Astral Pet Store

Their mother answered the call right away. Su Lingyue made up a quick excuse to ask her to go to the pet shop.

A moment after, Li Qingru showed up at the shop on hurried steps and threw Su Ping a worried glance, only to see her son sitting there just fine.

“Lingyin? Didn’t you say that your brother got injured? Something hit his head??”

“Oh, well… He just came to.” Su Lingyue didn’t look embarrassed at all.

Su Ping rolled his eyes after finding out about his sister’s terrible lie.

Since his family was finally there with him, he was less concerned about whether the unknown enemies would bother him or his family first. He assumed that the evildoer would soon find out everything about a poor family if they wanted, including his name and where he worked. They probably had no reason to go after his family first.

“What’s going on here?” Li Qingru looked at her children and demanded.

Su Ping also tried thinking of an excuse since he couldn’t tell his mother about the danger he was in.

“Eh, mom? I’m planning to expand the shop a little. It’s… well, important, so I hope you can come and maybe give me some advice.” “Expand the shop?”

Su Lingyue grew impatient and moved somewhere her mother couldn’t see, before she told Su Ping to prepare their escape plan as fast as possible using eye contact. In her view, they had to make their getaway fast, rather wasting time talking about this small shop.

Overhauling the shop sounded costly. Though she then believed that her brother had enough money for it after seeing him spending merit points like crazy.

However, this wasn’t the time for that.

All of her moves were met with Su Ping’s complete nonchalance.

But weren’t you driving like a drunk just now?? She madly protested without any sound. What’s next??

Unfortunately, she had no idea that Su Ping’s “safe house” was right there, at the shop.

To Su Ping, this place was the safest in the whole world right at the moment. There was no point in wandering outside.

But… they couldn’t live there together because it wouldn’t be comfortable for three people to live in such a small space. Not to mention that there were a lot of things he didn’t want to show his family, such as why he would often vanish into cultivation planes and pop back up again.

To expand the shop was not entirely a lie-he needed it to accommodate his mother and sister.

Money wasn’t an issue at all since he had enough funds to buy this entire street for his own use. More so, doing this meant putting the whole place under the system’s administration, by which time he could simply prepare another house for his family to live in, while the system would take care of any trespassers with bad intentions.

“But how would you—” Unlike Su Pingyue, Li Qingru didn’t think Su Ping had earned enough income for such a big plan. “I can take care of the money problems, mom.” Su Ping feigned a proud look. “You only need to sit here and um, help me keep an eye on things.”

Li Qingru didn’t protest. She was ready to stop Su Ping from making any silly adjustments to the building. Su Lingyue was so anxious about the situation that she finally spoke out, “Are you sure it’s time for this stuff??”.

“I know what I’m doing.”

Su Lingyue saw her brother’s serious look and chose to trust him for now. “You… mean to revamp the shop, like, right now?”

“That is correct.”

“But how?”

“I’ll find help.”

“Who can help us?”

“Professionals, of course.”

As he explained, Su Ping opened the main settler website on his computer, found the “lodging” tab, and began checking several business holders meant to help settlers with rents and housing affairs. Most of the time, those who did business with settlers were pretty reliable.

Li Qingru couldn’t see what her son was doing from her position. “Hold on, dear, we need to carefully plan ahead. You can’t just look for companies you don’t know well on the Internet. I can help you ask around, you know.”

“There’s no need, mom. Just leave it to me. Time to let your son handle something important for once, don’t you think?”

Li Qingru sat back.

Su Lingyue moved closer to the computer and checked the page with a surprised look. “Wait… I never knew they had these!”

This couldn’t be helped since she had just become an intern settler. There was a lot about the settler base she had yet to learn.

With quick moves, Su Ping made several orders with a few brokers who would help him negotiate with the neighborhood, whereas he would only need to pay the money.

Even though some of the neighboring shops were probably not planning to sell their spots, they would sooner or later give in to real estate agencies who could force them to.

After all, money worked wonders.

Of course, he didn’t actually plan to do any dirty business. He told the brokers to try offering thrice the original plot prices to buy them. As far as he could see, no one would reject such a grand offer. And even if someone did, he could just exclude those parts from his expansion plan.

Should anyone wish to exploit his generosity by asking more than what they were promised, some “dirty business” wouldn’t hurt then.

That was about everything he needed to do. From here on, he only had to sit there and wait for his hired hands to deliver several new house deeds to him.

To get the shop to level 3, a bigger business area was one of the requirements. He also needed to finish a special training order which was due in a month. It was time to get to it.

Luckily, he was free to forbid people from entering the pet room. As long as he teleported to cultivation planes from there, he could avoid revealing his secret to his family.

With this in mind, he stood up and spoke with a serious look, “I need a few hours to tend to the pets. You two stay here and don’t leave the shop no matter what happens.”

Li Qingru frowned. “What do you mean? What’s going to happen?” Su Lingyue also looked doubtful, for she wasn’t sure why her brother could find time to train pets at such a time. Still, she knew she could trust Su Ping.

“I-no problem. Let’s take it easy for now, mom.”

Su Ping added, “Don’t answer any calls for any reason. People might come and claim that they want to do some business with you or such. Do not listen to them. Stay inside.”

Su Lingyue nodded again. She wondered if any of the guys Su Ping had just hired would show up, though she had no problem obeying Su Ping’s orders, after witnessing many of his amazing feats.

Seeing his sister had been persuaded, Su Ping closed the shutter of the shop, entered the pet room, and closed the door.

So far so good…

It never crossed his mind that he would bring back enemies by visiting the Mysterious Realm. Now he felt ever more eager to get stronger.

Thankfully, all the treasures and merit points he had gained this time should be enough to help him to reach the titled battle pet warrior rank. He just needed time.

Meanwhile, he also had to help Little Skeleton absorb the Skeleton King Bloodline as fast as he could since it was his best “bodyguard.” Though there was much to be done. Not to mention that he didn’t know much about this ancient bloodline in the first place.

This had left him with three important jobs: enlarging the shop which was also their “safe ground,” finding materials to level up Solar Bulwark, and training Little Skeleton. Fortunately, he could take Little Skeleton along when doing the special training order, which meant doing two things at once. He had previously planned to visit mid to low-level cultivation planes to do the special training order. This might take him a lot of time and effort, but it would also save him energy points.

However, time was of essence right then.

He opened up the system menu and began looking at high-level cultivation planes. Each of those would cost hundreds or even thousands of energy points to enter.

The name “Demigod Burial” caught his attention. The ticket price was 1,200 energy points, which was pretty cheap among all the high-level cultivation planes.

Let me see here… A piece of forsaken land separated from the Archean Divinity, when a powerful god broke it away from its main continent. After that, it has always been drifting in the void… Wait, so this originally was part of the Archean Divinity?

The “Archean Divinity” cultivation plane required 9,000 points to enter, while each death would further cost him 900 points. He couldn’t afford that yet.

This smaller place was acceptable though.