Chapter 1067.1: A Daoist in the First Place - Part 1

The little incense burner was startled, then spat out a mouthful of incense ash. It was about to make a fuss, but then it remembered the things it had sensed earlier and had no choice but to fall silent.

The letter-writing gentleman smiled. “There is clearly a mountain of gold right in front of him, and I've clearly already told him that he can take whatever he wants, yet he has never once taken even a single tael for his own private use. Is a person like that rare or not?”

The little incense burner nodded solemnly. “It's like hanging a fish in front of a cat and even telling that cat, ‘Go ahead and eat it, it's no big deal,’ yet that cat still refuses to eat it. That's very difficult.”

The letter-writing gentleman smiled broadly. “There's one more point. He is only thirty this year. At such an age, to be like this, isn't easy.”

The little incense burner frowned unhappily. “You didn't tell me about this either.”

The letter-writing gentleman smiled without speaking, merely shifting his gaze back to the skygold coin in his palm.

The little incense burner thought for a moment and said, "If I grit my teeth, it won't be a problem to eat a bit of his fortune."

“No need.” The letter-writing gentleman shook his head, rejecting the little incense burner's suggestion.

The little incense burner frowned in confusion. “Then you've made up your mind to make a transaction without capital? You should know, without payment, no matter how much you give, it's a losing transaction. It's only a question of how much you lose.”

It was somewhat anxious on behalf of the letter-writing gentleman before it. One had to know that ever since he decided to walk this path, it had already been several hundred years without change, and there had never been a single time when he broke the rules. This time, it might look like something that could simply be ignored, but it understood very well what the consequences would be once this opening was made. No one could say for sure.

The consequences were still fine. Actually, what was most frightening was that it might cause his convictions to waver, and from then on, he would no longer be able to remain single-minded.

The letter-writing gentleman naturally knew what the little incense burner was worried about. He merely said with some nostalgia, “Back then, when I left that place, I thought, so what if I cultivated to become a great daoist sage? It still didn't mean much. But more importantly, I felt that if I continued cultivating like that, this life of mine would end here. Becoming a great daoist sage was quite glorious, but that was all.”

"So I read some of the teachings of the Great Peace Dao and wanted to see what this other lineage outside of these two lineages was about. Of course, at that time, everyone thought I had gone mad. Naturally, they didn't care in the slightest why I wanted to do this; they were only frightened. If I did this, wouldn't the Longevity Dao lose all face?" “So countless people came forward at the time. Some earnestly tried to persuade me, while others directly threatened me. There are some things outsiders don't know, and I hadn't heard them either. At that time, the then temple master of the Infatuation Daoist Temple had spoken to me with absolute certainty: if I really intended to act this outrageously against convention, he would personally take action and beat me to death.”

Hearing these old matters, the little incense burner was somewhat angry as well. “This matter had nothing to do with them in the first place.”

The letter-writing gentleman shook his head and smiled. “If he had taken action and beaten me to death, the Longevity Dao would only have lost even more face. Otherwise, given how arrogant and overbearing the Infatuation Daoist Temple had been in those years, why would he have said this? He could have simply taken action, straightforward and direct.”

The little incense burner sighed endlessly.

“Later, I compromised. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I was simply afraid of death.”

The letter-writing gentleman sighed with emotion. “If I had really persisted, that fellow would have had to fight me. The Infatuation Daoist Temple Master, the number one person of Daoism, and you could even say the number one person in the world at that time. How could I have fought him?”

“But they also couldn't take things too far. After all, forcing a great daoist sage into a dead end was clearly not a good thing. That's why I spent so many years reading books in this daoist temple, and afterward, there was this Danxiao City.”

Having said this, the letter-writing gentleman paused, his eyes hazy. “It's only a few sentences when spoken, but actually doing it was truly not easy.”

“However, after I finished reading the teachings of the Great Peace Dao, I still felt that they were insufficient. Compared with the Longevity Dao, the Great Peace Dao merely had one additional ‘non-contention,’ and was not as stubbornly attached, but in essence, there was no difference.”

The letter-writing gentleman smiled. “That wasn't what I wanted.”

The little incense burner nodded. It knew what happened afterward.

He did not want to walk the path of the Great Peace Dao, while the path of the Longevity Dao was one he had chosen not to walk himself. So if he still wanted to move forward, he could only find a new path to walk.

That was why, in the years afterward, he explored a new path in Danxiao City. In the end, he could be said to have settled on one path: becoming a letter-writing gentleman, writing letters for others in exchange for silver. As for what he did with the silver he exchanged for? Most of them are thrown into the incense burner to take a look at that person's good and evil, whether they are good or bad. For a small portion of people, if they have something they seek, he will demand some compensation from them according to what they are seeking.

Still, it all comes down to money.

The little incense burner consumes some of the other person's fortune, which in turn nourishes itself.

After walking this path for several hundred years, he successfully advanced into Fuyun. But his thoughts did not stop there. He wanted to continue moving forward, and had set a milestone for himself.

That was to establish an unseen connection with every common person still living in Danxiao City. Once all the connections had been completely established, he would swallow the fortune of this entire Danxiao City in one bite, allowing his cultivation to advance by leaps and bounds.

Only then would he truly be the City Lord of Danxiao City.

However, this also carried an enormous amount of uncertainty. The surge of fortune that entered him all at once could cause his cultivation to advance by leaps and bounds, but afterward, the two sides would influence each other.

If he continued moving forward without pause on the path of cultivation, then the fortune of the common people here would become increasingly abundant. Later, things such as passing the imperial examinations and producing some extraordinary figures would all become easier.

That was the benefit he, this City Lord of Danxiao City, brought to the common people.

But if afterward he stopped moving forward on the path of cultivation, developed many doubts, or even developed inner demons, causing his realm to fall, then the common people here would also be greatly affected. Those doing business would find business difficult, those taking the imperial examinations would fail year after year, and end up among those who had failed to place...

And on the side of the common people, if some major upheaval happened to them, it would also affect his realm. He might be dragged down and forced to stop moving forward, or even regress and fall in realm.

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