Chapter Ninety-Six: The Poison Master’s Visit

At Qingyun Immortal Academy, before the notice board of the City Lord Candidates’ Potential Rankings.

By nightfall, the crowd of students that had once gathered there to watch the commotion had already dispersed.

“Ye Mo has climbed another five places! His rating is outstanding!”

A young cultivator in black robes, cold-faced and alone, stood before the ranking list.

His expression was one of surprise.

He was a confident man. There are two kinds of confidence: arrogance without basis, and confidence born of real ability. Lin Zhi happened to be the latter.

Among the hundreds of martial artists who had arrived aboard the pirate ship at East Sea Spirit Isle, his ability had been among the very best. With his own skill, he had even found work as an apprentice poison-refiner in Donglai Immortal Village, and had earned some spirit stones by selling a poisonous formula known as Ghost-Seeking Sorrow.

Among those hundreds, only Ye Mo and Gao Jian truly caught his eye. As for the young marquis Zheng Yiqing, he merely relied on the power of the Zheng family and was not worth Lin Zhi’s regard.

Back when he saw the notice recruiting students for Qingyun Immortal Academy in Donglai Immortal Village, his ambitions had been stirred. After great difficulty, he had scraped together one hundred spirit stones and become a support student at Qingyun Immortal Academy.

But a support student was not his goal.

Lin Zhi wanted to use that role as a stepping stone, then find a way to become a City Lord Candidate and found his own immortal village.

Yet the more than one hundred names on Qingyun Immortal Academy’s potential rankings for City Lord Candidates had shocked him and filled him with immense pressure.

The list briefly mentioned each candidate’s background and the vast resources behind them. The higher the ranking, the more astonishing the backing.

For the first time, Lin Zhi realized that the ability he had always taken pride in could not possibly catch up to those City Lord Candidates.

Compared with the children of great cultivating clans and noble families, his foundation was far too thin. Even if he had become a City Lord Candidate with a thousand spirit stones, he would have ended up at the bottom of that potential ranking list, just like Ye Mo.

Even among the more than a thousand support students at Qingyun Immortal Academy, he had no real advantage.

Lin Zhi had chosen the most obscure path of all: poison-refining.

Poison-refining was similar to alchemy, in that both used spiritual herbs and medicinal plants as materials to produce pills. The difference was that the former used poison-bearing herbs, while the latter used ordinary ones.

But very few cultivators chose poison-refining.

Alchemy was generally used to improve a cultivator’s cultivation, could bring in large amounts of spirit stones, and could even earn one a respected position in an immortal city. Poison-refining, by contrast, was for killing. It was easily associated with demonic poison cultivators and was not readily accepted.

Between poison-refining and alchemy, most cultivators would rather choose alchemy.

From childhood, Lin Zhi had been exposed to all kinds of poison. His body possessed strong resistance to toxins, and he had a natural talent for identifying poisons.

Long before on the continent of the Nine Provinces, he had already been a famed poison master. On that lonely island in the Eastern Sea, he had even refined an extremely ferocious poison from a rank-nine poisonous herb, killing a first-rank sea demon beast.

Lin Zhi had never doubted his own ability in poison-refining.

However, no matter how strong his skill in that art might be, in the eyes of most cultivators he was still only an ordinary rogue cultivator with a particular specialty.

People like that were common among the support students. Their best path was to become the subordinate of some city lord, a slightly higher-ranked support cultivator.

Lin Zhi was deeply unwilling to accept that.

He longed to become a city lord, to build a poison-based immortal city famed throughout the cultivation world, and let every cultivator know that poison-refining could stand above the crowd.

Unfortunately, without a family to provide enough spirit stones, he could only become a support student.

Among the City Lord Candidates within the academy, many had also tried to recruit Lin Zhi. Cultivators skilled in poison-refining were too rare; among a thousand support students, there were only a handful. Moreover, those few had long since become followers of other City Lord Candidates.

Only Lin Zhi, the poison-refining student, remained unattached.

But whenever he thought of those City Lord Candidates looking down from on high, with the air of “I grant you the honor of following me,” Lin Zhi’s face grew even darker.

Those fellows were all people with a powerful desire to control others. Once one accepted their recruitment, one could never leave again and would forever remain in a subordinate position. In their eyes, leaving was equivalent to betrayal.

“I want to found my own immortal city, a powerful poison-based immortal city! Perhaps he can help me!”

Lin Zhi clenched his fist, his gaze fixed tightly on one name in the potential rankings.

Ye Mo!

That fellow, also a rogue cultivator from the Nine Provinces, was among the City Lord Candidates at the very bottom of the potential list. If he were to pick one person among those hundred-odd city lords who might help him, it would have to be Ye Mo.

That night, Ye Mo’s room was still lit.

Holding an ancient reference volume borrowed from the academy’s library, Ye Mo was turning its pages and pondering how to perfect the defenses of the lowest-tier immortal village. The subject assigned by Kuang Zhen this time was precisely “city defenses.”

“Brother Ye, someone’s here to see you! It’s that black-robed poison master, Lin Zhi. I only found out today that he’s also in Qingyun Immortal Academy, as a support student in the poison division! He says he’s here to see you, so maybe he wants to follow you!”

Wang Hu ran upstairs, pushed open the door, and said excitedly.

Qingyun Immortal Academy was enormous. Students of different disciplines attended classes in different places, so it was usually hard to run into one another.

