bookrandom Chapter 444
Chapter 444
The price they offered for this commission was far beyond what one would pay for fighting a peak second-grade demonic beast, so Yue Kaishan accepted it as if it were just a casual task to hunt down a minor first-grade demonic beast.
The old village chief quickly added, "The immortals only need to find a way to make it leave this place. They can lure it away with some meat. Our village can provide the meat bait."
“Old village chief, you’re bullying us!” Xuan Jing immediately jumped up. “Your village made its fortune selling Miaoyun Jade, do you really need this little bit of money? I don’t think you want to solve this problem at all.”
Upon hearing this, the old village chief burst into tears, causing the others to frown.
"Immortal Master, you don't know this, we earn our money through hard work, and the prices we sell to you are very low. How dare we set prices arbitrarily? If you buy it for a high price elsewhere, that's because the immortal masters who come here to buy goods sell it for a high price. It has nothing to do with us~~" The old village chief cried sincerely, his tears streaming down his face, his cries were heartbreaking.
“Immortal Master, we still have some Miaoyun Jade in our warehouse. If you are willing to help, please take it all. Our village is willing to build a shrine for you and worship you for generations.”
The four looked at each other, and Zhong Ming made his decision.
“You point us to the location, and we’ll go scout it out first.”
The old village chief was overjoyed upon hearing this and immediately ordered a lean man to lead them to the place where the excrement had been found.
"My legs are weak, so I won't hold the immortal masters back. I'll go and direct the men to prepare the gifts as a token of our gratitude." The old village chief was really about to kneel down before Zhong Ming.
Zhong Ming... was the first to fall to the ground.
He put the pile of excrement into a brand new storage bag, which he casually carried at his waist as bait.
"Alright, lead the way."
After saying that, the group ran towards the depths of the mountains.
They walked in silence for an hour.
The sky was high and the clouds were light. Zhong Ming had lost count of how many times he had soared into the sky and then descended the wet stone steps. They were already deep in the mountains. After passing through a lush forest, a canyon appeared directly in front of them.
“Immortal Master, this is the place. It’s steep and dark here. There’s a kind of bird that likes to build its nest on the cliff face. There are also some medicinal herbs growing on the cliff. The two people at the east end of the village were found at the bottom of the valley when they came here to collect herbs.”
After he finished speaking, he stopped moving and waited for the immortal masters' instructions, but he only saw Zhong Ming staring into his eyes, motionless.
"Immortal Master..."
"You're hiding something from me."
"Immortal Master, you've been wronged! I would never dare to conceal anything." The man hurriedly tried to kowtow, but Zhong Ming grabbed him.
“You’ve been withholding some information. Tell me, tell me everything from beginning to end, and tell me all the details you can think of.”
A few minutes later, Zhong Ming saw that the man knew very little, so he shook his head helplessly and told him to wait on the mountainside next door.
Once he was out of sight, Xuan Jing began to speak, “Cui Hong, what’s going on? This price is clearly unreasonable. Making us work for such a small amount of money is obviously a losing proposition.”
"How about you try a different approach?"
What's the strategy?
"If we were to hunt this monster, wouldn't we have to pay for its tracks? Now that they've told us and are even willing to pay, let's make a profit. After all, the monster's carcass is ours."
Zhong Ming didn't think a demon beast would go to a strange land for no reason.
Either it was driven away by a more powerful enemy, or something terrible happened to its territory and it could no longer stay, or... it has something it needs here.
"Ideally, it should be an injured third-grade demon beast. Let's take a gamble; we might just make a fortune."
Zhong Ming looked around, searching for clues by probing spiritual energy.
“This is very risky,” Chen Dahai said, not because he was cowardly, but because he was worried about his expensive arrows.
"Let's get to work and find it."
Zhong Ming used some deodorizer and, following the traces of unusual spiritual energy, slowly made his way to one side.
The terrain here is very rugged, and a slight misstep could cause rocks to fall, which would be bad if we alerted the enemy.
The four men used the reconnaissance skills they had learned in recruit camp, following the intermittent traces as they explored forward.
"Didn't they say there were birds here? They were all scared away?"
"That should be it. The birds were flying away when they found the droppings." Zhong Ming tiptoed across the rocks without making a sound.
"But this strange beast left almost no tracks. Could it be a flying beast?"
"Judging from the amount of excrement, if it is a flying monster, it must be very large, so large that it would blot out the sky when it flies. The villagers should be able to detect it."
The group was a bit unsure; surely this thing couldn't have been launched from a catapult.
Further ahead, the residual spiritual energy on the ground was almost imperceptible.
Xuan Jing affixed a lightness talisman and carefully landed at the bottom of the valley. He carefully observed the ground; the weathered rocks were full of cracks, and the sharp edges could easily tear a mortal's clothes.
“These cracks are new.” He astutely noticed that among a large number of old cracks, there were some brand-new ones. However, the reason these cracks were difficult to detect wasn't because they were small, but because…
"It cracked from below and extended all the way to the surface."
"Great, we've found it."
Zhong Ming stretched his limbs. In any case, this thing seemed to be a burrowing monster.
...
Meanwhile, in the village, the old village chief sat in the main seat at the banquet, watching the singing and dancing below, enjoying the delicacies in his hands, feeling indescribably content.
Another elderly man, a few years younger than him, looked uneasy, chewing the delicacies in his hands as if they were wax, and kept glancing at the old village chief.
They sat together on the high platform, quite a distance from the villagers below, with loyal guards on both sides. Even so, knowing the power of the immortals, he still felt a chill run through his body.
"Village Chief," he finally couldn't hold back any longer, stood up and walked to the village chief, whispering, "Is this really okay? What if..."
"There's no 'what if'. Remember, we only have one principle: whoever wins, we help." The old village chief took a sip of wine, and just as a dance in front of him finished, he raised his glass and shouted, "To Yunshan Village, cheers!"
"Cheers!" The thunderous cheers from below drowned them out, as if the doubts had never existed.