Chapter 627 - First Time Seeing The Ocean
Lin Mu, Jing Luo, and Little Shrubby had now been traveling for about two days now. Since they had to travel at a bit more relaxed pace than before, they only covered about a thousand kilometers in a day.
Plus, Jing Luo needed to rest to recover his meridians as well. This showed to Lin Mu how much of a difference having a complete Body Tempering cultivation made, along with him having the Xiantian.
Though there was still the question of Little Shrubby, who was the one who could run at that speed for a long period of time. Little Shrubby said that he could still run at that speed and did not feel tired at all, so they were yet to find the limits of little Shrubby.
As for the pace at which they were traveling at currently, they could do so without stopping for weeks upon weeks had it not been for Jing Luo. Though there was also the fact that every time they came across a village, they would pause their journey and gather some information.
This was the additional reason why they were even slower. If it were not for them halting, perhaps they would have covered twice the distance they had by now. The villages that they came across were mostly small and relatively isolated communities.
In total, they had seen seven villages in the past two days and only two out of these seven villages even had a cultivator in them. The rest of them were just filled with commoners and warriors in the body tempering realm.
And just as Lin Mu and Jing Luo had thought, they were looked at with suspicion when they entered the villages. It took them quite a bit of effort before even getting some interaction with the villagers.
Jing Luo, who had been deprived of normal human interaction for over fifty years now, was still quite enthusiastic and tried to talk as genially to the villagers as he could.
Alas! When Lin Mu showed them a bit of gold, the villagers turned into chatter birds, showing that Jing Luo's efforts were a bit inefficient.
Still, even when the villagers did start to speak, Lin Mu and Jing Luo didn't really get any information that they could consider to be useful. They mostly talked about their daily lives, about who's kid got married, whose cow gave birth, whose wife beat up their husband, and stuff like that.
Lin Mu could simply rub his forehead in helplessness while Jing Luo fully enjoyed it all, laughing with the villagers. Lin Mu even wondered if the villagers were hiding something and spied on them using phase, but it turned out that they were speaking the truth.
Lin Mu then wondered if these villagers were too isolated or something. Only when he reached the final two villages where there were cultivators did they get some actual useful information.
Lin Mu and Jing Luo learned that the Fenlong kingdom was currently in a complex situation. Their royal family was undergoing an internal conflict, and the aristocrats were also vying to pull some power under them.
The prices of commodities had risen up and the merchants were fully taking advantage of it all. While they did not find out the reason behind this, Lin Mu reckoned they should get the information quite soon.
The Fenlong kingdom was the third smallest kingdom in the entire Great Zhou continent and was comparable to the Wu Lim County in size. It only had two major cities, with one of them being the capital and the second one being the Port City Jiao Long.
The Fenlong Kingdom was located on the eastern coastline of the continent and thus had access to the ocean. This was Lin Mu's first time seeing an ocean as he hadn't even seen a sea before this in his life, thus he was amazed.
The Port City of Jiao Long was the first major city that they came to and thus the two men, along with Little Shrubby, came to a stop in front of a cliff that faced the city on one side and the ocean on the other.
"This… I've never seen so much water before…" Lin Mu said with awe in his voice.
The glistening, blue expanse of water looked mesmerizing to him. There was a strange calmness he felt upon seeing it that he could not explain.
"Ahahah! You'll get used to it. Water is water, once you see one sea you would have seen them all!" Jing Luo said with a laugh.
"If you say so…" Lin Mu replied, not knowing if the man was being serious or not and his choice of alliteration.
"Mmmhmm, I don't like it." Little Shrubby said upon taking a long stare.
"You don't?" Lin Mu asked, while looking at the beast.
"Seems too wet," Little Shrubby replied.
"Ah… I guess that's okay?" Lin Mu said, thinking that little shrubby was still a cat in the end.
"It's my first time here and I've heard that this place is small, but yeah it really is." Jing Luo said while gazing at the Jiao Long port.
Lin Mu turned around and took a look at the city as well. Calling it a city was a bit of an overstatement as the entire Jiao Long Port was the same size as that of the Northern town.
"It really is small, though they do have a lot of boats and ships to compensate for that I guess." Lin Mu said while gazing at the large blanket of floating vessels.
There were easily over a thousand boats and ships on the port and in the water surrounding it. The ones that were near the port were densely packed and dangerously treaded.
If there was any mistake made, they would quite likely collide with other vessels that were passing by. It was evident that the sailors and fishermen were quite skilled at controlling their ships and boats.
"Indeed. Jiao Long Port is said to be one of the cities with the best shipwrights and sailors in the entire Great Zhou Continent."