CHAPTER 513: 512

Where to find these things.

Shangjia Moti came to the chaotic slums of Kathmandu.

The crime rate here reached an astonishing five percent, with suicides accounting for two per thousand, and the startling figures including car accidents, murders, and robberies, could surely delight anyone harboring malicious intentions. Shangjia Moti was the first to set both his sight and body on this piece of land.

In this place, he had enough materials to satisfy his research; as for the happenings behind these materials, he neither had the time nor cared to meddle.

As night fell, a giant bald old man in a black Kasaya emerged from a courtyard with three rooms. He looked up at the sky while his right hand’s fingers kept busy with calculations.

Just now, his Seven Killings Scorpion and Five-step Golden Ring Snake had become inexplicably agitated and even almost bit the hand he was feeding them with. Such disturbances were not a good omen, if it wasn’t for the appearance of a natural predator or a strong magnetic field disturbance, his poisonous pets would never behave like this. However, after calculating with his fingers, he was baffled—looking up at the sky, there were no major fluctuations, and after calculating with his fingers, although somewhat opaque, everything seemed largely peaceful. Could it be an invasion by some force of nature?

Shangjia Moti walked around the courtyard. His various traps and poisonous creatures were all in place. The Ink Black Viper that guarded the gate was his trusted assistant—swift and highly venomous, it would definitely not let any foreign entity into his yard. He blew two whistles, and the Ink Black Viper swiftly slithered over from the bushes, excitedly raising the front half of its body upon seeing its owner.

No problem with the Viper.

With a casual wave of his hand, Shangjia Moti commanded the Viper to hide back amongst the bushes, disappearing from sight.

Now that was strange.

Shangjia Moti returned to the yard, baffled and white with confusion.

The courtyard housed three thatched huts in a row, and the rest of the space was occupied by various shanties and beast cages. The place looked shabby, but in these slums with scarcely a tile for cover, it was akin to a palace.

Shangjia Moti resided in the eastern room out of the three, while the middle and right rooms harbored all sorts of poisonous insects and ferocious animals. The insects in the yard were just loose foot soldiers, but the ones in these rooms were his real trump cards—creatures with even more lethal poisons, like the seven-tailed centipede and the Triangular Beetle, were amongst the most venomous in the world. Even if one scoured ancient texts, there would only be a few lines about them, yet here they were alive and breathing. Just a drop of their venom could kill an entire village. Although immensely valuable, they were merely underlings in front of the Gu King, at best, they were just food for cultivating the Ice Worm. One must use poison to raise poison to cultivate the most toxic creature in the world.

However, feeding the Ice Worm was not such a simple task.

First of all, the insects used for feeding must be extremely poisonous. The common South American Spider and the Saudi Rattlesnake are just mundane among the mundane, even worthless. The so-called claim that they can kill a fully grown elephant is nothing but a ridiculous story spread by a group of people who love to create a fuss out of nothing. Just these insects used as food, it takes at least seven to eight years to grow a batch, and an Ice Worm requires nine batches of such food, following the principle of "returning to unity after nine times nine," and to use up these nine batches of poisonous insects it takes about seventy to eighty years to do this work. One also has to take into account the success rate of the batches of poisonous insects, as these insects are rare and hard to find. Collecting a batch requires traveling around the world. It is fortunate that Nepal is adjacent to Mount Everest and has a giant dragon dragon vein, which allows Shangjia Moti to collect some creatures that can only be found in books. Another aspect is the talent of Shangjia Moti; this person is truly a rare genius who appears only once every few centuries, and he has managed to reduce the cultivation time of these insects by a tremendous twenty years by using methods he’s discovered himself.

Time is wealth, and in his hands, these twenty years gave him more time to accomplish his ideals.

Finally, after looking at the small and large boxes containing poisonous insects and seeing that they all settled down, Shangjia Moti felt at ease. This was the last batch of mature insects. As long as their toxicity reached the standard, they could be fed to the Ice Worm.

From selection to feeding, the Ice Worm that Shangjia Moti had was even more important than his own life. He has carefully tended it for fifty years. If anything goes wrong in this last step, he would go insane, and the thought of dragging an entire city into his funeral was just a momentary consideration.

Poisonous insects prefer silence and darkness, and it is inappropriate to make too much noise to avoid disturbing their rest. Shangjia Moti hung a thick yet breathable layer of hollow cotton curtains between the two houses. This hollow cotton, true to its name, was hollow at the core and absorbed water without becoming damp, close-knit yet well-ventilated. This type of cotton was originally exclusively used by the Royal Family of Thailand to lay on the dragon beds for pleasures with the King of Thailand and his concubines, but it wasn’t difficult for the National Master Family to request a bit for themselves. Shangjia Moti used these left-over resources from his ancestors cleanly.

There were three layers of curtains, and just as he was about to lower the third layer, a faint noise from the yard suddenly startled him. The sound was made by the Black Viper. It was not as mournful as the Silver Ring Snake’s, nor as noisy as the rattlesnake’s. It was a light sound, like breaking a dry twig, crisp but particularly grating to Shangjia Moti’s ears amid the silence of the night.

It was the sound of a Viper’s vertebrae breaking.

An intruder had come!

He quickly placed the ornate brocade box with the Ice Worm inside into the folds of his Kasaya and then stepped out the door into the courtyard.

In the pitch darkness, it seemed as if nothing had happened.

Shangjia Moti was already an old man, more than eighty years old. How could his eyes, used to tending to poisonous insects, not detect the lurking malice around him and the thick scent of strangers in the air?

All things have a spirit, and becoming acquainted with Gu requires enduring some hardships. The nearby insect trees have been in Shangjia Moti’s company for decades. No one has ever dared to enter his territory without permission. If there were strangers, he could naturally sniff out their scent.

"If there is any fellow Daoist present, would you show yourself for a talk?"

Anyone daring to enter here was certainly not an ordinary person. The most likely ones were fellow practitioners living nearby. Everyone knew he had an Ice Worm, but they all considered it a bluff. However, his real strength was there for all to see, leaving no room for doubt.