they had more than ten thousand people gathered in one place. Over a thousand of them were Golden Core and Nascent Soul cultivators, while the remaining ten thousand were at the Foundation Establishment stage. Even if that Nascent Soul cultivator from before came back, they would still have the strength to fight him. With so many of them joining forces to form arrays, they could wear him down to death!

Unfortunately, ideals were plump while reality was painfully thin.

When more than ten thousand of them joined forces and attempted to shatter the barrier surrounding the area, they discovered that it was completely impossible!

It was not that the combined power of their spells was insufficient to break the regional barrier. Rather, they never even had the chance to unleash their spells!

The moment they began circulating their spiritual energy and casting offensive spells, every spell was instantly dissolved by an unknown force.

At the same time, a bolt of lightning as thick as a barrel would descend from the sky and strike every single one of them, blasting them until they were charred and fragrant.

The lightning did not look particularly thick, but its power was truly formidable. Even Nascent Soul cultivators were injured by it.

Some of the more observant cultivators suddenly realized that the power of the lightning striking each of them seemed to be roughly equal to the power of the spell they had just unleashed.

“Could this be… an array that reflects attacks back on the attacker?” someone with extensive knowledge blurted out, exposing the truth in a single sentence.

Unless this array was neutralized, any further attacks would be futile. Unless, of course, they genuinely had a proclivity for self-abuse.

The informant cultivators therefore began searching every corner of the area for a way to break the array.

What they did not know was that this was a built-in function of Xiushui City itself. If people of their caliber could break through and escape, Sys would probably activate its own self-destruct protocol.

Thus, they spent several days searching without finding the slightest clue.

Gradually, some of them began to give up on trying.

The spiritual energy here was abundant, after all. At worst, they could simply devote themselves to cultivation and wait for headquarters to send someone to rescue them.

When it came to giving up and doing nothing, all it took was for a small portion of people to start before everyone else was eventually dragged into it.

After cultivating for nearly ten days, they were pleasantly surprised to discover that the cultivation conditions here were actually quite good.

There were no miscellaneous chores to disturb them, and they did not need to keep watch over various places all day long or constantly relay messages. Even if headquarters learned what had happened, it could not hold them responsible, because even Venerable Gui Jia, the most powerful among them, had been captured and was completely helpless. What could lackeys who had not even reached the Nascent Soul stage possibly do?

As the saying went, when the sky fell, the tall ones would hold it up.

Besides, the spiritual energy here was denser than elsewhere. It was practically an ideal place for secluded meditation and cultivation.

For a time, the cultivation atmosphere in this prison district of fifty buildings was so intense that it rivaled that of the Lingxian Sect’s cultivation hall.

Unfortunately, Heaven does not always grant people what they want, and good times rarely last.

Before half a month had passed, the informant cultivators were stunned to discover that the spiritual energy around them had vanished.

The spiritual energy here had not gradually grown thinner. It had simply disappeared all at once.