You Hour, Ink Plum Courtyard.When Chen Jinshu returned, the air had warmed considerably. After a full day of rushing about, she had finally managed to deal with all six of the request jade slips. Today's harvest wasn't bad at all. The first disciple's reward—a Ghostlight Lantern Fruit—was the most valuable. While the rest didn't quite measure up, they were still worthwhile.
Requests made to a spiritual plant healer were typically paid for with spiritual herbs. If that wasn't possible, equivalent spirit stones were used instead. Judging by today's turnout, future request slips would be inevitable. She would need to arrange a regular schedule to handle them efficiently.
After a short while, she extracted the spiritual seed from the Ghostlight Lantern Fruit and placed it in a growth-inducing elixir. There was only one such fruit, which could produce just a single batch of pills. It was better to use the spiritual seed to grow a full plant. Ghostlight Lantern Fruits matured once every three years, but in her spiritual plant space, that could be shortened by over a year.
Two days later, Chen Jinshu had finally managed to distribute her new rules regarding request slips:
Only cases involving rare or difficult-to-diagnose plant ailments would be accepted—only when the cultivator was unable to resolve it themselves. Also, the spiritual plants involved must not be common. Over the past two days, she'd received about ten jade slips, each with very different information.
Some were as rare as Starbone Fern, while others included common plants like Frostneedle Pine seedlings. Some of the symptoms were similar, indicating that the owners hadn't even bothered researching before sending their requests.
If she took them all on, it would be far too much work.
So, the next day, she asked her senior brothers and sisters to help relay her criteria for accepting requests. Sure enough, when she headed out that morning, the jade slips had been halved—only three remained.
Fortunately, all three were of high quality, involving rare spiritual plants with significant cultivation value. As for the ten slips she'd previously received, she'd carefully selected about half to treat.
By Shen Hour (3–5 p.m.), she had completed all three treatments.
"Not a bad haul today! I can finally take a few days off."
Aside from setting request guidelines, she had also limited the number of requests she would accept per month to eight, leaving her more time to cultivate and refine pills. Just as she entered the courtyard, Xiao Yin swooped down from the ink plum tree.
"Master! I'm hungry!"
Chen Jinshu paused in shock. The voice was childish—yet unmistakably spoken. She stared at the bird in disbelief.
Xiao Yin... had learned to speak.
It was extremely rare for demonic beasts to speak the human tongue. Only descendants of divine beasts with exceptional bloodlines could do so naturally, or those who had reached Foundation Establishment, possibly Core Formation if their bloodlines were weak.
But this Shadowpeak Finch was none of those things—and yet, here it was, speaking.
"Did you eat some kind of spiritual item again? How can you suddenly speak?" she asked, her voice tight with worry.
For an ordinary avian beast to develop speech, the required spiritual item would have to be incredibly rare. If the Shadowpeak Finch had unknowingly consumed someone else's treasure, the resulting karmic debt could be difficult to resolve.
Last time, it had eaten her senior sister's Luck Fruit, and she had to recover a massive number of lost items to settle the karma.
"I ate the seed that dropped from that Blood Demon beast we fought last time."
Chen Jinshu breathed a sigh of relief. So long as it wasn't something randomly picked up, it was fine. Still, she looked at the bird with awe.
"The Moon-Devouring Demon Lotus seed had this much power?" It seemed she had underestimated its value—she should've picked up more than just one.
"You've spent the last few days digesting it?"
"I fell into a coma right after I ate it," Xiao Yin said.
Chen Jinshu felt a stab of guilt. She had been so busy with her healer tasks, she had completely forgotten about the bird. No wonder it hadn't come out to eat the red berries she left in the feeding nest. She'd just assumed the bird would come out on its own. Now, seeing the untouched berries still sitting there, her heart ached a little.
"My fault for being so busy I ignored you. I didn't realize you were unconscious."
"It's okay, Master. I wasn't aware of the outside world while I was asleep."
"Do you feel any other discomfort?" Chen Jinshu asked, carefully inspecting the bird.
"I feel great! I can talk now—and I think my cultivation rose a level. I'm at the same stage as you!"
The bird flapped its wings happily. She stared at those wings for a while, noticing that the black feathers now bore pale white lotus patterns, elegant and mysterious.
Its eyes, once pitch-black, now glowed with a subtle golden sheen. Its tail feathers were larger, giving it a completely different aura from regular spirit birds.
"Any other changes besides being able to talk?"
"I found my voice is really pretty!"
"It is pretty nice," Chen Jinshu agreed. Hearing the bird's song now gave her a strange feeling of inner peace.
"I should visit the Scripture Pavilion soon. This mutation must be a positive evolution," she thought, seeing the cheerful bird.
The next day at noon, Chen Jinshu left the Green Pine Herb Garden and made her way to the Archive Pavilion.
The Shadowpeak Finch's sudden transformation still weighed on her mind. A voice in her heart urged her to fully understand its bloodline. She headed straight to the spiritual beast records section, which was vast—filled with volumes on rare beast species and their bloodlines.
After consulting the first-floor artifact spirit, she finally found a record of the Shadowpeak Finch and its various variants.
"It should be a variant of the Qingyin Lingque—it hasn't fully shed its Shadowpeak Finch bloodline yet, but it's changed a great deal."
Qingyin Lingque were known for their calming songs, capable of soothing agitated cultivators and beasts alike. As for the white lotus markings on the Shadowpeak Finch, she assumed they were a mutation brought on by the Moon-Devouring Demon Lotus, and likely had no adverse effect.
The Archive held no additional records on the lotus's influence.
"The Shadowpeak Finch's bloodline should now be above that of Fire Sparrows," she thought.
If Shadowpeak Finch ranked above Fire Sparrows, then Qingyin Lingque—akin to a divine songbird among spirit finches—were on a whole other level.
She recalled the Moon-Devouring Demon Lotus entry in the The Grim Record:It mentioned the seed would undergo a demonic transformation when exposed to blood, creating a murderous Blood Lotus Demon.
Now that the Shadowpeak Finch had consumed the seed and mutated, she realized this seed was far more complex than anyone knew.