The Cultivators Who Throw Themselves into Your Arms

This person was none other than one of the ten members of their cultivation world group, Fellow Daoist Su Wanjun from the Tianxuan Sect of the Southern Spirit Domain, a newly advanced early Nascent Soul stage cultivator.

"Elder Yao, please save me quickly!"

Yao Yuchang: ......

Could it be that this Fellow Daoist Su failed to notice that he himself was locked in a cage and being dragged along, looking every bit like a prisoner of war?

Save him? Yao Yuchang himself wished someone would come rescue him first.

Yao Yuchang glanced at Su Wanjun and ignored him.

Su Wanjun seemed to finally realize that Elder Yao was being dragged in while trapped in a cage. He fell silent in disappointment, watching the caged Yao Yuchang being pulled away.

After passing Su Wanjun, when Yao Yuchang walked past the second room, he was shocked to find that there was another person locked inside, someone he also knew: Luo Qiuzhi, the Fifth Elder of the Law Enforcement Hall of the Wanxiang Sect from the Northern Spirit Domain, a mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator.

The third room held Fellow Daoist Hong from the Wangyun Sect of the Chongxiao Domain.

The fourth room held Fellow Daoist Hua from the Dixuan Sect of the Southern Spirit Domain.

The fifth room held Fellow Daoist Xu from the Dishamen Sect of the Northern Spirit Domain.

The sixth room held Fellow Daoist Liu from the Hongyuan Sect of the Southern Spirit Domain.

......

When he saw the very familiar face in the eighth room, Yao Yuchang closed his eyes in despair.

All nine members of their cultivation world group, except for the traitor He Yi, had been captured completely.

This was really... If he had known this would happen, he would rather have never heard of Xiushui City or the Lingxian Sect at all, and asked no questions. After all, what did the changes in the mortal world have to do with them? They could have just focused on investigating the matter of the Extreme Stone, that would have been far better.

Now look at the situation, they were all rounded up in one fell swoop.

While Yao Yuchang was drowning in regret, Liao Pantu threw him into the ninth room.

The moment he was locked inside, he immediately cast a spatial spell to try to tear open a rift in space, but this time he couldn't even rip open a tiny crack. This place seemed to even disable all spatial magic!

Seeing this, Yao Yuchang had no choice but to give up his attempt.

If this place could even disable spatial spells, then all his other means would surely be rendered useless too. What's more, there was not a trace of spiritual energy here, so he had to conserve his power carefully.

Having just left a spiritless region not long ago, he had clearly already formed a good habit of frugality.

Yao Yuchang wasn't overly worried that his life would be in danger. After all, with the status and background this group of people had, as long as Wan Wantong didn't want to immediately draw the attention of their respective sects to this place, he would never dare to harm any of them.

But staying locked up in this spiritless cell for a long time was never a viable solution. Yao Yuchang paced around the room frowning, quietly thinking about what countermeasures he could take next.

Outside, Liao Pantu finished locking him up and left the Cage Courtyard. He went to find Yuan Jinsheng to assign him the next set of tasks.

Right now, there were more than enough cultivators assigned to reclaim wasteland and plow fields, there was no shortage of these nine high-level cultivators including Venerable Gui Jia at all. In that case, it made far more sense to have them do other kinds of work, otherwise these strong laborers would just be wasting their strength doing nothing.

So Liao Pantu instructed Yuan Jinsheng to arrange for them to work in production lines.

Tasks like alchemy, carving formation patterns, and artifact forging.

Very few people in this group had specialized skills in these areas, otherwise they would have been working in their sects' Four Arts Halls, and would never have been dispatched out to investigate external matters.

But no matter what, they were all cultivators of the cultivation world, far more experienced and knowledgeable. They had been exposed to far more content related to the four great cultivation arts than the cultivators in the mortal realm, so it was a pretty good arrangement to have them craft items.

Even if you couldn't ask them to produce high-level elixirs or high-level formation plates, with their powerful spiritual energy reserves, churning out low-level items for them was as easy as mass production.

Of course, you had to give people benefits for the work they did. The compensation Xiushui City offered them was that the rooms they were locked in would have spiritual energy released into them at regular intervals, plus a commission cut corresponding to the number of goods they produced.

This commission rate was definitely not as high as what the formal disciples of the Lingxian Sect received, only one-tenth of that.

After all, prisoners of war deserved the treatment of prisoners of war.

With He Yi, their old acquaintance, overseeing things, these nine cultivators who had "walked right into their trap" didn't add much extra workload for the Lingxian Sect members at all.

They didn't cause any commotion in Xiushui City either. On the contrary, they gave the city's teahouses plenty of new story material for the storytellers to share.

Following the complete success of the first transaction at the Xiushui City Trade Affairs Center for all the sects and royal families, every shop on the First Street of the commercial district opened for business smoothly.

All the shops in the commercial district put a lot of effort into their opening promotions and decorations. They even spent a large sum of mortal silver and gold to hire lion dance troupes made up of ordinary civilians in the city to liven up the opening events.

Firecrackers, the ultimate symbol of liveliness, were set off by the dozens and hundreds, their crackling sound echoing across the whole of Xiushui City.

Fortunately this was Xiushui City. If this were an ordinary small town, the noise would have been too much for the old residential buildings to bear, shaking off entire layers of plaster from the walls.

This bustle not only drew the attention of cultivators, but also gathered crowds of ordinary mortals stopping to watch.

Even though they knew nothing about cultivation practices, that didn't stop them from enjoying the fun and seeing all the new and exotic sights. Where else would they ever get a chance to see things like this?

Not to mention that some of the ordinary mortals even had spirit stones in their own hands.

Many cultivators who had traveled from far away were overjoyed to see such a well-organized commercial street.

They wandered from shop to shop, and found that each store sold a completely different main category of goods.

The shops were divided into broad categories: some only sold elixirs, some only sold formations, some only sold artifacts, and some only sold talismans.

But even among shops that fell under the same broad category, there were still huge differences. For example, among the four elixir shops, one mainly sold recovery-type elixirs, one mainly sold attack-type elixirs, and the other two were even more distinctive: one sold life-saving elixirs and poison elixirs, while the other sold all kinds of special functional elixirs.

The shops in other categories followed the same pattern.

This made the mortal realm cultivators feel extremely curious, and filled them with a strong desire to keep browsing and shopping.

What's more, they noticed that not only was the variety of goods abundant, the stock seemed nearly endless. Many low-level cultivators saw high-level cultivators paying with spirit stones to buy items, but the goods on the shelves were restocked almost instantly, with no sign of ever selling out!

This was nothing but great news for them.

If the shops on this commercial street could keep operating like this, wouldn't the mortal world have a stable place to buy all the common cultivation resources they needed in the future?

With that thought in mind, whenever they found something they really liked and their pockets weren't too tight, they would pay with spirit stones to buy a few pieces.

They hoped that as long as there were customers spending money, these shops would stay open for good.

Many people also found the Lingxian Sect General Store located at the very end of First Street.

The goods sold in this general store might not impress high-level, wealthy cultivators much, but for the vast majority of low-level cultivators, especially rogue cultivators, this was literally the shop of their dreams!