The outer cores are said to be larger while the inner cores are condensed, yet from Lu's memories, it is said that not even soul awakening cultivators would take the journey from one inner core to another. Even at their high speed, they need hundreds of years, Yong Lu couldn't imagine himself trying to move towards there. The region he is currently is already the border region between the human environment and the natural environment.
All around, there were several smaller natural environments until one reaches the periphery of the endless swamp, which is said to be the largest inner core, followed by grasslands, forests, mountains and finally rivers.
Yong Lu stood up from his seat, took the cloth into his bag and walked towards the centre of the black market. There was a shop dedicated to transportation in every black market, even if they were small ones, the shops would at least be able to tell the route of the common spirit boats and the stops where one can enter.
From this, one might think that it is extremely easy to rob the flying boats, but the ones that do aren't far from death. The Shadow Cave behind the black markets forbids such a thing. Since an evil force already did so, naturally most would comply. As for those that try to challenge the rule, at least on the main routes, that's not possible, there are many stations that are ready to take action.
The private moves of some parties aren't a matter for these stations as long as they don't explicitly fly in front of their door. This formed an unspoken rule for robbery cultivators, the main routes that mainly served to transport people from place to place were left out, while the private transportation and good transportation of other ships would be their target.
Although there are some twists, in the end, the human race still created a save transportation line. The main purpose was to connect all human land to advance and retreat together in case of an emergency. Of course, although that's the high call, in fact, there has never been a major fight between humans and beast in the open, naturally such a fight can't be fought in private.
There seemed to be a large veil around this topic and Yong Lu didn't know anything about it, but he knew that there must be a reason why there is such peace. Not to mention humans, the beasts themselves are only considered one party when attacked by a larger force, in fact, they are once again split into bloodline cultivators and natural awakeners, the nine holy places, their races and even their species and branch, and even in this case.
They have differences and when there is no existential threat, they won't unite. Still, there is rarely any large in-fighting. The largest faction fight in the human realm is the fight of ideology between the righteous and demonic cultivators, similar to the bloodline and awakener faction fight.
'Hmm' Yong Lu was curious as he was once again tapped in his mind. 'Alas, this world is so interesting, and the veil covers any force beyond the soul awakening realm, the fights below can only be considered minor fights for resources, but those above… it's as if there are abundant resources and no will to fight unnecessarily.'
The way to the shop wasn't long, and it had a simple name 'Flying Ship Ticket Bureau'.
When Lu entered, a young man was sitting behind the counter. Upon hearing the door upon, he stood up with a smile on his face but didn't greet nor bow.
Seeing this, Lu didn't follow etiquette either. From his memories, he knew that there was basic Taoist etiquette, but in fact, only the sects with Taoist heritage would follow it to the point.
Most would greet with their fists cupped, and this was indeed the case for the young man when Yong Lu approached the counter. "Greetings fellow Taoist, how can I help you?"
Yong Lu nodded his head and said "Take out your transporting map." He didn't deign to greet properly, anyways, currently he had the identity of a ruthless poison master, it would be weird if he suddenly was friendly. People might think he's approached them to kill.
The receptionist nodded too and took out a mall map from below the counter. When it was pressed on the counter, it enlarged several times. There was a red dot in the middle and several streams flowing all around, it was not very detailed and only some territories were marked, such as the forest Yong Lu came out.
Lu looked at the map and at the north eastern corner, he finally saw the name 'Endless Swamp'. He already knew where he was prior and only confirmed it now. The endless swamp is the largest and strongest force in the inner cores, and even if compared to all nine cores, it can be counted to be among the top three.
For this reason, it occupies the central region of the whole world, the northeast being the forest core, southeast the lake core, southwest the grassland and northwest the mountain core. North is the tundra core, east is the ocean core, south is the volcanic core and west is the desert core.
In fact, listening to them like this, one might think they are directly connected, but they are far from each other, with numerous smaller beast gathering places in between, not to mention the human gathering places that are larger than the beast gathering places.
Between the centre and the four directions, there are the four holy places of the human race, which are less than half of the beasts. If Yong Lu was fast to judge, he would say that the humans are very weak, but he wasn't, and just because they are all called holy places, doesn't make them equally strong.
This is shown from the fact that there is a ranking among the beast holy places.
Yong Lu looked at the young man and pointed at a line that went close to the central region, at least closer. There were several gathering places at one point gathered and the line wouldn't continue, and from then on, even after the beast places, it was too close to the beast holy land, so there were no stations around.
Lu looked at this and he guessed that the journey would take two years as a foundation building cultivator to enter the outermost periphery of the central area. As for how long he would take to cross the whole periphery, he didn't know, and in his closest guess from the simple journey books, it was written that even a soul awakening cultivator would take several weeks to cross even the smallest region of the holy places… of course the smallest region was the strongest, so naturally a weak cultivator of that level wouldn't have the chance to do.