Chapter 313 – Life 76, Age 140, Martial Emperor Peak

Even after decades of research, I was only able to make minor improvements to ShouLi’s Rank 4 body cultivation technique. Everything I tried had only resulted in broken Low-Yellow techniques. Still, even though this rating hadn’t changed, I wasn’t entirely unhappy with my results.

Drill of Fellowship, Low-Yellow Rank 4 Body Cultivation Technique (Broken), Karmic Energy, Effects: Makes those connected by this technique feel an enhanced sense of community. Makes one more obsessed with growing stronger.

Aside from changing the technique’s primary mental effect, I had also found several ways to reduce the amount of karmic energy it needed, including a method to cultivate it without the need to consume the meat of Rank 4 beasts.

Unfortunately, the method I had devised was rather difficult. One needed to draw karmic energy out of their dantian, pull it through their acupoints and into their physical body, and then delicately weave it into their wu before absorbing it into their muscles. This was all rather tricky to accomplish, and manipulating karmic energy outside of one’s dantian was rather finicky in the best of circumstances.

Simply put, it was impossible to cultivate the Drill of Fellowship without a high affinity for karmic energy.

Did this mean that I had wasted the last 28 years? Not exactly.

I considered the effects of both the Core of Fellowship and this new Drill of Fellowship to be extremely important for our plans going forward. By expelling people from the sects when they turned 50, we were essentially training up Peak Grandmasters and handing them over to our enemies. These techniques, however, would keep them connected to us by karma, making them less willing to act against us.

So, while developing the Drill of Fellowship had taken longer than I would have liked, I was happy with the result.

That said, the issue of needing an affinity for karmic energy couldn’t just be ignored. While I was able to assist a person in cultivating the technique by taking direct control of their energy, I didn’t want to have to assist everyone at every stage of Rule Tier body cultivation. At the same time, I had no way to raise the karmic affinity of everyone in my clan.

What was I supposed to do? Changing the technique so that it wouldn’t require an affinity would both weaken it and raise the amount of karmic energy needed to cultivate it.

In the end, I decided on a stop-gap solution. Eventually, I would just need to improve the technique to fix this flaw, but until then, I could raise a single person’s affinity high enough that they could help everyone cultivate it.

After a brief conversation with ShouLi, we handed this off to TongBin. He had proven his skills by being the first person to reach Peak Rank 5 in fire body cultivation, and he had been the one who had destroyed the first 3 rings of the formation beneath Dragon Gate. At the same time, his alchemy skills were rather weak, so he was having trouble gathering the contribution points needed to reach both Peak Emperor and Peak Rank 6 of body cultivation. So, letting him serve the clan by helping everyone master body cultivation was a win-win.

There was just one thing that I needed to do first.

“System, raise Su TongBin’s affinity for karmic energy to peak six-star. This only needs to be a ‘temporary’ boost that will last a single lifetime.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1,617,760,000 credits. 137,847,788,524 credits remaining.

As TongBin could stay in my inner world and not be reset by the time loops, a ‘temporary’ affinity was enough to last him the rest of his life, so I was able to save a few credits. I just had to hope that a peak six-star affinity would be enough for him to assist people with their Rank 4 techniques. While I still had enough credits to raise him to a high five-star, that would be expensive, and I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have to.

After making this purchase, I spent some time teaching TongBin how to manipulate karmic energy in someone else’s body. Then, I sent him to Elder TaiZu to give him someone to practice on.

With this taken care of, I could finally shift my focus elsewhere.

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At the start of this life, my inner world had only absorbed 34% of the Laws contained within the seed of the Solid Mountain Fire. While I wanted to get back to expanding the world, I had chosen to leave the Solid Mountain Fire in place since it was the only source of both qi and Laws for my nascent world.

Now, over a hundred years later, neither of these was much of a concern. Most of the people had already left, and, more recently, the world had completed its absorption of the Solid Mountain Fire’s Laws.

Solid Mountain Fire, Profound-Rank, Elements: Earth, Consumes: Energy, Produces: Earth Qi, Laws Absorbed: 100%

Even after reaching 100%, the number of techniques that people could use in the world was limited, but that was good. I had wanted to enhance my analysis ability so that it would give me a detailed breakdown of exactly which Laws each seed possessed, but this wasn’t something that I could buy with credits. After several attempts, I hadn’t been able to find any way to get such information from the System, but these limitations on which cultivation techniques people could use provided me with a way to learn at least some of what I wanted to know without the System’s assistance.

