Demon Sword Sect's Undercover-Chapter 786 - 785: Brush and Then Finish

What nobody expected was that Senior Brother Liu actually agreed to the newcomer Hou Niao’s advice, "Start with the easy tasks before moving on to the difficult ones."

Since Hou Niao joined the team, everyone could see that he and the head supervisor Liu Yishou were at odds. It was also evident that Hou Niao had significant backing, and Hu Daoist might not be his only support.

In the Daoist Sect, this mutual restraint was not at all unusual. In various contexts, it had become a part of the sect’s behavioral norms. They highly esteemed such a structural system, believing that such a collective would be more solid and less prone to serious errors.

So when Hou Niao showed his defiance, no one thought it was wrong; instead, they believed that the Inner Warehouse had been too accommodating by not pushing forward someone like him to counter Liu earlier.

Hou Niao, in the God Sensing Realm, with his current age under a hundred years, had a not insignificant possibility of advancing further; such a cultivator, even in the Daoist Sect, was considered to have potential. If there were no other reasons, few people would want to spend their years in a place like the Inner Warehouse.

Unlike Liu Yishou, who was nearly two hundred years old and a cultivator in the Natural Realm with no hope of advancing further, only then would one seek a place for a peaceful retirement while attempting to gather some resources.

Hou Niao was somewhat vigilant about his own identity and the origins of his fellow workers. Half a year was too short, and limited interaction made it impossible to thoroughly understand a person, especially the story behind a cultivator.

He had realized that everyone had a story. Even if it had not been Liu Yishou who was targeted initially, replacing him with someone else would not have changed the fact that everyone in the Cultivation World had a story, making it hard to disguise oneself as someone else.

Humans are indeed too complex.

Over the next month, he gained a preliminary understanding of Mount Langya, familiarizing himself with all the entry and exit pathways and obstacles as much as possible.

The guardians of the treasury were not forbidden from entering and exiting, but they were required not to bring any spatial devices with them, meaning they had to enter and exit the Inner Treasury lightly equipped. Under the powerful scrutiny of the Inner Treasury Formation, it was as if they were stripped bare.

This was of little concern to him, as he wasn’t planning to take anything out, but to convert what was there into his own.

Still, he remained extremely cautious about this mission. From Old Zhu’s death, he had learned a lesson: never treat anyone as a fool. If this was true for mortals, it was even more so for the deep-thinking cultivators.

Huai Daoist smiled with a knife up his sleeve, Hou Niao’s intentions were unclear, and this included those warehouse workers who ostensibly obeyed him on the surface. It was hard to say whether there might be another Hou Niao among them.

After a month, the Inner Warehouse began to show its new setup. Five to six thousand artifact treasures, genuinely old and no longer serviceable, were picked out, not placed on the shelves, but kept in chests, waiting for a decision from above on whether to refine or destroy them.

The decrepitude of these thousands of artifacts was unanimously recognized by the warehouse managers, some of which couldn’t even be activated, belonging clearly to the type that was too broken to conceal. There was no doubt about this.

The real potential problems, the chances for corruption, lay with those artifacts whose age and function were unclear and about which everyone’s judgements conflicted; there were also several thousand of these. As the head official, Hou Niao’s idea was to set these uncertain artifacts aside for the time being during sorting, to place those artifacts that were definitely made within the past thousand years and whose functions and attributes were clear on the shelves first, and to deal with the batch about which opinions were divided last.

This was the right solution, and no one objected.

In front of the Xin warehouse, Hou Niao locked up the divisional warehouse in front of everyone and set restrictions,

"From today onward, no one is allowed to enter the Xin warehouse except me; until the Inner Treasury is unsealed and a message from above tells us how to deal with this junk. Any objections?"

Everyone shook their heads; these artifacts truly had no value, took up space, and would only invite criticism if lent out. Other than the material they were made of, which still held some value, everything else about them was subpar, leaving no other option but restructuring.

To put it bluntly, even if a great thief came in, or if any of them harbored second thoughts, they would not take such a great risk for this trash. Why wouldn’t they choose the best rather than the worst? Wouldn’t that be foolish?

Until now, he had done almost everything calculable to the utmost in the relatively enclosed space of the Inner Warehouse. What remained were tests of his luck; he couldn’t remain inactive because of the various intentions of these people, so he had to start forcibly, then wait and see what changes would occur.

Only he was allowed into the Xin warehouse, and in the future, after each divisional warehouse was sorted, it would also be sealed, still accessible only by him, the head, to prevent problems before they could occur.

In the main hall of the Inner Warehouse, a few warehouse workers were busy sorting and determining the Five Elements attribute of the artifact treasures, then sending them to the appropriate warehouse and shelf locations, creating detailed labels and building an index catalogue. This was no simple task; they had to ensure not a single treasure was lost and also ensure that when the Inner Warehouse was opened in the future, the guardians could find the target items immediately based on the borrower’s requirements.

Hou Niao, the master, patrolled and checked for possible errors. This was more or less the process.

During the patrol, of course, he could also check the already sealed Xin warehouse, beginning the theft he had long planned, activating the Mysterious Light, and unabashedly sweeping away those old treasures that, despite being barely serviceable, were made of genuine materials.

In fact, in the Cultivation World, the technique of Artifact Refining was improving by the day, from the clumsy beginnings on the Continent to its current refined state, progressing rapidly, just like all manufacturing pursuits. The implication of this refinement is to achieve greater effects with less material.

So, if one were to distinguish all artifact treasures by their usefulness to him, ironically, it was these old items made of solid materials that held greater value, while the ingenious designs of artifacts, those ethereal things, could not be swept away.

As one treasure after another was swept by the Mysterious Light and broken down into the most essential Five Elements Qi, and through a special connection between the Mysterious Light and the Purple Mansion Sword Seed, with a certain absorption ratio, it became fertile soil for the robust growth of the sword seed.

Gathering grains of sand to form a tower, piling up little by little, this speed was much faster than directly absorbing the Five Elements Qi from nature.

This method had one advantage: it offered limitless possibilities. The growth of the sword seed had no upper limit; it could improve quality by continuously compressing its essence, like forging iron, continuously hammering, incorporating other materials, tempering, and then hammering again...

This method would allow the Flying Sword to grow with him, rather than being like an ordinary Flying Sword that, once formed, found it hard to significantly increase its potential.

In the Cultivation World, the best skills, the best treasures, and the best artifacts all shared one common feature: growth.

That is, the future.