Second Round of Assignments

One by one, the little tree demons that had scattered earlier began gathering around the pool. Those who were injured followed Big One’s example and submerged themselves in the water to heal.

Several uninjured little tree demons sat by the pool with their roots wrapped around themselves, watching their injured kin recover.

One of them asked softly, “Do you think our boss will come back?”

Another little tree demon responded in confusion, “They’re our boss. Aren’t bosses supposed to stay with their clansmen?”

All the tree demons turned their gazes toward Big One in the pool, hoping to get an answer from it.

These tree demons had all gathered here over the years, guided by their bloodlines after gradually gaining sentience. Big One had been the first among them to develop intelligence and come here.

“Our boss was tricked by those people,” Big One said indignantly.

“Many years ago, I personally saw those people in yellow robes trick our boss into using its true body and divine abilities to build Zhenyang City.”

“They must have used some underhanded method to seal our boss’s bloodline memories!” Big One declared with certainty. “Otherwise, there’s no way our boss wouldn’t be able to sense our existence or come out to meet us.”

“That’s right. They must have a guilty conscience. That’s why they set up a barrier outside specifically to keep us from entering and meeting our boss!” added another tree demon that had gained sentience relatively early.

A small number of the tree demons had only awakened in recent years and knew little about the past. After hearing Big One’s explanation, they nodded in innocent understanding.

The group of tree demons gathered together and chattered for quite a while, but the information Lin Xiao was able to glean remained extremely limited.

Although Lin Xiao didn’t recognize what specific species of tree demon they belonged to, their condition was quite similar to Little Luan’s when it had first gained sentience. He guessed that, for their species, these tree demons were all still quite young.

However, the Zhenyang City they had mentioned earlier was worth visiting.

A city built with the help of a tree demon—Lin Xiao was curious what it looked like.

Seeing that, despite many of the little tree demons being injured, none of them seemed to have suffered damage to their foundations, Lin Xiao stopped listening to their denunciations of the Zhenyang Sect. He withdrew his divine sense and quietly left.

The spiritual plants in this region seemed to grow far more luxuriantly than those in the other areas Lin Xiao had passed through, and there were far more varieties as well. As a result, quite a few cultivators came here to gather them.

Cities were generally not built too close together. Lin Xiao guessed that most of the cultivators out gathering spiritual plants had probably come from Zhenyang City.

He didn’t need to ask anyone for directions. He could find Zhenyang City simply by following the groups of cultivators returning from their excursions.

Although Lin Xiao had a map given to him by the Yuan family, it mainly recorded the situation in the Southern and Northern Spirit Domains. Once it reached the Profound Extremity Domain, the farther inward it went, the vaguer the map became.

Only a few of the most famous major cities in the Profound Extremity Domain were marked, and even the terrain was merely approximate.

Zhenyang City didn’t even appear as a tiny dot on the map in Lin Xiao’s possession. This entire region was nothing but a blank expanse.

Lin Xiao leisurely followed several groups of Qi Refining cultivators who had just finished gathering spiritual plants. At the same time, he received the map assignment of Yuanling City that the eight members of his sect had worked together to complete over the past five days.

After carefully reviewing it, he found that they had done an excellent job. Every detail was properly covered, and the information on each area was extremely comprehensive.

Lin Xiao was very satisfied. He immediately sent a group message to them and assigned another round of work.

The second assignment was to map the wilderness stretching from outside Yuanling City all the way to the next city, as well as every low-level secret realm around Yuanling City that had recently opened.

Completing this assignment would naturally take far longer than mapping Yuanling City itself. Not to mention the time required to explore each secret realm, even the recently opened secret realms all had different opening schedules. Some remained open for a long time and opened frequently, while others were open only briefly and rarely became accessible. Still, most of these low-level secret realms would open at least once a year.

To complete the assignment as efficiently as possible, they would need to make careful plans.

But Lin Xiao left all that to them. He set the deadline for one year later, reminded them to memorize the safety guidelines in the summer-camp handbook, and then contentedly became a hands-off manager.

After following those Qi Refining cultivators for a day and a night, Lin Xiao finally saw the Zhenyang City that the tree demons had called their boss’s creation in the distance.

There was no other reason for it—this city was simply too unusual.

It was a single enormous tree.

It was so large that even from far away, merely looking at it inspired an inexplicable sense of awe.

Its trunk was as thick as a city itself, while its dense crown towered into the clouds, so high that the naked eye could barely make out its full extent.

The branches crisscrossed over the tree’s body, forming city walls and streets together with its abundant, thick green leaves.

The entrance was a city gate built from numerous sturdy, gnarled roots at the very bottom.

Large swaths of green leaves blocked the view from above, making it impossible for Lin Xiao to see what lay inside. Although a formation prevented divine sense from probing the city, the formation didn’t appear to be particularly advanced. If he really wanted to break through it, it wouldn’t be too difficult.

However, this was a large tree demon capable of becoming an entire city through its own strength. Lin Xiao had no intention of forcibly breaking the formation just to conduct a divine-sense investigation—a thoroughly unfriendly thing to do.

He would simply enter the city properly, like everyone else.

Before he even reached the city, Lin Xiao saw many low-level cultivators setting up stalls outside the gates and calling out to passersby. Some were looking for companions to help dig up spiritual plants and medicinal herbs. Some were seeking low-level alchemists. Others didn’t want to pay the entrance fee and were selling low-level herbs outside instead.

Quite a few cultivators were even sitting cross-legged beneath the great tree’s roots, meditating and cultivating.

Most of these cultivators were in the early stages of Qi Refining and appeared rather poor. Even when they meditated and cultivated outside the city, no one seemed interested in robbing them.

They all looked as if their pockets were even cleaner than their faces.

The closer he got to Zhenyang City, the more clearly Lin Xiao could sense the wood spiritual energy in the area growing denser.

Moreover, this wood spiritual energy was unlike the mixed and impure spiritual energy elsewhere. It seemed to have already been partially sorted and refined, making it quite gentle. For cultivators, it was much easier to absorb than ordinary spiritual energy.

This was probably the foundation upon which Zhenyang City had been established.

From this alone, one could imagine how attractive the city was to cultivators with wood spiritual roots. Any cultivator whose spiritual roots included wood would likely want to cultivate here.

As the number of people around him increased, Lin Xiao thought for a moment before adjusting the Peach Leaf Pendant, making himself appear to be a young cultivator in the late Qi Refining stage.

After all, he intended to pay the entrance fee and enter the city. If he adjusted his apparent cultivation too low, someone might see that he was young, traveling alone, and still able to produce the entrance fee, which could invite trouble.

Although he was already a Nascent Soul cultivator and had nothing to fear from these Qi Refining cultivators, there was no need to attract attention when he could easily avoid it.