Chương 182: Chapter 183: The Guano Gang

"A gang?" Leo repeated. Zhang Wei nodded.

"A few weeks ago, this elder would have said 'sect.' A proper sect, with disciples and elders and formal recognition from the Imperial Court. Then the Heavenstone Sect held their inner disciple selection." He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a jade slip. It was cracked down the middle. A vital slip. One of the Azure Profound Continent's specialties. The formations carved into the jade linked to a specific cultivator's karma and tracked whether they were alive or dead across any distance.

The technology didn't exist on Earth. Karma worked differently there, or maybe American formation masters just hadn't figured out how to read it yet. But Leo knew what a crack down the middle of a vital slip meant. The person linked to this slip was dead.

"Wang Daoyi." Zhang Wei set the slip on his desk with a care he hadn't shown any of the tablets.

"Foundation Establishment. Twenty-three years old. One of three thousand outer disciples who entered the fog six days ago for the Heavenstone Sect's inner disciple selection. His sister came to this office yesterday, asking if we had any news." Someone had died in an inner disciple selection? That didn't make sense. An inner disciple selection was a promotion exam. Sects tested their outer disciples with duels or formation puzzles, and the losers went back to sweeping courtyards, not home in a coffin.

"She was not the only visitor." Zhang Wei opened a drawer and pulled out a wooden box. He set it on the desk and lifted the lid. Inside, dozens of cracked vital slips lay stacked like broken tiles.

"These are only the families who found us. Desperate people looking for any organization that is not the Heavenstone Sect. Two hundred and seventeen disciples emerged from the fog." He closed the lid.

"Out of three thousand." Three thousand entered. Two hundred and seventeen survived. Wait... The fog?

"The Heavenstone Sect conducted their selection inside Monarch Scatterstraw's profundity?"

"The Heavenstone Sect claims to have spirit veins inside the fog, so they built their entire organization in it." Zhang Wei spread his hands.

"Outsiders cannot enter. Outsiders cannot see what happens during the trial. Convenient, is it not?" Spirit veins. Leo had been inside that fog. He'd walked through Scatterstraw's domain, excavated the soil around the wheat roots, mapped the profundity's boundaries with his own divine sense. There were no spirit veins in the fog. There were no natural qi sources anywhere near the wheat field. The only spiritual resource worth extracting was the T4 wheat and the soil it grew from.

Soil that was extracted by cultivators who thought they were taking an inner disciple selection.

"Are they sending disciples into the fog with picks and shovels?" The words came out flat.

"Telling them it's an inner disciple selection?" Zhang Wei was quiet for a moment.

"This elder believes so." He looked away.

"But inner disciples who emerge are sworn to secrecy through cultivation oaths." Cultivation oaths. The kind that bound your spiritual foundation to your words. That was how they kept the secret. But then why were there survivors at all? Leo turned the question over. Three thousand disciples entered. Two hundred and seventeen came out. If the fog led to Scatterstraw's field, and Scatterstraw killed anyone who entered his domain... Then how did anyone survive? Unless the survivors never entered the field.

Leo thought about Qin Zhenwei. The young master with the folding fan and the lackeys who hung on his every word. If you were sending three thousand disciples into a deathtrap, you wouldn't send your own grandchildren. You'd find some way to exempt them. An alternative test. A safe route. Instructions that kept them away from the actual danger. The sons and daughters of sect elders got a different selection. Everyone else walked into Scatterstraw's domain and never walked out. You needed some survivors.

People who could return and say yes, the selection is dangerous, but I made it through. Proof that advancement was possible even for loose cultivators. Hope to keep the next batch of recruits flowing in. But the vast majority were pre-selected. Children of council members. Political allies. Everyone else was expendable. Leo's hands were shaking.

"Young friend?" Zhang Wei's voice seemed far away. The contaminated T4 soil that Flockfeather had shown him four days ago. The soil crawling with hair-thin threads of Slaughter Qi. The soil the Heavenstone Sect was selling to beast clans at prices too good to be true. That soil came from dead disciples who had thought they were undergoing an inner disciple selection.

"They're farming people." Zhang Wei nodded grimly.

"That is how they appeared out of nowhere," Leo continued. His voice sounded strange to his own ears.

