The animals that could be seen by Gray Robe and tried to be caught were all the best among their species or even the leaders of their groups. Their intelligence would not be too low.
Therefore, after the animals dealt with Gray Robe, they all squatted down with their front limbs and lowered their heads to the ground to express their gratitude to Jiang Yuqing.
Seeing these guys covered in scars, Jiang Yuqing was quite moved.
She simply did a good deed to the end and used Rejuvenation Technique to heal all their injuries at once.
The animals cried excitedly, circled Jiang Yuqing a few times, and let out a long howl towards the woods.
This was to announce to this piece of woods that they had regained new life.
Jiang Yuqing waved to them and said, "Go back, don't get caught again in the future!"
The animals understood her words. They knelt down again to express their gratitude to her, then left the cave without looking back.
After the animals left, Jiang Yuqing searched the entire cave and found the few jade tablets with beast control inheritance that Gray Robe had mentioned. She collected them into her Spiritual Realm.
In addition, she found some things that looked like Taoist stuff at the first glance, such as scriptures, magic tools, compasses, and so on.
Among them was a very ancient sheepskin scroll with a broken antiquity. Jiang Yuqing opened it and took a look. It was full of all kinds of weird texts and symbols that she couldn't understand at all, literally incomprehensible.
She found a box and packed everything up to take away. After returning to the capital city, she would go to Three Purities Temple to ask Huayang Zi for some benefits.
Anyway, she had also helped him clean up the door, so whether more or less, he had to give her some labor costs.
After searching for all the valuable things in the cave, Jiang Yuqing threw out a spell technique. The entire cave collapsed instantly, burying all the evil under the ground. Dust returns to dust, soil returns to soil.
After settling all this, Jiang Yuqing was about to leave when a Golden Monkey suddenly stopped her. Jiang Yuqing wondered, "Hey, little guy, why haven't you left yet?"
The Golden Monkey said, "Benefactor, you saved my life. I wonder if you can come to my tribe as a guest?"
Jiang Yuqing was taken aback for a moment before saying, "I can, but won't your people be afraid of us humans?"
The monkey anxiously said, "No, you are my benefactor, and the aura on you smells especially good. We can feel the kindness in you."
Jiang Yuqing nodded and said with a smile, "In that case, I accept your invitation."
The Golden Monkey was overjoyed and jumped onto a tree to lead the way for Jiang Yuqing. It said, "My tribe lives by the river valley two mountain tops away. Please follow me, benefactor!"
This was a remote deep mountain with rare human traces and primitive jungles. Naturally there was no road.
The Golden Monkey moved fast, and Jiang Yuqing followed it with great difficulty. Later, she simply summoned her flying sword, pulled the monkey to fly along the treetops, which made things much easier.
The monkey was overjoyed and said, "Turns out the benefactor is an immortal!"
Jiang Yuqing just smiled without refuting its words. She simply sped up her flying sword. Soon they arrived at the river valley it had referred to, and indeed heard the cries of the monkey troop.
Jiang Yuqing carried it down to the ground. The Golden Monkey climbed to the highest tree and shouted loudly around it for several times.
The valley was quiet for a while, then countless roars rose one after another, echoing each other, seeming to respond to the Golden Monkey’s words.
Then violent shakes of the treetops came from all directions, and the monkey troop was on the move.
Jiang Yuqing saw dense monkeys swarming up instantly and was completely stunned. The number of this monkey troop was a bit too huge.
With her limited knowledge in her previous life, a normal monkey troop seemed to have only dozens of monkeys at most, and it was very rare for more than 100 of them to appear.
While there were at least thousands here, which completely subverted her cognition.
But then she thought that even she could have a new life and cultivate immortality now, so it was not too surprising that the monkey troop was just relatively larger.
The Golden Monkey she had saved had an obviously larger physique than the other monkeys, and its fur was more gorgeous too. It was clearly the leader of this huge group.
Jiang Yuqing watched it yelling with the tribes for a while. She could probably guess the general meaning that it had been caught by the bad guys and was saved by the benefactor (her).
Then, all the monkeys looked towards Jiang Yuqing uniformly. Being stared at by so many monkey eyes, she felt a strange sense of pressure.
Somehow, when she had watched monkey performances on the streets of the capital before, watching monkeys was just watching monkeys.
But now in the monkey’s territory, she became the “monkey” in the monkeys' eyes, or some exotic goods.
Fortunately, it was a friendly monkey troop with a nice leader.
To thank the benefactor of their group, without waiting for the leader’s order, the monkeys brought Jiang Yuqing all kinds of fruits one after another to express their gratitude.
In a short while, a mountain of fruits was piled up in the open space.
Many of them were what Jiang Yuqing had never seen before.
She randomly picked a few, smiled at the monkeys and said, "There are too many fruits. I can't finish them. These few are enough. Take the rest back and eat them yourselves, otherwise they will rot and be wasted."
Animals are not good at human courtesies. Since Jiang Yuqing let them take them back, the monkeys really took them back.
The Golden Monkey took Jiang Yuqing to a big tree that needed a few people to hug, and pointed to the big hole in the middle of the trunk, indicating that there were good things inside and letting her go up.
Without any doubt, Jiang Yuqing flew up on her sword to take a look. To her surprise, she saw a “liquid” in the tree hole.
