But Lin Mu had not let the strong opening go to his head. He assessed his own position with absolute clarity.
"I am nothing more than a middleman flying the clan's banner."
He turned and walked back, running the calculations in his mind.
"If I hold some kind of open auction and let the Elders and direct-line disciples squabble with outside independent cultivators over market stalls, I would be slapping the clan's upper echelon across the face."
In the world of Gu cultivation, hierarchy and face sometimes mattered more than Primeval Stones. Exploitation, too, had to be dressed in a respectable coat.
Over the next two to three days, Lin Mu transformed completely into Black Blood Stockade's most diligent and professional "campsite guide."
He made no loud proclamations.
Instead, he quietly issued private viewing invitations to representatives of the various factions within Black Blood Stockade — in batches, sorted by rank.
On the surface, everyone strolled along the wide, level campsite roads in an atmosphere of warm cordiality.
The various managers and Elders stroked their beards and praised the campsite's orderliness and grandeur, commending Lin Mu as a reliable young man.
But in private — the moment anyone stepped into the soundproofed inner tent — Lin Mu would shift into an entirely different mode of negotiation, calibrated precisely to the visitor's standing and financial capacity.
This was the investment and harvest of power.
For his former ally Lin Feng — now an Elder's personal disciple, backed by the clan's concentrated resources, on the verge of breaking through to Rank 2 —
Lin Mu did not mention money at all.
He did not even appear in person.
He simply sent Lin Ping on a quiet errand, delivering three prime Inner Ring Plot Jia plaques — the most coveted positions, right beside the Three Star Cave's reserved space — with no fanfare whatsoever.
Accompanying the plaques was a single brief message from Lin Mu, transmitted by sound: "Young Lord Feng, our past cooperation has been a pleasure. These few small plots — consider them a welcome gift."
A gift. Outright. Prime real estate worth at least fifteen hundred Primeval Stones, handed over without so much as a blink.
Lin Feng, upon receiving the plaques, understood immediately.
This unspoken mutual understanding did not merely cement Lin Mu's status as an absolutely trusted confidant — it purchased for Lin Mu the most solid, unshakeable political capital he could possibly hold during the frenzied wealth extraction to come.
With Lin Feng — a tree that would soon grow into a towering canopy — standing out in front, no one else would dare make a move, no matter how envious they were.
For the other established power factions, however — Lin Yan of the Punishment Hall, Lin Xue of the Medicine Hall, and the various deep-rooted Elders —
Lin Mu's attitude underwent a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree reversal. He became firm, businesslike, and entirely unyielding.
"Inner Ring Grade-A stalls. Fixed price. Five hundred Primeval Stones each. No credit. No bargaining."
Inside the inner tent, facing the managers sent by these normally untouchable figures, Lin Mu sipped his tea and did not yield a single inch.
The managers of these powerful factions ground their teeth in fury. They thought the boy had gone completely money-mad — an outrageous price. But there was nothing they could do.
The Jia Clan Caravan's early arrival meant the rarest resources in the Southern Border were coming to their doorstep.
Whoever secured a prime position first — whoever got closest to the center — would hold an absolute advantage.
And besides, if Young Lord Lin Feng and Hall Master Lin Mao Mao had both already claimed spots in the Inner Ring, could they really afford to be left out — forced to squeeze into the outer perimeter alongside sweaty, dirt-caked commoners?
For the sake of face, and for the sake of profit.
These powerful factions bled inwardly, but they had no choice. One by one, they pinched their noses and obediently counted out fistfuls of Primeval Stones.
In just three days.
The Inner Ring's core zone — those dozens of plots staked out with low wooden fencing, previously empty — had been carved up entirely by Black Blood Stockade's upper echelon and several neighboring vassal clans who had caught wind of the opportunity.
And at that moment, inside Lin Mu's dim underground chamber —
Inside the Rank 2 Gourd Gu's interior space, a small mountain had accumulated, radiating dense Primeval Energy. A staggering four thousand Primeval Stones lay quietly within, emanating a suffocating brilliance.
But this was far from over.
Having thoroughly squeezed every drop from the high-value clients, Lin Mu immediately turned his gaze toward the far broader lower market — and unleashed the ultimate move he had been planning all along.
He issued a single, stunning official announcement:
"The Outer Ring zone at the campsite's outermost perimeter is entirely free of charge. Not only will no stall fees be collected, but the campsite will also provide complimentary basic meals, free stabling for caravan animals, and free fodder."
The announcement landed like a heavy bomb dropped into a still lake.
In the past, no matter which clan hosted a large caravan, the treatment of low-ranking independent cultivators and commoners who came hoping to catch a few scraps had always been harsh.
Steep entry fees were standard. Even getting a drink of water meant reading the guards' expressions first.
And now everything was free? Meals and animal feed included?
Of course, the common folk at the bottom had no way of knowing that these so-called "free provisions" and "animal fodder" were entirely funded by public money — officially allocated from the clan's treasury specifically to receive the Jia Clan Caravan.
In previous years, this substantial sum had been skimmed layer by layer by the External Affairs Hall's supervisors and Deacons, pocketed as personal gain.
But for Lin Mu now, sitting on over four thousand Primeval Stones, he had no interest whatsoever in that paltry grain and cheap fodder.
He simply redirected the public funds entirely — using someone else's flowers to make his own offering — and deployed every last coin of it to leverage the most enormous and most indiscriminate force in existence: foot traffic.
The effect was nuclear.
The news spread like it had grown wings. Within a single day, it reached every corner within several hundred li of Black Wind Ridge.
Low-ranking Gu Masters, vagrants from the Grey Street Market, even ordinary villagers from nearby settlements who had never seen the wider world — they surged toward Black Blood Stockade's southern district like a dam breaking open.
