When Mei woke up, it was afternoon.

The moment she opened her eyes, she winced and turned aside. The sun was so bright... now she was going to have to deal with dark spots.

"Hey. You're finally awake."

To her surprise, Yang Ning was there, alongside Ning Xing. Su Qing was floating nearby, zipping around anxiously.

"You know each other?" Mei asked.

Ning Xing laughed.

"Seriously? That's the first thing you ask?" she said. "But yeah, I've known him for quite a while."

"We found you unconscious here beside this little spirit, who was keeping watch." Yang Ning said. "Be more careful next time."

Be more careful? All she remembered was talking to a monkey, eating a peach off the ground and- Ah. Maybe he was right.

As the two of them walked off, Mei finally regained her senses. Ah... she should have asked what happened. How did Su Qing even get here?

"What happened?" she asked the spirit.

"Auntie Luye bought me here! But big big monkey fall down! And flying dirt beat small monkey, but is actually owl! And crow angry! Scare bad owl and monkey away!"

What. That didn't make a lick of sense.

She turned to the side and saw a massive crater just a few metres away. Even further down, there was a massive dirt monkey planted facefirst in the ground. Seriously, what the heck happened?

She looked to her sliced basket, surprised to see it still had herbs in it. Most of the lotus seeds and the shredded petals seemed to have remained as well, tumbling to the bottom due to their size.

After thinking hard about it, influenced by the novels she read, Mei came to a conclusion.

With all the herbs she was blatantly carrying, the monkey from earlier must have been tempted, knocking her out before snatching them. But in the meanwhile, other spirit beasts were attracted! And they had a very epic battle that somehow didn't hit her! Mei was a little giddy imagining those overly exaggerated scenes. If only if she could have seen them herself...

This mountain was way more dangerous than she expected... With that misunderstanding, Mei decided to book it before she got "robbed" again.

"Wuuu... wuuuu!"

Returning to Qiulan Village. to her surprise, Guang Ai was curled up outside, crying. That haughty expression, it was all gone. Mei wondered if it was wrong to think that she looked much cuter that way.

"Um. What's wrong?" she asked.

"Wuuu... the beasts, they said I was a child predator!"

...what.

"I just thought they were cute and tried to pet them! And they whispered things like—that girl is up to no good, those beast tamer types always try to kidnap and brainwash the kids! Wu..."

Smelling the herbs, Guang Ai stopped sniffing for a moment and looked over to the ruined basket.

"Can I have some...?"

"No," Mei said, hugging it defensively.

She looked over and saw Guang Ai's toppled backpack, a few packets of snacks spilling out.

"Actually, if you could spare some..." she said, pointing to them.

"Sniff... Go ahead. I'm not in the mood to eat them right now."

Mei happily began pulling bags of snacks out of the bag, while to the side, Su Qing tried to console Guang Ai.

Mmm... she tried a bit of the biscuits, the bread, everything. As she rummaged through the bag, to her surprise, she saw a huge egg covered with green stripes inside. She turned over to look at Guang Ai, who immediately began sweating intensely, an expression of "Shit! I forgot!" on her face.

"Those spirit beasts, unbelievable! How could they accuse you of that? I know you would never do such a thing!" Mei said, grinning deviously.

"Ha... ha... indeed, how could they?" Guang Ai made a pleading gesture.

Mei reached into her basket and popped 6 of the lotus seeds between the pleading hands. Each was worth 3 Jade, so she made sure she ate more than what the seeds were worth. Then she took a pack of twisty biscuits from the bag, before heading off.

Guang Ai looked relieved for a moment but glared at Mei anyway.

At the collection point, an elder stared at Mei's basket with a speechless look. This disciple... this was the first time a disciple had turned in the herbs in some half-assed basket they made on the spot. Did she really not have the foresight to buy a basket before heading there? Was there a drought on baskets?

And the shredded lotus flower petals... admittedly, it would still work fine ground into powder for pills, but the sight really hurt his heart. Why didn't she read the instructions in the jade slip? They were there specifically to prevent things like this from happening! Even the lotus seeds, which looked fine at first glance, were practically all immature. She must have forced them out of the pods...

"Disciple. I see your harvest is, ahem, bountiful. Are you sure you don't want to continue gathering? There are still quite a few days before the deadline."

"Um, that's fine, haha..."

The elder sighed before handing the girl a small bag of Jade, who ran off happily. Even with the spies they planted in an attempt to put a loophole in the agreement, disciples were still so terrible at harvesting...

4 green pieces of Jade and 6 white ones! Mei was very happy right now.

Not having counted the number of seeds in the basket, she didn't realise most of the seeds had only been paid off with only a single Jade.

It was almost enough for her to wish she continued looking for more dens. But then again, if she got robbed again, she probably wouldn't get as lucky. At least, that was her excuse.

Unbeknownst to her, she would have been fine, as Monkey, the main troublemaker had been taken care of.

Of course, Monkey was not the only spirit beast responsible for snatching back the spirit herbs. The elders were not the only ones that tried to find loopholes in the agreement, the beasts of Qiulan did too.

While they weren't personally allowed to snatch their herbs back... the agreement didn't say anything about spirit beasts from other regions.

But currently, 12 out of the 13 enforcers had taken sick leaves, a truly unfortunate "coincidence", considering how it was time for the annual harvest. This was definitely not instigated by the elders, not with bribes, nor by mixing laxatives into food or other underhanded measures...

After all, what Virtuous sect would do such things?