The Cultivation Seed Merchants
Yi Yeok raced through the forest, outpacing the night wind itself.
Before long, a single shadow caught up to him. It was Mo Yeong.
"So? Did it work?"
Yi Yeok didn't answer, but the moment Mo Yeong spotted the bundle slung over his shoulder, she knew he had.
"As expected of my darling. You actually robbed an immortal sect. Once word of this gets out, you'll become a living legend."
Yi Yeok gave a crooked smirk.
"Is that all? Someday I'll clean out a high-tier sect too."
"How does my darling dream so big?"
They ran on like a whirlwind. Before long, a crease formed between Yi Yeok's brows.
"Someone's tailing us."
"What?"
"Don't look back. They won't show themselves to your eyes anyway."
Sure enough, cultivators were a different breed from the strongest of the mortal world. They had picked up on his presence without even glimpsing him, and that terrifying speed alone marked them as a cut above. The Jeong Tak fellow from earlier really must have been the lowest of the low in that sect after all.
Even so, Yi Yeong could tell that their pursuer was no real threat compared to that woman from the Guryeong Sect earlier. Not worth the hassle of a fight.
"No reason to waste time tangling with them. Cat, grit those teeth and keep up!"
Yi Yeok pushed his speed even higher. Mo Yeong's jaw dropped. The wind whipping past her ears already roared like a typhoon—and he was accelerating beyond that?
To avoid falling behind, Mo Yeong did exactly as he said: clenched her teeth and clung on for dear life.
Some time later, dozens of li behind them, the elder came to a halt.
"Unbelievable."
He hovered roughly five ja above the ground. Even flying through the air, he had failed to catch up to those mysterious thieves who'd apparently been running on their own two feet.
He could have pushed his speed further, but decided against straining himself and gave up. Their true identities were simply impossible to pin down.
The elder sank into troubled thought. The sheer audacity of robbing an immortal sect, and that extraordinary speed. According to Jeong Tak, this was the work of some fledgling not even twenty years old—how could anyone that young possess such skill?
No mere mortal could have such power, and a mortal wouldn't have dared dream of touching a sect in the first place.
Even assuming they came from a higher-tier sect, it didn't add up. Losing the dantian supply stung, but measured against the entire scale of the Yangcheon Sect, it amounted to little more than a mosquito's blood meal. No higher sect would go to such lengths for a haul that trivial.
"Utterly inexplicable. Could it be they knew the sect would be empty today? If so, this may have been a coordinated diversion. I must inform the sect leader at once."
Once Yi Yeok was certain they'd shaken the pursuit, he eased his pace a little. Mo Yeong, who had been pushed nearly to her limit, sucked in ragged breaths.
"Let's... let's rest here a bit."
Yi Yeok leaned against a suitable tree trunk and sat down. Mo Yeong found a broad flat rock and flopped onto her back across it entirely.
"Immortal sects are rather fun, aren't they."
"Oh?"
"At minimum, a place has to be this good to be worth robbing. All right, decision made. Someday I'm going to strip a high-tier sect down to its bare bones."
"I'll admit I got a fresh look at your skills today, but that's genuinely not going to be easy. The gap between even mid-tier and low-tier sects is as wide as the gap between the immortal world and the mortal one—let alone high-tier."
Mo Yeong spoke up.
"Come on then, how about doing what I said and coming to the Nokhyeon Sect with me? Distinguish yourself there, and you can advance to a mid-tier sect. Maybe you'd even end up connected to a high-tier one. Just think of it as scouting ahead—as my dowry."
"You're surprisingly well-informed. You haven't even joined a sect yet."
"Hehe. Actually, my dad hunted high and low and found me a private tutor. Probably some exiled cultivation seed, or something like that."
"And what does 'distinguishing yourself' mean, exactly? Am I supposed to topple the Nokhyeon Sect leader too?"
Mo Yeong lit up. For the first time, she judged her persuasion was actually landing.
"Once a year there's something called the Hae-seon, the Celestial Transfer. They pick the most outstanding talent from among it and send them up to the higher sects. It's a rule the Seongdo Immortal Sect laid down ages ago."
"What? They hand their own trained disciples over to someone else?"
"It's not a loss, though. The sect receiving the talent has to pay the originating sect an astronomical pile of resources—pellets, spirit stones, the works. The low-tier sects actually count down the days to the Hae-seon, raising disciples just for it."
"I think I get it. So they're running a people trade, aren't they?"
"You could look at it that way."
"Now that I see it, that's how all these low-tier sects operate."
The low-tier sects apparently treated the Hae-seon as their core business. Grow talent, then 'sell it off' through the Hae-seon—and pocket a tidy fortune in the bargain.
That said, it wasn't as though the sects raised their disciples out of pure generosity.
Even Yeo Gwi had spent hundreds of thousands of nyang just to get into a low-tier sect. And if he had, no doubt Mo Yeong had too. Getting in wasn't the end of it, either—the pellets and spirit stones needed for cultivation cost a fortune, and most of that expense was footed by one's birth family.
Only now did Yi Yeong understand how the Yangcheon Sect's massive bulk—carved halfway up a mountain—had been built. He spat on the ground at his feet.
"Makes me sick. It's not like they're raising pigs or horses. And they don't even feed their stock for free—people pay to climb into the stable."
"Can't be helped. Without going through them, you'd struggle to get contact with even a mid-tier sect, let alone a high-tier one."
"...Whatever. Doesn't matter to me what those bastards earn. One way or another, I'm robbing a high-tier sect."
"Heh, my darling young lord. Who knew you had such buried ambition?"
Yi Yeok said nothing. Absently, he rummaged through the front of his robe and closed his hand around something—the jade pendant the woman from the Guryeong Sect had dropped long ago.
"So it's settled, then. You, me, and Yeo Gwi—off to the Nokhyeon Sect, the three of us?"
Yi Yeok rose to his feet without answering.
"If you're done resting, get up. We're going back to the turtle. Something feels off—I'm worried that fool's gone and gotten himself into some kind of trouble on his own."
