Chapter 185
『Daoist(66.102) Selling: Earth-grade fire-attributed cultivation method, Flame Flower Art (炎華訣). 5 premium spirit stones.』
[A keepsake left behind by an elder of my clan. Not a single scratch on the jade slip.]
『Daoist(402.8) Selling: Kunwon Art (坤元訣). Earth-grade earth-attributed cultivation method. 4 premium spirit stones.』
[That's the final price. No haggling.]
These were the listings she had painstakingly narrowed down over an entire half-day.
This time, she hadn't swept up whatever caught her eye like she had last time.
First, she filtered out the posts with flowery language plastered all over them.
She had learned long ago that the more desperate a listing was to hook someone, the longer its sales pitch tended to be.
She skipped both the absurdly cheap listings and those priced sky-high.
She even dug through the sellers' previous posts one by one.
‘This one should at least pass for a decent person.’
Baek Cheong carefully completed the purchases.
A notification rang, and the items were transferred to her storage pouch.
She immediately swept through the jade slips with her divine sense.
The Flame Flower Art was indeed worthy of being called Earth-grade from its very first lines.
The incantations were elegant, and the structure for wielding fire qi was so intricate that her head nodded of its own accord.
The problem began in the middle.
The incantations that should have continued abruptly cut off, and everything afterward was blank.
‘It's only half-finished!!!’
The infuriating part was that there wasn't a single lie in the sales post.
The words “Earth-grade fire-attributed cultivation method, Flame Flower Art” were true.
The claim that it had no scratches was also true, if one considered only the jade slip's exterior.
It simply hadn't mentioned anywhere that half of the contents were missing.
‘So this was the trick...’
With trembling hands, Baek Cheong picked up the Kunwon Art.
This one had a complete sequence of incantations from beginning to end.
But no matter how thoroughly she examined it, it couldn't be called Earth-grade.
Its framework was plausible, but all the substance had been stripped away, leaving something little better than Yellow-grade.
Only after mulling it over for a long while did she guess what had happened.
It was an abridged secular version split off from the Earth-grade Kunwon Art.
Since they shared the same root, it had borrowed the original's name and grade wholesale.
‘Can this even be called fraud...?’
She set down the two jade slips and pressed a hand to her forehead.
The Nameless Forum marketplace was a place where one couldn't post false information unrelated to an item.
If someone put up a talisman and insisted it was an elixir, the listing wouldn't even be registered.
But the Nameless Forum had a major loophole.
It was impossible to disguise something entirely unrelated as the real thing.
But anything even remotely related could have its name or grade dragged in and inflated.
On top of that, there was no way to discover defects or tampering unless the seller disclosed them.
Whether it was a defective copy or an abridged version, there was no knowing until one bought it and opened it.
‘No wonder scam listings are overflowing...’
It was called a marketplace, but once you opened up the contents, it was practically an asura's hell.
Then again, she wasn't exactly in a position to criticize.
She herself had hooked a Daoist by listing the Danmun Spirit-Attracting Pill as nothing more than an ordinary elixir.
Baek Cheong shamelessly shook her head.
‘That was that, and this is this.’
Even after exercising the utmost caution, she had ended up with this, which made her anger burn twice as hot.
She was just opening the chatter board to soothe her boiling insides.
Then a new post caught her eye.
『Daoist(402.8): This actually sells lol』
[I'm leaving after enjoying Daoist(913.14)'s spirit stones.]
It was the Daoist who had just sold her the Kunwon Art.
He had even nailed down his own realm number, so there was no way she could fail to recognize him.
Replies were already strung beneath it.
[Daoist(84.256): Even Daoist(913.14) gets scammed lololol]
[Daoist(490.17): You ate someone else's spirit stones and should've left quietly, but you've really got some nerve.]
[Daoist(331.5): The crime of laying hands on a clone's spirit stones will never be a light one.]
[Daoist(11.23): But what did you sell? Let me see too.]
There were mockers, angry commenters, and even people offering condolences.
The chatter board had heated up into a spectacle for the first time in a while.
Baek Cheong sprang upright on her bed.
‘This bastard, seriously...’
Her divine sense kept being drawn toward the karmic retribution.
She desperately wanted to press it and teach him a lesson.
But she didn't even know whether she had any Dao marks.
She hadn't tried pressing it since using it to crush that Upper Realm cultivator, so she had no idea whether any had accumulated.
Even if they had accumulated, she couldn't use them carelessly.
A single karmic retribution had made even a Spirit Realm cultivator shudder.
She couldn't waste something so precious just to catch a petty thief.
It would be like using a butcher's knife to kill a mouse.
‘Endure it. Endure it...’
More importantly, anyone who had stirred up trouble knew one principle.
The moment she lost her temper and replied, she would be the one to lose.
Even as she trembled with rage, she quietly left the post.
Instead of venting her anger, she first counted the premium spirit stones she had left.
She shook out her storage pouch and counted exactly 54.
The 137 she had possessed had been whittled down to a mere fraction in an instant.
‘Where did it all leak away...?’
At this rate, she would have trouble acquiring Earth-grade cultivation methods.
Now that things had come to this, she had no choice but to earn it back.
But the more she thought about it, the fewer viable options she saw.
Selling the useless cultivation methods back was the simplest solution.
