My Portable Spirit Farm: Rise of the Humble Servant

Chapter 1: A Jade Pendant

Author’s NoteI hope you’ll keep reading. The protagonist has a rough time at first, but it’s all setting up the satisfying moments later. Things will get very satisfying! As for farming, I promise you a farming novel unlike any you’ve read before. Drop a follow, get rich, and Merry Christmas.—Story

The night was thick as ink, pressing down heavily upon the Servant Peak of the Qingyun Sect.

The wind howled through the cliffs like a weeping child, rattling the rotten thatch roofs of the low, dilapidated shacks. It seemed as if the roofs might be torn off at any moment.

A persistent smell of damp and mold hung in the air. It was not so bad in itself... except that it mingled with stale sweat, choking smoke from cheap oil lamps, and the pungent reek from the distant spirit beast pens. One small breath could leave a person retching. Chen Ping had long since grown used to it.

He lay curled in the corner of his shack on a pile of withered grass that mocked the definition of a “bed.”

His thin, ragged hemp clothes could not keep out the chill seeping from the stone walls. Cold wind slipped through the cracks in the door, making him shiver. Yet it was not the cold that made his emaciated body so unable to bear the wind.

It was the hunger.

He was truly starving. In the three years since he had come up the mountain, he had not eaten a single full meal. His empty stomach ached as though countless tiny insects were gnawing at it. Cramps gripped him in waves, making his vision darken.

His last meal had been half a bowl of watery gruel the previous evening—thin enough to see his own reflection and already turning sour. That was his entire reward for a full day of backbreaking labor as the lowest-ranking Servant Disciple of the Qingyun Sect.

Outside, the suppressed coughs and pained groans of other servants echoed in the night. They were all struggling on the brink of death, praying for the dawn.

Chen Ping closed his eyes, forcing himself not to listen or think about it.

Yet, in the darkness, the image of that bowl of gruel stubbornly surfaced. He remembered the murky broth with a few disintegrated grains of Spirit Grain settled at the bottom.

He remembered the impatient face of the Outer Disciple who had ladled it out, and the accidental flash of a sparkling jade bracelet on the man’s wrist. The luster of that jade, contrasted against the emptiness in Chen Ping’s stomach, was a brutal reflection of their status.

He abruptly opened his eyes.

His hollow gaze fixed on a hole in the roof gnawed by rats. Faint starlight trickled through, falling on his face to remind him he was still alive.

Alive... living for nothing but survival...

Like an ant under the protection of this mighty immortal sect, he clung to life on its pitiful handouts of sour gruel.

His fingers unconsciously dug into the rough, prickly straw mat beneath him. His knuckles turned white from the force. Chen Ping gritted his teeth.

Resentment rose within him, swelling until it filled his entire mind.

Was he really going to spend his whole life barely scraping by like this?

He turned it over in his mind, but in the end, all he could do was sigh helplessly.

Clang!

Before the first light of dawn could pierce the horizon, the piercing sound of a gong exploded through the servant quarters, brutally tearing apart the last remnants of sleep.

“Get to work! You bunch of lazybones!”

Manager Wang’s grating voice drilled through the thin walls, making eardrums buzz. “Still lying there dead when the sun is up? Are you waiting for me to invite you with my whip?”

Chen Ping jolted upright with instinctive swiftness.

He quickly rolled up his thin, tattered bedding and stuffed it into a corner. He pulled on worn straw sandals that left his toes exposed, their soles nearly worn through.

He tied a frayed hemp rope tightly around his waist—a desperate trick to slightly suppress the endless feeling of emptiness in his stomach.

Rushing out of the shack, he merged into the silent, weary stream of people trudging toward the massive buildings halfway up the mountain slope.

Servant Peak... it sounded impressive by name.

In reality, it was merely an impoverished, barren mountain clinging to the side of the Qingyun Sect’s main peak. It was rocky, desolate, and sparse in Qi.

They, the lowest-ranking servants, were forever assigned the dirtiest, most exhausting, and least respected tasks. Carrying water, chopping firewood, cleaning latrines, hauling stone, clearing garbage...

Day after day, year after year, they squeezed out every last bit of their Physical Strength to exchange for meager rations barely sufficient to keep them from starving to death.

Today, Chen Ping’s assigned task was clearing away the mountains of Waste Residue piled up in the Pill Hall area.

It was a filthy, exhausting job. A strange odor of burnt material and rotting medicinal dregs lingered in the area, and no one wanted to do it.

But Chen Ping had no choice.

The massive pill furnace hall resembled a slumbering giant beast. Even without the fires lit, it emanated oppressive heat and residual medicinal vapors.

Chen Ping dragged a heavy wooden wheelbarrow back and forth between several deep pits designated for dumping waste.

The cart was heavy with ashes, fragments from shattered pill furnaces, medicine cloths stained with unknown filth, and large amounts of charred medicinal paste from failed alchemy attempts.

Sweat soon soaked through his thin clothes and plastered them to his bony back. Dust and medicinal dregs caked them into dirty, muddy streaks. Every breath carried the nauseating smell deep into his lungs.

By afternoon, the sun blazed overhead. Even the stones seemed to sizzle in the heat. Chen Ping staggered toward the most remote waste pit with his final load, heading for a place almost no one visited. The stench was even sharper here.

Gritting his teeth, he pushed the heavy wooden cart to the edge and unfastened its rear board.

Crash! The filthy waste poured down, raising a cloud of gray dust.

He coughed violently, wiping the sweat and grime from his eyes with his sleeve. As his vision cleared, he noticed something glinting faintly near the base of the pit wall.

The glimmer was extremely dim, almost buried beneath thick ash and medicinal dregs, like a dust-covered fish eye.

Chen Ping’s heart gave a sudden, inexplicable leap.

He looked around, confirming no one was nearby. Then, he slid carefully down the steep pit wall, his feet sinking into the sticky, suffocating muck below.

The pit floor was covered in sticky mud and rotting medicinal dregs. Fighting his nausea, he picked his way through the suffocating stench, his feet sinking unevenly as he went.

He dug through the filth with his hands. His fingertips touched something hard; he pried it loose and pulled it from the mud. It was a jade pendant.

It was cold in his hand and slick with mud from the pit. About half the size of his palm, it had an irregular shape and rough edges that seemed to have been chipped. The material was neither metal nor jade, but a dull, lifeless gray-white. It looked like an ordinary pebble forgotten on a riverbed and washed by the current for millions of years.

There were no intricate carvings, only a few crooked, faint grooves that looked like a child’s careless scratches. In the center lay a tiny, nearly imperceptible dark red spot.

His heart sank. Even the lowest Outer Disciple of the Qingyun Sect wore ornaments possessing some spiritual glow or treasure aura.

It was probably trash someone had thrown away with the residue after a failed alchemy attempt, or simply a stubborn stone left in the furnace ashes.

Disappointment washed over him like an icy tide.

He twisted his mouth in a self-mocking smile and silently cursed his own wishful thinking. A chance at cultivation? How could that ever fall to a servant who was worth less than a dog?

He wiped the pendant against his dirty clothes to remove the surface mud, then slipped it into the patched inner pocket at his chest—the only part that was still reasonably clean. At least it was hard. Perhaps he could use it to crack grain husks someday.

Numb with exhaustion, he climbed out of the pit and dragged his empty cart back to his endless labor.