The liquid was clearly transparent to the bottom, but there was a very strong and pleasant wine fragrance.
Even Jiang Yuqing, who was not interested in wine herself, couldn't help sniffing it a few more times. Looking closely, there were also many fruits sunk at the bottom of the “liquid”.
Jiang Yuqing suddenly thought of a legendary thing called "monkey wine".
Legend has it that mountain monkeys collected all kinds of fruits in a hole for winter food storage. If there was no lack of food that winter, the monkeys would forget about the stored hundreds of fruits in a hole. Then the fruits would gradually ferment and become monkey wine.
It was a truly invaluable wild wine that was precious and hard to come by.
Jiang Yuqing dipped her finger in the wine and tasted it with her tongue. It turned out to be wine indeed, with a wonderful and indescribable flavor and aroma.
Jiang Yuqing asked the Golden Monkey, "This is a great thing. Are you sure you want to give it to me?"
The Golden Monkey said, "Our tribe is not interested in such rotten fruit water. But I’ve heard from the old monkeys that you humans like it. Some humans even came to our place specifically looking for this kind of fruit water before. Benefactor, please take them all if you like it!"
Since the Golden Monkey said so, Jiang Yuqing would certainly not stand on ceremony.
After thanking the Golden Monkey, she took out a bunch of empty wine jars from her Spiritual Realm, and spent a full hour and a half taking all the monkey wine in the tree hole without leaving a single drop.
There was nearly a thousand catties in total, packed into fifty to sixty jars, big and small. She was truly overjoyed.
The males and seniors in her family were all wine lovers. Such a treasure taken home to honor them would surely delight them.
After filling up the wine, the Golden Monkey took Jiang Yuqing to the large cave where the monkeys lived. As soon as she entered the cave, Jiang Yuqing was stunned.
Because scattered in the cave, there were several large and small natural Gold Nuggets, with the largest one weighing at least twenty to thirty catties, and the smaller ones weighing a few catties.
Seeing that she was interested in these shiny stones, the Golden Monkey said, "These are all brought back by the little ones in our group to play with. After they get tired of playing, they just throw them here randomly. Benefactor, feel free to take them away if you like them."
Jiang Yuqing swallowed, and finally couldn't help collecting all the Gold Nuggets into her Spiritual Realm.
She asked the Golden Monkey, "Do you know where these shiny stones were picked up? They are very important to us humans!"
Because where there were natural Gold Nuggets, it represented gold mines. Monkeys could easily pick up so many natural gold blocks, indicating that the gold reserves here must be huge and of high quality.
The Golden Monkey said, "I know. Go over this mountain, then over another mountain, there are few trees there, only stones. I've been there to play before too."
"Can you take me there? I can take you to fly directly there and then send you back."
The Golden Monkey said excitingly, "Of course I can." It loved the feeling of flying in the air, which was just great.
Jiang Yuqing summoned her flying sword again, threw it into the air, pulled the Golden Monkey on it, and flew in the direction it had pointed out.
After crossing over two big mountains, Jiang Yuqing finally saw a large expanse of weeds and rocky mountains as expected.
In the distance, two rivers flowed through the gorges between the high mountains and converged here.
Calculating the approximate orientation, she had already reached the border between Qingzhou County and Baichong County of Fuzhou Prefecture.
Jiang Yuqing and the monkey landed on the ground. Jiang Yuqing released her spiritual sense, searched the entire rocky mountain, and as expected, found some gold nuggets in the shallow soil again.
Then she took out a mining shovel from her spiritual space and dug out a few visibly gold-bearing ores.
Afterwards, she recorded detailed orientation maps and drawings, and also took out a small piece of gold, put them together in a box, preparing to report to the imperial court after returning to the capital.
Private mining was punishable by execution of nine generations of one's family, but the current emperor was still acceptable. The taxes were not heavy and the common people also lived rather securely. She had no plans to rebel for the time being.
As for the remaining work, it was none of her business. She knew nothing about mining, professional matters naturally had to be handled by professionals.
After sending the golden monkey back to its tribe, to thank them for their gift, Jiang Yuqing gave them a large pile of spiritual fruits, enough for the entire tribe to enjoy a good meal.
She decided that when reporting the gold mine, she would write another note, urging the imperial court that when mining, they must pay close attention to protecting the surrounding environment.
In particular, be careful not to harm this group of lovely monkeys who live very close to the gold mountain.
After leaving Monkey Valley, Jiang Yuqing did not return home directly, but went to Teabag Ridge again.
Seeing the lush tea trees covering the mountains and fields, and the clusters of green little fruits on the branches, Jiang Yuqing suddenly laughed.
Tea trees, Tea Bag Mountain, so that’s how it is. Unfortunately, she had never been here before, so she had missed the treasure for many years.
Jiang Yuqing raised her hand and snapped off a branch, preparing to take it back home.
Bai Xiaoshi, her spiritual pet, jumped out of her spiritual space and mocked her: “What is your standard, looking for such an ugly branch.”
Jiang Yuqing gave her spiritual pet a contemptuous look: “What do you know? This is a treasure. Don’t think you are invincible in the world just because you have lived for tens of thousands of years. You still have a lot to learn!”
“Tsk!” The dignified spiritual pet did not need to know.