But to receive their full price, she would have to wait until a buyer came along.
She would even have to post the methods and promote them, making the whole process tedious and troublesome.
‘It would be easier to make a big lump sum all at once.’
The way to get her hands on a large number of spirit stones in one go was obvious.
The supreme-grade Tribulation-Overcoming Pill had been a wonderfully profitable item, earning her 137 spirit stones per pill.
But the Yunryeong Fruit had run out long ago, leaving her no way to make more.
That left selling Danmun elixirs or Five Elements Pills.
If she put them up, demand would ensure they sold quickly.
The problem was that her heart wasn't moved in the slightest.
Deliberately brewing elixirs to earn spirit stones, only to hand every last one of them over to scammers?
The mere thought of it made her shudder at the waste.
‘Why should I do the scammers a favor?’
Baek Cheong puffed out her cheeks and glared at the marketplace board.
Then an old listing suddenly came to mind.
『Daoist(237.309) Selling: Boundless Five-Element Cultivation Method. 50 premium spirit stones.』
[A five-element cultivation method usable from Qi Refining to Incarnation. For a five-element spiritual root cultivator, there is nothing better for evenly developing all five attributes.]
It was the listing from the madman who had supposedly bought a million five-element spiritual-root cultivators and experimented on them.
It was a cultivation method she had always shaken her head at, suspecting a trap whenever she saw it.
But today, for some reason, her eyes kept being drawn to it.
‘If they were all scams anyway...’
She had learned the hard way that sound goods were rare in the marketplace.
If she was going to get scammed again anyway, she wanted to take a look at a cultivation method that looked like a trap.
‘All right, let's buy it and assume I'm getting scammed.’
They were useless premium spirit stones—a chicken rib she couldn't even use outside the Nameless Forum.
[Payment complete. 50 premium spirit stones deducted.]
[Daoist(237.309)'s item has been sent to the storage pouch.]
She had 4 premium spirit stones left.
A rich woman who had possessed 137 spirit stones had become penniless in a matter of days.
‘...This isn't why I sought out cultivation methods.’
Swallowing her bitterness, she took the cultivation method from her storage pouch.
But even the feel of it in her hand was unusual.
It was neither a jade slip nor a book, but a bamboo slip.
It contained no spiritual energy and looked like something that might be lying around in a schoolhouse for mortals.
She had expected at least a book made from the skin of a five-element spiritual-root cultivator.
It was completely unlike the eerie stories about a million experiments and the Incarnation stage.
The surface was simply engraved with Five Elements Art (五行功).
‘What an unenthusiastic name.’
Even after searching through every five-element cultivation method in the world, she doubted she would find one with a plainer name.
Baek Cheong opened the bamboo slip while remaining intensely wary.
She was prepared for a trap to leap out at any moment from the very first line.
But the farther she read, the more she tilted her head in puzzlement.
The contents were more normal than she had expected.
No, they weren't merely normal—they were excellent.
The incantations flowed without superfluity, and the five elements meshed together as one from the outset.
If fire qi ran wild, water qi soothed it and earth qi buttressed it, with safety mechanisms built in throughout.
Even compared with the Earth-grade cultivation methods she had seen so far, its stability was actually superior.
On top of that, it was written so that it could be practiced directly from Qi Refining.
There was none of the difficult, abstruse rhetoric that customarily adorned the opening of a cultivation method.
Instead of rambling about the Dao and profundity, it marked out the path step by step in plain, tangible language.
As an introductory method, it had the lowest threshold of any cultivation method she had seen.
‘Wouldn't this be worthy of being called Heaven-grade?’
Yet such an item carried the label “Boundless.”
She had no way of knowing whether that was humility or whether there was another reason.
Of course, she had no intention of simply letting the matter pass.
Her counterpart was Daoist(237.309).
When it came to being unsettling to five-element spiritual-root cultivators, he ranked among the worst on the entire Nameless Forum.
‘There has to be something.’
Baek Cheong lit a fire in her eyes and began verifying it.
The various fraudulent cultivation methods she had bought in the marketplace had at least unintentionally trained her eye.
She had already caught tricks that altered a few lines of incantations.
She examined it character by character, but found nothing awkward.
She wondered if it was a defective copy and compared the beginning and end, but found no inconsistency in its principles.
After staring at it for a long while, she reached a conclusion.
It was a flawless cultivation method with absolutely no problems.
‘...Seriously?’
Holding the bamboo slip, she blinked blankly.
It was almost too sound, and that only made her suspicion rise.
Why had such a cultivation method remained in a corner of the marketplace until now?
Yet despite being an old sales listing, the Nameless Pavilion hadn't verified and relisted the Five Elements Art.
‘If there isn't a problem with the item, but they didn't reclaim it for some other reason...’
Only one possibility came to mind.
There had to be a flaw that she couldn't even perceive at her current level.
‘There has to be something...’
She had no choice but to keep examining the cultivation method while maintaining her suspicions.
Baek Cheong opened the bamboo slip from the beginning again.
She mulled over the incantations, retraced their flow, and swept through every part with her divine sense.
She read it twice, then three times, and on the fourth reading, she even read it backward.
Even then, the conclusion remained that it was a cultivation method safe to learn.
‘...Should I give it a try?’
‘...Perhaps I should try learning it.’