"They turn expendable cultivators into T4 soil. They sell the soil for T2 and T3 spiritstones. They use the spiritstones to recruit more outer disciples. And then they march them into the next selection." Recruit desperate cultivators with promises of advancement. Take their money, their labor, their hope. When you've extracted everything useful, march them into the fog and call it an opportunity. Harvest the soil. Sell the soil. Use the profit to recruit more victims. An endless loop.

A machine that converted human lives into spiritstones. Zhang Wei said nothing.

"How many selections have they held?" Leo asked.

"Four since their founding." Zhang Wei's voice was very quiet.

"Approximately eleven thousand outer disciples have entered the fog. Fewer than eight hundred have emerged." Ten thousand corpses. Leo thought about the refugees he'd seen on the road into Stonehaven. The thousands of desperate cultivators shuffling toward the city walls, their spiritual artifacts dead, their foundations crumbling. They had come here looking for opportunity. A chance to maintain their cultivation. A way to survive. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And the Heavenstone Sect was waiting for them with open arms and a one-way ticket into the fog. That was why the sect was harassing his laborers. He was draining their supply of victims. Every cultivator who worked for Leo was a cultivator who wouldn't walk into the fog. Every tael of wheat Leo paid out meant a Foundation Establishment cultivator who didn't need to gamble his life on the Heavenstone Sect's so-called selection. He looked at the box of cracked vital slips. The petition with ten thousand names.

Forming a gang meant drawing a line. Everyone on this side lives. Everyone on that side gets fed into Scatterstraw's field. It meant war with the Heavenstone Sect. Leo's first instinct was to say yes. Approve the organization, formalize the ranks, march into the Heavenstone Sect and tear the conspiracy apart brick by brick. But the problem wasn't the Heavenstone Sect. The problem was Scatterstraw's profundity. The wheat field that turned cultivators into T4 soil.

Even if Leo killed every elder in the Heavenstone Sect, even if he demolished the organization brick by brick, another sect would spring up in its place. The profundity would still be there. The soil would still be valuable. Someone else would figure out the same scheme and start the cycle over. He needed to attack the problem at its source, either by resolving the profundity itself or by making the T4 soil worthless. But Scatterstraw was still a Deity Transformation Monarch. A T5 existence.

Leo was Foundation Establishment with a fancy sword. He couldn't kill a Monarch head on. Worst of all, their old plan of starving the Monarch wouldn't work anymore. His wheat field was probably larger now. Fed by thousands of cultivators who'd walked into the fog thinking they were taking an exam. That left the tainted T4 soil.

"Zhang Wei. I heard the Heavenstone Sect is selling T4 soil to beast clans. Who else is buying?"

"Sects in the Central Provinces. The great temples in the East. Anyone with spirit stones." His mouth thinned.

"Everyone knows the prices are impossible. Nobody asks."

"And the buyers. Have any of them reported problems? Side effects? Anything unusual?" Zhang Wei stopped.

"Young friend." His voice was careful now.

"What do you know about this soil?" Leo met his eyes.

"Lord Flockfeather showed me a sample four days ago. It was crawling with Slaughter Qi. Anyone who cultivates with that soil, anyone who eats wheat grown in it, could be absorbing corruption without knowing." Zhang Wei's face went very still.

"The gang's first order of business will be to investigate the soil." Leo said.

"Find out who's buying. Track what they're using it for. Document side effects. If the contamination is spreading, we don't need to fight the Heavenstone Sect at all. We just need to make sure everyone knows what they're actually buying." Zhang Wei stood up and bowed.

"It shall be as the gang leader commands." Gang leader. Leo winced at the title. It was probably going to stick.

"There is one final matter." Zhang Wei produced a fresh jade tablet.

"The petition asks for a proper gang, and a proper gang must be named. Your companion Mike Ross has already submitted a proposal. He was quite enthusiastic." He turned the tablet so Leo could read it. GIANTS GANG Leo thought about Coach Harbach's face. The way it purpled every time Leo walked into the training facility.

"I can't use that name." Zhang Wei raised an eyebrow.

"What if I get traded? We'd have to rename the entire organization." Zhang Wei didn't understand what Leo meant by being traded, but Leo and his friends had said stranger things before.

"How about the Guano Gang?" Leo suggested.

"Guano," Zhang Wei repeated.

"The stuff we process at the factory. The critical ingredient for our gunpowder." Zhang Wei's brow furrowed.

