As a new officer on Tianqiao Peak, Yan Liqiang's duty on Tianqiao Peak is warehouse manager, responsible for managing a ore warehouse on Tianqiao Peak.
Compared to the previous job of cleaning toilets, this job was so easy - the only thing Yan Liqiang needed to do was to register the various minerals in and out of the warehouse.
There are fixed times for the various ores to be put in and out of the warehouse at Tianqiao Peak. Special personnel will deliver the ores, and senior brothers from Tianqiao Peak will pick them up with orders when they are taken out of the warehouse. They are put out of the warehouse at Chenshi in the morning and put into the warehouse at Weishi in the afternoon. After these two times, there is basically nothing to do for the rest of the time, so you can have plenty of time to practice or do what you like.
This position is definitely a privilege for Yan Liqiang.
Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng also followed Yan Liqiang and got a job as an assistant on Tianqiao Peak. As Yan Liqiang's assistants, they were freed from the messy farm work.
On the second day after starting work at Tianqiao Peak, the three of them moved out of the small valley below Tianqiao Peak and moved to a yard on the peak. The accommodation conditions were immediately improved to a higher level, and their meals were no longer just steamed buns and pickles, steamed buns and pickles, but they began to enjoy the good benefits on Tianqiao Peak.
On Tianqiao Peak, Yan Liqiang's immediate superior is a deacon named Huang. Above Deacon Huang is the manager of Tianqiao Peak, and above the manager is the head of Tianqiao Hall, Su.
On Tianqiao Peak, in addition to abiding by the various precepts and rules of the Sword God Sect, there is also a taboo that no one dares to violate. This taboo is that one cannot call Hall Master Su's full name, because Hall Master Su's full name is Su Xiaoai. As long as anyone dares to call this name, Hall Master Su will definitely get furious, and anyone who dares to call this name will definitely be in bad luck, and very bad luck.
This was the earnest advice given to Yan Liqiang by Deacon Huang after he arrived at Tianqiao Peak.
Yan Liqiang had never expected that the head of Tianqiao Hall, Su, a man with a big beard, so rough and manly, would have such a feminine name. When he heard Deacon Huang say it for the first time, Yan Liqiang held back his laughter and nodded seriously.
Deacon Huang is an old man, a nice and amiable person. He is an elder in the Sword God Sect and has worked there for decades. Even in his sixties, he was still just an inner sect disciple. He only advanced to the rank of Dragon and Tiger Warrior ten years ago when he was in his fifties with the help of elixirs. Because he was conscientious and hardworking, he was noticed by Hall Master Su and promoted to a deacon in Tianqiao Peak.
One is a fourteen-year-old young steward, the other is an old deacon in his sixties. There is only one rank difference between a steward and a deacon, but the ages of the two are several times different. One has a bright future, while the other is in his twilight years. Because of this, Yan Liqiang respects Deacon Huang even more, and behaves well, not daring to overstep the mark. From the first day he arrived at Tianqiao Peak, Yan Liqiang has truly asked for instructions in the morning and reported in the evening to his immediate superior, without being ostentatious at all, which makes Deacon Huang very satisfied.
The heavy snow lasted for three days and then stopped. Such weather was very rare for Laizhou and the Sword God Sect, but it did not cause any losses to the Sword God Sect. Instead, it made many people feel strange. After the snow stopped, the vinegar that Yan Liqiang, Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng had made and could not sell before suddenly became popular in the Sword God Sect.
There is no impenetrable wall in this world. After a few days of fermentation, the news of Yan Liqiang being promoted to the Gray Robe Officer spread in the Sword God Sect, causing quite a stir among the Sword God Sect's outer disciples.
As the news spread, the news that Yan Liqiang made vinegar also spread like wildfire. According to various rumors, it was because Yan Liqiang made vinegar that he cleaned the toilet on Tianqiao Peak so well, which attracted the attention of Master Su of Tianqiao Hall, and he was then promoted to be the steward of Tianqiao Peak.
All of a sudden, the price of the vinegar that was originally unsalable at 20 wen a bottle kept rising in just two days - 50 wen a bottle... 100 wen a bottle... 500 wen a bottle... and the demand was totally insufficient to meet the supply, which made Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng grin from ear to ear.
Eating, drinking, defecating, urinating and sleeping are inevitable for everyone. A bottle of ground vinegar at 500 coins is more expensive than many fine wines. However, the Sword God Sect has no shortage of rich people. As the saying goes, the poor are good at literature and the rich are good at martial arts. Those who can truly concentrate on practicing martial arts all have good family conditions. At the same time, there is a great demand for ground vinegar in the toilets and restrooms of all sizes in the Sword God Sect. Not to mention the outer disciples who want to copy Yan Liqiang's "success model", even the elders and the sect master, who doesn't want the place where they live to be cleaner and fresher? So for a while, there was no problem selling the ground vinegar.
At this time, Yan Liqiang handed over all the local vinegar business to Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng. He asked Gu Zexuan to sell it slowly and not to rush. It was enough to sell a small amount every day and try to control the delivery speed. He set a target for Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng. No matter what the two of them did, no matter how many people wanted to buy it, the local vinegar soaked by the three of them had to be sold slowly and for three months until the local vinegar they produced in cooperation with Huo Bin and others could be sold to a financial bank.
"The vinegar produced by the three of us is too small to make any money. The real money is made from the vinegar produced by our cooperation with Huo Bin and others. During this period, our vinegar is used to create topics and attract attention. While we are trying to drive up the price, we are also controlling the shipment quantity. Zexuan, go find Huo Bin tomorrow and discuss with him. Ask him to find a few people to drive up the price of the vinegar..."
