Who says literary cultivators can only live or die by their spiritual roots? Lin Mo, an outer disciple of Qingxu Sect, was born with an ordinary root. After three years of hard cultivation, he has only reached the third level of Qi Refining. He's the bottom of the class in his peers' eyes, his sect stipend is even skimmed by the steward, and he has to give everything he's got just to kill a first-tier demon beast.
Then he finds half of a blackened stone in a spirit-vein mine. It's a fragment of the Spirit Vein Origin Pearl, lost for a thousand years. Others see broken spirit swords as junk, but when he infuses them with spirit-vein energy, he can restore and reinforce them into affordable weapons that low-level cultivators scramble to buy. He turns discarded spirit crystals and withered moss into Spirit Crystal Paste, a catalyst-enhanced product with a purity of spiritual energy comparable to medicinal pills, at just thirty percent of the cost. Even his cultivation loans, mocked as "wishful thinking," help him save his first fortune and establish his own caravan.
When the three great merchant guilds of Wanbao City join forces to drive him out with price wars, resource blockades, and malicious slander, Lin Mo counters with a combination of "low margins and high volume" and "technological monopolies," then turns around and takes over his rivals' supply channels. When the great powers fight until they're bloody over spirit veins, he wins over smaller factions with "resource swaps and shared interests," then profits from the conflict and becomes the joint master of the spirit veins. When the threat of invasion from another realm looms, he has already built a commercial empire spanning the cultivation world and the mortal world, all thanks to his cross-realm industrial chain.
Some call him "reeking of money and defiling the Immortal Way." Lin Mo just smiles and shows off his mutated Gold Merchant spirit root. "Cultivation is about defying heaven and changing your fate. All I did was turn resources others wasted into stepping stones to reach the heavens." This is a comeback story forged with an abacus and a spirit sword. After all, only those who control resources deserve to control their fate.
