Chapter 43 - One Scary Cultivator
Zou Tian had maintained oversight—he much preferred that term rather than spying—on wandering cultivators before. In his experience, such people weren’t much more powerful than regular gang members. Basically, they were trumped up peasants who somehow gained access to the most basic and incomplete of trash tier cultivation methods and techniques and suddenly felt themselves better than anyone else.
Not that Zou Tian thought himself better even than those unfortunates. As an orphan street rat growing up in Sixth Flawless Flowing City, no one was of lower status than him.
No. He definitely didn’t look down on anyone, but his prior experience explained his reasoning when the Meticulous Contradictory Twelfth Gang asked him to maintain oversight on the warehouse and three suspected wandering cultivators who had rented it for three months.
There were, of course, a few red flags. The three were dressed nicer than most wandering cultivators. They had been able to pay the leasing fee of one thousand tael a month for three months up front. And the eldest of the three wore a spatial ring, something nearly no one of his supposed ilk could afford.
It was those points, however, that drew the intense interest of the gang, and it wasn’t like Zou Tian could really refuse. It was stay in the gang’s good graces and eat or not stay in their good graces and perish.
Still, he hadn’t thought much of the assignment, certainly not that it would be exceedingly dangerous. Not even when he caught sight of the three.
All wore very nice clothes, obviously recently purchased. Though he carried no visible weapon, the eldest one looked the fiercest of the three with his stubble-covered dark head and striking blue combat robes. There was just a quality about how he carried himself. The other two were no slouches, though. The young man was big and muscular, obviously much more well fed than a street rat, and the spear he carried was definitely a prime cultivator weapon, not just some stick he’d picked up in the woods.
Zou Tian found it difficult to pay too much attention to either of the men, though, due to the appearance of the girl. Wearing a jade green robe with perfect features and flowering cheeks, she was amazing. As was the bow she carried. He wasn’t an expert on such things, but he bet such a weapon would cost thousands of taels.
Those wandering cultivators weren’t so simple.
Besides their appearance, the next big danger sign was that the eldest one actually noticed Zou Tian.
After he’d been pushed out onto the streets at eight years old following his aunt no longer being able to take care of him, he noticed that he had an uncanny ability to simply blend in. Nothing supernatural or anything, but people seemed to feel that he fit in with crowds even when the people around him were older and better dressed. Ironically, that trait had been what had attracted the gang to him, an occurrence that had made his life both much easier in that he no longer had to beg and steal for food and much more complicated in that failure to do what the gang wanted could easily result in his death.
It wasn’t all bad, though. Most of the very much older gang members tended to treat him like a younger brother, teaching him how to fight with knives, pickpocket, and other useful skills.