"This elder confesses some uncertainty about what guano actually is. Arthur refuses to share the details. He claims it is an important strategic secret." His eyes narrowed slightly.

"Do you know?" He didn't. He had been so focused on everything else that he'd never actually asked. Mike had said it came from spiritual bats. Bat's guano. Maybe.

"I don't know either," Leo admitted.

"But it sounds better than the Saltpeter Gang." Zhang Wei considered this. Then he stood. He set down his brush and straightened his robes. His hands came together in front of his chest, fingers interlaced, thumbs touching. A formal Daoist salute.

"Guano Gang it is."

The founding of the Guano Gang was electric. Zhang Wei had the symbol painted on banners within minutes of Leo's approval. Two English letters: 'GG'. No one knew what guano actually was. It was English, and Arthur had refused to translate it, claiming strategic secrecy. Most people concluded that guano must be another name for saltpeter. Within days, the symbol appeared across the Savage Mountains. On gates. On banners. On the backs of laborers' robes. Leo hadn't expected that part.

He'd thought of the gang as an organizational tool. A way to formalize ranks, track contribution points, and separate trusted workers from newcomers. What he got was a movement. The refugees flooding into the Savage Mountains had spent years being ground down. The war had stripped them of everything. Their sects had collapsed or been absorbed. Their spirit veins had been seized. Their families had scattered.

They'd trudged from province to province, watching recruiters promise advancement in exchange for walking into meat grinders. They'd taken jobs hauling ash and mining sulfur because the alternative was regression. Many of them had accepted it. Their dao hearts had cracked, their ambitions had withered, and they'd made peace with the fact that their journey on the immortal path would end in a beast's stomach or a jade mine. The Guano Gang changed something. Leo didn't fully understand it at first.

He was too busy recording crane songs, attending NFL practice, and trying to figure out how to stop the Heavenstone Sect from harassing his saltpeter supply. But Zhang Wei saw it happening in real time. The job postings Leo had proposed, the investigation teams to track contaminated T4 soil, drew applicants unlike anything Zhang Wei had seen before. These weren't desperate cultivators waving credentials about wood-chopping endurance. These weren't refugees explaining how many hours they could work without breaks.

These were people dusting off identity tokens that had meant something before the war. Sect insignias. Town guard badges. Formation guild certifications. They talked about their brave deeds in the past. They highlighted their attainments in formation study. They spoke about their sense of right and wrong. No employer in the Savage Mountains had wanted to hear about those things in years. Zhang Wei assigned them to teams. He sent off dozens of teams at first. Then hundreds.

Each team received a mission: track a shipment of T4 soil. Document the buyer. Test for contamination. Report back. Leo had stockpiled enough spiritual wheat to employ a hundred thousand Foundation Establishment cultivators. He authorized Zhang Wei to spend freely. The investigation teams would serve double duty. They would help Leo study the effects of the soil, and more importantly, identify cultivators trustworthy enough to defend Gustav Mountain when the zombies came.

The Guano Investigators, as they came to be known, began to spread across the Azure Profound Continent. To everyone's surprise, the buyers welcomed them. The Nascent Soul Lords who had purchased Heavenstone soil knew something was wrong with it. The prices had been too good. The sellers too eager. No one bought T4 spiritual soil with T2 spiritstones without suspecting a catch.

When Foundation Establishment investigators arrived at their gates, carrying Guano Gang insignia and offering free contamination testing, the Lords let them in. Some were relieved. Some were curious. Some just wanted confirmation that their paranoia was justified. The investigators carried Shen family testing formations, simple arrays that exposed Slaughter Qi contamination through visible energy fluctuations.

They demonstrated the technique to every Lord who would listen and left copies of the formation diagrams for the Lords to try themselves. Word spread. Beast clans who had purchased Heavenstone soil began destroying their stockpiles. Noble families in the western provinces demanded refunds. Sects in the Central Provinces filed formal complaints with the Imperial Court. The Guano Gang, which had started as a labor organization competing with the Heavenstone Sect for workers, became something else entirely.

They became a threat to the Heavenstone Sect's foundation. Every buyer who burned their purchase was a buyer who wouldn't return. Every Lord who learned the truth was a Lord who would warn others. The Heavenstone Sect's council met in an emergency session. They could not attack the investigation teams directly. They could not discredit the contamination findings. But they could attack something else. The namesake of the gang. The symbol painted on every banner. The operation that had started it all. The guano.