The Little Demonic Cultivator in the Courtyard: Borrowing 100,000 Japanese Pirates to Heal

After smashing everything, Lou Bancheng stood amidst the chaos, panting heavily, his chest heaving violently, and veins bulging on his forehead.

Then he sat down in the armchair, expressionless, and picked up the broken pieces of porcelain from the ground one by one, throwing them into the wastepaper basket.

His finger was cut by a piece of broken porcelain, and blood seeped from his fingertip, dripping onto the blue brick floor. He glanced down, then reached his hand over the wastebasket to let the blood drip onto the broken pieces of porcelain, and continued picking them up.

The following day, the Sijiu City Business Community Cooperation Association was officially established.

Lou Bancheng was appointed as the president.

The notices were posted on bulletin boards along all the main streets of Beijing, stamped with the seal of the Japanese headquarters.

……

Leaving aside the fact that Lou Bancheng was forced to become the number one traitor among Beijing's merchants, Xu Jiande's situation was different.

Because the main store didn't sell rice, Xu Jiande basically didn't go to his own rice shop except to check with the main store every day to see if they had any rice.

Even Aji didn't come to the store.

There's no rice to sell.

Xu Jiande stayed in the courtyard house. Apart from serving as the courtyard house manager and having to go out when necessary, he rarely went out anymore, since it was too dangerous outside.

That day, Xu Jiande, who was staying at home, sat cross-legged on the bed, closed his eyes, and focused his consciousness into his dantian.

The vortex in his dantian was a whole circle larger than before. After refining his qi to the third level, the speed and solidity of his demonic energy circulation had both improved significantly.

The dark red core at the center of the cyclone was slowly rotating, like a red-hot iron bead, with the surrounding demonic energy swirling around it, the rotation speed increasing the closer one got to the core.

The airflow generated formed a miniature vortex in the dantian.

But what truly drew his attention was not the cyclone itself, but the black sediment at the bottom of the cyclone.

That was the resentment of hundreds of compatriots who were killed on the day of his execution at Caishikou, which had solidified in his body.

At first, these resentful energies were scattered, blocking the meridians in bits and pieces, making the flow of demonic energy somewhat obstructed.

Later, he spent several nights grinding and compressing the resentment bit by bit, sinking it all to the bottom of his dantian.

Now, these resentful energies are no longer scattered ice blocks, but have condensed into an extremely thin, translucent black crystal, lying quietly directly beneath the cyclone.

It looked like black sand that had settled at the bottom of the water had been compressed into a single block.

Xu Jiande tried to circulate his demonic energy, letting the vortex sink downwards to touch the black crystal.

The moment the demonic energy touched the edge of the crystal, the entire dantian shuddered violently, as if two whetstones had rubbed against each other.

The demonic energy was sharpened and solidified by the crystalline edges, but the bone-chilling cold also surged upwards along with the demonic energy, rushing from the dantian all the way to the chest.

Xu Jiande shivered, feeling as if his heart had been squeezed hard by an icy hand.

But this coldness lasted for less than a second before it subsided, replaced by a purer form of demonic energy being peeled off the crystal and fused into the vortex.

At this moment, resentment is not a pure burden, but rather like a whetstone, which sharpens the demonic energy every time it passes over it.

But the process of sharpening a knife is painful.

Moreover, he noticed a problem: every time demonic energy and resentment clashed, his emotions would become abnormally irritable.

In that instant, images of Caishikou Square flashed through his mind: the eyes of the young resistance fighter, the girl's dangling fingers on the flagpole, and the dark red liquid in the wooden bucket.

These images came without warning, as if they were forcibly stirred up from the depths of memory by resentment.

Xu Jiande took a deep breath, retracted the demonic energy into the vortex, and no longer touched the black crystal.

He needs to figure out exactly how much this resentment will affect him.

Does it only temporarily affect his emotions during cultivation, or does it subtly change his behavior in his daily life as well?

The answer came faster than he expected.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then got up and went to the kitchen to fetch water to drink.

Just as they reached the kitchen door, they heard Jia Zhangshi cursing from the courtyard.

Madam Jia was cursing again, this time targeting her own husband.

Her husband, Jia Laonian, was squatting in the corner repairing a broken wooden bucket. He had been working on it for a long time but hadn't finished. When Jia Zhangshi came out of the house and saw him, she started scolding him. Her voice was shrill and hoarse, and it carried from one end of the courtyard to the other.

Yes, if they do it again, Old Jia won't be dead yet, and Jia Zhangshi won't be a widow.

Xu Jiande stood at the kitchen door with a bowl of water in his hand, listening to Jia Zhangshi's cursing, his fingers unconsciously tightening.

The rim of the bowl made a very faint creaking sound under his fingertips, a sign that the ceramic was about to break under the pressure.

He glanced down at the bowl in his hand; a thin crack, as fine as a hair, had appeared on the bowl's surface.

He quickly loosened his grip and placed the bowl on the stove.

In that instant, a thought flashed through his mind: rush out and punch her in the face to shut her up.

The idea came to him so quickly that it startled him.

Although Jia Zhangshi was a gossipy and annoying person, her crime did not warrant death, and she was not worth his time.

In the past, he would impatiently shake his head and turn away, never feeling the urge to hit someone.

But that impulse really did exist, even though it only lasted for less than a second.

Xu Jiande leaned against the stove, looking down at the bowl he had almost crushed.

The crack on the bowl extends from the rim to the bottom, like a thin lightning bolt.

He knew this wasn't Jia Zhangshi's problem, but rather a problem of resentment.

The hatred and obsession within his resentment not only honed his demonic energy but also eroded his emotions, making him more irritable and easily angered.

Things he could tolerate before now require deliberate suppression to endure; things he didn't care about before might now ignite a nameless fire in his heart.

He had to find a way to control this resentment.

It's probably impossible to completely eliminate them. The only way is to find a way to keep the resentment and demonic energy at a safe distance, so that they come together when you need to sharpen your knife, and are separated when you don't.

As it stands, as long as he doesn't actively use demonic energy to touch that black crystal, his emotions won't be greatly affected.

However, this also means that he cannot frequently use resentment to hone his demonic energy, and his cultivation speed will slow down as a result.

Sharpening a knife with resentment can improve one's cultivation level faster, but it carries the risk of losing control of one's emotions; sharpening a knife without resentment is safer but slower, and in this occupied area surrounded by Japanese invaders, slowness means danger.

Xu Jiande finished drinking the water in the bowl and put the cracked bowl back on the stove.

He decided to leave the crystallized resentment untouched for the time being, at least until he figured out how to control the backlash of his emotions.

After refining Qi to the third level, the demonic energy within his body was much stronger than before, more than enough to handle ordinary battles.

You can keep your resentment until you find a solution.

At this moment, Bai Ling came from the living room to the bedroom and looked at Xu Jiande. For some reason, she also felt a chill down her spine.

At this time, Xu Jiande tried his best to suppress all negative emotions and gradually return to normal. Then he kept trying to see if he could better temper his resentment.