Destiny in Cinders

Stability was the most precious thing, especially for An Jing, who could traverse both worlds and take advantage of their resources to grow if he was left unattended. While nothing significant happened during the month of peace, An Jing found it just as exciting and eventful.

In Skysource, Huo Qing drove An Jing across the roads of Mortality Plains of inconsistent widths. They occasionally killed fey beasts and fed a fierce wolf or dog some canned meat as a reward for chasing away other feys for them.

Throughout that time, they transported goods and worked with Metalhand to arrange their inventory. Once they were all done, the three men looked at the tidy warehouse with their hands at their waists in satisfaction, smiling with innocent bliss.

During some of their transport trips, An Jing ran into bandits or vagabonds that blocked their cars to beg. Some only used verbal threats and cussed them out if they sensed they weren't going to get anything, but there were also those who came equipped for a robbery. They chased away those that ran and killed those that didn't. Even Huo Qing didn't go easy on people like that.

The two of them also experienced a second fey siege. There were so many of them flying above the sky of Hilltwixt, forming large masses that seemed like black clouds. However, the Purple Mansion major formation sent lightning coursing through the air and easily wiped out the fey horde.

An Jing had observed the major formation operate from up close and did manage to discern some of its details. The Grand Neon Tower that served as the central core of the formation, like divine armaments, could continue to grow stronger as long as it served that role. The formations of both worlds had the same origin, so the principles he learned from one could be applied to the other.

In Void Embrace, An Jing spent his time scouring the markets. He hired a few people that Madam Shen had approved to be his assistants there. Manager Li of Blessed Virtue Garden also came to help him on the instruction of his employer, purchasing large amounts of beast hides, frostjade and herbs from the northern frontier on his behalf.

When it came to making the trades with Dustdawner tribespeople, An Jing did it all himself. They almost knelt when they saw the token that the sage from Voidsight Mountain had given him and didn't dare to question what he wanted to do with the things he purchased.

That wasn't what An Jing wanted, however, since he wanted to let people know the excuse he had prepared to cover his tracks properly. He went out of his way to tell them that his tribe in Dustdawn wanted to rebuild an outpost, hence the need for the materials he purchased.

After buying them in bulk at great prices, An Jing spent some money to buy one of the empty warehouses that Honor Pavilion once owned to store his goods. The warehouse should have cost him 1500 liang of silver, yet he only got it for three hundred, not just for his association with a sage, but also as a result of the administration's goodwill.

The warehouse was situated near a riverbank and didn't catch the eye at all. Every time enough goods were stocked up, a convoy would transport those goods to the border of the northern frontier and be left there for the rest of An Jing's "tribespeople" to pick up. The convoy's workers didn't find that weird at all, since spirit items were always traded rather unconventionally. Nobody cared about the details as long as they were paid for the job.

Once the convoy left the goods, An Jing checked his surroundings to ensure that nobody was around and used the Grandvoid Pathway to transport all of it to his warehouse in Hilltwixt. Huo Qing would then sort the goods for him according to size and take photographs and film videos for their online listings, making sure to cut the videos and add music and filters to them too. He produced all sorts of short clips to promote the goods on the spirit net.

"Premium-quality beast hides! They're absolutely not synthetic and freshly hunted! Own a piece of badlands exotica now! Numbers are limited, so order them right away!"

"Pure, untainted water-aspect frostjade. Where else would you find something like this?! Use it to stabilize your focus for your cultivation needs. No addiction guaranteed! If you don't have any focus talismans, these are your second-best choice!"

These adverts were used by a middleman company that Metalhand's big sister introduced to them to sell off the goods.

An Jing made sure to pick the kind of goods that he would be able to source from merchants in the northern frontier as well once he made his way there. He could also stockpile lots of them, selling them at a controlled rate for some juicy scarcity marketing.

As for the herbs, Huo Qing had his own channels to sell them. There was an herb vendor back at his old home, Pilljungle Town, that he was closely acquainted with. He was the one who bought the herbs An Jing had brought the first time around. The only issue with this was that Huo Qing would have to return to Pilljungle for larger transactions. He wasn't quite sure if the boss of the Noontigers would cause problems for him.

