The Sect Leader System

Benton decided to stay up all night. The four guards on duty each shift were fine to deal with any mortal concerns such as raising an alarm if bandits approached or scaring off wild animals, but he wanted to make sure no cultivators appeared in range of his spiritual sense.

The night passed quietly, however, and he found himself really wishing he had the internet. He had managed to find some scrolls of what passed for fiction back in the city, basically short stories involving ghosts for some reason, and a couple of books of compiled stories about cultivators. Those last were amusing at least, but he’d already churned through everything he’d found.

As morning neared, he figured it was time to get some work done. First, he made his way quietly into the woods about fifty yards from the dirt cart path—he refused to call it a road—and buried the Jade Chameleon Sect member’s body.

The man had a storage ring, and it was accessible. Benton didn’t know if it unlocked upon the man’s death or if anyone could have accessed contents at any time; both types were in common use with the latter being much less expensive. Only the costliest ones remained locked after death.

Neither he nor Su’s memories had any idea how to create a device that detected a user’s death and reacted to the input, but Benton hoped to learn one day. Making objects seemed like a good, productive way to pass the time since he couldn’t cultivate.

The contents of the sect member’s ring were okay but not exactly a financial windfall. There were less than a hundred silver taels, which according to Su’s memories most cultivators kept handy if they might have occasion to frequent mortal inns and such. The actual prizes in the ring were five spirit coins and several weapons, all suitable for use by a Foundation Establishment cultivator, including three swords, a half dozen knives, and nineteen of those throwing blades the man had used to try to kill Zou Tian.

Benton extracted anything that seemed like personal effects—clothes, toiletries, personal letters, etc.—and buried those with the body. The loot he transferred to his personal storage and looped the man’s ring on the cord that went around his neck with the others.

That grisly task reminded Benton about the other nineteen bodies he had stored. How crazy was the world when he could actually forget about all the corpses he was carrying around with him. Yikes.

Benton debated just making a mass grave nearby for them until deciding against it. He planned on marking the location for the cultivator’s body, so it was possible that people might search the area. Everyone knew he killed them all, obviously, but finding the bodies would essentially tell them he’d kept them in his ring, meaning his ring was large enough inside for nineteen cadavers plus all the other stuff they knew he put in there.

Ugh. He’d have to wait longer to dispose of them, probably somewhere near the village. Maybe he could feed them to the spirit beasts. It was a little gross to think about, but he wondered if it would benefit the beasts in any way. An interesting experiment.

For a moment, he considered that essentially desecrating the bodies of his foes set a bad precedent, but he was living in a cultivation world. He was too soft and knew he was having trouble developing the toughness he needed to be a sect leader. Being less than kind to enemies remains was the least he could do.

If they didn’t want their bodies to end up in the stomachs of spirit beasts, they shouldn’t have tried to steal his stuff.