Mila
Once she'd passed the hurdles to create her identity, the Violet Mountain Sect was actually quite nice, filled with kind and easy to manipulate people.
Granted, they were only kind to her. With Sensory Domain she could spy on everything within roughly 54 meters of herself, allowing her to see behind a lot of closed doors, and there were many, many very depraved people in the sect.
To her, though, most were deferential, her status as a core disciple putting her on nearly the same level as most of the sect’s D ranks, and this made people want to win her favor, even those who were in charge of giving her resources. More important, however, as a new core disciple from outside the sect, it was the job of those giving her resources to make her want to be loyal to the sect, and her preparing her own cultivation technique so she could gain access to the Twelve Element Primal Code had the nice side effect of both the cook in charge of her meals and the politically connected trainer feeling they needed to give her more, which was helping her raise her stats quite quickly.
Sure, Earth had a lot of Foundation Establishment Soup and other stat boosting treasures from Mila spending most of her extra trial points, but it was always nice to get things for free.
She’d even managed to gain access to a residence holding one of five secret entrances into the core of the Crystal Mountain, where she assumed the subspace’s inheritance was located.
Then of course there were all the men fawning over her, which she could probably make use of in the future in some way.
The true advantage of joining the sect, however, for her at least, was the information she was gaining access to. It wasn’t the lessons. She was fully aware she could buy taped copies of pretty much everything she was learning for a few D rank universal credits at most. But watching those lessons on her own wouldn’t give her the perspective she was gaining just by living in an upper B rank force.
In the tutorial and then on Hira and Earth, she hadn’t truly understood her own place in the universe, but after joining a B rank force as a core disciple, she realized that from the beginning of the integration she’d been enjoying the same types of benefits granted to core disciples of A rank forces.
Granted, she’d had to work harder for the resources than normal core disciples, but she’d gotten so many Legendary grade resources she’d started to give them away.
As a result, she’d had an incorrect understanding of the value of what she already had. Just the information Aalam had been given at the beginning of the tutorial would be measured in units of at least thousands of A rank universal credits, and something like the Orb of Devouring used as the core of the Left Hand of the Runescribe would be valued in a similar range.
More important than the material benefits, however, or even the boon Aalam had received which allowed him to design the insane builds they were using, she hadn’t been making full use of the greatest benefit she’d received from the tutorial, the fact she had the ear of an experience A rank at any time she wanted.
There were so many possibilities which existed for turning her access to Nana Xara into tangible power, and it was time to start making use of them.
Take the Violet Mountain Holy Land for example. By this point, Mila was almost positive everyone she’d met so far in the Violet Mountain Sect didn’t know their holy land was effectively acting as a poisonous dao guide. But she could tell the chief elder and at least some of the elders were definitely aware, judging by how their descendants were encouraged to train in Laws other than water, earth, and metal, and the ability to realize this was very valuable.
With Mila’s knowledge from Nana Xara, she could see how the sect truly functioned, and how being stationed on one of the Carium Galaxy Cluster’s three C rank planets was not at all worse than being allowed access to the Violet Mountain Blessed Land, which really changed the political dynamics compared to if she didn’t have that information, several elders holding far more power than they’d originally seemed.
This knowledge wasn’t super useful at the moment, but when she eventually chose a faction in the near future it would be invaluable.
And this was a very, very minor example.
Through the boon Mila had received from the Trial Tower, Mila’s own force—which admittedly currently only consisted of her, Aalam, Isaiah, Diana, and Epecteos—could purchase access to any public teleportation platform in the universe.
Even with the high costs of teleportation, with 12 universal credits of the same rank as the teleporting cultivator required for intra-cluster and 144 universal credits required for inter-cluster teleportation, along with the high costs for the rights to use each platform in the first place, there was a lot of money to be made from moving resources from where they were common to where they were rare, and the type of access they had was not at all common among forces as weak as theirs.
A rank forces wouldn’t care much about D and C rank forces in the outer galaxy clusters of the universe, but, with just this boon, Earth had the possibility to make a lot of money in the future once they brought more members into their force.
Without Nana Xara’s information, however, it was very, very likely they would try to trade something too valuable and just get their member killed, or worse blackmailed into giving over their entire operation to a force with more power. With Nana Xara’s information, however, they could avoid accidentally competing with other powers in the same line of business, at least those which had been around for a long time, as well as choose some known good trading partners with long standing history of honest transactions.
From her lessons, Mila was getting a better sense of the types of resources forces at each rank would desire yet not have easy access to, and she was really kind of enjoying the idea of creating a multi-cluster conglomerate of sorts in the future based around planets with the Heavenly Spark Soul King as overlord, only with multiple different pseudonyms created by Aalam’s eventual Pupa of Bonds.
“So, we have an interesting opportunity on the home front,” Nana Xara began one day as Mila rolled out of bed, about a week after she’d officially entered the Violet Mountain Sect. “No one told Epecteos we already have access to the Twelve Element Primal Code, so he sent a message to the Vin Clan royalty of the Grand Elven Empire asking if they needed anything for trade and he got back an interesting reply.
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“It seems the Vin Clan has set a bounty on Highgenion Flowers after you bought all three from the Trial Tower, and, while they only need one, they are willing to trade for resources worth up to twelve times as much.”
Mila thought about it for a few seconds. She’d learned about the Vin Clan from her classes, as they were one of the closest A rank forces to the Violet Mountain Sect, and she was pretty sure the elf who’d tortured Aalam had been a member.
This didn’t mean they weren’t honorable business partners, however, just that one of their disciples was a sadist.
“Is it possible to tell the origin of a Highgenion Flower?”
“No. it is not.” Nana Xara sounded like she was smiling.
“Is there a way to tell how long ago a Highgenion Flower had been picked?”
“Not if it was sealed well, which our Highgenion Flowers were.”
“Alright then.” Mila nodded as she quickly got dressed. “Unless you see any problems, we should have Epecteos change the box of one of our flowers and then trade it to the Vin Clan for the remaining required materials for upgrading the Left Hand of the Runescribe as well as the materials for the Twelve Element Stationary Enhancement Formation to boost Diana during her run at the Trial Tower. Any leftover difference can be granted to Epecteos in universal credits.
“Is there any way to make the transaction not be in person?”
“The elves provided a System guaranteed contract which can be initiated over the universal soul net which will then have the System teleport the traded materials between the interested parties. For F and E rank materials, the cost is about the same as teleporting equivalent rank cultivators, but the elves are eating the cost so we don’t need to worry about it.”
“Now, if only we’d learned about this earlier, it would have simplified so much.” Mila was disappointed. It had only been a few weeks, but she was already missing spending time with Aalam, Diana, Isaiah, Nitya, and even her grandparents. In the Violet Mountain Sect she always had to act a part, and there were less benefits than she’d thought from joining.
She was already the least talented of her small group, yet now she, stuck in the equivalent of a C rank planet, was also in the worst environment, and she couldn’t easily go back to Earth due to the stupid Mountain Mark.
Though maybe…
Mila started to think, several decent excuses to leave the range of the Mountain Mark beginning to appear in her mind. Sure, she’d probably have to remain in the Violet Mountain Blessed Land for several years first, but then she could probably arrange to stay on Earth for at least until after the next F rank Trial Tower, so she’d be able to help Aalam advance and Diana to gain rewards.
A plan in mind, Mila started to feel a lot better as she left her compound to go gain what little she could from the Violet Mountain Sect.
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