I brought together a large group of Disciples, Masters, and Grandmasters and had them run through all my Warrior Tier earth qi techniques to make a list of which ones worked and which didn’t.

Nearly all the Yellow-Rank techniques in my library were usable. Even in Rank 3 there were only a handful that no one was able to cultivate, and the mental effects of those all related to ideas like calmness, harmony, and sympathy.

For the Profound-Rank techniques, there was still a rather large variety that worked in Ranks 1 and 2. But in Rank 3, the only functional techniques were those relating to strength, resilience, and stubbornness.

No one was able to cultivate any of the Earth-Rank techniques.

How could I use this information? What did it tell me?

I wasn’t sure.

One possibility was that Laws were structured like pyramids where high-level Profound Laws were rooted in an ever-expanding collection of simpler Laws. Maybe the Solid Mountain Fire contained so many Yellow-Rank Laws because those were necessary precursors to its Profound-Rank Laws.

If so, then this might mean that I shouldn’t worry too much about people cultivating a mess of low-level techniques. Doing so would help lay a foundation for learning more complex techniques.

However, another possibility was that fire seeds were simply… messy. Maybe the Yellow-Rank Laws weren’t there because they had to be. Maybe they were there because whoever—or whatever—created the seed didn’t know what they were doing.

In the end, all I could do was pass this information off to our trainers to see if they could find a way to make use of it while I moved on to the next task I needed to accomplish.

After sending a message to ShouLi to let her know what I was up to, I looked into my soul, shut down the Qi Gathering Formation, extracted the seed of the Solid Mountain Fire, and stored it away in a jade box.

Then, I flipped through my personal collection of fire seeds while also considering some of the seeds that others had picked up during their time in the Nine Rivers Sect. While a few of the Profound-Rank seeds did contain Laws of Earth, they were all multi-element seeds. The only single-element Profound Rank seed in my collection that contained Laws of Earth was the Solid Mountain Fire.

I didn’t see much value in spending time on Yellow-Rank seeds when I had other things that I needed to do, and I definitely didn’t want to start absorbing the Laws of a second element until after the world had reached its maximum size. So, I decided that it was finally time to stop working on Laws and start working on expansion.

I pulled out the seed of the Expanding Realms Fire and slotted it into my soul.

Over the past several decades I had spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how I wanted to expand my inner world. One option was to simply continue its outward expansion, creating an endless, flat disc, but that seemed… boring.

With the freedom to mold my world into any shape that I could think of, why limit myself to a single flat disc? Why not create something unique?

After playing around with a few ideas, I finally came up with a plan that I was rather excited about. A while back, Bao had suggested that I should design my world around the Bagua Formation. Why not do something like that? Why not go further?

At the moment, my world had an area of 2 square kilometers. The first step in my plan was to increase it to roughly 6 and a half square kilometers.

I did not plan to introduce any new elements directly into this space, however. It would remain a realm of earth, the ideal refuge for earth cultivators who were looking to enter seclusion. At the same time, it would also serve as a place where I could study the Laws of Earth in relative isolation.

After the expansion of this first disc was complete, I would then make two more.

There were three elements that touched earth on the Nine River’s Bagua diagram: fire, dark, and wood. Each of these had potential upsides, and I had yet to commit to which one I would use as my second element. I was leaning toward wood as that was in the center of the diagram and would open up more possibilities for the future, but fire, having a constructive relationship with earth, was also appealing.

In any case, no matter which one I ended up choosing, I planned to make a total of three equally sized discs. The first would remain focused on earth, the second would focus on my second element, and the third would be a place where these two elements could mingle and interact.

I wanted these three discs to, essentially, be three separate worlds, but the rules that governed my storage space dictated that they all had to be connected to each other via tunnels. This wasn’t exactly ideal, but since such tunnels would give people a way to traverse the different biomes without my assistance, I considered them to be more of a positive than a negative.

At any rate, this was a matter for the future. Before I could even think about constructing tunnels and secondary discs, I first had to more than triple my existing disc.

Focusing on the task at hand, I wrapped the Expanding Realms Fire around my inner world and activated the Qi Gathering Formation.

Slowly, the edge of my inner world began to separate from the outer walls of Chang’an.

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Expanding my inner world would take time, and there wasn’t anything I could do to make it go any faster. So, once the expansion was underway, I pulled out the Drill of Fellowship and began cultivating.

With the number of cities we had at this point, we had an abundance of Lord-level karma, and I had access to as much of it as I required. So, I was able to advance all the way to the peak of Rank 4 in less than a year.

After that, I turned my attention to Rank 5.