“Lin Zhi is also at Qingyun Immortal Academy? What does he want with me?”

Ye Mo was puzzled.

He was not as optimistic as Wang Hu. If Lin Zhi were so easily willing to attach himself to someone else, he would have done so long ago. There was no need to wait until now.

Ye Mo quickly went downstairs and saw Lin Zhi in a small sitting room on the first floor of the attic.

“Brother Lin! It’s been a long time. I never expected we’d both be studying at Qingyun Immortal Academy. If I had known you were here too, I would have visited you at once!”

Ye Mo went up to greet him with a smile.

“I also only learned that Brother Ye was at the academy when I saw your name on the City Lord potential rankings. But I did not come today to reminisce.”

Lin Zhi smiled and took a pale green jade bottle from his robe. “Some time ago, while at the academy, I refined a first-rank poison pill. It was made from twelve highly toxic medicinal herbs, and against cultivators it can seal the throat with blood. Even a first-rank demon beast with extremely tenacious vitality would lose much of its fighting strength within a few breaths and die within half an hour.”

“A first-rank poison pill?”

Ye Mo could not help but freeze. A strange thought flashed through his mind. He looked at Lin Zhi and said, “If you want to sell poison pills for spirit stones, there are many shops in Qingyun Immortal City that would buy pills like that, and the price would not be low. Brother Lin has come looking for me, surely for some other matter?”

“Heh, Brother Ye is indeed quick of mind! You have something I need. I want to use this poison pill to make a trade with you!”

Lin Zhi’s expression turned serious.

“Oh? What sort of trade? Let me hear it.”

Ye Mo asked, his expression unchanged.

“I want all the course material for the City Lord Candidates. Every lesson taught by Kuang Zhen, give it to me, and I will provide you with one bottle of poison pills like this.”

Lin Zhi’s eyes were full of longing.

The City Lord Candidates’ curriculum was the crystallization of countless cultivators’ wisdom accumulated over ten thousand years. These were things he had no access to. Yet they were precisely what one had to master to become a qualified city lord. He was not arrogant enough to believe he could become a proper city lord without learning anything at all.

“What do you want those for? You’re not a City Lord Candidate, so it’s useless to you!”

Ye Mo’s expression turned odd.

“I don’t have that many spirit stones to sign up as a City Lord Candidate. And even if I did become one, there’d still be no chance of snatching a place in the top ten among the hundred-odd candidates. So I plan to leave Qingyun Immortal Academy after graduation, take my people, find an island, and build a village-level wild city.”

“A wild city?”

Ye Mo was instantly stunned.

In the Eastern Sea archipelago, nearly all immortal cities were members of the Immortal City Alliance.

Of course, there was another kind of immortal city: a wild city.

These cities had not obtained the status of an allied city lord. Some wild cities built by rogue cultivators stood alone in a corner, unable to receive the protection or support of the Immortal City Alliance.

Such a city was like a lone boat in the ocean, liable to be swallowed at any moment by violent winds and waves. It could not last long.

“A wild city cannot survive in the Eastern Sea. From the information I’ve seen, among the four levels of village, town, city, and main city, the strongest wild city in the Eastern Sea at present only grew as far as the city tier, and its city lord was a late Gold Core cultivator. Even so, it was destroyed in the struggle against an orc tribe.

“Without the protection and support of the thirty-six main immortal cities of the Eastern Sea archipelago and the Immortal City Alliance, a wild city simply cannot survive here on its own. Brother Lin, this is far too risky!”

After his shock, Ye Mo calmed down and shook his head.

“I understand that very well. But it’s the only way. Since there is no hope of becoming a proper city lord, even founding a wild city is something I want to try; otherwise I won’t be able to rest easy! That’s why I want to trade this bottle of poison pills for Brother Ye’s city lord lessons.”

Lin Zhi gave a bitter smile.

Ye Mo thought for a long while before shaking his head. “Your poison pills really are good things. However, I have little use for them right now! I’m not planning to hunt demon beasts, and it’s perfectly safe in Qingyun Immortal City, so I have no use for them at all.”

“Brother Ye, though this bottle of poison pills isn’t especially valuable, it doesn’t require you to pay any extra price. As long as you give me the course material, these pills are practically free!”

Seeing that Ye Mo still had not agreed, Lin Zhi hurriedly said.

Ye Mo was the only person he could turn to.

If he went to any other City Lord Candidate, he feared that before he had even finished speaking, he would be driven out.

“Although Qingyun Immortal Academy does not explicitly forbid passing these course materials to outsiders, this is specialized study for City Lord Candidates. If I were discovered, the consequences would likely be severe. I don’t want to take that risk. You know as well as I do that it was no easy matter for me to become a City Lord Candidate. I won’t risk academy punishment, or even the cancellation of my graduation assessment, for a bottle of poison pills.”

Ye Mo shook his head.

Lin Zhi fell silent.

It seemed the thing in his hands was still not enough to make Ye Mo agree to the trade.

Just as Lin Zhi was filled with disappointment, Ye Mo suddenly spoke again. “Poison pills are not very appealing to me. However, you can trade with something else!”

“Something else?”

A flash of delight crossed Lin Zhi’s face, but then it dimmed again. “Aside from poison pills, what else could you possibly care about?” He knew his own limitations; aside from poisons, he had nothing else worth mentioning.