The Overlord of Puluo

A faint glow spread across Properfolk Village.

When enough people successfully activated land within the same region, the glow from each plot overlapped and blended together. It created the illusion that this was no longer New Land at all.

Of course, the glow over New Land could never be as bright as the light shining over the Proper Land. Yet as the light from countless activated plots blended together, it looked much like daybreak in Proper Land.

Just how many plots surrounded Properfolk Village were activated? Someone would have to sit down and count them properly.

Li Banfeng led the land activators into a stretch of woodland. They were still more than two and a half kilometers from Properfolk Village, yet houses were already scattered across the landscape, and there was even a small restaurant.

For some of the hunters, this was their first visit to Properfolk Village. They could not help but wonder how a restaurant out here managed to get its ingredients.

There was not much to eat in New Land.

In the past, most of Properfolk Village’s food came from the oranges grown in Orange Grove, the fish caught in the lake, and the few wild beasts that were safe to eat.

Things had become different. More and more Agrarian Cultivators had successfully activated the surrounding land. They had begun growing crops and raising livestock, steadily expanding the village’s food supply.

Once the food supply became reliable, more and more people began settling nearby. There were land activators, hunters, people hiding from trouble, cultivators, and even crews making movies. Little by little, the houses were built beyond the village and into the surrounding land.

As Li Banfeng approached Properfolk Village, he spotted two old men playing chess beneath a great tree at the entrance.

One was small and thin while the other was enormous, broad as a door and built like an elephant.

The skinny old man frowned. “Are you going to make a move or not? You have been staring at the board for half an hour.”

The enormous old man shoved his piece aside. “What difference does it make? I don’t know how to play chess in the first place. They are already here, so why are we still pretending?”

The two old men were Shui Yongquan and Qiu Luoye.

The moment Qiu Luoye spotted Li Banfeng, he hurried over and pulled him aside. “Old Qi, you’ve brought quite a crowd this time. Do you need the two of us to help with something?”

Li Banfeng nodded. “I do. Severed-No-Grudge, Trusty-Doubty, and the others have done a great deal for me. I want to keep them by my side permanently.”

Qiu Luoye gave a hearty laugh. “Is that all? Then keep them! Ma Wu borrowed Qin and Huo Ling from me ages ago. Have I ever asked him to return them?”

“Big Bro Qiu, I am not asking to borrow them. I am asking you to give them to me. I want their contracts as well.”

“Easy peasy! They are yours! But they are still from the New Land. You will still need to talk to Old Shui about covering up their identities with his abilities.”

Shui Yongquan stood at the side with a smile on his face. He didn’t say a word.

Qiu Luoye frowned. “Old Shui, what is that supposed to mean? Are you trying to raise the price? Old Qi brought all these people here today, and you will not even do him this small favor?”

Shui Yongquan shook his head. “Listen to what you are saying... Of course I’ll help. I am only asking if we can put the land activation on hold for a while.”

The moment Li Banfeng heard this, he froze. Why would Shui Yongquan show such an attitude? Weren't land deities usually eager to have more people activate more land?

Qiu Luoye was just as puzzled. “Put it on hold? What for? What has gotten into you, Old Shui? Have you been drinking since breakfast and muddled your head?”

Shui Yongquan only smiled. “Calm down. Let us find somewhere private to talk.”

Shui Yongquan had built himself a small wooden hut on his territory. Most days, he disguised himself as a hunter and spent his time chatting with the people who passed through.

Once inside, Shui Yongquan poured each of them a cup of tea. Qiu Luoye shoved his cup aside and looked straight at him.

“We knew Old Qi was coming today, so we agreed to come out together to meet him. If I had known you had something else on your mind, I would never have come with you. I would have brought Old Qi straight to my own territory instead.”

Shui Yongquan frowned and said, "Elephant Qiu, that's a bit uncalled for."

"How so? Then tell me what this is really about!” Qiu Luoye was genuinely angry now. “Have you found yourself someone more powerful? Are you planning to work with someone else? Is it me you look down on or Old Qi? It does not matter if you think we are beneath you. We do not need your favors.

