Unsheathed

After placing Pei Qian's treasure box back inside his bamboo bookcase, Chen Ping'an left the inn by himself and casually wandered around the county city to experience the local customs and traditions.

Even though the county city was small, it still contained all of the necessary essentials. There was a scholarly temple and a martial sage temple, a county office and a private school, and all kinds of shops and stalls selling a variety of different things. There was everything that one could wish for.

There were uneven and muddy paths, willow trees that were sprouting new branches, crowing roosters and barking dogs, and brand new spring couplets and door gods.

There were merchants from foreign lands bustling about and peddling goods with no set location, and there were also little children sprinting through the streets, with most of them still wearing brand-new clothes they had been given for the New Year. They were filled with energy and vigor.

Chen Ping'an continued to wander around, and before he knew it, he had arrived at the martial sage temple. On the way, he had also passed a god of wealth temple that was enjoying a relatively large number of worshippers and incense offerings compared to the scholarly temple.

Chen Ping'an had traveled tens of thousands of kilometers these past few years, and he had discovered something very interesting. Ordinary mortals seemingly respected yet were distant from the temples of larger gods, yet they were quite attracted to the shrines and temples of smaller gods and deities such as the god of wealth, the mountain lords, and all kinds of female deities.

For example, in the Azure Phoenix Nation that was filled with Buddhist temples and Daoist temples, commoners would often offer incense to the gods in the main hall and that was that. They wouldn't stay in the main hall for a long time. However, they would often kowtow sincerely before the feet of the gods and deities who were responsible for ruling over some specific matter. After doing this, they would quietly murmur their hopes and wishes.

Chen Ping'an entered the martial sage temple that only had a small handful of worshippers right now.

The divine statue in this temple was a painted clay statue of a martial general who had a ferocious expression and was holding a steel truncheon. It was an extremely dignified-looking statue.

The temple attendant of the martial sage temple didn't come out to greet him. Chen Ping'an was at the fifth tier of martial arts now, but he was still yet to fully recover from his injuries. This had both pros and cons. In any case, he had a sliver of a chance to fight for that elusive and intangible title of the strongest fifth-tier martial artist in the world. Of course, the prerequisite was that Cao Ci, that supreme prodigy from the Great Duan Empire, had already advanced to the sixth tier.

The most important task when one advanced to the sixth tier was to acquire a Hero's Gall Pill, something similar to the golden cores of Qi refiners. There were two main ways to do that.