My Portable Spirit Farm: Rise of the Humble Servant

Chapter 225: Jadeite Blind Boxes

The bulk of his immediate spoils came from the Storage Bags looted off Mo Xiuyuan and the other Foundation Establishment casualties.

After a thorough count, Chen Ping sat before a small, literal mountain of over 105,000 Low-grade Spirit Stones. The sheer volume of wealth practically hummed with ambient spiritual light. It was a spectacular haul, bringing him one massive step closer to triggering the Jade Pendant’s next upgrade.

Next came the Dharma Artifacts. There were over 20 pieces, ranging from Tier 2 Low-grade to Top Grade, though the vast majority sat comfortably at the lower end. The pile included swords, spears, halberds, shields, and various armor pieces, each pulsing with varying intensities of Qi.

Chen Ping inspected them meticulously. Most were perfectly ordinary, and their elemental affinities clashed with his own. Only two or three Tier 2 High-grade pieces were of notable quality, but they still felt clunky and inferior compared to his specialized Mother-Child Flying Sword set.

He did, however, keep a Tier 2 Top Grade small cauldron that had belonged to Mo Xiuyuan. While his flying swords offered a decent defensive screen, they couldn’t compare to the raw, unyielding protection of a dedicated defensive Dharma Artifact. He didn’t know the cauldron’s specific name or origin, but a Tier 2 Top Grade shield was nothing to scoff at.

As for the rest of the armory, their best use was being liquidated for more Spirit Stones.

Then came the Talismans. Nearly 200 Tier 2 scrolls, covering a dizzying array of offensive, defensive, and auxiliary functions. Most were of standard potency, but standard was often all it took to turn the tide in a desperate fight. Chen Ping sorted and cataloged them meticulously for future use. Even if he didn’t need them, they would make excellent rewards for his disciples.

Finally, he examined the Pills. Over 20 ceramic bottles. Some still bore legible, mundane labels like Qi-Returning Pill or Injury-Healing Powder, while others were completely unmarked, their contents an absolute mystery.

Chen Ping didn’t dare test them. In the Cultivation world, every pill carried a degree of innate toxicity; swallowing an unidentified concoction was practically begging for a violent death. He securely sealed the bottles, deciding to dump them on a black market merchant when the opportunity arose.

“A massive quantity, but severely lacking in refinement,” Chen Ping muttered, finalizing his assessment of the standard loot. “Aside from the Spirit Stones, I’ll liquidate the rest for resources I actually need.”

With the mundane spoils categorized and stored, his gaze finally locked onto the ancient, unadorned band of metal resting in his palm.

Han Liren’s Storage Ring.

This was the ultimate prize. The true Return on his catastrophic gamble.

The metal was ice-cold against his skin, deeply etched with archaic, microscopic runes that remained flawlessly sharp despite centuries of neglect. Because its original master had Perished over 800 years ago, the tyrannical Divine Sense imprint had long since eroded, leaving behind only a fragile, skeletal framework of defensive Restrictions.

Chen Ping channeled a thread of Qi into the band. The ancient, degraded Restrictions melted away instantly, like snowflakes hitting a hot iron.

The process was almost insultingly easy.

“Lucky…” Chen Ping exhaled a tense breath.

High-tier Storage Rings in the Cultivation world were notorious for their brutal self-destruct mechanisms. If a powerful cultivator died violently, or simply refused to let a grave robber inherit their legacy, a single dying thought could trigger the ring’s core matrix. The internal dimension would violently collapse, vomiting the ring’s entire contents into the unnavigable void.

It was the primary reason why “looting corpses” became exponentially less profitable the higher you climbed the Cultivation ladder. Experts at the Violet Palace realm and above operated on a strict policy of mutually assured destruction: I would rather shatter the jade than leave the tile intact.

This spiteful tradition was a major factor in the slow, agonizing decline of the Cultivation world. From the ancient eras to the present day, countless heaven-defying techniques, mythic Pill formulas, and profound secret arts had been permanently erased from history by dying, spiteful masters.

Given Old Ghost Han’s ruthless, sociopathic paranoia, if he had the Qi to spare, he absolutely would have detonated this ring rather than leave it for me, Chen Ping thought, a cold sweat pricking his neck. Truly, timing is everything.

