Song Miaozhu: Mm.
Yu Lichuan: I give up.
Zhang Yunxi: Hahaha! That's what you get for bragging!
Yuan Liben: You used to be third-level Red Spirit when Master Song was first-level Azure Spirit. Now you're first-level Azure Spirit and she's first-level Blue Spirit. The gap's getting smaller, isn't it? What are you upset about?
Yu Lichuan: The difficulty of condensing Azure spirit crystals is already ten times harder than red. Blue must be even worse! The gap isn't smaller. It's clearly growing.
Xie Wushuang:Of course it's getting bigger. That's normal. Master Song is the creator of the Spirit-Gathering Lucky Dolls. Look at the foreign cultivators, they're miserable. The corporations control all the paths to learning crafting. Ordinary people have no way to cultivate and are desperately trying to immigrate to our country. But even if they control the number of cultivators, they can't compete with our Lucky Dolls. I heard they still don't have a single cultivator above sixth-level Red Spirit! We've got dozens at ninth level.
Yu Lichuan:...That does make me feel better.
Song Miaozhu:The difficulty of condensing Blue spirit crystals is more than a hundred times greater than Azure. It's exhausting! When will the Spirit Tide finally arrive? I can't keep going like this.
She sent that herself, after glancing at the chat through her little paper servant during a break in her paper crafting.
Yu Lichuan:A hundred times?! Did I read that right?
Song Miaozhu:More than a hundred.
Yu Lichuan: ...I'm suddenly grateful to still be in the Azure Realm. So, does blue spirit energy feel different?
Song Miaozhu: It speeds up the growth of spiritual constructs.
So far, that was the only clear difference she'd noticed.
Yu Lichuan:That just makes me even more jealous.
Zhang Yunxi:Master Song, are you running low on spirit energy too?
In her cave, Song Miaozhu sighed deeply, having just drained yet another top-grade spirit stone. Low on spirit energy was an understatement. She was nearly in the red.
In the mortal realm, she earned 25 million hell coins a day, mostly from selling Spirit-Gathering Lucky Dolls. In the underworld, her average daily income was 15 million, thanks to fourth-grade Yin Paper Clothes and Yin paper mounts.
In other words, she made 100 million every 2.5 days, just enough to exchange for one top-grade spirit stone.
Back in the Azure Realm, even when using spirit power around the clock—paper crafting, training, nourishing her body, imbuing her spiritual items—she only needed five high-grade stones' worth of energy a day. One top-grade stone could last her twenty days. She could barely spend her income fast enough.
That all changed after stepping into the Blue Realm. Condensing a single blue spirit crystal took more than a hundred times the energy it used to. Now she needed more than five top-grade spirit stones per day. Her income hadn't increased to match. She still earned about 40 million hell coins a day—only enough to exchange for 40 high-grade spirit stones.
She was officially spending more than she earned.
But she couldn't cut back on her investments in cultivation and spiritual constructs. Advancing in cultivation was essential, and her spiritual constructs had to grow stronger alongside her.
Spirit energy was ultimately external. Cultivated spiritual power and bonded constructs were what truly belonged to her. So every day she raised 500 little paper servants, 20 squads of paper soldiers, and various other crafted items. She had no choice but to start dipping into her savings.
She had 29.2 billion hell coins saved over the past few years. She exchanged almost all of it for top-grade spirit stones, only keeping a small buffer. It barely lasted four months. Just enough to push her into second-level Blue Spirit. The once overflowing warehouse of her ghost shop was nearly empty.
She had to drastically cut back on the spirit energy used to raise spiritual constructs just to break even. Where she once poured everything she had into crafting and nourishing—paper servants, paper soldiers, spirit armor, fourth-grade Yang Paper Clothes, spirit mounts and vehicles, stand-in paper servants, Lucky Dolls, Shadowbinding Paper Chains, and Moon Dew Paper Cups—now only the life-saving stand-in dolls were raised with full power.
She could no longer afford to create new paper soldiers or servants. Even the old ones had to be grouped. Every 100 paper servants required a spirit recovery. With 500 paper servants and 980 paper soldiers, that meant 15 total recoveries.
For the rest—armor, Yang Paper Clothes, healing dolls, substitution dolls, Shadowbinding chains, and Moon Dew Cups—she grouped them all into a single recovery.
Spirit vehicles were dropped entirely. Only her spirit phoenix mount remained active. By scaling down, she could still cultivate and even save a little, though not much. She brought out all the Lucky Dolls she had previously put away, placing them throughout the cave. Every spare coin went into buying spirit stones, which were then used to raise the Lucky Dolls.
Her ghost shop's coin reserve never rose above 100 million. Anything extra was immediately traded for spirit stones, which were consumed almost as fast. Song Miaozhu had expected higher cultivation stages to require more spirit energy. She just didn't anticipate the leap from Green to Blue would be this extreme.
She had gone from billionaire to paycheck-to-paycheck overnight. Her daily earnings were spent before she knew it. If top-grade stones weren't so much more efficient than high-grade, her daily income wouldn't even be enough to maintain her basic operations.
It had been a long time since she had to calculate her spending so carefully—counting coins, tallying spirit stones, monitoring her spirit energy.
It reminded her of the days before inheriting the ghost shop, when she had to stretch every penny just to get by.
She used to dismiss cultivators' complaints about spirit shortages. Now, she found herself silently praying for the Spirit Tide to arrive. She couldn't keep burning through spirit stones like this. But even after all these years of spiritual resurgence, the world's ambient energy remained sluggish and dim. There wasn't the faintest sign of a Spirit Tide.
Even the luminous stone ox in Xiaoli River had lost its glow. Song Miaozhu knew this couldn't continue. She had cut expenses as much as possible. It was time to increase income.
Forty million a day wasn't enough.
She planned to slightly increase the amount of spirit energy she used for daily cultivation and avoid crafting unprofitable items. Her main money-makers were only four now: the Spirit-Gathering Lucky Dolls, fourth-grade Yin Paper Clothes, and the spirit and Yin paper mounts.
With that, she could earn money, improve her cultivation, and keep honing her paper crafting and spirit infusion skills.
Three birds with one stone.
As for sales, the underworld's market had nearly hit its ceiling. The growth potential lay in the mortal realm.
So she listed her spirit mounts on her cultivation merchant shopfront and prepared to ramp up Lucky Doll production.