Top-Tier Perception Starts From Basic Fist Techniques

It was better than Lu Changsheng had expected. The Hundred Flowers Sect was a martial sect, but it had Immortal Dao cultivators as well. Though the highest was only a Nascent Soul, it was still on par with a Martial Saint.

With cultivators like that, there was no need to worry about alchemy, formations, and artifact refinement.

The sect also held a large spirit stone mine, and a spirit stone vein ran directly beneath the mountain gate. The foundations were extraordinary, exactly what one would expect a true Heavenly Saint to leave behind, and a measure of how glorious the sect had once been.

Glorious or not, it had fallen. What the Hundred Flowers Sect amounted to now was a child sitting on a mountain of treasure with more eyes on it than anyone could count. Only the grand formation stopped Earthly Saints from making a move against it.

However, a true top-tier Earthly Saint would not be afraid of such a formation. The Floating Cloud Sect's ancestor, for one, had been working at it for years. If the formation cracked or failed once, the sect was finished.

Hence, Zhang Ling was in such a hurry to bring an outsider in to hold the top seat. She would never have considered it if there had been another way. Letting a powerful stranger into the sect carried its own considerable risk, after all.

"So why has nobody here achieved Earthly Saint in all this time?" he asked. "Can't you get hold of deity fragments?"

It puzzled him. With such foundations, deity fragments wouldn't have been hard to come by. Even if they failed to obtain them, they could simply have bought them.

"No, we can get them. We have many of them. It's talent, Supreme Elder. Surely you don't think achieving Earthly Saint is easy? Sacred Star City makes it look that way because Earthly Saints gather there. However, they all became Earthly Saints somewhere else and then moved to the city. The city didn't produce them.

"Every Earthly Saint is a man who could have found a sect and ruled a region. Take the Floating Cloud Sect's ancestor. Back where he came from, he beat everyone and became number one. You were the same in yours, I imagine?"

Lu Changsheng nodded. He had seen so many Earthly Saints in Sacred Star City lately, cultivator robbers included, and it was to the point that he felt like they were as common as dirt. Now that he thought about it, he realized that it was a mere illusion from where he happened to be standing. Every one of them ruled somewhere.

Sacred Star City simply had the name and the resources an Earthly Saint needed, so they all converged on it. For a sect native to the city, producing one was desperately hard. Even a sect with a Heavenly Saint to teach them struggled to manage it.

He drew a breath and lowered his voice. "How many deity fragments does the sect still have?"

Her heart sank. There it was. She knew that bringing in an Earthly Saint from outside meant talking about resources, sooner or later. He would take what he wanted, and there was no stopping it. Was the sect's own Supreme Elder not entitled to the sect's resources?

She gritted her teeth. "323 deity fragments, Supreme Elder."

Lu Changsheng went still. "How many did you say?"

He could not believe it.

"323." She repeated the number for him.

For a moment, he had nothing to say. This was what the word "foundation" meant! Martial Saints spent two or three hundred years in the Divine Region to return home with one fragment. He himself had never topped a hundred, yet the Hundred Flowers Sect could put three hundred on the table without thinking. He was truly impressed.

He had arrived assuming that such a sect, so far into decline, could scrape together only ten or twenty deity fragments, but it seemed he had underestimated what having a Heavenly Saint lineage meant.

"Sect Master, I'm a rogue cultivator. I don't understand how the Hundred Flowers Sect obtained so many."

"That... don't you know about it, Supreme Elder? We have been a sect for a million years. Surely building up this pile one deity fragment at a time is nothing remarkable?"

𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Lu Changsheng's brows drew together. "Deity fragments are hard to get in the Divine Region. You'd have to continuously send Martial Saints in to fetch them, and the sect burns through them at the same time. How does anything accumulate?"

Zhang Ling blinked as realization settled in. He really was a rogue cultivator, or he would have known what having a Heavenly Saint lineage meant.

"Supreme Elder, you may not know what having a Heavenly Saint lineage means. Once a man achieves Heavenly Saint, he can cut space away and hold it as a world of its own. Then he goes into the Divine Region, takes deities, and puts them inside it.

"At that point, they're like livestock. Kill one and, given time, it comes back inside the cut space. That is why a sect with a Heavenly Saint is never short of deity fragments."

Lu Changsheng finally understood, but thought of another question. "Hold on. There are a lot of deities in the Divine Region, but if every Heavenly Saint takes one, they'd have been cleaned out long ago."

"A deity that goes into a cut space stops having anything to do with the Immortal Martial World. The world sees it as dead and raises another to replace it, so the Divine Region never runs short. What a Heavenly Saint cannot do is let one of his own deities back in the Immortal Martial World. The moment that happens, the world would snuff them out."

Now it was clear. A deity was a rule of the world made flesh. If it was carried off into a separate space, it would fall outside the world's rule, but killing it still yielded fragments. The cut space had been carved out of the Immortal Martial World to begin with and had everything the world held, so a deity killed inside it recovered with time.

However, it required a Heavenly Saint to cut it again every now and then and feed energy back into it. Without that, the space would gradually die. As a result, the Hundred Flowers Sect's space was dying.

If the sect did not produce a Heavenly Saint to feed energy back into it, the space would collapse, and the deities inside would be exposed to the Immortal Martial World and be snuffed out.

The steady supply of fragments would end, and that would truly be the end of the Hundred Flowers Sect.

Lu Changsheng looked at her and slowly said, "Good. I'll be using some of those fragments to bid on a secret world. Any objection?"

Something tightened in Zhang Ling's chest, but she nodded anyway. "You are the Supreme Elder of the Hundred Flowers Sect. Of course you may use them."

He smiled. "Good."

Three hundred or more fragments were a lot, and it was more than enough to win at least three secret worlds at auction. A world at a higher energy level would go for more than that, perhaps over a hundred fragments on its own.

"When do you want them, Supreme Elder?"

"There's no rush; it can wait." He glanced at her. "Three days from now, I'll sweep the Hundred Flowers Mountain Range clean, and we can talk after that. I don't intend to use the sect's resources for nothing. Keeping this place safe is part of the arrangement."

Zhang Ling was pleased. She would let him take whatever he wanted so long as he did the work. Safety was the one thing the sect lacked, and clearing the mountain range would announce his arrival in a way that finally made the Hundred Flowers safe.