American variety show world begins with subduing Jason

"You little rascal, I'll call the factory and tell them to start production. I'll take you to pick it up in two days."

After seeing Bai Ziyuan off, the young man secretly made plans in his heart.

If you're going out to invite trouble from demons and monsters, you'll need to make quite a few preparations.

Once he has the information, he can try to follow the clues. For safety reasons, he does not plan to go alone, but rather to go in a team!

This can be done directly through the Hualian channel. They have a certain cooperation with the Federation and have a dedicated organization under them, similar to an adventure guild in a game. They occasionally post commissions for extraordinary individuals in the public to accept. These commissions can be completed solo or in a team.

A significant portion of these missions are outsourced by the government, primarily to assist officials in apprehending criminals with superpowers and eliminating dark and evil entities.

The reason for doing this is twofold. First, government personnel are very valuable; they are legitimate federal employees, and if something happens, there are reports to be filed, compensation to be paid, and the aftermath to be handled, which is a lot of trouble. Considering the costs, it's better to leave the dangerous work to those who want to be bounty hunters.

Furthermore, Zhu Mingyao's tendency to speculate in a darker direction may also be intended to allow the factors of instability among the people to be worn down.

With Bai Ziyuan acting as a go-between, he could easily find a few reliable helpers to fight monsters together without worrying about being attacked by the monsters.

However, he also needed to have his own means of obtaining information and could not rely solely on others. Zhu Mingyao decided to install a computer and a mobile phone as soon as possible. Although the bulky PCs of this era were expensive and difficult to use, and the internet was not very developed, they were still much faster than traditional media in terms of information access.

Then, the beat-up pickup truck parked in the back alley also needs some cleaning. The Federation is vast, and even on the outskirts of cities, there are many places that public transportation can't reach. Sometimes you still need a means of transportation. You can't just put two speed traps on your clothes and walk around in the dark.

In that case, it might not be long before urban legends about ghosts running wildly through the streets at midnight begin to circulate.

Besides, this would also make it easier to carry some tools, Zhu Mingyao thought.

"If only there were a spatial artifact that could store things, I could just leave and go. Unfortunately, such things are too rare and can only be encountered by chance."

Finally, we need to enrich our methods of dealing with enemies. A qualified magician does not perform without preparation, and a qualified practitioner does not fight without preparation.

……

"It's no fun for you to stay cooped up and cultivate every day. You should go out and have some fun once in a while. It's not like hundreds of years ago. Even the seniors nowadays sometimes have to go out and socialize."

Bai Ziyuan lightly placed her hands on the leather steering wheel and spoke to Zhu Mingyao in the passenger seat.

"I've recently reached a minor juncture in my cultivation, and I'd like to reforge the squad of Yin soldiers left behind by the old man. I'll come visit you after I'm done with these next few days."

The boy mumbled a reply, glancing out the window at the line of large trucks carrying livestock, smelling the pungent odor carried by the wind. He touched his nose and rolled up the window.

With so many people transporting goods, your factory's business must be doing much better.

Bai Ziyuan smiled smugly and said, "Now those foreigners have become as discerning as we are. They know that the livestock in the slaughterhouses run by our Chamber of Commerce are all castrated and the blood is drained cleanly, so they don't taste fishy or foul at all. They all love to order from here."

"So other factories run by white people are now starting to learn from us, improving their machines and draining the blood before slaughtering, otherwise the meat won't sell well."

As they were talking, the car turned off the highway, drove along a cement path for a while, and stopped at the side gate of a slaughterhouse.

Zhu Mingyao came here today to retrieve a newly prepared spiritual material—Yin Shen Jiang (Yin Spirit Elixir).

As for how a slaughterhouse could produce spiritual materials used by cultivators, that's a long story.

For practitioners, although modern society is not as spiritually abundant as ancient times, it has its own advantages. The material abundance brought about by the development of productivity is far beyond what their ancient counterparts could imagine.

In ancient times, if a sword cultivator wanted to forge a flying sword, without the support of his master or elders in providing some rare and precious materials, he would have to work hard to collect tens of thousands of kilograms of metals and slowly refine them to their essence.

Nowadays, as long as you're willing to spend the money, a single phone call can connect you to a smelter, start an industrial production line, and deliver high-purity metal ingots of various colors to your door immediately, in any quantity you need.

Similarly, those who refine external elixirs no longer need to worry about the materials from all over the world on the list. In this global village era, not only can you get deer antlers from Liaodong and Ganoderma lucidum from Yunnan and Guizhou, but you can also get American ginseng from North America and antelope horns from Africa by air.

For all kinds of external materials needed for cultivation, as long as they don't reach the level of spiritual objects, the supply of ordinary materials will definitely exceed the demand.

Moreover, the progress in productivity has also challenged some of the deeply ingrained concepts held by practitioners.

The spiritual material called Yin Shen Jiang that Zhu Mingyao came to collect today is one example.

The so-called Yin Shen Jiang is a spiritual liquid made from fragments of human and animal souls, and it is extremely effective in refining guardian spirits and the like.

