Chapter 177: Chapter 135: Scheming (Extra 1 for Chen Pengyu at)
“Junior Li, congratulations!” Yu Yong’an said as he handed a jade bottle over to Li Shiming.
Li Shiming did not participate in the final auction of the super-grade magical artifact, as it was a defensive item. In his view, it wasn’t as practical as the Spirit Turtle Shield.
With his strength, if he were to infuse it with spiritual power, it wouldn’t be long before he fell due to a lack of spiritual energy.
The item Yu Yong’an had acquired for him was the Foundation Establishment Pill he had bid for, which cost 123,100 spirit stones.
To be honest, that price was not expensive, at least Li Shiming thought so.
But in reality, that price had already far exceeded the normal auction value. Every five years, two Foundation Establishment Pills would be auctioned off, and each cultivator was acutely aware of the value of the pills in terms of spirit stones.
If the bidding price exceeded the cultivators’ psychological limit, even if they still had spirit stones, they wouldn’t bid.
Another reason was that Li Shiming’s bids were too aggressive; he simply did not treat spirit stones as currency, adding ten thousand at a time.
If it wasn’t for a force continually driving up the price, perhaps it could have been won for within one hundred thousand spirit stones.
Li Shiming knew the identity of the cultivator who drove up the bids, simply by looking at his surname; the cultivator’s surname was Yun.
Li Shiming scanned the interior of the jade bottle with his spiritual thought. The bottle was specially made by the sect for storing important elixir pills, capable of preserving them for a long time, and the Foundation Establishment Pill was safely stored inside.
“Brother Yu, I’ll give you the spirit stones!” he said, reaching for the spirit stones.
“Junior Li, no rush on the spirit stones, just deduct it from later transactions. We need you to provide five hundred ‘Thousand-Mile Mutual View Second Generation’ for the trading house!” Yu Yong’an said with a smile, stopping him.
The Hidden Dragon Trading House’s event this time was an overwhelming success, with all participants extremely satisfied; all two hundred ‘Thousand-Mile Mutual View Second Generation’ devices were kept by the cultivators.
The Hidden Dragon Trading House was planning to hold a small auction every week, a large auction every month, and daily scheduled new product introductions.
The cultivators were more approving of Hidden Dragon Trading House’s sales model because it was much safer and spared a lot of trouble.
“I will have the five hundred ‘Thousand-Mile Mutual View Second Generation’ ready within three days!” Li Shiming agreed without insisting, nodding his head.
He didn’t linger any longer with the ecstatic Yu Yong’an; once he returned to his cave dwelling, he immediately went down to the underground space.
He approached a machine, which was a computer with two CPU chips, 64G of memory, acting much like a programmable switch.
Currently, all data from both ‘Thousand-Mile Mutual View’ and ‘Thousand-Mile Mutual View Second Generation’ would first pass through this computer before exchanging data with the core of the Sect Formation.
Especially the group function on ‘Thousand-Mile Mutual View Second Generation’ was completely controlled by this computer.
As for data security, since all stored data existed in hexadecimal format on the hard drive.
Without the necessary knowledge, even if this computer was handed to a Golden Core cultivator, they would not be able to uncover its secrets.
Of course, Li Shiming wouldn’t check every chat message, but the greatest use of this computer was for monitoring—triggering an alarm if the chat content included any of the keywords he had pre-set.
After all, this world had no concept of information security, and besides, even in his previous life, technicians managing chat servers could see user chat context, couldn’t they?
He then checked the machine room space, where his clone was absorbing spiritual energy.
The concentration of spiritual power in the machine room space was somewhat exaggerated, only slightly less than the environment of the exclusive Low Grade Spirit Vein beneath the underground space.
Underneath his clone was not the original Gathering Spirit Plate but a Gathering Spirit Array made up of thirty-six array flags.
The same Gathering Spirit Array, the effects of the Gathering Spirit Array surpassed the original Gathering Spirit Plate by more than double.
In such an environment, his clone could finally manage to maintain its cultivation conditions.
Additionally, after observing for so long, the drop of essence blood at the clone’s heart had shrunk by more than half.
The clone’s spiritual thought and physique had also greatly increased, reminding Li Shiming of the vast gulf that existed between second-generation cultivators and ordinary ones.
The good news was, in a few more months, the clone would be able to fully absorb and assimilate that drop of essence blood, and then it would be able to leave the machine room space.
Elsewhere, in the main hall of Yun’s Trading House’s headquarters, five elders from the Yun Family were seated according to their status.
Yun Ze had no seat, so he had to stand at the lower end.
“Clan leader, I told you to agree to the Holy Ice Sect’s proposal—to hand over Li Shiming to them!” the elder seated at the upper left spoke gravely to the Yun Family Patriarch sitting in the center.
The change in Yun’s Trading House’s attitude towards Li Shiming was due to two differing voices within the family.
It was because the Holy Ice Sect had contacted Yun’s Trading House, hoping to lure out Li Shiming through them and hand him over to the Holy Ice Sect, for which the sect had offered significant benefits.
The matter of Li Shiming trading a large volume of goods with Yun’s Trading House was not a big secret, so naturally, the Holy Ice Sect’s intelligence network had also noticed it.
The benefits of handing over Li Shiming were so substantial that some of the upper echelons of Yun’s Trading House agreed to the Holy Ice Sect’s proposal.
However, the Yun Family Patriarch did not wish to do so, as once the matter was exposed, it would spell disaster for the Yun Family.
It was precisely this indecisiveness among the higher-ups that resulted in the changed behavior towards Li Shiming by Yun’s Trading House’s subordinates; they no longer wanted to fulfill orders that did not earn spirit stones.