📖 Chapter 1328 - A City like a Sect

16 May, 2024

Seeing how welcoming the people of the shop were, Wang Baole smiled widely. His heart swelled with emotion as he looked around the shop.

This was a shop that belonged to him.

“Right, what were you talking about earlier? Something to do with ingredients?” Wiping the leftover porridge from the corners of his mouth, Wang Baole looked at the four shop employees.

These four people didn’t dare to hide anything from Wang Baole. They quickly answered to the best of their ability.

When they called him an ingredient, they didn’t mean they were actually going to eat him. Cannibalism was rare even in Tongue’s Desire City. The reason they had become so avaricious upon seeing him was because they smelled the aura of joy on his body.

Although the Wang Baole here was a clone, he was still contaminated with the aura of his true body’s law of joy. For cultivators of Tongue’s Desire City, this aura was an incredible delicacy, and just a whiff could whet their appetite.

That was why they made the plan to capture Wang Baole. They wanted to refine him and extract the aura of joy from his body to satisfy their own desire.

At the same time, they could also choose to sell him for great profit. In fact, it wasn’t just joy; any one of the seven emotions was a peerless delicacy here in Tongue’s Desire City.

However, the four people in the shop never expected that what they thought was an excellent ingredient would turn out to be a monster. They had been crushed in an instant…

As they explained everything, they noticed that the nightmarish young man sitting there actually had a look of disappointment on his face. Their hearts trembled even more upon seeing this.

When he saw the expressions on their faces, Wang Baole shook his head regretfully.

“So that’s it. It’s different from what I was expecting. How disappointing…” As Wang Baole spoke, his gaze swept across each of the four people in turn, finally settling on the little fatty. This little fatty had a swollen and bloody face, but his flesh was white and tender.

Wang Baole’s gaze made the four people turn even paler, and their hearts pounded wildly as they involuntarily thought about what was so disappointing.

‘He’s disappointed that we don’t eat human flesh…’

‘That’s it! That’s definitely what he’s thinking right now!’

‘He’s a total lunatic!’

In particular, the little fatty looked like he was about to cry. He was almost scared to death by Wang Baole’s glance.

The four people trembled wildly as they looked at each other. Right now, there was no longer any difference in status between them. Waiter, manager, cook… none of it mattered, since all of them were now prisoners who couldn’t hide the terror on their faces.

Outside, it was getting late, and the festival was coming to a close. The originally bustling streets were now slowly growing quiet. With the darkening of the sky, many shops turned on their lights. Although these shops didn’t yet open for business, their lights made the city gradually turn bright.

However, inside Wang Baole’s shop, the falling of night just made the atmosphere more oppressive. Perhaps it was because they were frightened by Wang Baole’s gaze, but the four cultivators became even more obedient. Whenever he asked a question, they would immediately answer nervously without daring to hide anything.

Thanks to that, Wang Baole quickly learned a lot about Tongue’s Desire City. After all, these four people were much more familiar with the city than him. Even though Wang Baole was basically a stranger to Tongue’s Desire City, after listening to the four people talk, he had a much better understanding.

For instance, he learned that people with long-term residency permits for Tongue’s Desire City could come from any other city. There were even many people from Ancient Epoch City among those who had obtained residency permits.

Obtaining a residency permit wasn’t easy, and it required a cultivator to make contributions to Tongue’s Desire City. However, there were great benefits to doing so.

As long as a person lived inside the city limits, their cultivation base would continuously grow. Eating food from Tongue’s Desire City was extremely helpful for cultivation.

Moreover, when someone opened a shop within the city, the contract for the shop also doubled as a catalyst that allowed the cultivator to gain insight into the law of tongue’s desire.

This law was the foundation of Tongue’s Desire City, as well as the symbol of the city’s most orthodox lineage.

“As for how to gain insights, they have to start with selling various kinds of food. If their food is good, their reputation will increase, and more and more people will go eat at their shop. This will give great benefits to the shopkeeper and all their employees.

“Outsiders come to Tongue’s Desire City to increase their cultivation base by consuming various delicacies. But for cultivators of the law of tongue’s desire, the most important thing is to absorb the desire of others.” The female manager’s voice trembled as she spoke.

Wang Baole was thoughtful. After a moment, he asked some other questions.

For example, he asked about the hierarchy and structure of cultivators in Tongue’s Desire City.

Roughly speaking, Tongue’s Desire City could be regarded as one gigantic sect. There were countless disciples in this sect, but the vast majority were just outer disciples. Only those who owned their own shops could be considered inner disciples.

In Tongue’s Desire City, these inner disciples were known as stomach fillers.

The outer disciples beneath the stomach fillers were split into two categories. One category was the starving ghosts, and the other was the hungry poor.

Starving ghosts were the most numerous. The skinny cultivators who had gone crazy hunting for golden tentacles earlier were mostly starving ghosts, while hungry poor were slightly better off.

However, there was a limit to how well off they could be. To a certain extent, these two types of cultivators were nothing more than sources of cultivation for cultivators of the law of tongue’s desire.

Naturally, there were those above the stomach fillers as well. These people were called abundance eaters.

Abundance eaters often had their own ideas about the law of tongue’s desire, and after cultivating to a certain degree, they could no longer satisfy their needs with just a shop. Most of them would end up raising some slaves to provide them with a large amount of desire.

For example, those colorfully-dressed people in the procession were classified as abundance eaters.

There was another level above the abundance eaters, called mincemeat acolytes^[1]. These people were already in the upper echelon of Tongue’s Desire City, and not many could cultivate the law of tongue’s desire to this level.

Throughout all of Tongue’s Desire City, there were only a few dozen mincemeat acolytes. Because of their special cultivation method, they usually secluded themselves and seldom made appearances outside, so most people didn’t know much about them.

In fact, it was those ranked above them who were more well-known; the Gluttony Lords second only to the Desire Lord.

The eight fat mountains that Wang Baole had seen in the procession earlier were the eight Gluttony Lords of Tongue’s Desire City. Each and every one of them possessed the terrifying might of the fourth step.

In Tongue’s Desire City, there was only one person at the pinnacle. That was… the one who founded the city and occupied the sourcepoint of tongue’s desire. The Desire Lord, the monstrous lump of fat who had descended upon the altar.

“Structurally speaking, Tongue’s Desire City is much like a sect. However, there aren’t many sect rules to speak of.”

When he heard this, Wang Baole narrowed his eyes.