Dao of the Deal

The mountain's bounty proved to be inexhaustible, at least so long as it was only being harvested by a pair of teenagers. Muchen and Chuhua settled into a daily routine of flower collection and refinement. Even though each basket of flowers produced only a pittance of essential oil, day after day of steady effort resulted in a healthy stockpile.

Equally as important, Chuhua proved to be a quick study. It only took a few days before she was able to take on the extraction process by herself. She moved the heavy equipment around with surprising ease considering her tiny frame. It was a testament to the hard life she and Yize had been living and the benefits she had reaped from her first true steps down the road of cultivation.

She hadn't volunteered to discuss her dao with Muchen since that first day, but she had clearly found something that agreed with her. Muchen could practically feel the spiritual energy responding to her presence, if her unusual strength hadn't already made her progress obvious.

The next step was to transform the essential oil into a product that was ready to be sold. Back on Earth, Muchen would have had two options when it came to making his own perfume: mixing the scent with alcohol or with oil. An alcohol based perfume would go into spritzer bottles, set to evaporate as it was applied, leaving only the scent behind. An elegant solution, if not for the fact that Muchen had access to neither pure alcohol nor spritzer bottles.

Mixing the scent with oil, on the other hand, was simply a matter of finding a neutral smelling oil that could be mixed with the essential oil to produce a proper scented oil. Fortunately, the agricultural level of the Qianzhan Continent was pretty good, which meant that seed oil was widely available for purchase. He was even able to get the stuff that back on Earth would have been labeled as organic and GMO free for no additional cost, though the local consumer culture sadly wasn't advanced enough to appreciate such things.

Muchen was able to rely on his own experience to find the proper balance of scented and unscented oils. If his essential oils were a little watered down compared to what he used to buy on the Internet, it was easy enough to simply add a bit more to the mix. He did two batches himself, making sure Chuhua had a chance to watch the process and study the end product, before turning her loose to try mixing up perfume on her own.

She performed admirably under his watching eyes, her movement steady as she mixed the two ingredients together. She carefully tested each step of the way, relying on her nose to tell her if anything had gone wrong. Muchen knew what the result would be even as she handed the mixing bowl over, but still made a show of bringing it to his nose and taking a sniff.

"That's good," he said. "Now we just have to pack it up."

While they'd been busy gathering flowers and stockpiling essential oils, they'd also settled on a final design for the perfume's packaging. Now their spare storage space was packed full of small wooden boxes decorated with a small line drawing of a mountain overlapping a flower in bloom. Each box had the characters for "Flower Mountain" written along its lower edge. Not the most original brand name, but it should at least be memorable.

They were halfway through parceling out the perfume into boxes when there was a knock on the door. Muchen left Chuhua to it and went to greet the visitor, a young man still covered with dust from the road.

"You're looking for me?"

"You're Muchen? Of Li Village?" the man asked.

Muchen nodded. "That's me."

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded over several times and sealed. He took a half step back when Muchen reached out for it. "I was told there was a tael of silver in it for me if I delivered this."

"Let me see the seal," Muchen said. The man held it out, poised as though he was ready to run the instant Muchen tried to snatch it from him. Which was annoying, but Muchen could still make out the "Long" character stamped in the wax.

Heisan had actually come through for him. Muchen pulled a tael of silver from his money pouch with a smile. The young man took it, handed over the letter, and left without saying another word.

Muchen put him out of his mind, his attention turning to the paper in his hands. He broke the seal without a second thought. For all of the grandiose packaging and the money Muchen had paid for delivery, what waited inside was only a single line of text.

Chun Zihan in Jiaoqu Town. Betrothal gift. Flowing Fortune bracelet.

Muchen sucked in a breath. The Flowing Fortune bracelet was one of the spiritual tools that he'd thought was most likely to be related to Xinyi. It was a simple bracelet with a turtle shell pattern that allowed its wearer to conjure a head-sized ball of water and freely control its shape and location. The distance the water ball could be moved varied depending on the strength of its user.

Jaioqu Town was the northernmost outpost of the Qianzhan Empire. Any further north was the Northern Wastes, home to nothing but demonic beasts and a few nomadic tribes that eked out a primitive standard of living. Not somewhere Muchen would have chosen to visit on his own, with its relatively undeveloped consumer market.

If it meant fulfilling his promise to Xinyi and giving her another boost in power, though, it was well worth the trip. It should be roughly two weeks north of Jiliu City. That made the round trip almost a month and a half, setting aside any time that they spent taking care of business.

Muchen waited until after dinner that evening to broach the topic. "Xinyi and I will be away for some time."

