Translator: TheBrokenPen
Editor: Dhael Ligerkeys
Trade with the Vault of Providence went both ways.
Anything of value could be bought and could also be sold to the Vault.
However, there was little worth in reselling items to the Vault. Lu Ye had tested reselling Inviolable to the Vault and the price he was offered was just a measly fifty Contribution Points.
He bought Inviolable for a hundred and thirty-eight Contribution Points and less than one-third of the original price was offered in return?!
But if there was anything of value, then beyond any doubt, that would be the dragon scale he got from inside the Dragon Spring. To his surprise, the scale was offered a price of a whopping eight thousand Contribution Points during a test he did on a whim.
But of all the things Lu Ye could trade away, he would never sell that. It had just done so much good for both Amber and him. In fact, putting the scale in one of the training chamber’s Circle of Boon’s cavities has been what he had been doing lately so that he could gradually assimilate its energy.
And as a result, Lu Ye had been feeling his physique making noticeable improvements.
Not unlike how Amber had become more intimidating and ferocious since he began inhaling the energy released by the scale last time.
The next item that the Vault ranked lower than the dragon scale was Lu Ye’s Barrier-penetrating Fruits. Valued at five hundred Contribution Points apiece, the fruits were one of the few items that Lu Ye could barely bring himself to part with. The Fruits have proven to be extremely useful in unlocking Spiritual Points and he would need the fruits one day.
As it happened, he had already given both fruits to Shui Yuan. Not only a Medical Cultivator, but Shui Yuan was also an accomplished Pill Cultivator who could synthesize the Barrier-penetrating Fruit with other herbs and turn them into pills which could be better and more effective than just ingesting the fruit.
Buying a Barrier-penetrating Fruit from the Vault required three to four hundred Contribution Points and every one of the Fruits could, in the skillful hands of Shui Yuan, produce at least four to five pills.
“Is there no other way?” Lu Ye muttered as he shoved another morsel of Shui Yuan’s cooking into his mouth, and he gobbled away.
“Issue a challenge then,” Li Baxian smiled, “You could challenge Thousand Demon Ridge factions to battle. Assign a fixed amount of Contribution Points, both sides put it on a wager, swear the terms with a pact in Heaven’s name, and if you win, the entire sum goes to you!”
Lu Ye’s face turned sour. With him as the only Crimson Blood Sect member in the Battlefield, he could hardly just strut up to another outpost, bang on its doors, issue a challenge, and expect to win, could he? As much as they really were enemy outposts scattered around the vicinity, even he did not have any certainty that victory would be his, assuming that they would even accept the challenge in the first place. Besides, at the moment, Lu Ye was sorely lacking in Contribution Points which would be needed to put forward as collateral.
“Or… how about the Battle Royal of the Legates?”
The suggestion only just slipped out of Li Baxian’s tongue when Shui Yuan gave him a nasty glare.
“Lu Ye could hardly just keep his head low for the rest of his life, could he? There’s no way that you, Sister Shui Yuan, and Old Man could mollycoddle him for the rest of his life. Lu Ye’s a proper acolyte of the Crimson Blood Sect now and hence, he should be allowed to see the world and broaden his perspectives for his own good.”
Shui Yuan glumly added more food to Lu Ye’s plate without saying a word.
Lu Ye peered at her and saw how she was avoiding his gaze, so he asked, “What’s the Battle Royal of the Legates?”
“The results of the tier assessment will be out in almost a half-month. Usually, that’s when the Battle Royal of the Legates begins…” said Li Baxian and he went on explaining further.
Lu Ye now knew what this Battle Royal was all about.
Most of the sects and orders would come to an understanding to keep a temporary peace until the tier assessment had concluded. Any disturbances or turbulence with the assessment being so close could very well jeopardize their performance and that was certainly what no one wished to see.
But the Spirit Creek Battlefield was not called a Battlefield for no reason. Peace, however lovely and cheerful, is just so brittle and fragile. The specter of horrific carnage that just couldn’t stop haunting the Battlefield still loomed. So, the sects and orders each agreed to a huge festival of violence—the Battle Royal of the Legates.
