Today's Xianmen elegant pig slaughter

I heard from the older generation that before the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree withered, the world was bright.
At that time, most of the cultivators were able to break through to the Nascent Soul stage, and even the nine-day thunder-drawing event during the Tribulation Period was recorded in the literature.

Nan Fuguang had never seen a great being transcend tribulation, nor had she seen too many Nascent Soul masters. When she was born, the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree that always hung high above her head had withered. Day and night of course rotated as usual, but the old people often said that the world had fallen into eternal twilight.

What's the difference?

Nan Fuguang once asked her mother this question. In her memory, her mother just smiled, gently stroked her head, and said nothing. Later, Nan Fuguang found out that it was not that she didn't want to say it, but that she really couldn't describe the scene.

——After the Bloody Dusk Era, many powerful people who were once promising fell and died due to explosions during breakthroughs.

The humans exploded with a "bang" like inflated balloons due to the power within their bodies, and blood and flesh fell all over the caves and houses where they had meditated and practiced day and night.

From then on, this phenomenon became widespread. Since even the advancement from the Qi Refining Stage to the Foundation Establishment Stage became a kind of tribulation, most people stayed in the Qi Refining Stage, as if being willing to break through itself was a brave thing.

It is recorded in "The Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree" that when the Sun of Dawn and the Eternal Moon and Stars both descend upon the world of immortal cultivation, the withered Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree will be revived, and this horrible phenomenon that has lasted for thousands of years will stop.

"We are waiting for the divine phoenix and the true dragon to revive with the help of those who practice Taoism" is the concept that Nan Fuguang has heard since he was a child. People are looking forward to the rising of the day of dawn, and the eternal moon and stars will shine again one day.

She had also imagined, like everyone else, that one day she would stand under the branches of the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree, looking up with joy to see the purified and reborn sacred tree sprouting new buds.

On that day, those who practice Taoism will break through the status quo and enter a new civilized order, and ordinary mortals will have a better life under their leadership.

Until this day really seemed to be coming.

Nan Fuguang suddenly realized that she had never thought that the revival of the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree could be related to her...
She was an insignificant person in the Three Realms and Six Paths, and her life seemed to be about to change dramatically from now on.

As the wheel of fate rumbled forward, she became the first cannon fodder crushed under the wheel.

……

How to be cannon fodder?

Specifically, when the Yuntian Sect's number one senior sister dusted off the dust on her body and walked out of the ruins of the Bone Bone Pavilion, she received countless mean looks like "your father doesn't want you anymore because he has a younger brother/sister."

When you are in the martial arts world, you are bound to get hurt. There are always some gangs and factions in the sect that are at odds with her. It is hard not to be gloating at this moment.

"Senior Sister Fuguang, is that a divine phoenix?"

When she walked out, there were many people standing in front of the Bone Identification Pavilion. They were basically ordinary inner disciples who were not qualified to enter the inner cabinet to watch. When Nan Fuguang passed by them, they made way for her.

Perhaps it was because she looked too dazed, which gave people the impression that they had an opportunity to take advantage of her. A guy in the clothes of the Medicine Pavilion tried to reach out and push her, but before he could touch her shoulder, he was stopped by another person from the Weapon Refining Pavilion.

"Why, are you going to rebel?" That junior sister was also a stranger. "Are the people in the Medicine Pavilion so shameless? Didn't they just shout "Thank you, Senior Sister" like a lapdog? Yesterday, you were eager to fight for the immortal weapons and magic treasures in the Jingtan. Remember, it's not Senior Sister Fuguang. You can only get scraps from it in this life!"

The disciple from the medicine pavilion smiled awkwardly, muttered "just kidding" and retracted his hand.

But the various gazes did not disappear. They seemed to have transformed into grimacing faces without noses and eyes, grinning and making mocking sounds at her.

...It's so annoying.

"It's not time to beat the man who's down yet. Please bear with it for a while."

she sneered.

Like a bared-toothed puppy, ready to bite the neck of a random lucky audience member.

Ignoring Taotao calling her from behind, Nan Fuguang jumped onto the Qingguang Sword and stood on the sword floating in the air. She looked back and saw that the Bone Identification Pavilion was in chaos, with people surrounding Lu Sang and Yan Ji'an in layers.

