Top-Tier Perception Starts From Basic Fist Techniques

The Heavenly Star Pavilion was the largest intelligence broker in the Sacred Region, and it dealt in nothing but information. Whatever one wanted to know, the Heavenly Star Pavilion would sell it.

Lu Changsheng walked in. An Earthly Saint carried weight wherever he went, and he was shown to a room kept for honored guests without being made to wait.

The Earthly Saint of the Heavenly Star Pavilion came to meet him with a smile. "What sort of information are you after, Fellow Daoist Lu?"

Lu Changsheng looked at him curiously. "Oh? You know who I am?"

As far as he could recall, he had never once had dealings with the Heavenly Star Pavilion.

The man's smile did not move. "Fellow Daoist Lu, you're too modest. You cut down a whole band of Earthly Saint robbers outside the city, then took the coordinates of a secret world at the Secret World Pavilion.

"We opened a file on someone of your standing a long time ago. How could we not know your name when you are so famous?"

So that was it. The pavilion collected information on everything, and he was important enough to have a file of his own. Curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, "Out of curiosity, how much would my file sell for?"

"Fellow Daoist Lu, your file is a very mysterious one. Seeing the whole of it would cost you as much as ten deity fragments." The man smiled faintly. "The ordinary details go for a handful of spirit stones, of course."

Lu Changsheng thought to himself. So, even information about the same person comes at different prices depending on what I want to know. The most expensive would cost me deity fragments, while the cheapest would cost spirit stones.

Anything payable in spirit stones is obviously very cheap, but deity fragments are too expensive! Plenty of Martial Saints earn only one deity fragment after spending two or three centuries in the Divine Region, yet a single file on me costs ten deity fragments? This is daylight robbery!

Lu Changsheng realized that his visit to the Heavenly Star Pavilion was going to be very costly. He was going to bleed for it. He laid out his conditions carefully, saying, "I want to know about sects near Sacred Star City. Ideally, I need ones that used to have an Earthly Saint holding the fort but haven't fallen apart yet. They should have some strength left, plenty of disciples, and deep foundations. The important part is that they need an Earthly Saint badly enough to bring one in from outside.

"Does the pavilion have anything that fits?"

"Fellow Daoist Lu, give us a little time. We will go through the files, and you will have an answer in about four hours."

Lu Changsheng nodded and settled down to wait.

Four hours later, the Earthly Saint came back. "There are three sects that match your conditions." Then he stopped, and the silence made the rest plain enough. The names would cost money.

"How many spirit stones?"

"Ten thousand a name, for any of the three," the man said as he grinned from ear to ear

"Ten thousand. So all three would be thirty thousand."

He had known the pavilion charged exorbitantly, but he had not expected it to be this much. Ten thousand spirit stones for one name.

In fairness, he was not buying a name. He was buying the work of sifting every file the pavilion held down to the three that fit. As expensive as it was, he could afford to pay in spirit stones.

"Give me one name for now. Here's your ten thousand."

He only needed one. He would get the name, make a visit, and if it didn't suit him, he would come back and make a purchase for the second name.

The Earthly Saint took the stones and said, "The Hundred Flowers Sect."

That was all. He dropped a name, and not one word more.

"The Hundred Flowers Sect." Lu Changsheng turned it over.

"If you want the details on them, that will be another twenty thousand."

Now, he understood how the Heavenly Star Pavilion worked. Sell a man the name, then sell him what the name meant.

"Never mind. I will go and see them myself."

He had more than enough spirit stones, but that was no reason to throw them away. He was looking for a sect that suited him, and one visit would answer that better than any file.

If the sect suited him, then once the Hundred Flowers Sect became his, every scrap of information on it would come at no cost. He left the pavilion, and a few questions to the right people gave him a rough summary of the place.

The Hundred Flowers Sect went back a long way, over a million years by most accounts, and it even once had a Heavenly Saint. It had been glorious. These days, however, it did not have a single Earthly Saint, and the decline became obvious.

There was one other peculiarity about them. The sect recruited based on looks. Whether it was a man or a woman, the candidate had to be handsome or beautiful. The plain-looking ones were turned away at the door. That rule had held for a million years.

They were in a difficult position. They still had their grand formation and what was left of their foundation, enough that a handful of Earthly Saints, even about ten of them, could do nothing to anyone who remained within the sect grounds. However, it had been far too long since an Earthly Saint was present to oversee the sect, and many people had decided to set their sights on it. One slip and the sect would be wiped out.

That was why they wanted to take in an Earthly Saint from outside at all. They were hanging by a thread, which made the Hundred Flowers Sect almost perfect for Lu Changsheng. He moved straight toward their sect grounds in the mountains.

Their sect stood some eight hundred li outside the city, in the Hundred Flowers Mountain Range, where rare flowers and herbs grew thick across the slopes. The range had once been sect territory, and no outsider was allowed foot in it. Now, Martial Saints and even Earthly Saints came and went as they pleased, and the sect could do nothing about it, which spoke volumes about how far it had fallen.

He crossed a great distance in a single step and walked in without announcing himself. His voice rolled through the mountain gate. "I have come to pay my respects. Ask the Sect Master to come out and meet me!"

Figures came out to the gate one after another. Most of them were women, with a few men among them, but every one of them was striking to look at.

"Who are you?"

One of them, a Martial Saint, stepped forward with her guard up. "Greetings, senior. I'm Zhang Ling, the Sect Master of the Hundred Flowers Sect. What brings you to us?"

Lu Changsheng looked her over and clasped his hands behind his back. "I hear your sect wants to bring in a Supreme Elder at the Earthly Saint level, so I have come to put myself forward. What does the Sect Master think? Do I qualify?"

He put it as bluntly as that. He had come to join the Hundred Flowers Sect, and to join it as Supreme Elder. There was no mistaking what that meant. A Supreme Elder held enormous authority within a sect, and when such a figure spoke, people would listen.

In many ways, he was the one who really called the shots, so it would not be wrong to call the Supreme Elder the true master of the sect.

Zhang Ling's face tightened. The fact that the sect needed an Earthly Saint was no secret to anyone. However, that did not mean they would just welcome the first one who offered.

There were a dozen things to weigh, and the weighing was done quietly, in private.

Since someone like Lu Changsheng had marched straight up to the sect grounds in such a forceful way, his intentions were perfectly clear.