Chapter 325

Ten days in, Shang Xin Ci has tripled her capital to three hundred thousand primeval stones, earning an average of twenty thousand a day. Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing profit too. Fang Yuan’s earnings have outgrown his primeval elder Gu’s capacity, so he buys two more, and his total assets reach two million four hundred thousand. Watching him, Shang Xin Ci’s servants Xiao Die and Xiao Lan grow more confident in her. Bai Ning Bing profits as well, but feels unsettled by it. She cannot work out how Fang Yuan got such precise foreknowledge of the inheritance, and time spent near him only deepens her sense that he hides more than he shows. ^{ch. 325}

Fang Yuan tells Shang Xin Ci the intel business she proposed will not scale the way the Gu purchase did. That scheme worked because her rivals were caught off guard, and most of all because Shang Ya Zi’s exile had left the clan’s shops with no one to manage them or interfere. An information business needs resources, manpower, and a network able to survive rivals trying to strangle it, and her foundation, a few years in the city with two servants and no real contacts, is still too thin. He proposes hiring a manager first: Zhou Quan. Zhou Quan once led Zhou clan at rank four, until demonic Gu Masters slaughtered it and he escaped with wounds that cost him a full rank. Now he is proud, difficult, and the best performing shopkeeper under the exiled Shang Ya Zi, whose loyalty even Ya Zi never won. Shang Xin Ci doubts she can succeed where Ya Zi failed. Fang Yuan tells her to trust her own charisma and try anyway, and she agrees. ^{ch. 325}

Wei Yang then visits. Fang Yuan tells him, in a mix of truth and invention, that his information traces to notes left by Grey Bone Scholar’s exploration of Bai Gu mountain, since destroyed for safety. The genuine part is what those notes are said to hold: the three kings inheritance sits on a rank six Gu Immortal’s blessed land. The three kings drained it once, their inheritances strain it further now, and it is heading toward collapse and eventual destruction. Wei Yang, alarmed at the scale of the claim, says he must report it to Shang Yan Fei before acting further. He still offers to buy any further detail Fang Yuan has on the inheritance’s contents. Fang Yuan names four hundred thousand primeval stones. Wei Yang calls it too little for a rank six Gu Immortal’s inheritance, but pays it as a first installment and promises more once the claim is verified. Shang Yan Fei sends three teams of at least three elders each to San Cha mountain on the strength of it. Days later, Wei Yang pays Fang Yuan the promised sum; the information helped Shang clan’s teams greatly and avoided many deaths. Fang Yuan then meets in secret with Li Ran, a Wu clan spy hidden in the third inner city battle stage whose identity only he knows, and tells him he has information Wu clan will want. ^{ch. 325}