Chapter 54
As she repeatedly engaged in cultivation and Pill Refining, time flowed quickly.
In a flash, several months passed, the new year arrived, and Baek-Cheong turned 11 years old.
Unable to endure the boring life along the way, she consumed an Inscribed Spirit Gathering Pill and uploaded a picture post, pretending to be Jinseonkasu; the post completely flipped the Nameless Forum upside down, but that was a trivial matter.
Thanks to the top-grade Elixirs she had ignorantly devoured and her steady Qi Absorption, her seemingly bottomless Dantian was already nearly half full.
And to welcome the new year, a grand banquet where all the relatives gathered was held in the spacious Grand Banquet Hall of the Baek Clan Mansion.
Excluding those with prior engagements or in closed-door cultivation, everyone took his or her Seat, led by the Grand Patriarch, along with the Direct Lineage Families and numerous Branch Lineage Families whose faces were usually hard to see.
“Hahaha! Have you been well?”
“Elder brother, have you been healthy?”
The atmosphere in the Banquet Hall was more excited than usual.
Nine times out of ten, the Branch Lineage members gathered in small groups, clinking glasses and sharing blessings and virtues, and the topic of conversation was about Baek-Cheong, who had emerged as the Baek Clan’s new pride.
“Did you hear the news? They say the Clan Head’s Youngest daughter reached 5th-Stage Qi Condensation in just one year. Everyone was so worried during the Spiritual Root Examination because she had a Five Spirit Root. But to think she would overcome the limits of a mixed spirit root with the innate comprehension she had since she was a baby.”
“How could it be just that? To handle a 1st-Grade High-Tier Spell by splitting it into ten streams at once - not only her comprehension but also her Talent as a Prodigy must surely be a miracle bestowed by the heavens looking down upon the Baek Clan.”
“If the Clan Head ascends to the Golden Core and the Grand Patriarch enters the late stage, our Yeonha Baek Clan will surely be reborn as a Clan that commands the Southern Region.”
Going up and down the gossiping lips of the Branch Lineage members, various rumors and eyewitness accounts were passed on exactly as they were.
Their past attitude of secretly ignoring and Whispering about Baek-Cheong for being born with the terrible aptitude of a Five Spirit Root had flipped like the palm of a hand.
“Cheong-A, do you recognize your Paternal Uncle?”
“Elder brother, really, she hasn’t even seen your face properly, so how could Cheong-Yi recognize you? Maybe if you had attended the banquet for Cheong-A last time… Um, I am your Maternal Cousin-Uncle, do you recognize me?”
Even the Branch Lineage Families competed to offer silk, spiritual medicines, and so on.
They were busy making a good impression by thrusting expensive gifts into Baek-Cheong’s arms.
And they also revealed their blatant ulterior motives by forcefully pushing their own children or grandchildren to Baek-Cheong’s side, trying to stick them next to her somehow so they could get some crumbs.
“Sister Cheong! This is a spirit cat cub I caught in the wild mountains outside the Baek Clan. Isn’t it super cute?”
“Cheong-A, when I was young, at the Marketplace…”
“Sister, sister! Look at this!”
Suddenly, Baek-Cheong was surrounded by children of a similar age.
As if they had received orders, the children chattered and played pranks to attract her attention, clinging to her like leeches.
“Ah, yeah. That’s amazing.”
Baek-Cheong forced a smile as she suffered through the children’s offensive.
She felt like her energy was being sucked dry in real time.
It was such an exhausting situation that she felt she would rather be Covered in Ashes in the Pill Refining Room.
“Why give me such an ordeal…”
She tried extending her Divine Sense to secretly access the Nameless Forum while avoiding the children’s surveillance, but a child would notice the signs of her doing something else like a ghost and tug at her hem to talk to her, resulting in failure every time.
It was an inescapable dilemma, a hell of children.
“Ahem.”
Suddenly, a boy who looked a year or two older than her intruded, acting like an adult in a way that didn’t suit him at all.
Judging by his well-dressed appearance, he seemed to be from a Family with quite a bit of influence even among the branch lineages.
And his face was completely steeped in jealousy and arrogance.
“Hmph, the adults are making too much of a fuss just because you reached 5th-Stage Qi Condensation and used a few spells.”
At the boy’s provocative first words, the other children who had been chattering around them went as quiet as mice.
“I was born with the excellent aptitude of a Three Spirit Root, and next month I am set to enter the Biun Sect, a Great Sect.”
For someone from a Branch Lineage to enter a Great Sect was clearly a path to success that went beyond personal glory and would become the pride of the Clan.
“Wow! Elder brother, are you really going to the Biun Sect?”
“A Disciple of a Great Sect… I want to go too!”
The naive children were quickly swayed by the boy’s pompous boasting and let out exclamations mixed with envy.
As the children’s attention naturally shifted to the boy, Baek-Cheong felt her stifled breathing open up.