Steeling his nerves, Chen Ping slowly extended his Divine Sense into the ring’s internal dimension.

The instant his mind crossed the threshold, his expression violently froze. His jaw slacked into a mask of pure, unadulterated confusion.

There was no mountain of High-grade Spirit Stones. There were no heaven-shaking Dharma Treasures blinding him with divine light. There weren’t even rows of ancient jade slips detailing lost techniques.

Instead, his Divine Sense was met with a claustrophobic, maddening wall of boxes.

The storage space was literally crammed to the ceiling with thousands of them. They were uniformly carved from Top Grade imperial green jadeite—a material considered a priceless miracle in the Mortal world, but practically garbage to a cultivator. While the craftsmanship of each box was exquisite, jadeite could barely hold a thimble’s worth of Qi, making it vastly inferior to the cold jade used by true cultivators.

Chen Ping was momentarily stunned. Did Old Ghost Han have a hoarding fetish? What possible reason would a late-stage Violet Palace overlord have for hoarding thousands of Mortal-grade jewelry boxes?

Pushing aside his profound disappointment, Chen Ping reminded himself that beggars couldn’t be choosers. The hoard was his now.

“Whatever. Let’s treat it like opening blind boxes,” Chen Ping muttered, his mood a chaotic mix of weary anticipation and preemptive dread.

With a thought, he materialized ten random jadeite boxes from the ring, arranging them in a neat row on the stone floor.

He reached out and popped the lid off the first box.

Resting on a bed of rotting, musty silk was a shriveled, pitch-black husk of a Spirit Grass. He could barely discern its original shape—the leaves were uniquely star-shaped, and the central veins hinted at a once-brilliant silver hue.

“Tier 3 Spirit Medicine… Silver Star Grass!” Chen Ping gasped. It was an incredibly rare, hyper-potent body-tempering herb.

Heart pounding, he gingerly reached in to examine it. The very millisecond his fingertip brushed the desiccated leaf, the entire plant silently collapsed. It disintegrated into a pathetic, crumbly pile of gray-black ash. The faint, ghostly pulsation of its lingering Qi vanished entirely.

Chen Ping’s chest violently tightened. He ripped the lid off the second box.

Inside lay a similarly withered, petrified flower. He poked it. It instantly crumbled into fine powder.

The third box held a shriveled, mummified rhizome. Ash.

The fourth… the fifth…

He tore through the first ten boxes. Every single one contained the remains of a priceless, legendary Tier 3 Spirit Medicine. And every single one suffered the exact same fate.

Over the course of 800 years, the pathetic jadeite had failed to seal their spiritual essence. Their vitality had bled out into nothingness, leaving behind brittle, ghostly husks that vaporized at the slightest touch.

Chen Ping stared at the gray dust staining his fingertips. The silence in the cave dwelling was deafening.

Just those first ten herbs, if perfectly preserved, would have fetched tens of thousands of Spirit Stones.

And they were just gone.

A sickening wave of heartache crashed over him. Refusing to accept the reality, he aggressively materialized another ten boxes and ripped them open.

The exact same result. Ten more piles of useless, disintegrating ash.

Another ten boxes. Dust.

His movements blurred. He sped up, tearing through box after box like a deranged, tireless machine. The contents were uniformly devastating: endless varieties of Tier 3 Spirit Medicines, interspersed with impossibly rare Tier 2 variants. Without exception, every single one turned to flying ash the moment they met the air.

His heart sank like a stone in a freezing lake.

The rarer the herb, the higher its hypothetical value, and the uglier Chen Ping’s expression became.

He did some quick, agonizing mental math. The nearly 300 boxes he had just opened represented an original, pristine value of over 3 million Low-grade Spirit Stones.

It was an apocalyptic amount of wealth. Enough to single-handedly fund a minor Sect for a century! Old Ghost Han’s net worth had been completely incomprehensible.

And now, that world-shaking fortune was nothing but a pile of worthless, musty dirt.

“This paranoid old bastard,” Chen Ping gritted his teeth, staring at the ash. “Before he went into hiding, he must have embezzled the Han family’s entire ancestral treasury!”