Qiu Luoye turned and said to Old Qi, "Old Qi, I will give you all the men you asked for, and I will find someone to hide their identities as aberrant creatures. I have more capable fighters too. I will bring them over later, and you can choose whoever you like! I, Qiu Luoye, have always acted with a clear conscience!"

Shui Yongquan waved his hand. “Old Qiu, this has nothing to do with anyone’s conscience!”

Qiu Luoye slammed his fist on the table. "What else could it be? Back then, no one would come to this miserable place to activate land. How many people has Old Qi brought us over the years? Now that you have found someone more powerful, you want to cast him aside. Did you swallow your own conscience?"

Shui Yongquan sighed. "Let me be honest with you. My territory contains 10,900 plots, each roughly half a kilometer across. Of the 10,900 plots, 900 were given to me by Qiu Luoye."

Qiu Luoye waved him off. "There is no point telling me that. I cannot work out the numbers."

"I am not asking you to. I have already done the math for you," Shui Yongquan said as he took out his account book. "More than 2,700 plots have been activated in my territory. In yours, the number is just over 2,500!"

Qiu Luoye's expression darkened, and his gaze turned cold. "Are you saying less New Land has been activated in my territory than in yours?"

Shui Yongquan looked helpless. "Is that not obvious? Can you not count?"

Qiu Luoye lowered his voice and asked Li Banfeng, "I got that right, did I not? Mine is lower than his?"

Li Banfeng nodded with complete certainty.

Shui Yongquan said, "What I mean is that nearly thirty percent of both our territories have already been activated. If this continues, the Inner Provinces would eventually notice us."

Qiu Luoye snorted. "Let them notice. What is there to be afraid of? We have followed the rules, so what right do they have to interfere?"

"We have not broken any rules, but our situation is unusual. Our territories are deep lands, not shallow ones. I am worried that the Inner Provinces will find some excuse to make trouble for us."

Li Banfeng was puzzled for a long while. He couldn't understand what "deep lands" and "shallow lands" meant. On the surface, the meaning of the two terms seemed obvious enough.

Shui Yongquan explained, "Whether land is considered deep or shallow depends on how far it lies from Proper Land. New Land close to Proper Land is called shallow land. Qiu Luoye's territory and mine are far from Proper Land, with several stretches of New Land between us and it, so ours are considered deep lands.

"The closer a place is to Proper Land, the easier it is to bring in food and supplies. Naturally, more people are willing to activate shallow land. Old Qi, ask around. How many land deities have had thirty percent of their territories activated? Even the territories right beside Greenwater Bay have not managed that much. As far as I know, they have not even reached twenty percent.

"Yet here we are, buried deep in the New Land, with nearly thirty percent of our territories already activated. We stick out like two fat geese in an empty field. Do you honestly think the Inner Provinces have not noticed? If they find out about it, do you think they will not find some way to make life difficult for us?"

Li Banfeng was very curious and asked, "What would they do to make your lives difficult?"

"It's hard to say," Shui Yongquan said as he shook his head. "They might send someone out to stir up trouble or they might destroy our contracts with the land."

Li Banfeng was even more confused. "You said the Inner Provinces might send people here to stir up trouble, but can their people enter Puluo Province whenever they want?"

"They can't," Shui Yongquan said as he smacked his lips. "But they must have other ways. I just haven't figured out what those ways are yet."

Li Banfeng asked, "You also said they could destroy your deeds. But the deeds are buried inside your own territories, so how could they reach them?"

Shui Yongquan replied, "Little bro, you have never seen our contract with the land before. You only know half the story."

Who says I have never seen it? I have seen two! Of course, I can't tell you guys about this.