Yunshang Xianzun lowered his head and said something to Lu Sang who was leaning on him. Soon Nan Fuguang's sight was blocked by others, and she could only see a corner of the former's burnt Taoist robe.

Yan Ji'an was so busy that he didn't even notice that Nan Fuguang had left.

So Nan Fuguang left without looking back.

After returning to his cave, Nan Fuguang packed up his things without stopping, stuffed the things he needed into the Qiankun bag on his waist, and went down the mountain.

……

No matter what earth-shaking events happened today in the Yuntian Sect hidden high among the mountains, the mortal world below the mountain seemed to have no reaction to it.

Their lives were no different from usual.

The mortal world is located below the immortal world. Compared to the immortal world which is surrounded by spiritual energy and fairy mist, they have less protection. The dead branches of the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree appear clearer in the sky than in the immortal world.
In midsummer, the dry tree trunks and branches cannot provide any shade; the sun shines directly on the earth, the temperature rises, and people walking on the ground feel like they are being roasted on a fireplace.
There were few people on the street, and the few who were there were all walking in a hurry.

According to some ancient records, when the Shatuo Likong Tree was still there, the mortal world was the place with the most distinct four seasons. Later, the tree withered, and it seemed to take away the soul of this world. Apart from the hot summer and the cold winter, there were only unbearable sandstorms.

According to the description of the author of the ancient book that Nan Fuguang had read, the Shatuo Liekong Tree withered when the winter was about to end. That day he witnessed with his own eyes the thawed river water freezing again, the waves rolling up in thousands of layers, and the white waves frozen in place. He never waited for the peach tree in front of his home to bloom with flowers that belonged to spring.

The world of immortal cultivation can still rely on spiritual energy to hold on for the time being, and ordinary trees can be seen growing normally. But what is left for young people in the mortal world is only this black and white world, which seems to have been dead for many years.

Walking into a familiar street, there weren't many shops open for business, and the few that were open were shrouded in the dull cicada calls. There was no wind, and everything was dead silent.
Perhaps the weather is too hot. Except for the cicadas, no mortal can cope with this bitter summer.

...Even those who practice Taoism cannot do so.

Not long after walking, a thin layer of sweat appeared on his forehead. Nan Fuguang made a cold body spell and quickened his pace.
On the roadside, the bosses were either sitting or standing in their shops, originally with their eyes wide open in a daze, until they saw Nan Fuguang, who was wearing the robe of the Yuntian Sect, they all raised their necks unconsciously, with a hint of anticipation in their eyes.

He seemed to want to come up and sell his products but was hesitant to do so.

Until she passed by a bookstore, the owner came forward and said, "Fairy sister, please stay!"

Nan Fuguang was startled.

The other person was too close, and she subconsciously took a defensive stance, but soon relaxed.

The bookstore owner seemed to be aware of the alienation between them and the immortal cultivators, but he just paused awkwardly, then rubbed his hands and finished his words: "The latest novel, "The Tyrannical Immortal Lord Depends on Me", do you want it? It's 18+, a substitute literature, chasing after the wife to the crematorium, so trendy!"

Nan Fuguang thought expressionlessly, you are so good at stepping on people's sore spots when dancing, Fairy sister, I am the substitute, but it's a pity that there may not be a popular crematorium of chasing wife.

While honestly taking the book from his hand, she thought for a moment and asked, "Do you know that something big is going to happen in Yuntian Sect today?"

The boss asked back, "Are you talking about the beam of light that shot up into the sky this morning? They said it might be a great auspicious sign."

Nan Fuguang: “Yes.”

Nan Fuguang waited for the boss to have some different reaction, but he didn't. He nodded perfunctorily and muttered, "So what? The weather won't get a little cooler." He pointed to the book in Nan Fuguang's hand and said, "Five copper coins."

There was no intention to ask what exactly happened.

It seemed that to him, five copper coins were more important than the birth of the divine phoenix.

Nan Fuguang paid the money and stuffed the book into the Qiankun bag on his waist under the boss's admiring and fascinated gaze.

"I'll buy a Qiankun bag if I have money," said the bookstore owner, "so I don't have to drag a cart so many times to get goods in the future!"

A Qiankun bag is not expensive, and it can be a dream? Is it because there are too many pirated works these days that it is difficult to make money from literary creation?

