Treasurer Meng

"One smelly brat leaves and another takes his place." Treasurer Meng snorted when he entered the treasury building after speaking with Yang Kai.

He was of average height and build, with a head of pure white hair and a long beard to much. The old man was propping his head up lazily on one hand while leaning on his table.

"You know old masters are supposed to be wise and mysterious," Shen Lei snorted, making his way over to him, "You're just a crabby old bastard."

"Maybe if tardy little brats like yourself and that other idiot that just left came at proper times, I wouldn't be so crabby, I was having a perfectly good little nap before you two came you know," Meng huffed, before reaching across his desk to pull up a notepad and flipping through it, pausing on one page and looking it over, "One hundred and twenty merit points this month huh? You really are one weird kid."

"I don't wanna hear that from an old lecher like you who can't keep his eyes off of the female disciples," Shen Lei rolled his eyes, "So that's a thousand two hundred silver I can get if I cash it all in, right?"

Over the last year, he'd actually built up quite a tidy sum of silver from how many merit points he had collected over the time and selling stuff at the black wind market.

He tended to spend all of his merit points each month, since the sect was able to get their hands on materials he usually wouldn't be able to. Like yang fruit tree seeds. They were rarely in stock at the market and needed to be brought directly from the Red Blood Gang sect.

He'd planted three of them outside the back of his dorm and had been growing them for the past year. Usually, they took a good ten years to fully grow, but he had bought eight seeds in total. One of the most basic seal arrays of all was for gathering world energy, so he'd used the five extra seeds to set up an array that took in and transformed the taken qi into yang qi that would then permeate around the trees he was growing. With that, plus the yang qi from the sun, his fruit trees were pretty much fully grown now.

"Mhmm," Meng nodded absentmindedly, "That what you want to do then?" the old man asked.

"Most likely," Shen Lei shrugged, "Unless you have something that would be good for me?" he asked.

Now that he had reached the second realm, he was able to manipulate his yuan qi freely within his body, and he extend it over his body. It wouldn't be until the next realm though that he would be able to expend his qi outside his body, which limited him right now in what martial skills he could learn.

There was only one martial technique that second realm cultivators could use that belonged to High Heaven Pavilion. Heavenly Sword. Elder Su had passed on a text copy of it to him not long ago before he left his home to come to the treasury.

"Not really," Meng casually waved off his question, "All the stuff here is all low level crap, and since you've finally managed to break through and have that yang attribute, not much here will do you any good, you know how stingy those clan elders of yours are."

Shen Lei almost groaned at the reminder. Beyond Elder Su, the rest of the elders were all idiots playing power games using the disciples as their pieces, especially the Grand Elder and the fourth elder in charge of the disciplinary committee, both of them seemed to be trying to take full control of the sect together.

The grandson of the Grand Elder was a real piece of work. A weak piece of trash that wouldn't amount to anything at all without his grandfathers help. He was a stage three Initial Element, a stage above Shen Lei himself, but he had only reached that point, at seventeen years old, three years older than Shen Lei because of his grandfather practically stuffing him with pills and giving him special attention.

And the guy was a pussy on top of that, he always wore a defensive artefact when sparring with other disciples, despite that being against the rules. He'd challenged Shen Lei once, angry about the praise about his heaven defying talent, but the fool was a weakling and even with his bottleneck and not reaching the second realm, he'd made short work of the fool, defensive artefact or not.

"Wait," Shen Lei paused, "You can tell I broke through?"

Meng snorted again, "Brat, the aura coming off of you compared to last month is like night and day."

Ah, as expected of Meng. The old guy was seriously mysterious, he wasn't really an official part of the sect apparently, and Shen Lei had never been able to sense what kind of cultivation he was packing himself, and he always has amazing advice for him when asked and even was the one to help him get his hands on the materials he needed to get started with alchemy, artefact refining and seal arrays.

And he wasn't wrong about the difference in power. When cultivating, an appropriate analogy of it could be likened to stairs. Each stage was a new stair up, but when one broke through to the next realm, it was like taking another step up and then leaping up an entire staircase on top of that, and his own growth through breaking through his bottleneck, could be likened to almost two staircases, his strength was far beyond his stage at the moment.

"So," Meng eyed him seriously, "How did you manage to break through in the end? I'm quite curious, I've never heard of anyone ever suffering such a bottleneck in merely the first realm, well beyond the smelly brat that was in here before you."

So, despite everything the old man apparently knew, it was only himself and Yang Kai that struggled with bottlenecks like this at the first realm? Did Yang Kai perhaps have some issue like his own? Or come into something that let him break through his bottleneck like him?

He still wasn't sure at all about his other self within his soul sea and the memories he'd received. Meng was probably his only hope right now of getting answers.

"...To be honest it wasn't really through any effort on my part," Shen Lei admitted with a frown, "It was yesterday it happened. A splitting headache came over me and I staggered back to my dorm room and passed out. When I came to, I suddenly had memories of another persons life and my bottleneck completely disappeared as if it was never there in the first place and I broke through easily."

Meng's eyes widened in shock, "...You're being truthful?" he asked, suddenly leaning over his table and staring into Shen Lei's eyes.

"Yes, but not only that," Shen Lei nodded, "When I awoke, I was in a void of black, the place that will be my soul sea in the future I believe and alongside me there was a ghostly apparition that was completely transparent but in the shape of another boy."

"...Incredible, to think I'd find another one." the old man collapsed into his seat and ran his hand through his white hair.

Shen Lei's eyebrows furrowed at his words. Somehow, it seemed he knew exactly what was going on? "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Brat," Meng narrowed his eyes seriously, "Have you ever heard of people with special physiques? Born with special abilities in their bodies that lets them stand above the common person when it comes to cultivation?"