Chapter 341 – Life 79, Age 30, Martial Sovereign Peak

Both Shen and Du XiongMing had their own goals for this life.

Shen was given a portion of the Jiu Clan’s blood essence and was promoted to the position of the Clan’s Patriarch. No one was happy about this, but Shen needed Sovereign-level energy, and if we had to have a Jiu Clan, it might as well serve as the source of that energy. So, he had to spend a fair bit of time establishing his prestige in his new clan.

Du XiongMing, likewise, had to re-establish his prestige among the time-traveling members of the Du Clan. As he had been dead for hundreds of years, many people had forgotten about him. Unlike Shen, though, Du XiongMing felt no need to take up the mantle of Patriarch. Like me, he gave himself the title of Ancestor and just focused on maintaining a grip on his clan’s upper echelon.

That said, they both spent a significant amount of their time helping me with my projects. While I would have liked to believe that this was simply because they agreed with my priorities, the main reason was no doubt that they wanted to remain in the good graces of the person controlling the time loops.

Either way, though, their assistance was appreciated.

---------------------------------------------------

Before starting my projects, I made a series of high-value purchases from the System:

Enhanced comprehension of formations: 15 trillion credits.

Enhanced energy control: 9.9 trillion credits.

A permanent mid three-star earth affinity: 35 trillion credits.

Mastery of the Immutable Mountain spirit fire: 10 trillion credits.

Enhanced concealment of the Qi Gathering Formation in my soul (Rank 7): 22.5 trillion credits.

A comprehensive upgrade of my mental library (Rank 8): 1.2 trillion credits.

Enhanced comprehension for reading emotions: 1 trillion credits.

Cost 94.6 trillion credits. 6.6 trillion (6,618,792,640,982) credits remaining.

The first four purchases would help me learn more Rank 7 formations, and the enhanced concealment would come in handy if we were successful. I had wanted to purchase a mastery of the seed of the Immutable Mountain Fire, but the cost of that was a quadrillion credits, so I had to settle for a mastery of only its spirit fire.

As for the upgrade to my mental library, while a comprehensive upgrade to Rank 8 might not have been necessary, there was a small chance that we would be able to stumble into Rank 8 secrets during our studies. I wanted to be prepared just in case that happened, and, in any case, the price was well within my budget.

Finally, my ability to read emotions had served me well over the years, but recently, it had started to fail me. Getting a solid read on Sovereigns had been difficult, and while this purchase might not have been strictly necessary, it would help me in dealing with the Saint’s Envoys and Emissaries.

Once these purchases were in place, it was time to get to work.

---------------------------------------------------

The first formation we studied was the one that allowed the Nine Rivers Sect to establish permanent portals throughout its territory. As there were dozens of copies of this formation strewn across the continent, we had several examples to use as references. However, going into this task, I still expected it to take us at least a century of hard work. Thankfully, though, the mastery of the Immutable Mountain spirit fire that I had purchased proved its worth.

As an Earth-Rank fire, the Immutable Mountain Fire existed across a spectrum of 4-dimensional space. And as an earth-element fire, I could merge it into a stone without, necessarily, reshaping the stone’s structure. This let me take a 4-dimensional scan of a formation to better understand its layout without needing to go through the arduous experimentation phase that we had used when creating the Anti-Portal Formation.

We were also helped by the fact that the Portal Stabilization Formations weren’t too different from what we had already created. Like the Anti-Portal Formation, this formation was focused on stabilizing space. However, instead of stabilizing space to prevent portals from forming, this one stabilized space to keep them from disappearing. While this changed a few key details, the basic ideas of the formations were the same.

The hard part was designing a formation that could stabilize a portal connected to my inner world. Because of my world’s low Rank, any time I tried to create a portal inside of it, the portal wanted to spread and rip the entire world apart. I could use my soul and willpower to stop this, but if we wanted to set up long-term portals into and out of Chang’an, then we needed a formation that could also stabilize the surrounding environment and keep this from happening.

This research took us 30 years to complete. Once it was done, I set up a series of gateways to connect the Wastes, the Nine Rivers Sect, and our various allied clans to Chang’an. Of course, the dangers involved, I also added in several fail-safes that only I knew about just to prevent anything from going wrong. I wanted these portals to make life easier, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the safety of my world in the process.

After this, we worked on replicating the sect’s formation for storing karmic energy on my Plane of Woody Earth. While storing energy in TongBin’s assistants had worked, I wanted to shift to a system that was less reliant on the goodwill of strangers.

At first, we made rapid progress with this formation as well, but it soon became clear that the trees’ roots would form vital pathways for the formation’s energies. So, to create this kind of formation, a portion of the roots would need to be shoved into the fourth dimension. While some of this was possible with a combination of spirit fires and wood affinity, what I really needed was wood qi. So, after making what progress we could, I had to set this formation aside for the future.

Finally, I got to the formation that I was really interested in: the Rank 7 Qi Gathering Formation. I wanted to grow my inner world as rapidly as possible, and the only real bottleneck was the amount of qi that I could supply to the Expanding Realms Fire. So, if I wanted to grow the world faster, I needed a better Qi Gathering Formation.

Without any examples to work from, this was going to be a bit tricky, but we had a good understanding of the principles involved in the lower-Rank formations, so finding a method of creating a Rank 7 one should be feasible.