Nan Fuguang thought again when he was about to say this: the biggest problem is that things in the world of immortal cultivation are generally not leaked out -
A Qiankun bag only costs a few medium-quality blue spirit stones (equivalent to a silver ingot on a one-to-one basis), but it might cost a gold ingot in the mortal world...
And you have to buy it secretly from the black market.

Sometimes Nan Fuguang feels that the idea of ​​"those who practice Taoism should lead the progress" is a joke in itself. After all, the Taoists in the Taoism world are reluctant to share even the most basic things.

Nan Fuguang closed his mouth, smiled at the bookstore owner, and stopped discussing the auspicious sign with him. He turned and entered the Pavilion of Rare Treasures next door.

……

There were cabinet doors on both sides, densely packed with small compartments like those in a drugstore cabinet. All of the mysterious small compartments were locked with individual locks. Occasionally, there were a few compartments separated by transparent glass, which contained some imported goods from the unclean sea for display.

The store was dimly lit. Compared to other listless stores, the Treasure Pavilion was eerily quiet. The boss, dressed in a simple grey outfit, sat behind the counter, his hair tied up with a silver hairpin, his head tilted, almost snoring.

——The Pavilion of Rare Treasures is the largest black market distribution point stationed at the foot of Yuntian Sect Mountain.

The senior elders of Yuntian Sect might not be completely unaware of this, but if the disciples of the sect occasionally exchange some items for money to make extra money, it would make them complain less about the sect being stingy, so most of the time, Yuntian Sect turned a blind eye to this store.

Nan Fuguang is the largest supplier of the Pavilion of Rare Treasures.

He tapped the countertop with a thin layer of dust on it with his fingers slightly bent. The tapping sound made the young woman behind the counter utter a nasal "hum" and then sat up straight, her eyes dazed and her face still had red marks from her hands: "Who! Me! What are you doing!"

Nan Fuguang didn't know whether to laugh or cry: "Me."

The silver-haired woman's face was blank for a few seconds, and then her eyes finally focused. She saw the man standing behind the counter with his chin raised like a little peacock, and her face blossomed with bright life: "Ri Ri!"

Nan Fuguang forced a smile at her, took out a few handmade wind chimes from his Qiankun bag and placed them on the counter, shook them open roughly, and then pushed them all to the person behind the counter.

She didn't even have time to say anything or introduce herself, her face was held in her hands the next second -

Anyway, the person who was originally sitting behind the counter now leaned out like a snake, half of his body was stretched out, and his soft and warm fingers held Nan Fuguang's face, forcing her to raise her head slightly, and the scent of honey and flowers enveloped her.

"You're not happy today either?" The person who spoke looked at her deeply with his light brown eyes, "Why?"

Nan Fuguang was not very close to mortals, but he did not make a fuss as if he had contracted a serious illness by being touched. He grabbed the woman's slender wrists, pulled them apart to the left and right, and freed his face: "'Also'."

"Big sister from the Yuntian Sect, every time you come to my store, you are unhappy and come to sell some contraband." The woman winked at her, "What did you bring this time?"

The female proprietress of the Rare Treasure Pavilion is named Wuqiong. She has been dealing with Nan Fuguang, a centenarian young man in the world of immortal cultivation, since her father's father's generation.
But it was obvious that she was the only one who liked to put her hands on Nan Fuguang.

"Dream Catcher, also known as 'I'll get rich when I wake up from my dream'." Nan Fuguang plucked the bell on the wind chime, "You told me last time that many scholars in the mortal world said they had strange dreams recently. The dreams talked about some earth-shaking things about the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree. If they recorded them, they could write a good article and become famous..."

"Last time I dreamed, I thought I had a great idea that would make me rich right after I woke up. I struggled to get up in the middle of the night and wrote it down, then fell back to sleep. The next day I saw what I had written on the paper: Juicing kiwifruit without seeds is the most delicious juice in the world."

"..."

"Don't believe a word that mortal scholars say."

I am poor, but I still carefully read the books like treasures, "I will be rich only after I wake up from my dream"——
The levels of talismans are usually arranged in order of white, green, blue, red, purple and gold. The top medium blue dream-entering talisman and the lower green recording talisman are drawn by Nan Fuguang himself. The appearance of the wind chime is that all disciples of the Yuntian Sect will hang a soul-calming dream-entering wind chime on the eaves.
Combining them with an imaging mirror, they become something that can read people's dreams.

