Chapter 71 - Home Alone
The next six days passed with excruciating slowness for Benton. Creak, creak, creak went the wheels. Followed by another creak, creak, creak. And another creak, creak, creak. Endless, endless creaks.
He missed cars and buses and trains and planes and literally any mode of transportation that moved faster than a oxen-driven wagon on a rutted dirt path, especially ones that didn't creak.
The only possible thing worse than how slowly it took to get from place to place when moving at mortal speeds was the negligible amount of entertainment offerings. One would have thought that cultivators, some thousands of years old, would have created some form of mobile television or something with qi, but they didn’t even really read novels. Cultivation took up all their time.
Ugh!
Worse, in those six days, he’d only gained two measly Sect Points, those from Xun Wu’s wife and son reaching the second minor realm, bringing Benton to thirty-nine. He needed more recruits.
Luckily, they’d be at Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town in four more days, and hopefully, he’d find new disciples there.
Thinking about that eventuality, however, made Benton realize some of the problems with such recruitment. For example, the town had a bad reputation for lawlessness, and there might be rogue cultivators in the town left over from when the Righteous Rain Sect ran things. He wanted to get his disciples in and out of there as quickly as possible to avoid danger.
Recruitment, on the other hand, took time. You couldn’t just snatch people and drag them into your wagon as you passed.
Well, he could. If there weren’t any powerful cultivators around, no one could stop him. Still, he wasn’t quite that desperate for recruits yet.
No, he’d need to find an orphanage and make an offer somehow without sounding like a creep. And he felt bad about using kids young enough to still be in an orphanage for martial pursuits, so it would be nice if he could grab a street gang or two as well. Most of the young people engaged in those types of activities had been driven to it by hunger and desperation. He doubted they were beyond redemption.