The Battle Royal was a contrivance of the Heavens, or Fate, or whatever sustained the Battlefield. A malefic design shaped by the very unseen hands that kept the Battlefield’s existence. No one could stop it from happening. If anything, it only seemed like the Heavens wished to further ignite the powder keg between both the Grand Sky Coalition and the Thousand Demon Ridge that was already about to blow.
As soon as the tier assessments had ended, the legates-in-charge of the outposts in the Battlefield would be allowed to submit their names. With one level of enhancement on the outpost’s Divine Opportunity Column as a wager, the legates would be magically transported into another unknown pocket dimension where the many-sided melee would take place and the defeated of every skirmish would not only yield to the victor his or her life, but also the level of enhancement that was waged.
Enhancements applied to an outpost’s Divine Opportunity Column were what strengthened the richness of Spiritual Qi in the outpost where every level of enhancement increased the richness by one-tenths. Each enhancement was valued at five hundred Contribution Points, Lu Ye once surveyed the cost, although Li Baxian had warned him before that each level was priced differently. Enhancements could grow increasingly expensive the more enhancements the Divine Opportunity Column of an outpost accrued.
Therefore, legates who performed well in the Battle Royal would win more enhancements to be placed on the Divine Opportunity Column of their outposts and that would ensure a heavier effusion of Spiritual Qi in the atmosphere.
But that was not all; it was said that rare items—Barrier-penetrating Fruits, for instance—commodities with impossibly sparse supply, could be easily found inside this mysterious pocket dimension.
Thus, making the triennial event a major gala that almost every sect and order in Jiu Zhou with an outpost in the Battlefield would take part in.
Lu Ye sat in his chair, bewildered and perplexed as he struggled to digest what he just heard. He had been wondering what he could do to increase the abundance of Spiritual Qi in the outpost. If it was not for the hefty price tag, he would have invested in at least one level of enhancement already. That the news of this tournament came at such a timely moment really was a pleasant surprise.
Naturally, only legates and prolegates from each sect and order would qualify for the Battle Royal. Still, even with only two contestants from each denomination in both the Grand Sky Coalition and the Thousand Demon Ridge, the total number of contestants nevertheless made up a sizable crowd.
“But wait, Brother Baxian. I’m only just a Fifth-Order. Although I might be able to hold up against Seventh-Order enemies, what if I encounter those from the centermost areas of the Battlefield?” lamented Lu Ye. As much as he was thrilled about the Battle Royal, he realized that his chances were slim.
If contestants as dangerous as Li Baxian, the prolegate of the Devoted Ones outpost here in the Battlefield, were joining the Battle Royal, one could hardly expect that a Fifth-Order like Lu Ye would have any chances of winning at all.
“The Heavens might be brutal, but it would never send you to certain death for nothing. A balance must be maintained. That is why the Battle Royal is held inside a pocket dimension. In this separate reality, there’s an unknown force at work that functions to inhibit the powers of high-ranking contestants. The more they travel outwards, the greater the inhibition is on them. For instance, when I’m transported to that pocket dimension, once I begin moving away from the center and inner ring areas, my powers will be limited by certain degrees depending on how far am I moving from my area. On the other hand, with your present rank, the enemies that you’ll encounter are usually legates and prolegates of the outer ring areas whose rank and powers would not be too difficult for you to handle. That’s why the Battle Royal isn’t just for high-ranking contestants. Of course, most legates and prolegates are at least Seventh-Orders, although you might encounter Sixth-Order prolegates as well.”
“Ohh, that’s great then!” Lu Ye quipped with brimming enthusiasm.
That prompted a furtive glance from Li Baxian at Lu Ye. He would have responded with a sardonic snort if it were any other Fifth-Orders who expressed such excitement despite the odds. Yet Lu Ye had proved himself to be extraordinary; far from ordinary Fifth-Orders in fact. In the past few days of training, Li Baxian had witnessed with his own eyes the exponential growth in Lu Ye at such a pace that even he had to admit was ungodly.
Just then, Shui Yuan said quietly, “But that doesn’t mean that our Sect qualifies for entry. Admission into the Battle Royal requires BOTH the legate and prolegate of the outpost. There’s no way you could join unless you could find yourself a prolegate.”
