Strongest Mage with the Lust system

Chapter 977: It isn’t a secret if a Second Person Knows about it

Among the Gu Family’s three shops, the Spirit Fish shop brought the least income even when their businesses weren’t being suppressed by Liu and Song families.

The reason was simple: This was a world where everyone with some means pursued cultivation to become stronger as only by doing so they had a chance to live their lives freely.

Since this was the case, people tended to spend most of their money on cultivation resources. As for food and clothes, as long as they didn’t go hungry or their clothes weren’t completely unusable, they wouldn’t spend much on them.

While the name of their shop had ‘Spirit Fish’ in it, they rarely sold spirit fish as they were very few in number in the river and it was extremely difficult to catch them.

Thus, usually they only sold normal fish. Since people didn’t want to spend much on normal food, the shop obviously didn’t earn much profits.

The situation of the other two shops—currently managed by his step-mother, Gu Ruolan, and his mother, Zhao Ziyan—was different from it. Even now, they still earned some income which the family was using to get by.

This wasn’t because his mothers were very good at managing the shops, but because the shops sold cultivation related things—The shop Gu Ruolan managed sold Spirit Talismans and the one Zhao Ziyan oversaw was a Spirit Weapon Repairing shop.

[Gu’s Spirit Talisman Shop]

Max watched the shop from afar for a while and noticed that a customer or two would enter the shop every once in a while but compared to the nearby shops, which also sold Talismans, their number was pitifully low.

Still, he couldn’t help but become surprised.

Why?

Simply because the situation of this shop was the same as before he fell ill.

‘So why has the family’s financial condition worsened in the past few months?’ He wondered, then shook his head. Thinking about it wouldn’t give him any answer, so he decided to head into the shop and ask his step-mother.

Just when he reached the entrance, a customer came out, grumbling, “…If this continues, I’ll stop buying the raw material from here.”

Max raised his brows, ‘Raw material?’

While thinking this, he entered the shop and saw a beautiful woman in her thirties, standing behind the counter with a professional, polite smile on her face as she greeted him, “Welcome to Gu’s Spirit Talisman Shop, valued custom—”

Mid-greeting, her eyes widened and she stared at him in disbelief.

“Hello, Second Mother.” Max greeted her with a smile. This woman was Gu Ruolan, his step-mother, and they respectfully addressed her as ‘Second Mother’.

“Chen’er…?” Gu Ruolan tentatively asked, still not able to believe that Gu Chen was standing before her.

“Yes, Second Mother, it’s me. I have recovered.” Max said while walking over to her front.

Gu Ruolan reached out and touched his cheek. “It’s really you…” She mumbled, her disbelief slowly turning into genuine joy and curiosity.

“Yes,” Nodded Max before looking around the shop. Instead of seeing talismans on the shelves, he saw stacks of talisman paper, raw material to make talisman ink and other miscellaneous things necessary to create talismans lying around in heaps.

Seeing all this, he understood why this shop wasn’t earning much despite the number of customers being similar to six months prior and it made him sigh.

Gu Ruolan noticed this and immediately came out from behind the counter before grabbing his hand and dragging him over to chairs.

“No need to worry about it. Things are still manageable.” She said before changing the topic, “Tell me, when did you recover and how? I haven’t heard anything about any new doctor coming to treat you in the past few days.”

Max had already planned things in his mind, so the state of the shop didn’t bother him. So, he immediately became fully focused on his beautiful step-mother, who was sitting beside him while holding his hand in hers over her soft thigh, looking at him with bubbling joy and curiosity.

He took a moment to feel the softness of her thigh on the back of his palm before saying with a calm smile on his face, “No, Second Mother. No other doctor came. I recovered on my own…”

He told her the same story he told Gu Lan.

At first, she couldn’t believe him but then as she made sense of things, she repeatedly nodded, “Yes, yes, you unknowingly received a legacy when you ventured into the forest. And when you caught that strange illness and no one could tell what it was… it was because it wasn’t any illness but a side effect of you obtaining this legacy.”

Max couldn’t be happier to hear this as he no longer needed to convince her.

After a moment, Gu Ruolan looked at him with gleaming eyes, her whole body trembling in excitement, “Chen’er… you are truly lucky. Barely anyone, especially in these impoverished lands, has such a fortunate encounter. And what’s most absurd is that you didn’t need to fight for it or take any trial. Truly… your luck is simply heaven defying.”

Max chuckled lightly, “It seems so.” Then he looked into her eyes and seriously said, “Now you can stop worrying now, Second Mother. With my Cultivation Art, It’s only a matter of time before I reach Bone Refinement. Then everything will become manageable.”

“Shhhh.” Gu Ruolan was still reeling with amazement, so she couldn’t react before he finished speaking. When she came to her senses, she shushed him in a panic, then jumped to her feet, ran to the shop’s entrance, looked around and closed the doors shut.

“How can you be so careless? Don’t you know how dangerous it will be for you and the whole family if someone found out about it?” She scolded him in a hushed voice, then she thought of something and quickly asked, “Who else knows about it?”

“Just you and Lan’er.” Max answered while wearing an apologetic look on his face to calm her down.

“Good. Except for us in the main family, no one should know about it.” Gu Ruolan said, then added, “In fact, you shouldn’t have told Lan’er and me either. A secret is safe until a second person know it.”

Max’s expression fell, ‘Don’t tell me she isn’t going to ask about my ‘Miraculous Cultivation Art’ is?’