What had been intended as a simple commercial campsite for a caravan was transformed, by this staggering flood of people, into the largest, most sensational, most electrifying grand fair in the entire history of Black Blood Stockade.
A sea of people. Shoulder to shoulder, as far as the eye could see.
And beneath this extreme contrast of fire and ice — the Outer Ring packed to bursting for free, the Inner Ring priced beyond reach — a grotesque, blood-soaked meat grinder for the middle tier was born.
The Middle Ring.
The traditional mid-tier merchants, traders, and seasoned independent cultivators from the Grey Street Market — those with some means but not enough to reach the inner circle — fell into a frenzy.
They had come loaded with goods, expecting to make a killing at the caravan grand market. Instead, they arrived and found themselves staring at a wall.
The foot traffic had all been lured to the outermost ring by the free-entry hook. The high-ranking Gu Masters and senior caravan officials with money to burn were all concentrated in the Inner Ring, which they could not access.
If they did not want to be left out of this windfall entirely, they had no choice but to secure a stall in the Middle Ring — the zone between inner and outer, positioned to capture the highest conversion rate of foot traffic flowing between the two.
It became a contested chokepoint overnight.
Middle Ring plot prices, under extreme supply-demand imbalance, shot upward like a rocket within a single day — tripling in price before the day was out.
For this kind of messy, mid-tier haggling and squabbling, Lin Mu no longer bothered to show his face.
His standing and his ambitions had grown beyond the point of wasting breath on penny-pinching merchants.
He handed absolute pricing authority and allocation rights for the Middle Ring entirely to his number-one lieutenant — Lin Ping.
Inside a side tent at the campsite.
Lin Ping — once a timid, cowering youth at the bottom of the clan's hierarchy, too afraid to breathe too loudly, who had nearly been sent to the mines for failing to complete an assignment — now sat sprawled in a large armchair with the ease of a man who owned the place.
Outside the tent, over a hundred anxious, sweat-drenched mid-tier merchants and black-market independent cultivators waited in line.
Inside the tent, Lin Ping was pounding the table, trading verbal blows with several Rank 2 independent cultivators he would not have dared to even look at before, spittle flying:
"That's the price! Two hundred Primeval Stones — take it or leave it! Too expensive? Then get out and turn left and go fight the dirt farmers in the Outer Ring for scraps!"
"Don't try to get friendly with me! No cash? Then put up that Rank 1 Gu of yours as collateral!"
He did not yield a single step. For every last fraction of profit Lin Mu had entrusted to him, he fought like a rabid hound.
He had finally, completely, tasted the sweet poison called power.
Time flew by in the frenzied churn of money.
The five-day deadline arrived at last.
At noon on that day —
At the edge of the southern horizon, a vast cloud of dust suddenly rose, blotting out the sky.
Accompanied by a series of deep, earth-shaking roars from great beasts of burden, an enormous shadow — like a moving fortress — slowly materialized in everyone's field of vision.
The Jia Clan Caravan's main force, led by Jia Fu himself, had finally arrived.
Black Blood Stockade's upper echelon, led by Patriarch Lin Cang, had already formed a reception line on the ancient road ten li from the campsite, giving this titan of Southern Border commerce every ounce of face he was due.
Yet when Jia Fu and his party rode their great pack beasts forward, surrounded by Black Blood Stockade's leadership, and slowly drew near the southern campsite —
Even this well-traveled, widely experienced caravan leader could not suppress a sharp intake of breath.
Inside the campsite, the noise was already deafening, the crowd already packed shoulder to shoulder.
Vendors' cries, beast roars, and the flashing light effects of Gu worms on display wove together into a scene of peak vitality and commerce.
Without any exaggeration — the energy here had already reached the point where, even if the Jia Clan Caravan had not come today, this place would already have been an enormously successful Southern Border trade event in its own right.
"Patriarch Lin... in half a lifetime of running trade routes, I have never seen anything like this — the scale of it, the organization, the sheer momentum." Jia Fu looked out at the unbelievable spectacle before him and spoke with genuine feeling.
Lin Cang was inwardly somewhat bewildered himself, but in front of outsiders, he naturally stroked his beard and laughed broadly, claiming the credit without hesitation as a testament to the clan's superior planning and coordination.
And at that moment —
Deep within the grand fair, in an inconspicuous hidden tent that no one was paying attention to —
Lin Mu sat quietly in meditation, legs crossed.
Before him, arranged in neat rows, were three Rank 2 storage Gu of different shapes.
Every single one was packed full of gleaming Primeval Stones.
Over ten thousand Primeval Stones.
And this was the net profit — after all labor and material costs had been deducted, after every bribe and payment up and down the chain had been settled.
It spoke for itself: once the logic of capital formed a closed loop, the terrifying profit margins it produced were enough to drive men to madness.
This staggering fortune — enough to ignite a storm of blood and fire within a mid-tier clan — had flowed silently into Lin Mu's pocket over the course of just five days, through a commercial leverage that struck like a weapon from a higher plane.
His ammunition was now more plentiful than it had ever been.
He listened to the thunderous clamor outside. He listened to the roaring tide of voices that erupted as the caravan's main force made its entrance.
At this most fevered, most brilliant moment — the man who had single-handedly built this miraculous campsite from nothing chose, with great deliberateness, to step back.
He retreated completely into the shadows behind the curtain and did not show his face again.
Lin Mu raised a cup of tea that had long since gone cold and drank it in a single swallow.
His dark, deep eyes gazed through the gap in the tent fabric — patient as the most unhurried of fishermen — fixed quietly on the prime Plot Jia trading zone at the very center of it all.
"The water has been stirred murky. The net has been cast."
"Now — I wait for the treasure inside that tree house to reveal itself."