‘I’m saved!’
Cheering inwardly, she moved her Divine Sense to quietly access the Nameless Forum while the children were engrossed in the boy’s story.
However, when Baek-Cheong seemed to be doing something else without giving him even a hair’s breadth of attention, the boy’s highly inflated jealousy caught fire.
“Hey! Can’t you hear me?”
The boy snapped at Baek-Cheong with a sharp voice.
“Unlike someone who was just lucky enough to be born into the Direct Lineage Bloodline and comfortably raises their realm while squandering the Clan’s precious resources despite having the trash aptitude of a Five Spirit Root, I won’t become a lazy Cultivator!”
It was a truly childish provocation.
Baek-Cheong didn’t even feel he was worth dealing with and tried to let it go in one ear and out the other.
But as she quietly watched the boy’s arrogant and detestable mouth, the Desire to Stir Trouble that she hadn’t been able to properly pour out on the Nameless Forum surged up.
“I was bored, so you picked the right time.”
Baek-Cheong managed her expression and wore a soft smile on her lips.
Then she opened her mouth and spoke gently.
“Yeah. You’re right. You’re really amazing for barely scraping by thanks to the Clan’s backing to enter the Biun Sect, even if it’s just as an Outer Sect Disciple.”
At that, the boy’s face flushed bright red.
“Wh-what! Why would I be an Outer Sect Disciple! With a Three Spirit Root, I can easily enter the Inner Sect…”
“You still haven’t grasped reality, have you? There are overflowing Prodigies trying to enter a Great Sect, and you think you’ll go straight to being an Inner Sect Disciple with the ambiguous aptitude of a Three Spirit Root? You only avoided becoming a Chore Disciple because you have a Three Spirit Root, and even then, if you hadn’t been from a Branch Lineage of the Baek Clan, even entering would have been difficult.”
Baek-Cheong lightly cut off the boy’s words and informed him of reality.
“Even if you become an Outer Sect Disciple like that, you’ll be doing menial chores, putting your cultivation on the back burner, and failing to raise your realm. The Sect will whisper that it’s an opportunity and push you into dangerous, unknown Secret Realms or perilous lands. No matter how lucky you are, you’ll just barely survive rather than obtaining precious treasures, and even if you somehow survive the competition and enter the Inner Sect… you’ll be lucky to live your life bowing and scraping, walking on eggshells around Inner Sect seniors who are much younger and have better aptitudes than you.”
The boy’s pupils began to shake uncontrollably.
It was so far removed from the glamorous and glorious life of a Great Sect Disciple he had imagined, yet it laid bare the cold reality of the Cultivation World so nakedly that it felt like looking into the future.
“Ah, if you don’t even have a special Talent in the Four Arts among the Hundred Arts of Cultivation, becoming an Inner Sect Disciple will be a distant dream. Still, since you have the Baek Clan’s bloodline, you must have been born with a Water Spirit Root among your Three Spirit Roots, so you could at least become a Spirit Plant Cultivator, a role which is the most common art.”
Baek-Cheong endlessly poured out the Sect Ecosystem she had picked up from the Nameless Forum.
At that, the boy’s eyes lost focus, and he was on the verge of bursting into tears.
“But you know what? Being a Spirit Plant Cultivator requires quite a bit of Talent, more than you’d think. If you don’t even have a slight Talent, you might spend your whole life plowing fields to death, chasing after the coattails of Prodigies until you grow old and die… Still, seeing you live like that, crawling up diligently from the bottom, would be quite a nice sight.”
When her long string of venomous remarks ended, silence fell among the children.
Furthermore, the boy’s bright red face had turned as pale as a sheet of white paper, and not a single rebuttal could pop out from between his trembling lips.
“Waaaaaah!”
Eventually, the boy collapsed to the ground and burst into loud wailing.
It was a desperate sobbing, a mixture of the shock of his fantasies about the Great Sect shattering to pieces and the shame of being butchered by cold reality.
And as if the boy’s crying was a signal, the other children who had been listening nearby couldn’t overcome the fear infected by the cold reality of the Sect and collectively burst into tears, wailing in resonance.
The loud and desperate crying poured out by dozens of children simultaneously instantly drew the attention of the entire bustling Grand Banquet Hall.
The adults stopped their conversations in surprise and turned their gazes to the corner where the children were gathered.
“Oh my, what is going on? Why is everyone crying?”
“Cheong-A, did our child commit some sort of disrespect by any chance?”
The flustered Branch Lineage adults came running over in a hurry, soothing the children while reading the room.
In front of the pouring gazes, Baek-Cheong wore the most innocent and bewildered expression in the world and shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t really know either. I just cheered him on to work hard when he entered the Sect, but he suddenly started crying. He was probably moved.”
Pretending to know nothing, she answered innocently, then simply picked up a sweet refreshment placed in front of her and munched on it while observing the situation.