Lord of a Fief Quest [Xianxia/Western Fantasy Fusion, CK2-ish]

You answered the old man, "No, charity is its own reward, stranger. There is no need for a gift."

The old man, no stranger to this game, smiled at you and replied, "Oh? Well, I think I might insist you accept some small token given the generosity you have shown me. Surely you would not refuse if insist on giving you a gift?"

You stared at the old man for a moment and then said, "Well, I suppose if you insist it would be rude of me to refuse after you so graciously accepted my gift of supplies."

The old man, dressed in white silk robes so tattered they resembled rags, smiled at you and pulled a bamboo scroll from somewhere else. It seemed the old man did not require a spatial ring to pull off that particular trick, a useful detail but high level cultivators possessed all sorts of tricks. He offered you the scroll with a smile on his face.

You took the scroll from the old man and inclined your head as you said, "Thank you."

The old man then seemed to fade into the background before he vanished completely from view. Definitely a high level cultivator then. You could not sense his presence and that required some rather high level techniques to pull off.

You unfurled the scroll only to find recipes for preparing spirit cores for consumption so they tasted better. The man's personal recipe scroll it appeared. It even had instructions on how to make human and Outsider cores palatable. It seemed cannibalism made the flavor abhorrent. You were horrified that the man had recipes for making human cores palatable but what could you do? He was clearly way beyond you in terms of cultivation and might made right at the end of the day. If you did not have the power to enforce your beliefs on the world, your beliefs were worthless.

A part of you wanted to get rid of the scroll, the idea of carrying around a recipe book that included human core consumption seemed dangerous but another part of you wondered if these recipes were in fact techniques to improve the gains or reduce the corruption or both. You probably should test them before you destroyed them out of hand. Although you could just smooth over the bamboo piece that contained the recipe for human core consumption. It might make the scroll look a little odd but it would be much safer to have it in your possession that way.

You...

[ ] Destroyed the bamboo scroll outright. It was evidence of all sorts of vile practices. It was bad enough you were eating spirit cores. Eating Human cores was more than taboo. It was a death sentence.
[ ] Smoothed over the recipe for consuming human cores. It might be odd to have a recipe book for consuming spirit cores but the act was not technically illegal as long as the core was not sourced from a human.
[ ] Kept the book intact. If you smoothed over the human core recipe you would never be able to recover it. This was clearly a technique scroll of some kind, you just did not know if it was purely for flavor or if it added benefits. Besides, humans were just another kind of animal.

Satisfied with your decision, you moved on to other matters.

Your retinue traveled for another couple of days without incident and made camp along the way. However, on the third day with the sun high overhead, you found a massive phoenix dead on the slopes of Mount Perdition. The poor creature must have died defending its nest.

You dismounted and inspected the nest only to find one of the eggs intact. It was warm to the touch and was heavy like solid stone. This was the egg of a powerful spirit beast, one that was easily of the third rank. Surely it had some value on the market if you did not keep it for yourself.

You placed the undamaged egg in your saddlebags to decide what to do with it later. You had another couple weeks in these mountains before your exploration was done. There was no rush to decide.

It seemed you had a good few days. First the encounter with the strange cultivator and his "gift" and now an egg that was likely valued in the hundreds of silver bars. It was too bad you had not pursued spirit beast taming in your youth, you could have trained the spirit beast yourself and acquired a powerful flying mount for your own use without the expense of hiring your own beast tamer.

Sorry for the short post, just not particular inspired today and the decision point was early on.