"Well, what are the 'support' and 'hype'?" Huo Bin looked at Yan Liqiang a little embarrassedly. Before meeting Yan Liqiang, Gu Zexuan felt that he was not stupid, and could even be said to be smart. But after meeting Yan Liqiang, Gu Zexuan began to doubt his IQ, because he did not understand many of the things Yan Liqiang said, and he had not even heard them at all.
Yan Liqiang explained what "a child's promotion" was, and then talked about some means of hunger marketing. These commercial marketing techniques that were popular in later generations left Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng stunned. They looked at Yan Liqiang as if they were an alien.
…
After handing the vinegar matter over to Gu Zexuan and Zhao Huipeng, Yan Liqiang no longer cared about it. Apart from working on time every day, Yan Liqiang now spends almost all his time doing one thing - constantly exploring the mystery of the strange stone in his sea of consciousness.
At this time, practicing Yi Jin Xi Sui Jing seemed to have become a means for Yan Liqiang to restore his physical and mental strength.
As the saying goes, if you keep thinking about it, there will be a response!
It was during Yan Liqiang's unremitting exploration that he gradually felt that he had found a way to communicate with the mysterious stone and discovered many mysteries of the stone...
Communicating with a stone, if you tell others such things, no one will believe it and they will think Yan Liqiang is crazy, but in fact, all this is really happening.
The communication with the stone is not through language or words, but through the heart, or more accurately, through pure consciousness and spiritual power.
Every time, when Yan Liqiang closed his eyes and stared at the stone intently in his sea of consciousness for nearly three hours, his entire consciousness would be sucked into a mysterious and vast void by the stone.
That mysterious and vast void was exactly the one that Yan Liqiang saw for the first time.
The first time he went in, Yan Liqiang didn’t even know how to get out. Later, Yan Liqiang discovered that as long as he closed his eyes in that mysterious and vast void and thought about his body at the same time, he could instantly come out and regain the ability to move freely. If he didn’t come out on his own initiative, he would be "kicked out" by the stone when he was extremely exhausted, just like the first time.
Every time he was kicked out by the stone, Yan Liqiang felt as if he had worked overtime for several days and nights in a row to prepare bids in his previous life. His whole spirit was very exhausted, as if he had been drained of everything. He didn't want to think about anything except sleeping.
After trying several times, Yan Liqiang discovered that what he consumed while entering and exiting the stone and being inside the stone seemed to be the invisible spiritual power in his head. His spiritual power was the bridge to communicate with the stone.
In the mysterious void inside the stone, Yan Liqiang tried many times, and even deliberately used various methods to calculate the time. Then he found that no matter how long he stayed in the mysterious void, as long as he was in the mysterious void, from the moment he entered, the outside world and time seemed to be completely still. Sometimes he felt that he had been in it for several hours, but when he came out, he found that the time outside, from the moment he entered the mysterious void, was as if it had never moved.
Yan Liqiang didn't know what was going on. With his not-so-profound knowledge and accomplishment, this situation just reminded him of a passage he had read in a book before - for a line, a point is always still; for a surface, a line is also always still; and for something that has the concept of volume, a surface is also always still; and for the world we live in, a stone, a table, will always be still if you don't move it. From this we can know that if we look at everything in the lower dimension from a higher dimension, everything in the lower dimension will always be still.
Yan Liqiang didn't understand what the mysterious space in the stone was, nor did he care. What concerned him most was why every time he entered that mysterious place, he could always see scenes of his past in the two magical light screens that appeared there.
In one of the light curtains, there was always everything he had experienced in Pingxi County in the past. Everything was frozen after he was killed.
And in the other light curtain, there is everything that he has experienced since he came into possession of this body. The content in that light curtain is always more than the last time, and the extra content is exactly everything he experienced from the last time he came to this body.
Everything within the two light screens was like two movies, documentaries within movies—one of the documentaries had been completed, while the other was still in progress.
Could it be that the stone in his sea of consciousness, in addition to allowing him to be reborn, is also a selfie cinema and QQ photo album created by some existence that he could hardly imagine? This thought once popped up in Yan Liqiang's mind, but then, after thinking about it seriously, he found how absurd and funny his idea was. Such creativity and invention can probably only be seen in nonsensical movies like "From Beijing with Love" starring Stephen Chow, and of course it is impossible for it to exist in reality.
Therefore, the existence of those two light screens is not just a boring movie clip, but must have other meanings that I don’t know yet.
With this question in mind, Yan Liqiang went in and out of that mysterious space over and over again for more than a month, studying the "documentary" on the two light screens over and over again.
The more Yan Liqiang watched the two documentaries, the more he realized that the two light screens showing different documentaries were more like two doors. It seemed that as long as he pushed them lightly, his whole body would fly in...
Every time he entered that mysterious space, it seemed as if the mysterious space was waiting for him to fly into one of the light screens - this seemed to be a crucial choice.
Yan Liqiang didn't know what was behind the light curtain, nor did he know what would happen if he chose to fly in. The more he observed, the more he felt that the foggy void behind the light curtain was full of unknowns and uncertainties. He kept observing, wandering, hesitating, and thinking for almost two months.
During these two months, every time Yan Liqiang saw the scene of Yan Dechang's death in the first light curtain, he was always heartbroken.
If you want to know what a pear tastes like, you have to taste it yourself...
Finally, one night two months later, Yan Liqiang gritted his teeth, stomped his feet, and plunged into the first light curtain...
(End of this chapter)