Chapter 326: The Secular World

Apart from Yuan Zhixia in her white-collar outfit, on his own side was a man over two meters tall, wearing a leather jacket and a hood, with a burly frame and knotted muscles, his ID displayed as 【Demon Slayer · Dark Falcon】【lv30】

Li Cheng had an impression of that ID — it belonged to an officer of the Monster Alliance guild, famous for a bloody, violent fighting style.

Well... not bad, at least a lv30 combat-type powerhouse; no need to worry about Zhongtian Beiji throwing wrenches in the works or playing dirty.

There was also one with regular, fairly handsome features, dressed in a proper suit, his ID displayed as 【Advocate · Justice】【lv15】.

Judging by the Advocate title, he was probably a lawyer in the real world too, like Howard and Hayer on the opposing side?

"Which guild are you from? Never heard of it."

Dark Falcon glanced at Justice and asked. His voice, muffled by the blood-colored leather hood, came out low and hoarse.

"I'm, I'm from the 【Six Harmonies Eight Wastes】 guild. I worked as a legal practitioner in the real world for a while."

Justice was quite nervous — his 【Six Harmonies Eight Wastes】 was a small guild of fewer than fifteen people, and even its guild leader was only lv26, utterly incomparable to an officer of a big guild like Dark Falcon.

"Don't be nervous. You studied law in the real world, so this mission needs your contribution. I'll cover you on everything else."

Dark Falcon patted Justice's shoulder with a palm the size of a fan, covered in scars, nearly sending the latter stumbling to the ground.

Both sides were now in position, and as if the system had designed it, a knock sounded at the study door right at that moment.

Creak.

The door opened and two smiling, radiant child Daoists walked in, cupping their fists in greeting: "Eight gentlemen have just been revived and must still be unclear on the situation. Please be patient — we've come to lead you to your respective rest rooms."

The group exchanged glances and silently followed.

The study itself was built on a sheer cliff face, and outside was a long, narrow wooden suspension bridge that flickered in and out of view among the clouds.

The bridge was laid with restrictive wards that blocked the high-altitude gale winds. Through the drifting clouds one could see a waterfall that, in the literal sense, plunged straight down three thousand feet, as well as a massive building complex erected on a steep, towering peak in the distance.

One could only say this lived up to a xianxia cultivation worldview — the two child Daoists, no more than ten years old, each emanated a transcendent power fluctuation equivalent to lv10, enough to hang-drye and beat the fierce ghosts and vengeful spirits from any ordinary horror film,

The two chatted and laughed the whole way, bouncing and skipping along, completely ignoring the terrifying height of being amid the clouds.

"Qingming, I've already reached the tenth layer of Foundation Establishment, and you're still stuck at eight. The Master admonished us just last month — now that Mount Buzhou is broken and Heaven and Earth are sundered, the spiritual Qi flowing down from the Upper Realm is extremely precious; every wisp and thread must be cherished."

"I'm not a genius like you, Zihong. I've already been working very hard, okay? Just yesterday I sat in meditation for four full hours breathing in and circulating spiritual Qi."

"Four hours isn't enough. You don't know — the firewood shed is preparing to recruit five new child Daoists. The moment the news was announced, cultivators from the bottom rung across the Lower Realm's fifteen nations and nearly a hundred provinces went crazy. Over a hundred thousand people fighting for five slots. Imperial Princes and Princesses, sect Holy Infants, Confucian prodigies — all of them came to apply for the Firewood Child Daoist position, and among them were even small-sect Sect Masters in their seventies and eighties, hair and beard gone white."

The child Daoist called Zihong spoke with earnest persuasion: "What are they after? Isn't it just to reside forever in the Immortal Court and get a share of immortal grain?

Our Immortal Court sits right beneath Mount Buzhou, closest to the Sea of Spiritual Qi, and we have the Grand Beginning Art cultivation method. Our training conditions are already top-tier.

Your grandfather and my grandfather both served as Thunder Department Adjudicators in the Immortal Court back in the day; by the time we got to our parents' generation, they couldn't get into a Department or Hall and could only enter a Bureau.

If we don't work harder, we'll sooner or later be weeded out by those Lower Realm geniuses who cultivate like their lives depend on it,

and end up as guest Elder in some mortal-world sect, or National Preceptor of some small country, or something like that."

In a world where the power tier was clearly skewed high, one could never be too cautious. The players followed behind, listening carefully to the two child Daoists' conversation while thinking rapidly.

Good news: this world apparently had clear "secular" rules, even with civil-service exams, and they were brutally competitive. Bad news: it seemed excessively secular.

What if some absolutely stunning, enchantingly bewitching fairy big sister took a fancy to Li Cheng and asked him to spend one night with her in exchange for her using her family background to resolve the case —

that would really be a hard choice.

While pondering, the group crossed the suspension bridge and arrived at a fork on the far side. The two parties split left and right, led by the child Daoists toward their respective rest rooms.

It was called a rest room, but it was more like a scripture library. The shelves were packed with a vast sea of legal books — everything from criminal law to civil law, to economic law, environmental law, and procedural law.

Yuan Zhixia casually pulled out a volume on environmental law. Besides protecting water, oceans, forests, cultural heritage sites, nature reserves, and so on, it also emphatically stressed that the spiritual Qi of Heaven and Earth was itself a kind of natural resource.

Any illegal harvesting of spiritual Qi would be treated as the most serious form of environmental destruction — a light sentence meant a hundred-year term, a heavy one meant execution by lightning tribulation.

This point was rather strange. In ordinary xianxia worlds, the spiritual Qi of Heaven and Earth was like the aether in ancient Greek philosophy — omnipresent. Some grotto-heavens and blessed lands were simply richer in it.

The only thing a cultivator needed to worry about was how to improve the efficiency of gathering and utilizing spiritual Qi.

But in this world, spiritual Qi was more like a non-renewable resource such as petroleum?

"Four lawyers, please wait a moment. Star Lord Lord Xiao Shui's carriage will arrive shortly."

The child Daoist named Zihong smiled: "I'll take my leave first."

No errors, no typos, no omissions, no duplicates — all in one read!

"Wait a moment,"

Li Cheng raised his hand: "You mentioned earlier that we have just been revived. What does that mean?"

The Killzone System would "correct" the indigenous residents' perception of the players; as long as the players didn't do anything too outrageous or say anything too bizarre (such as pulling out a photo of a third-generation Field Marshal on a Three-Body planet and trying to use three suns hanging in the sky to scare the Trisolarans to death),

it would simply be overlooked by the indigenous residents.

Otherwise, given Dark Falcon's leather-jacket-muscle-serial-killer look, he would have been struck down as an evil heretic long ago.

"Oh, that."

The child Daoist didn't suspect anything and answered directly: "In life, the few of you were all renowned lawyers and legal scholars of the mortal world.

After death, your divine souls were taken in by the Immortal Court, and for a hundred years you have been in a state of unconsciousness, handling miscellaneous affairs for the Immortal Court and resolving some legal disputes among Lower Realm cultivators.

Because this divorce case is of great significance, the Immortal Venerable used lotus root as a body to reflesh you all."

The child Daoist's tone was perfectly even — no trace of guilt whatsoever over enslaving mortal souls after death, making them work a hundred years of unpaid labor, and then, after resurrection, expecting them to keep working.

Uh... within the logic of this worldview, it did seem normal.

Mortals sold the usage rights of their post-death divine souls to the Immortal Court, and might even be able to bring their descendants a share of immortal cultivation fate.

Ordinary people would beg on their knees and still not find a place to kneel.

(End of chapter)