Too Many Questions

Lin Feng walked through the shopping mall. A few people were sitting on cushions on the floor. Lin Feng was debating on whether or not he should place more benches around the shopping mall for people to sit but he didn't want to fill the whole place with seats just so people could cultivate. They were supposed to shop here, not just sit around.

Many of them were people sent over by the imperial capital and they had only bought one thing. They didn't have spirit crystals themselves to spend after spending the one given to them by the government.

Lin Feng shook his head as he saw the groups of people sitting around but he decided to ignore it for now. They weren't in the way or causing any trouble, so Lin Feng didn't care that much. Besides, he had something more important to deal with now.

Another group of people from the imperial court had arrived, which should push him to over fifty unique customers.

It had taken them three weeks to send over fifty people. The distance between the imperial city and the Demon Tooth Mountains was long but Lin Feng still felt that it had been taking a very long time.

Truthfully, the imperial court had arranged for people to be sent over almost immediately once Zhang Fei had sent back word, but the distance was so far that the first people only arrived around a week later.

Golden Core cultivators like Wang Mu might be able to make the trip in a day, but the Yan Dynasty didn't have five hundred Golden Core cultivators. Those that it did have weren't free to take a trip to the Demon Tooth Mountains either.

The people that had already arrived were the strongest of the group and the ones that had rushed to get there. Nearly all of them were in the Foundation Establishment Realm.

Unfortunately, to Lin Feng, who couldn't sense spiritual energy or cultivation bases at all, the Yan Dynasty just felt very slow.

Regardless, Lin Feng had been keeping careful note of how many customers he had served on the system screen, and the seven people that had just walked in should have pushed him over the edge.

Lin Feng was hurrying over to where Mei was cultivating as the people from the imperial court were led over to the vending machines by some others who had already been here for a while.

As soon as they bought something, Lin Feng wanted to get a pharmacy or health supplement store and heal Mei's demonic core.

Then, just before he reached Mei, the system alerted him.

[Mission Completed: Sell to fifty unique customers! Congratulations! You have unlocked new functionality!]

Lin Feng's eyes lit up and he opened the system interface and navigated to the missions as he walked toward Mei.

[Congratulations on completing a milestone mission! You have unlocked the system's Spirit Crystal Store!]

Lin Feng stopped.

Spirit Crystal Store?

Lin Feng backed out of the system missions screen and tried to figure out what was going on. After the first mission gave him a free choice of a shop as a reward, Lin Feng thought that would be the normal reward given to him for completing missions.

On the main menu, there was a new option that he had never seen before. Lin Feng had spent months with the system at this point. The fact that there was still functionality to be unlocked was unexpected.

[Spirit Crystal Store]

Lin Feng opened it with confusion. The menu showed a number of different stats and options. There was an owner's share listed as twenty percent, spirit crystals listed as zero, and two selectable options below written in red—Withdraw crystals and Buy Cultivation Pill.

As Lin Feng watched, spirit crystals ticked up to one and both options turned white.

Lin Feng looked at the menu in disbelief for quite some time before he was interrupted.

"Big Brother?"

Lin Feng looked down to see that Mei had walked up to him, perhaps after seeing him standing frozen in the middle of the room. Lin Feng's brain slowly started working again.

"…How's your cultivation coming?"

Mei looked very confused over Lin Feng's odd behavior.

"It's okay. The pill that Little Yang gave me helped a bit but I still don't know how long it'll take for me to repair my demonic core. The damage is really bad."

Lin Feng nodded numbly.

"Don't work too hard. Big Brother will get you more medicine soon."

Mei nodded as she watched Lin Feng carefully, wondering if he was alright.

Lin Feng stiffly turned around and went to the vending machines, ignoring the group of new customers still crowded around.

After thoughtlessly buying some food, Lin Feng walked outside, still in a state of confusion.

Outside, everything was destroyed. The courtyard house was a pile of rubble and most of the trees and vegetation were burned to ash or charcoal. The lake was the only part of the landscape that had survived unscathed. Standing on the shore, Lin Feng stared at the corn dog in his hands with confusion.

"What the hell is a Spirit Crystal Store?"

The system seemed to be waiting for him to ask. A window immediately popped up to explain the new feature.

[The Spirit Crystal Store is where the owner can convert spirit crystals into cultivation! Use spirit crystals to buy pills that give varying amounts of cultivation with no bottlenecks! The more spirit crystals converted, the stronger the pill! Additionally, the shopping mall now gives the owner a twenty percent share of the spirit crystals taken in!]

Lin Feng stared at the explanation with frustration.

"Did you just answer my question?"

Lin Feng hadn't forgotten that the system had called him incompetent once before he had any customers. Later, he had assumed that it might have been a reaction to the presence of a potential customer, but he had never been sure. The system seeming to respond to a regular question reignited Lin Feng's suspicions.

"Hello? Are you just going to go mute again?" Lin Feng opened the system menu hoping to see anything else change as he questioned the system.

"What even are you? Who made you? What do you get out of this arrangement?"

There was no reaction from the system. Lin Feng wasn't even sure if it had really been proactively answering his question or if it was a normal part of the system unlocking a new function.

With a sigh, Lin Feng opened the Spirit Crystal Store again and looked over the options. A twenty percent share of sales? For the first time, Lin Feng felt a bit uneasy about the origin of the system.

Lin Feng wasn't sure if it actually needed the spirit crystals. If it could afford to do all the amazing things it had already been doing with so few customers so far, plus give him twenty percent of the sales, spirit crystals did not seem to be what the system was running on.

That should have been obvious if Lin Feng had thought about it earlier but it had never occurred to him. For months, Lin Feng had lived off of the system without ever gaining a single customer or spirit crystal. He had as much food as he wanted from the vending machines and the system could easily allow him to overpower the demonic beasts that had come into the valley, all without ever making a single sale.

There wasn't even anything stopping him from giving the products away for free.

What was the system getting out of this deal?

Lin Feng currently had a balance of one spirit crystal that the system had given him. He converted the spirit crystal into a cultivation pill without much thought and a softly glowing light blue pill appeared in his hand.

It still looked like it was made of opaque crystal. If the system hadn't told him it was a pill, Lin Feng wouldn't have even assumed it was edible.

As he played around with the, admittedly quite pretty, pill, he wondered what the use of such a system function was. He was already overwhelmingly powerful within the shopping mall and its surroundings. Why would he ever need to cultivate?

Lin Feng stared at the pill in his hand for some time. Questions and uncertainties plagued him.

With a sigh, Lin Feng tossed the pill into the lake. After a moment, he tossed the corn dog he had thoughtlessly bought into the lake, too.

Questions about the system's origin and the use of having such functionality at all left Lin Feng unmotivated and unwilling to bother with the pills.

Disappointed, Lin Feng walked back inside. He would have wanted to stay outside for a while, but, with most of the valley reduced to a wasteland, it wasn't a very attractive place to be in anymore.