Having a rough idea of ​​the pricing of this thing, Wuqiong said, "You always come up with interesting things like this. The last time you used the ink-free wolf-hair brush, it was sold out. If you can put a Yuntian Sect seal on it..."

"I will never go down the mountain again."

Wuqiong heard this, his eyelashes trembled, he lifted his eyelids and glanced at the man who had just smiled but was actually smiling.
The gloomy fairy sister said: "So, what's the reason this time?"

The conversation turned.

Nan Fuguang knew what she was asking.

One hand was propped on the counter, and she was silent for a moment. She used a chatty tone and tried to be as light as possible when she said, "Yan Jian picked up a little girl a few days ago. The Bone Identification Pavilion just confirmed today that she seems to be the reincarnation of the Divine Phoenix."

"It's fake." Wuqiong pointed to the brightly sunny sky outside, "Can't you see how hot it is today? The trees in the sand are still withered."

Compared to the people of the Yuntian Sect who were shocked as if the sky had fallen, like the bookstore owner, her face had the kind of indifference (and reassuring) calmness that a mortal should have towards the matter of the "divine phoenix descending to the world".

"Maybe it won't take root and sprout so quickly." Nan Fuguang said irritably.

"Well, um... the bookstore next door just got a new copy of 'The Tyrannical Immortal Lord Depends on Me'. Do you want to buy it and learn a little bit about the plot?"

“…What are the contents?”

"The Immortal Lord emptied the sea of ​​consciousness of his substitute to restore the body of the half-dead Bai Yueguang?"

"..."
So bloody?
Nan Fuguang covered his dantian with a complicated expression, feeling a dull pain.

Wuqiong put away the wind chimes, turned around, and looked at Nan Fuguang's pale face across the counter.

"You look so miserable, so I'll take you to eat something good - I'm going to buy some food, do you want to come?"

"?"
Nan Fuguang asked blankly.
"buy what?"

……

Buy pork.

The girls carrying bamboo baskets in their hands stood on tiptoe with shy looks at the front of the team. They gathered in groups of three or five, pushing and teasing each other. Nan Fuguang, a Taoist cultivator who wore white gauze hats to protect himself from the sun and stood stiffly among them, looked like an outlier.

The commercial street was deserted, probably not because the weather was too hot but because everyone had gathered in this place. I never thought that a market could be described as "crowded with people". The line in front of me was longer than Nan Fuguang's life.

At the end of the line is a pork stall.

A rotten wooden sign that was about to fall off hung above the stall, with the words "Fresh Wild Boar Meat" written on it. Under the sign, a hand raised its knife and a silver light flashed. With a loud "snap", the chopping board that looked like a tree stump jumped up like a frightened fish, and the dazzling red and white pig leg was split into two with meat splashing.

The hand holding the butcher knife was strong and powerful, with bronze skin and the blue veins on the back of the hand bulging with tension.

The man's casually trimmed short hair just covered his neck, which was wet with sweat and seemed to be emitting hot steam.

He was shirtless under the sun, sweat rolling down his muscle lines as the girls screamed. His broad shoulders made his waist look as thin as that of a handsome male dog.

A large piece of fresh pork fell into the lotus leaf.

"Thirteen cents, thank you for your patronage."

With a low voice and a slight hoarseness, the man leaned half of his body out of the pork shop and handed the tied lotus leaves out of the stall.

His small movement allowed the people outside the stall to clearly see his faded black cotton and linen trousers. Behind the casually tied belt, his tense muscles moved with his movements.

The sharp butcher knife fell on the chopping board, and he raised his hand to casually wipe the sweat from the tip of his tall nose.

Nan Fuguang's gaze was still on the whitish part of his belt.

After that.
Uh.

……………………………………It’s a big bag.

“Isn’t this scene more magnificent than the sprouting of branches from the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree?”

"..."

"Sister Fairy, why don't you say anything?"

"What are you talking about? The world is going downhill. How can you be so shameless? You have lost your morals and put the cart before the horse. You have ulterior motives—"

"Stop talking nonsense, just tell me if it looks good or not?"

“Isn’t this street used for buying groceries?”

"Why, are you reluctant to go to the scenic spot to buy vegetables?"

"..."

(End of this chapter)