"How long?" Chuhua asked.

"Between one month and two, most likely," Muchen said, holding up a hand to forestall any protests. "It's cultivator business. Can't be helped."

Xinyi grinned. "You found something?"

Muchen nodded. "We need to figure out how we're going to bring it back, but we have time to work on a plan."

"What should we do while you're gone?" Chuhua asked.

"Keep producing more perfume," Muchen said. "It was time you take full control of the process anyway."

Chuhua clenched both hands into fists, then nodded slowly.

"Yize, see about selling to Jiliu City," Muchen said. "There's no rush. For now, we want to get the first few units sold and let interest build through word of mouth."

On the Qianzhan Continent, of course, there was no such thing as mass media advertisement.

Muchen couldn't even buy space on a billboard to try to promote brand awareness. Well, he might be able to put up a billboard if he was willing to shell out the money, but considering the literacy rate hovered in the single digits he wasn't likely to get his money's worth out of it.

Instead, he mostly planned to rely on word of mouth. As the saying went, good wine doesn't fear a deep alley. If he could supply a consistent, high quality product then sooner or later a devoted customer base would spring up. Of course, it would spring up quicker if somebody helped to kick start the chain reaction. Muchen hoped Yize had what it took to be a good salesman.

Muchen would be willing to pitch in and help out if Yize ran into any serious trouble, of course, but this was a good time for Yize to step up and show what he could do. In the long run, Muchen's life would be much easier if he had a subordinate who he trusted to take the lead and open up new markets. The best way for anybody to develop such a skill, of course, was to learn by doing.

In Muchen's long term vision, Flower Mountain would be transformed into a proper factory. The wild growth would be cleared away and flowers planted to maximize the yield of essential oils. The fires would always be going, either extracting nature's bounty or distilling alcoholic beverages. The fruits of their labor would steadily be packaged up and carried away by a steady stream of delivery carts.

He wasn't there yet. Not even close. In a way, though, that was a good thing. A fully integrated production line running around the clock would need a full time manager running around putting out fires pretty much every day. There would be no way for Muchen to slip away and run vital errands, not if he didn't want to risk the whole machine breaking down in his absence.

For now, their production was slow and intermittent. Their customers were purely hypothetical. Where the modern world had just-in-time production that delivered goods at the very moment they were needed, Muchen had a just-in-case factory that stockpiled its products hoping that someday a buyer would show up.

The good news was that without customers banging down the door, it wouldn't be a problem if their efficiency took a dive for a few weeks while Muchen was out of town. Yize and Chuhua would get a chance to show what they could accomplish on their own. He hoped they would flourish under pressure, but even if they screwed up their failures would at least identify the areas where they needed to improve.

It wasn't like ignoring the bracelet was ever an option.

Xinyi wasn't completely unreasonable. If the item they needed was sitting in the heart of the Cloudy Peaks Sect, she wouldn't expect him to throw his life away challenging their protective formations. On the other hand, she expected him to be reasonable too. The fact that a trip might take a bite out of his future profits, or delay the operations of his business, wasn't enough of an excuse to neglect her interests.

Besides, he'd already reaped plenty of benefits from Xinyi's assistance. Recovering her strength just increased the help she could provide. Flower Mountain was a tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere. Once their business was in full swing and their reputation grew, there would be more and more people eyeing the profits they were bringing in. Muchen and Yize between them could handle any threat that might come out of the woods, but they'd be hard pressed to fend off a serious bandit attack.

Xinyi as she was already had the strength to see off any mortal bandits, but there were plenty of cultivators who were willing to stoop to robbery if the prize was great enough. Muchen still remembered the demonstration she had given him the very first time she put him through martial training.

It was an impressive feat, using an ordinary knife to slice through a boulder without even touching her target. It had also left Xinyi visibly winded, even to Muchen's untrained eye. Muchen didn't rub elbows with advanced cultivators, but he had some idea what they were capable of. Just from what she had shown, Xinyi was capable of running roughshod over anybody in the Formation Building Stage. Against talented cultivators working their way through Core Formation, it would be touch and go. A cultivator with a fully formed Golden Core would be able to crush the whole group of them on Flower Mountain without even knowing how they died.

Of course, Xinyi could have some hole cards. Or she could be capable of more impressive martial displays, at the cost of drawing on some reserve of power. Muchen didn't want to rely on such things. If picking up another treasure or two would get Xinyi to the point that she'd at least be a deterrent to a Golden Core cultivator, that would be more than enough to send most bandit sects searching for easier targets.

Besides, she'd offered him a lot of help. It was only fair that he offer his own help in return, now that he had the chance.