Anyone who dares to make this thing would be a quintessential evil spirit in ancient times, someone everyone would have the right to kill!

I'm writing slower and slower; my drafts are in danger!

Chapter 48 What era are we living in that we're still playing with traditional cultivation methods? (Part 2)

But nowadays, this is a perfectly normal material, and it's in high demand; you can't order it at all unless you know the person.

All this changed a century ago, when China was beset by internal and external troubles. A senior Taoist master, traveling through Europe in search of a way to save the nation, happened to witness an industrialized slaughterhouse assembly line there. His eyes were opened, and he suddenly had a brilliant idea:

Would it be feasible to set up a ritual here to collect the scattered souls of livestock and use them to perform the ritual in place of human souls?

In principle, humans are the most intelligent of all beings, and their soul, body, and spirit hold a unique place in mysticism that is incomparable to that of ordinary animals.

However, if there are enough people to make up for it, it is not impossible for it to serve as a lower-level substitute for humans in certain ritual occasions, the most typical example being sacrificial rites.

When civilizations were still in their ancient stages, who hadn't practiced human sacrifice? It's just that as society gradually developed and progressed, people gradually eliminated this bloody and barbaric method, burying this dark history.

Instead of human sacrifices, large animals such as oxen, white horses, and other livestock were used.

Although it cannot match the spirituality of a living person, it is still a barely acceptable alternative in terms of human ethics and economic costs.

But you have to understand that in the classical era, even among the nomadic dynasties that were most fond of such large-scale blood sacrifices, at most a few thousand cattle and sheep were slaughtered to offer as sacrifices to the heavens. It wasn't that they didn't want to do more, but that was already the limit of productivity at that time. If they had to kill hundreds of thousands of people every now and then, how could they live?

However, the ancient cultivators of that time could not have foreseen that their descendants would one day be able to fight such a rich war.

Today, a modern medium-sized slaughterhouse can slaughter thousands of animals a day, while large ones can slaughter millions a year! This is equivalent to the power of an entire nation in classical times.

Although, apart from powerful demonic beasts, ordinary animals only leave scattered fragments of their souls and spiritual essence after they die, it takes hundreds or thousands of large livestock to equal the soul of a single living person.

No problem, if the quality isn't good enough, quantity will make up for it! Many grains of sand make a tower, and many small contributions make a robe!

Not only scattered souls, but also scraps such as blood, bones, and hair coming off the production line can be recycled. Many unorthodox methods use such materials. In the past, it was hard to collect them, but now tons of them are hauled out every day. If you help them process these materials, they will thank you for saving the factory a lot of costs!

The fees charged by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for handling biowaste are not cheap!

In particular, the various fresh offal, apart from Asians, is not something most federals are used to eating. In the past, it was mostly used as fertilizer, but now it has found a new purpose.

All the cultivation schools that need blood food to feed their rampaging soldiers, spirits, beast tamers, and Gu worms have really struck gold! They can't possibly finish it all! There's simply too much blood food to consume!

One serving is enough, whether you use it or pour it out!

According to Bai Ziyuan, a senior member of Hualian who was skilled in this art once went to great lengths to acquire a giant American crocodile that showed signs of demonic transformation. He kept it in a secret underground cave in the slaughterhouse, hoping to use a large amount of blood food and secret methods to see if he could induce it to transform into a pig dragon.

To save trouble, this senior simply connected a pipe and let the factory's machines directly pour the daily sewage and blood down into it. He figured that since the secret cave was reinforced by magic, the crocodiles couldn't escape, so he went to do other things.

But he's old, and probably has no idea how much waste a modern slaughterhouse can produce in a day.

Several months later, he excitedly came to check, only to find that it was impossible to harvest a pig dragon. Instead, he found a super fat hippopotamus covered in fleshy scales that could barely move.

The crocodile stared with its two bulging, dazed eyes, completely bloated and floating in the filthy blood of the secret cave. It was so fat it looked like a ball!

The senior was heartbroken and lamented that he had added a bunch of rare materials, including dragon blood, only to produce such a thing! This matter became a laughing stock for a time.

This Yin Spirit Elixir is made by secretly collecting the spiritual essence of livestock scattered from slaughterhouses. It is very useful for refining Yin soldiers and ghosts, and has many advantages.

Practitioners who are skilled in this kind of magic sometimes find themselves in a moral dilemma when faced with questions from some old-fashioned fellow practitioners—where did the guardian spirits in your hands come from?

Was it a subdued evil spirit or a pitiful person who suffered a violent death?

Bring it here so I can check it!

Now that's great, I use scattered animal spirits to refine it. I'm not afraid of moral guardians or even small animal rights activists coming to my door—I use legal livestock from slaughterhouses, not some people's cats and dogs!

More importantly, livestock have low intelligence and a muddled sense of self. The Yin Spirit Elixir made from them is far less likely to cause a backlash of resentment than the original version made from human souls. It's practically a five-star product.

Since modern times, gunpowder weapons have become prevalent, and the method of controlling spirits to a certain extent to be immune to bullets has become a popular practice. Therefore, the Yin Shen Jiang, a spiritual material that is just right and has excellent effects, was widely sought after as soon as it appeared on the market.

