Chapter 882 – The Situation in the Verdant Depths Realm

When Mo Lan finished carefully sorting through the memories of the three Dao Ancestors, she piloted the Starsea Ark to the locations where their physical bodies had perished, retrieving the grotto-heaven space cores of the Myriad Swords Grotto-Heaven, the Profound Ice Grotto-Heaven, and the Eternal Spring Grotto-Heaven one by one. All the while, the Verdant Depths Realm’s world consciousness, which had been closely monitoring her every move, was nearly going mad with envy and jealousy.

Those were the grotto-heavens of three Dao Ancestor realm cultivators, containing vast quantities of source power.

Watching Mo Lan casually pocket these three “treasures” while it, bound by that “unequal” contract, couldn’t claim even the tiniest fraction — the Verdant Depths consciousness felt as though a knife were being twisted in its heart.

Intense greed ultimately overwhelmed its fear of Mo Lan’s strength.

Once Mo Lan returned to the Verdant Depths Realm, it cautiously reached out to her once more.

“…Congratulations to my ally… with supreme divine power… you have slain three Immortal Realm Dao Ancestors in succession… such a feat is unprecedented through the ages… truly… truly a great blessing for our Verdant Depths Realm!”

The Verdant Depths consciousness’s tone brimmed with “heartfelt” admiration, as if the one who had previously hesitated and deflected — even harboring hidden malice — hadn’t been itself at all.

Immediately after, without waiting for Mo Lan to respond, its mental voice shifted to a low, somber register, filled with “remorse” and “self-reproach”:

“…Before… before, I was foolish and short-sighted, nearly committing a grave error… I only hope… I only hope that one as magnanimous as yourself will not hold it against someone as lowly as me… I… I am truly filled with regret beyond words…”

Seeming to decide it had laid enough groundwork, it deftly pivoted:

“…Just now, in order to withstand that Dao Ancestor’s assault and protect my ally’s safety, I have already exhausted what remained of my source power… and the Ascension Passage had been draining my source power for years before that… at this moment, I am utterly spent, barely able to maintain the stability of this realm…”

Its mental voice trembled, taking on a sobbing tone:

“…I wonder… I wonder if my ally could, in consideration of… in consideration of the fact that I may not have rendered great merit but have at least endured hardship… spare from… from those spoils of war… even the most insignificant wisp of source power… to help me stabilize this realm, to give all living beings… a sliver of hope for survival… I… I would be eternally grateful!”

It painted its wretched circumstances in the most dramatic colors possible, trying to stir Mo Lan’s “sympathy.”

Mo Lan discovered for the first time that a world consciousness could be such a drama queen. This time, she had quickly used Psychic Magic to take control of the enemies, so the attacks that actually landed on the boundary membrane were minimal — just those few strikes, nowhere near enough to push this world’s consciousness to the brink of exhaustion.

She let out a scornful laugh, too lazy to waste words haggling with it, and replied with a single sentence: “Are you trying to violate the contract? I wouldn’t mind acquiring some more source power!”

That one sentence instantly pierced through every last shred of the Verdant Depths consciousness’s wishful thinking.

Its pitiful mental voice cut off abruptly, not daring to say another word, terrified that if it continued, it would violate the contract and forfeit all of its source power.

Now it finally recognized a cruel reality: before this harbinger of doom, it had absolutely no leverage to negotiate. Being able to preserve its own consciousness from extinction and receive conditional knowledge support from her was already the best possible outcome. As for those three Dao Ancestor grotto-heavens — so tantalizingly close yet impossibly far — they were destined to have nothing to do with it.

Seeing that the Verdant Depths Realm’s world consciousness had gone completely silent and stopped its chattering, Mo Lan paid it no further attention.

She rode her flying carpet, slipping quietly into the interior of the Verdant Depths Realm to begin conducting field investigations and gathering intelligence, preparing to localize the Celestial Profound Society’s version of Card Magic for this world.

She found a cultivator at the late Golden Core stage and, using Psychic Magic, carefully read through his life memories without causing any fundamental harm.

This Golden Core cultivator’s life was practically a microcosm of the Verdant Depths Realm. After reviewing these memories, Mo Lan finally understood why this world’s consciousness had turned out the way it had.

Though the Verdant Depths Realm wasn’t as cruel and cold-blooded as the Immortal Realm, it was still a world where trust was extraordinarily scarce. In this world, clans and great families were the absolute foundation of everything.

Mortals lived in clan settlements, and cultivators mostly hailed from cultivation families of varying sizes.

From this Golden Core cultivator’s memories, Mo Lan saw family after family bound tightly together by ties of blood.

Clan children were instilled from a young age with the concept that “when one prospers, all prosper; when one falls, all fall.” Individual achievement was inextricably linked to the rise and decline of the family.

Cultivators trained diligently and sought out resources not primarily for personal freedom or longevity, but to strengthen the family’s power and bring glory to its name.

It wasn’t as though there were no internal conflicts within clans.

Take the owner of these memories, Lin Yan, for example — he hailed from the Lin Family of Wild Goose City.

Within the Lin Family, clan members openly and covertly jockeyed against each other over resource allocation, inheritance rights, and influence, and friction was far from uncommon.

Yet deep within Lin Yan’s memories, when his mediocre aptitude drew mockery from peers in his youth, it was an eccentric great-uncle within the clan who secretly slipped him a set of basic medicinal pills. When he encountered a powerful enemy during an outside training expedition, it was several clan cousins — ones he wasn’t even close to on a daily basis — who fought to the death to cover his retreat and help him escape. And when he successfully formed his Golden Core, the entire family, regardless of how close or distant their prior relationship with him had been, felt genuine joy and pride, pouring resources into helping him stabilize his cultivation.

The competition among clan members was always constrained by an invisible bottom line: the bond of shared blood.

As a popular saying among the realm’s clans and great families put it: “Fight however you want behind closed doors, but never bend your elbow outward.”

Outside the family, wariness and calculation became pure instinct.

In dealings with other families, every conversation revolved around “interests.” Every collaboration was accompanied by repeated weighing and probing, each side terrified of being taken advantage of by the other.

Independent cultivators were regarded as unreliable opportunists who required extreme vigilance. Dealing with members of other families meant treading even more carefully — behind every smile might lurk a scheme.

Trust was an extraordinarily luxurious thing, existing almost exclusively among those connected by blood.

The entire world was composed of these clan fortresses — each one centered on blood ties, relatively cohesive internally, yet outwardly brimming with competition and defensiveness.

Together, they formed the cold and pragmatic social fabric of the Verdant Depths Realm.

This was also exactly why the Verdant Depths Realm’s world consciousness had become what it was. It was like a clan consciousness magnified billions of times over, treating its own source power as the most precious “family wealth.” Toward Mo Lan, this sudden “outsider,” it instinctively overflowed with wariness and calculation.

Its so-called “gifts of gratitude” were like what a great family would do upon encountering a clanless independent cultivator who happened to possess a treasure — toss out some trivial trinkets to appease them, then scheme about how to devour them whole and seize the treasure to bolster their own family’s power.

Toward outsiders, it simply had no concept of repaying virtue with virtue or conducting fair trade.