Shui Yongquan brought over some paper and a brush, then drew an arch. "This is what a deed looks like. It is the proof that a land deity owns their territory, and every major or minor event that occurs there is recorded on it. When I defeated Qiu Luoye, he ceded me a stretch of territory fifteen kilometers across. That was recorded too. If you don't believe me, we can dig up Elephant Qiu's deed right now and have a look. Every last detail will be written clearly on the deed!"

Qiu Luoye spat. "Pffft! Why not dig up your own deed instead?"

Shui Yongquan continued, "Not only does it record down when a plot of land gets transferred, it records down the land activation of each plot."

Li Banfeng kept his expression perfectly calm. He was convinced Shui Yongquan was making the whole thing up. He had seen two deeds before, one belonging to the Mountain-Uprooting Lord and the other belonging to Bei Wushuang. Neither contained any record of land activation.

Wait. Has anyone ever activated land in either of those places? Those territories are even farther away from everything than Shui Yongquan's and Qiu Luoye's territories.

There had never been any land activators in the Mountain-Uprooting Lord's territory before. When Nectarine, He Yuxiu, and Zhang Wanlong successfully activated their plots, Li Furong had already become the land deity.

It was highly likely that no one had ever activated land in Bei Wushuang's territory. That was why Li Banfeng had never seen such records on either deed.

In that case, Shui Yongquan was probably telling the truth.

"Are you worried that activating too much land will draw the Inner Province's attention?"

Shui Yongquan explained, "When there are so many deeds together, the people in the Inner Provinces would surely feel too lazy to look at every single one of them. But if a large block of writing suddenly appears on one of them, they would surely take a look at it."

Li Banfeng was confused again. "Where are all these deeds kept?"

"They are kept in a library in the Inner Provinces, hanging there in neat rows." Shui Yongquan said and drew another arch on the paper. "You see, every deed comes in two halves. We keep one half, and the Inner Provinces keeps the other. Join them together and they make a complete ring. If the other half gets destroyed by the Inner Provinces, who knows what might happen to ours?"

This time, Li Banfeng understood.

His wife had once told him that the Inner Provinces could see everything written on a deed. So that was the reason. Each deed was split in half, and whatever appeared on one half appeared on the other as well.

With the deeds hanging there in neat rows, any major change would be frightfully easy to spot.

His wife had replaced Mountain-Uprooting Lord's name with Li Furong's, but that was only a small change. Surely it would not attract the Inner Province's attention.

Surely not...

A faint uneasiness crept into Li Banfeng's heart. Just then, Qiu Luoye spoke. "That is enough about the ring for now."

Qiu Luoye seemed to be a little scared.

He gets scared? Li Banfeng thought.

Qiu Luoye turned to Shui Yongquan. "Old Shui, what do you plan to do?"

"We already have quite a lot of people living in our territories," Shui Yongquan said. "I made a rough count. With everyone coming and going, there are more than a thousand altogether. All those people bring us human auras, and the accumulation of human auras build up our cultivation. Why rush?"

Qiu Luoye was hopeless with numbers, but even he knew that a thousand people could not possibly be enough. "How many years will it take us to build up our cultivation with only those thousand people? At this rate, when will we ever reach level three?"

"What's the rush? We live five times as long as ordinary people. We can take our time," said Shui Yongquan. He was very patient.

This was the first Li Banfeng had heard that those at level two of the Cloudborne Layer lived five times longer than ordinary people. However, this was not important at the moment. What mattered was that Shui Yongquan no longer wanted to activate more land.

Qiu Luoye remained silent for a long while, then walked out of the wooden hut. With every heavy step, the last withered leaves clinging to the trees came fluttering down.

He turned to Li Banfeng. "Old Qi, bring all your people to my territory and prepare to activate the land. Once it is done, you can choose anyone you like from among my men."

Shui Yongquan frowned. "Elephant Qiu, did any of what I just said sink in?"

"No. Not a single word." Qiu Luoye answered with perfect honesty. "Old Shui, you can wait if you like. You can wait for as long as you please, but I will not. Old Qi is my benefactor. Heaven was kind enough to let me meet him, so I must do right by Heaven. I am seeing this through to the end!"