Chapter 40 - Making an Omelet
To simply call Sixth Flawless Flowing City a city did not do it justice. The area it encompassed was enormous. It stretched as far as Benton’s eye could see. He had no way of determining how many people lived within its walls but wouldn’t have been surprised if it were in the millions. Scanning it with his spiritual senses revealed that there wasn’t a huge concentration of qi like he would have expected with a sect, but there were thousands of cultivators present.
Benton hadn’t expected the city to be quite so huge when he’d set out from the village, nor to have so many cultivators present. Gaining the interest of a sect could be deadly for him, and going inside risked just that. He couldn’t help but reconsider whether continuing was worth it.
On one hand, yes. The three reasons he’d outlined to Yang Xiu before leaving still held. Though not starving, the people of the village were hungry, and he feared what winter would do to them. They needed the food he was going to return with, and doing so would create a lot of goodwill and start to build trust. The city was also the best place to sell the wood, and getting to know the players was crucial for developing a future industry. And lastly, his sect needed supplies.
If not Sixth Flawless Flowing City, where? His lone map didn’t show any other locations big enough to buy and sell what he needed, and any city that sold supplies for cultivators was likely to have … gasp … cultivators present.
Really, though, it depended on the degree of risk.
A risk matrix consisted of four quadrants, with probability from low to high being measured on the x-axis and impact, also from low to high, on the y-axis. Low impact but high probability was fine. As was high impact but low probability and, of course, low impact, low probability. The danger zone was high impact, high probability.
Buying and selling cultivator materials meant that Benton was almost guaranteed to run into other practitioners at some point. The result of a run in was much harder to predict. It might just be a nothing burger, but it might result in a fight for their lives. The only thing that gave Benton a modicum of confidence was the thirty-five Sect Points in his pocket. Quick mental calculations told him that he could get to the third minor realm of Golden Core with that many, though doing so would leave him almost nothing in reserve.
Knowing he had the ability to massively power up in an emergency gave him a lot of confidence. What still concerned him, however, was not knowing the strength of who he might be up against.
His spiritual sense could pick up the rank of beasts at a large distance because their cores, unless blocked by an innate ability, emitted that information. Cultivators were different. Intelligent. Controlled. Benton could sense their presence from far away but, for most cases, not their realm.
Still, Nascent Souls were rare, and the city before him was nothing special. Considering the sheer quantity of practitioners inside, there were likely Golden Cores, but he doubted there were any higher than that.
He could easily end up in a situation where he was both outnumbered and outgunned, but only in the case where he attracted undue attention. There was no reason for high rank sect members to pay attention to three low level wandering cultivators.
In the end, his decision came down to the old saying that, if one wanted to make an omelet, one had to break a few eggs. The best he could figure, the benefits of continuing their shopping trip outweighed the risks, but they’d need to be careful.