The Little Demonic Cultivator in the Courtyard: Borrowing 100,000 Japanese Pirates to Heal

As Jia Zhangshi stepped out the door, she almost tripped over the threshold. She swayed for a moment but regained her balance. She turned around and bowed to Xu Jiande, not with the usual perfunctory nod, but with a genuine bow.

Bai Ling stood at the kitchen door, watching Jia Zhangshi carrying the bag of coarse grains and walking quickly back to her own house.

The moment the door closed, she heard Jia Zhangshi say from inside, "Dongxu, there's food! There's food!" Her voice was trembling with tears, but she was definitely happy.

Bai Ling turned to look at Xu Jiande. Xu Jiande had already covered the rice jar and was squatting by the stove tidying up the firewood. His face was expressionless, exactly the same as before he gave Jia Zhangshi two catties of coarse grain.

She remembered Sister Zhou asking her if she knew who the attacker was.

Of course she knew. The attacker was the man squatting by the stove, gathering firewood.

He killed Japanese soldiers without leaving any survivors and showed no mercy to traitors, but he would also give a starving child two pounds of coarse grains.

Putting these two behaviors together, the organization's analysis report would probably describe them as "a civilian armed individual with simple patriotic enthusiasm," but Bai Ling felt that these four words were far from enough to summarize Xu Jiande.

She didn't know how to summarize it, nor did she intend to try. Some things don't need summarizing; just remember them.

Unbeknownst to her, Bai Ling had come to value Xu Jiande more than principles.

……

Almost the entire city was affected by the food shortage, whether it was ordinary households, merchants and workers, or wealthy families.

Even Lou Bancheng was the same.

That day, Lou Bancheng was summoned to Sasaki Maki's headquarters to attend the weekly meeting of the Business Cooperation Association.

At the meeting, Sasaki Maki announced a new policy: starting immediately, all factory workers will be subject to a rationing system, with each person receiving a daily wage based on working hours. Those who are late or leave early will have their wages deducted, those who are absent without leave will have their wages suspended, and those who disobey management will be treated as resistance fighters.

The essence of this policy is to turn workers into slaves. You only get to eat if you work, otherwise you starve to death, and if you resist, you are shot.

After finishing speaking, Sasaki looked around at the members of the chamber of commerce present and asked if anyone had any objections.

No one objected. Everyone nodded; some said the Imperial Army was wise, others said it should have been done long ago, and some even stood up and bowed.

Lou Bancheng nodded as well. He sat at the long table near Sassa Maki, a perfectly measured smile on his face, nodding with just the right amount of pressure.

But his hands, resting on his knees, were trembling with anger.

He recalled the days when he started his factory from scratch, the smiles on the faces of the workers when the steel rolling mill first opened, and the last time he went to the workshop before the city fell, when an old worker held his hand and said, "Boss Lou, don't worry, our factory will definitely pull through."

The workers are now locked in the same workshop, working only one hour a day and receiving only two steamed buns. If they are slow, the Japanese soldiers will hit them with their rifle butts.

He returned home in the evening and did not eat dinner.

A man sat in his study late into the night, a cup of tea that had gone cold in front of him. Occasionally, the sound of patrol boots could be heard outside the window, clattering as they walked from one end of the alley to the other and back.

As he listened to the footsteps, several questions swirled in his mind: What can I do? What should I do? Is it even worth it for me to do these things?

Finally, Lou Bancheng decided to contact Xu Jiande to see if they could work together to take down Sassa Maki.

This is essentially a form of mutual threat: if you don't give the people of Beijing a way to survive, then I'll kill you too.

At this moment, Lou Bancheng and the others were unaware that the sneak attack that had caused such a commotion and killed so many people was the work of Xu Jiande alone.

……

Meanwhile, Xu Jiande, after refining his Qi to the third level, could clearly feel the changes in his dantian.

It's not a radical transformation, but a more subtle and solid change, like reassembling a bunch of scattered parts into a perfectly fitting machine, where every gear meshes in its most suitable position.

Moreover, as the number of Japanese soldiers killed recently has increased, the cyclone has grown a whole size larger than before.

The vortex used to be only the size of a fist, but now it has expanded to the size of a palm. Its rotation speed is more stable and powerful, and each rotation can drive the magical energy throughout the body to flow synchronously.

At the center of the cyclone was still that dark red core, like a red-hot iron bead embedded in the very center of the vortex, with layers of demonic energy swirling around it.

The closer to the core, the faster the rotation speed, and the airflow it generates forms a miniature vortex in the dantian.

Xu Jiande tried to sink his consciousness into his dantian and use internal vision to observe the details of the cyclone. There was a very thin layer of dark red halo on the core surface, which was slowly flashing and changing, like the rhythm of a heartbeat.

What surprised him most was the change in resentment.

The large amount of resentment absorbed on the day of the execution at Caishikou had been precipitated in the bottom of my dantian in the form of black crystals, like a layer of cold scale. Each time the demonic energy passed by, a layer of it would be scraped off.

But now, the black crystal is beginning to melt under the repeated erosion of demonic energy.

This is not a sudden melting, but a gradual dissolution, starting from the edges.

The melted resentment is no longer a solid black particle, but a translucent gray mist.

The gray mist was very light, floating slowly in the dantian. When it came into contact with the demonic energy, it did not produce violent friction as before, but instead slowly and evenly penetrated in.

After the two energies mixed, an extremely thin membrane formed on the inner wall of the dantian.

This membrane is semi-transparent and spreads along the inner wall of the dantian, like a protective shield for the dantian.

Xu Jiande himself estimated that this might be related to the fact that he had killed a lot of Japanese soldiers recently.

In short, the resentment was effectively dispelled.

That evening, Xu Jiande tested the strength of the membrane.

He used his consciousness to guide a surge of demonic energy to accelerate its impact on the inner wall of his dantian. When the demonic energy struck the inner wall, its force was evenly dispersed by the membrane, without producing any vibration.

In the past, when he did the same test, the accelerated impact would cause his entire dantian to tremble slightly, and his meridians would feel sore and distended.

Now all those side effects are gone. This membrane isn't inanimate; it's alive.

It rises and falls slightly with the flow of demonic energy, like breathing. When the demonic energy is strong, the membrane thickens, and when the demonic energy is weak, the membrane thins, always maintaining a synchronized rhythm with the demonic energy.

He also noticed a change.

Ever since the resentment began to melt into gray mist, the life force absorbed after each kill can automatically circulate three times in the meridians before flowing into the dantian, whereas before it could only circulate less than two times.

It wasn't something he deliberately guided; it was something his body did on its own.

Life force surges into the palm from the wounds inflicted by the enemy, travels along the meridians towards the dantian, and automatically splits into two streams halfway there. One stream continues to travel towards the dantian, while the other loops through the meridians before returning to the main path.

Two streams of vitality flowed into the dantian one after the other, more evenly and steadily than a single stream.

The cyclone's efficiency in absorbing life has increased by at least 50% compared to before.

Simply put, one's own abilities improve faster.