---------------------------------------------------

The year I turned 189, while we were still hard at work optimizing 4-dimensional spiral patterns for the Rank 7 Qi Gathering Formation, Chang’an reached a radius of over 3 kilometers, giving it the maximum volume that I wanted it to have for this Rank of my inner world.

So, I shifted the Expanding Realms Fire to simultaneously expand the other 3 planes. Then, I sent word to the clan to begin expanding the bunker system to cover the new area available.

During the last overhaul of the bunkers, the radius of Chang’an was about 1.5 kilometers, and now, it was double that. While an extra 1.5 kilometers might not seem like too much, it had increased the area of each ring of the bunker from 4.5 square kilometers to nearly 27 square kilometers, giving us six times as much room to work with on every one of our bunker’s 100 levels.

A portion of this space went to housing and amenities, raising the number of people who could live in the world from 10 million to 20 million. Another portion went to farmland, ensuring that we could keep everyone fed. The majority, though, went to preparing the world for its upcoming Tribulation of Fire. While I didn’t know what such a tribulation might involve, it wasn’t hard to guess that large defensive formations empowered by water-based spirit fires would be a good idea.

After arranging everything, I returned to my work.

---------------------------------------------------

The basic design of a Rank 7 Qi Gathering Formation wasn’t too complicated. It was really just several layers of recursive spirals stretching through 4-dimensional space. However, perfecting both the design and my ability to carve said design into my soul still took hundreds of years. If necessary, I likely could have made something after only a decade or two, but I had plenty of time to work with. There was no reason to rush.

During this time, I also took frequent breaks, sometimes for years, to just go out and explore this continent that I had spent so much time on. So, it wasn’t until I was nearly 400 years old that I finally began carving up my soul once more.

My inner world sat atop a podium at the center of my soul. Previously, I had inscribed an intricate Rank 6 Qi Gathering formation into that podium. For the first step of this upgrade, all I needed to do was take that formation and expand it into four dimensions.

While this would have been easier if the Rank 6 formation hadn’t already been present, I had practiced this enough over the years that I was able to complete this step without difficulty and raise the formation to Rank 7.

I wasn’t done, though. While a Rank 7 formation was all well and good, my inner world needed energy—a lot of energy. So, after upgrading the podium, I went further.

With my visualization technique, the podium at the center of my soul appeared to be set in the middle of a walled garden that was several kilometers across. Years ago, I had reduced this garden to ash, but already, signs of life were spouting from the charred remains of what had come before. While this was, in a sense, only a metaphor, the fact that I could carve a formation into this space suggested some level of reality to the depiction. So, how far did this metaphor stretch?

Right now, the Qi Gathering Formation only covered the podium, but what if I expanded it?

With this thought in mind, I carved thirty-two distinct, equally spaced sets of inscriptions into the wall surrounding my soul’s inner garden. Then, I modified the formation on the podium to serve as the central node of a Rank 7 Qi Gathering Grand Formation that would span the length and breadth of the inner garden.

I had done my best to perfect this process, and I had conducted countless experiments on normal, stone formations over the centuries, but carving this into my soul still carried risks. So, I spent years making sure that every mark was placed exactly where it needed to be.

When it was all done and I activated the formation, I couldn’t help but hold my breath.

Qi slowly built up at both the 32 child nodes in the wall and the main node in the podium. Then, in a rush, it all poured inward and upward, directly into the Expanding Realms Fire.

After giving the formation a few minutes to stabilize, I started running calculations and found that the world was now expanding 20 times faster than it had with the Rank 6 formation. Since upgrading the formation to Rank 7 should have only given it a 5x increase, the remaining 4 times multiplier must have come from expanding the formation to cover the inner garden.

This made me stare at my soul in a new light. By this point, the inner garden was only a small piece of my soul. Beyond its walls, the rolling hills stretched out for dozens of kilometers in every direction. What if I expanded the formation to cover the entire thing?

There was no reason to rush, though. It would be better to keep things as they were until I knew for certain that there wouldn’t be any side effects.

---------------------------------------------------

By the end of this life, the Su Clan contained over a hundred million members spread across several empires. If we had continued trying to grow as rapidly as possible, the clan could have far surpassed this number, but both Ning ZeKun and Grand Elder Zheng BoQin had warned me against this. We needed to provide plenty of space on the continent for other clans to grow and prosper as well.

Sadly, my inner world was only able to house less than a fifth of this population, and a portion of that space was set aside for members of our allied clans. While I could have transformed the other three planes into massive housing blocks as well, we would have to make difficult decisions at some point, and I felt it would be better to start earlier rather than later.

In any case, while the majority of people wouldn’t be making this trip with us, that didn’t bother most of them. After 400 years in this timeline, most of the families had set down roots, and they didn’t want to abandon everything they knew to repeat some crazy adventure that only their long-dead ancestors had any memory of—especially after they were told that they would need to be confined to a bunker for 2 years.

Of course, the upper echelons of the clan, those who had been able to ascend to King and Emperor, knew the truth of matters, but that ‘truth’ didn’t sway many of their descendants. As a result, where I thought we would need to be selective with who to take, we instead had to spend time recruiting.

Finally, I hit 437 years old, and our time was up. We needed to move on to the next loop.

You have died. Calculating…

You died as a Martial Sovereign Peak – 100 trillion credits awarded.

You died at Peak Rank 6 of Body Cultivation – 1 trillion credits awarded.

Total Credits: 107.6 trillion (107,618,792,640,982)

Rank 2 Small World – 34.2/100 km3 (Earth, Wood)