"Could you check how many Battle Merits I have left?" Yang Kai asked.
"One moment, Senior Brother," the woman replied.
All records in the War Preparations Hall were shared with the Contributions Hall. The Contributions Hall tracked every human warrior's acquisition and expenditure of Battle Merits in painstaking detail — after all, on the Ink Battlefield, every shred of Battle Merits a human warrior earned came at tremendous cost, and not the slightest margin of error was acceptable.
After a brief pause, the woman read out a figure.
Yang Kai was stunned. "That can't be right. How is it so little?"
The woman was even more surprised. "You think that's a little?"
By her standards, the amount Yang Kai possessed was already extremely wealthy — many people didn't even have a fraction of it.
But Yang Kai knew full well how many accomplishments he had racked up in recent days. Since he had last requested permission to head out toward Base No. 4, he and his Dawn Squad teammates had slain a considerable number of Ink Clan warriors, rescued Bai Yi, and together with Bai Yi, killed Zhufeng. Then, in the final battle, he and Bai Yi had assisted Zha Hu in slaying another Domain Lord.
After seizing the resource-rich production zones of Base No. 4, he had handed over the Void Yin-Yang Mirror, allowing Brightfall Pass to relocate the production zones' World Domains back. He had also opened the gateways to eleven Secret Realms. All of these counted as achievements.
Setting everything else aside, the Battle Merits earned simply from joining Bai Yi to kill a single Ink Clan Domain Lord would have been enormous.
By his own rough estimate, what he currently possessed should have been far more than this — at least three times as much.
"Would you like me to check your Battle Merit expenditures as well?" the woman asked.
"Is that convenient?" Yang Kai looked at her.
She smiled softly. "All the information from the Contributions Hall can be accessed here. There's no inconvenience at all." As she spoke, she began searching.
After a moment, the woman's brow furrowed with puzzlement. "Senior Brother, according to what I can see here, about a month ago there was a massive expenditure of Battle Merits — an exceptionally large amount. However, this particular record is classified as confidential. My clearance level isn't high enough to view the details, so I can't tell what exactly was redeemed. You should know yourself, Senior Brother."
Yang Kai blinked in confusion. A month ago? That should have been right around the time he had just refined the World Tree. When had he redeemed anything?
Then it suddenly dawned on him — the expended Battle Merits must have been for the World Tree. Zha Hu had mentioned earlier that the World Tree's sub-tree could be handed over to Yang Kai, and the Pass leadership likely wouldn't object, but Yang Kai would need to pay for it with his own Battle Merits.
The value of a single World Tree sub-tree was impossible to quantify — it was an existence that could only be described as a treasure of heaven and earth.
The Battle Merits Yang Kai had spent must have been deducted on the orders of the Legion Commanders. Though the amount was substantial, when measured against a World Tree sub-tree, it was practically a gift.
Having figured this out, Yang Kai felt a sense of relief.
Meanwhile, the woman behind the counter was studying him with undisguised curiosity in her pretty eyes, wondering what on earth he could have redeemed that was classified as confidential information — something that couldn't even be looked up here. That was something she had never encountered before.
"Would you like to redeem anything else, Senior Brother? The War Preparations Hall has received a lot of new items recently," the woman offered.
Yang Kai had originally come to redeem some cultivation pills to speed up his training, so this piqued his interest. With the Pass's soldiers busy mining those World Domains one after another, it would make sense if all manner of novel treasures were being unearthed.
"Let me take a look first," Yang Kai replied.
"All redeemable items are in here. Please take a look, Senior Brother." The woman handed over a jade slip.
Yang Kai took it and immersed his spiritual consciousness to examine its contents.
Just as he had seen during his last visit, the top item on the redeemable list was the Profound Mother Spirit Fruit. However, after it were now listed the characters for "temporarily unavailable," meaning there was no stock on hand.
The expedition to the secret realm left behind by the ancient alchemist had yielded a fair number of Profound Mother Spirit Fruits, but Brightfall Pass's demand for them was colossal. As soon as the fruits appeared in the War Preparations Hall, they were snapped up within a few hours.
For the human race, no amount of Profound Mother Spirit Fruits was ever enough. It would only lose its value when the day finally came that all those Open Heaven Realm cultivators who had once sacrificed their Small Universes had fully restored them.
Yang Kai read further down. The second item on the list caught him completely off guard, and he couldn't help but look up at the woman. "You have World Fruit here?"
The second line in the jade slip clearly read "World Fruit," with a note beside it: produced by World Tree sub-tree — mid-grade!
The third line was also World Fruit, annotated as: produced by World Tree sub-tree — low-grade.
Yang Kai knew perfectly well where the World Fruit came from — they were what he and Zha Hu had harvested together from the World Tree sub-tree. He simply hadn't expected them to be placed in the War Preparations Hall for redemption.
The woman nodded. "We do, but the mid-grade supply is running low. There are still quite a few of the low-grade ones, though."
Yang Kai was genuinely shocked. "There are still mid-grade ones left?"