The problem is that this stuff is hard to preserve, so it has to be made on the spot. Otherwise, if it were sold to the public, it would be enough to become Hualian's flagship product. Those male and female witches who raise spirits, onmyoji who raise shikigami, sorcerers who raise little ghosts, etc., would definitely fight tooth and nail to buy it.

However, this has also sparked some new debates: are certain magical artifacts such as the Soul-Binding Rope, Bone Nail, and Filthy Blood Sand still considered heretical or evil? Should they continue to be banned? After all, these can be replaced by using large quantities of livestock as materials.

After lengthy discussions, several leading figures in the domestic spiritual practice community made a decision: in principle, they agreed to its use, but with strict management and control, including factory registration and real-name registration for purchasers. If it is discovered that you have no purchase record but are using this thing, you will have to give a detailed account.

Although Hualian is located overseas, its members are all related to the mainland, so they are closely connected. They always maintain a very upright stance, so they manage such things quite strictly. Not only is the production process confidential, but it is also generally handled internally and rarely leaked out.

Zhu Mingyao sat in the reception room of the slaughterhouse, drinking coffee. After a while, Bai Ziyuan returned from outside, carefully carrying a brocade box about a foot long, and gently placed it on the coffee table.

Upon opening the box, two large-bellied, narrow-mouthed urns were placed side by side inside. The mouths of the urns were sealed with lids carved from fine black jade. The dark blue-green bodies of the urns were covered with densely packed, fly-head-sized, ghost-face-shaped runes. The gaps in the box were carefully stuffed with cotton.

"Be careful and use it as soon as possible. This thing dissipates energy very quickly. Without the jar to suppress it, it will turn into a cold wind in a few minutes."

"Also, it's best not to let others know that you have this. Every year we take out a small batch to exchange for supplies. In the underground black market related to spellcasters, this thing has been speculated to be more expensive than gold. If it weren't for the fact that the ritual of making it must be presided over by several experts who are proficient in the relevant esoteric arts, other forces would have tried to replicate it long ago."

"Then, take good care of the jar. You must return it after you're done using it. Only Lü Longtou can refine this jar. The process is very complicated. Yin Shen Niange can only be contained in this jar. If you break it, he will definitely be angry," Bai Ziyuan solemnly instructed.

Zhu Mingyao nodded to indicate that he understood. The Lü Longtou he mentioned was another director and elder of Hualian, Lü Hetong, who was the head of both the Lushan and Meishan sects. He was the one who was now taking care of the several fierce ghost generals that Zhang Shouzhong had given to Hualian.

"I've also had someone buy the picture album you requested. They're all high-definition, and even the smallest details are clearly visible. But are you sure you want to do this? Your master will definitely scold you." Bai Ziyuan had a look of anticipation on his face.

"It's alright. Just like you said, we new generation cultivators should have open minds and broad hearts. I've wanted to do this for a long time, and I'm mentally prepared!"

Zhu Mingyao said calmly. At this moment, the resolute expression on his face was like that of Jing Ke, who was about to go to Xianyang. The wind was howling and the Yi River was cold!

Thanks to all the brothers who voted for me! My writing is slow and poor, I really don't deserve it -_-||

Chapter 49 Yin Soldiers Warm and Cozy

Back home, Zhu Mingyao didn't leave the house for several days in a row.

He was engrossed in a set of brightly colored and beautifully printed picture books, studying them so intently that he forgot to eat and sleep. He wouldn't let go of them, even while eating or sleeping, and would occasionally stroke the figures in the books with a mysterious smile on his face.

If this perverted look of his were seen walking down the street in my past life, young ladies would definitely spit inwardly and then quickly cover their skirts and walk away.

As the boy delved deeper into the subject, he would occasionally appear to have gained some insight, running down to the basement to sit at a table, his hands deftly moving up and down as he performed some intricate work.

……

"Today is an auspicious day for harmony between yin and yang, let's get things done tonight," Zhu Mingyao muttered to himself as he flipped through the almanac.

He took a thorough bath and changed his clothes, donning a loose-fitting cloth outfit. His young face, still damp with a few water droplets, flushed with excitement.

He slowly walked into the basement, placed the fruits of his labor over the past few days on the incense table in front of the altar, glanced at them, and smiled with satisfaction. He then turned around, picked up the picture book, and carefully compared them again.

The light illuminated the colorful picture book in his hands, and the words "A Detailed Explanation of the History of World Armor" were prominently displayed on the cover.

Zhu Mingyao closed the picture album and looked at the rows of brand-new paper figures of various shapes on the incense table.

The paper figures are exquisitely crafted, with not only individual parts made, but also colored with gold powder, silver paint, and various dyes.

There were Milanese knights wearing Gothic plate armor and wielding greatswords.

An English longbowman wearing leather armor and carrying a bow and arrows.

The Japanese warriors of this era are fully equipped with katana.

There were also Mamluks wearing chainmail and carrying scimitars at their waists.