None of them failed to miss the catch in Shui Yuan’s voice that hardly disguised her disapproval at Lu Ye joining the Battle Royal, even though she did not want to dash his hopes just yet…
But Lu Ye knew that Shui Yuan was only just worried about him. He understood her concerns about his well-being, but at the same time, Li Baxian was right: Shui Yuan and Tang Yifeng could only watch over Lu Ye so much, making it even more important for him to grow as well.
That would mean he needed a prolegate if he wanted to join the Battle Royal.
But where would he be able to recruit one in time? He needed one that he could trust, not to mention one who could hold his or her own in the tournament. The last thing he needed was a Third- or Fourth-Order whom he needed to babysit for the entire length of the Battle Royal.
Then he thought of the independents. But he barely knew any of them, to say nothing of the fact that none of them might be interested in gambling away their lives in such a brutal competition of life and death.
Lu Ye racked his brain for ideas to no avail.
After his meals, Lu Ye continued his training with Li Baxian before he was dragged off by Shui Yuan for another round of treatment. By the time he headed back to the outpost’s training chamber for his nocturnal meditation, it was already night.
It was during one of his meditation sessions in the outpost when Lu Ye felt a fleeting and ethereal sensation sweeping the whole compound. It was coming from the outpost’s Sanctum of Providence.
Squinting his eyes with curiosity, he got up and paced quickly towards the Sanctum of Providence where the answer to the strange phenomenon was revealed immediately.
The tier assessment results had been announced. The assessment itself was an act of the Heavens that no one could sway.
The Crimson Blood Sect should have been defunct in this year’s tier assessment but due to his induction, the Sect managed to endure. But it was also due to the fact that the Sect had at least one member each in the Divine Ocean Realm and the Real Lake Realm, otherwise the Sect would have lost even its present Tier-Nine status.
The tier assessment was done based on the Heavens’ very own ordained set of standards which remained an enigma to most, but what was certain about the grading was that the number of members of a sect or order and the overall strength of the members had direct influence on the performance of the group in the assessment.
Not knowing what just happened to the Divine Opportunity Column, Lu Ye could only choose to return back to the training chamber to continue his meditation.
Two figures fleeted around in a whirl of metallic clangor and gnashing at the square outside the main audience hall of the main stronghold the next day, a pair of caliginous shadows throwing themselves at each other before dislodging only to ram right into each other again. At times, they just missed each other just by inches, although that too, was followed by the shrill ring of steel striking steel. That was until Lu Ye retreated and when he looked down, there was blood trickling out of puncture wounds on his chest and abdomen. But that did not stop him from wheeling around to face his opponent and maintaining a defensive stance.
Not far away, across the other side, Li Baxian focused his gaze on his chest and there it was: a faint red line of blood. His own.
He smiled and sheathed his sword. “You’ve done it, Lu Ye! Well done! I have nothing else to teach you after this. But trust that your skills with the saber have greatly improved and you will do well.”
This was the first time Lu Ye had managed to hurt Li Baxian since they began training a month ago. Even with Li Baxian keeping his power down to Lu Ye’s rank, he was nevertheless a very deadly opponent and training with him was what gave Lu Ye a deep impression of the finesse, the strength, and the power of the one who was one of the ten deadliest Cultivators of the Battlefield.
Lu Ye returned his weapon to its sheathe and bowed, “Thank you so much for your help, Brother Baxian.”
Li Baxian tossed his gourd into the air. The object grew in size with visible speed, until it was the size of a tiny boat. Li Baxian leaped into the air and glided on top of it. “The results for the tier assessment are out. So it’s time I head back to prepare. Farewell, brother. Let me know if you are in need of help. I’ll see you soon.”
He waved to Shui Yuan then he paused and respectfully bowed in the direction of the main audience hall before he morphed into a bolt of light that shot into the distance and vanished.
That was it. Li Baxian left with suaveness and style.
Lu Ye watched him leave. Finally, the question that had been like a rock in his chest could not stay suppressed any longer. “Sister Shui Yuan, why is Brother Baxian a member of this Sect and yet he became an acolyte of the Devoted Ones?” ．
In fact, Li Baxian was hardly the only one. Lu Ye remembered that a Brother Xinghe was mentioned as well, another one of the Sect’s former acolytes who had joined another sect.
But Li Baxian came and went like this was his home. Even Tang Yifeng and Shui Yuan too treated him like he was still one of theirs.