An Jing, however, believed that a gang like the Noontigers had their hands full with many other business affairs and wouldn't bother to remember minor figures like them. Though, he didn't rush Huo Qing since he was worried about it. He was already making enough money selling hides and frostjade; the herbs were only a minor source of additional income.

The shipping infrastructure of Deepnight City was really well developed. With Metalhand's help, all An Jing needed to do was to send his goods into the city before they would be distributed to their respective buyers. All An Jing needed to do was ensure that his goods reached the warehouse in Hilltwixt while Huo Qing and Metalhand took care of the rest.

With Huo Qing's help, he also managed to overhaul the warehouse. There were two spirit-qi nodes there, which allowed two separate seclusion rooms to be built, They were good as both work and rest spaces. Cultivators didn't need different rooms for either purpose.

As for the remaining empty space, it was split into five different storage zones of different sizes for goods that took up different amounts of space, separated by metal plates. While this crude way of doing things could definitely be improved upon, it was enough for their purposes for the moment.

Once that was all done, An Jing got more orders for hides and frostjade. While the hides didn't sell out super quickly, each and every order was quite substantial. According to Metalhand, good-quality hides were in demand by talismanists. They could also be used to make lightweight leather armor or be treated to be used as a base layer to deploy formations on.

The processing methods of materials in Skysource were also far superior to Void Embrace's. Metalhand even demonstrated this by grinding a bad-quality hide and using it as "fertilizer" for his vine formation.

When it came to frostjade, however, they sold like hotcakes, emptied out the day the listing was made. It was in such high demand that Metalhand's big sister, a woman with a charming voice that put An Jing subconsciously on his guard, asked him how long it would take for him to supply the next batch.

Her codename was Rustfeather and she was a famous fixer in Deepnight City before she went missing in action. During the years she was unaccounted for, she was secretly maintaining minimal contact with her most important connections. That was how she was able to quickly reestablish her former work platform after she returned to deal with her nemeses. Though she did lose quite a few clients in the process, she did retain quite a bit of her reputation. Coming back from the dead also served as decent publicity.

Currently, she was in dire need of gigs or other assignments that would boost her reputation even more. The fine spirit items An Jing provided came at just the perfect time, so she was all the more willing to help him distribute them.

Rustfeather told him that frostjade, which was used as a material for jade focus pendants, was in incredibly high demand across all of Skysource, a world filled with cultivators. An Jing became even more alert after he learned of it and told her that his people were only able to produce that much of it at any given time, and that the last batch was something they had stockpiled for quite a while.

Rustfeather seemed rather dejected by the news, but it was only natural. She reasoned that An Jing's cult probably found an underground cavern of yin and frost that contained a single frostjade vein. They were probably more concerned with satisfying their own demand for the material than selling them for profit, so only the extras that they didn't need were sent to An Jing.

"The natural qi in Skysource is mostly of the metal, earth and fire aspects. Water and wood-aspect qi seem much rarer in comparison. This might be an aftereffect of the fiend calamity," Yvelbane concluded. "Just like Void Embrace, the Heavenly Dao of this world is flawed, but it's missing a different piece compared to Void Embrace's."

An Jing nodded in agreement. "They even lack spirit items of the yin and yang aspects. This world is constantly covered by dark clouds all the time. Even when I managed to see the sky when the immortal warship parted the clouds for a moment, I didn't see any moon up there, but there were many stars that streaked rapidly across my vision."

"The issues plaguing Skysource might be far more serious than we know. Then again, it's not something we can do anything about for now."

An Jing earned a total of 4700 merits from those spirit items. Those were sold at market rates rather than recycled rates. That amount was all net profit that didn't include the amount deducted by Deepnight City's nine-percent tax on natural spirit items and the twenty-percent cut paid to Metalhand and Rustfeather for using their platforms for sales and distribution. Other platforms charged up to forty-five percent of the cut as a fee, but Metalhand and Rustfeather gave An Jing a better rate considering that it was his first business collaboration with them. He was also a much-valued badlander supplier.

An Jing never minded giving his business partners some of the profit too. It would be senseless not to, considering that he only really spent around two hundred merits for cost. And that was without having to fight feys in the badlands or wasting time dealing with bandits along the way. He didn't even have to transport the goods himself! If he didn't want to let others have some of the leftover soup after all that he managed to get away with, he would be due some divine punishment.