Chapter 235 – Life 73, Age 35, Martial Grandmaster Peak

The following lectures focused on various methods for altering the energy levels within a field and determining the correct balance for any given herb. The elder covered a few qi techniques that were useful for making small adjustments, but her main focus was on how to make physical changes to a field to balance its energies.

For wu, this mainly consisted of impregnating a field with energy from demonic beasts. The most common way to do this was by coating the field in a thin layer of beast manure, but blood and viscera could also be used. Of course, even then, the energies in the manure had to have the proper balance of elements. If it all came from a wood-aligned beast, then wood wu would be too prevalent in the manure, and it would be difficult to grow high-quality herbs. So, an herbalist needed to source ‘energy’ from a variety of different beasts.

Balancing the qi levels of the field was far more straightforward and could be handled by common, everyday formations. The only, somewhat difficult part was balancing the elements in the correct proportions. Most formation specialists wouldn’t have too much experience with this kind of work, so an herbalist would need to be careful where they got their formations from.

In theory, this was all that was needed to grow the best herbs possible. Layer the ground with manure and use a formation to fill the environment with qi. However, there was one huge stumbling block: it was incredibly difficult to sense environmental energies with anywhere near the precision necessary for making the minute adjustments that growing a ‘perfect’ herb would require.

The sect had techniques that could help an herbalist analyze the level of the various energies involved, but they were difficult to use well and were prone to misinterpretation. A better option was to use a specially designed formation plate capable of giving accurate, real-time information, but those were expensive and were sometimes of questionable quality.

As for myself, I found that producing a formation capable of monitoring an area’s qi levels and providing an easy-to-understand read-out wasn’t too difficult, but doing the same for wu levels was far more challenging. This required learning an entirely new set of formation inscriptions, and I wasn’t sure how they all fit together.

For the time being, SuYin and I would both need to rely on an off-the-shelf formation for energy analysis, and I would work on reverse-engineering it at a later date.

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After the beginner lecture series was complete, SuYin turned her focus to the garden next to her house. While this place wasn’t suitable for growing large quantities of herbs, it was perfect for performing small-scale experiments.

While she focused on mastering the sect’s standard teachings, I wanted to explore different avenues and see what I could do with my new knowledge. Part of me wanted to see how the concept of ‘wu’ could be applied to alchemy, but I decided to look into ways of helping SuYin first.

There was little I could do to directly assist her with growing herbs since her and Bao’s skills were already far above mine, but what she needed wasn’t help from an herbalist. It was help from a formation specialist. So, I focused my attention on designing new formations capable of infusing the air and soil of her garden with precise quantities of the various energies.

One of the formations that I had learned long ago, one that was a staple of any formation specialist's repertoire, was the standard Plant Growth Formation. When I first learned it, I had no real understanding of how it worked. I could watch the energy flows it created, but I didn’t have the theoretical framework to understand what it was actually doing to improve the growth of plants. Now, however, I had a pretty good idea.

The standard Plant Growth Formation didn’t use any energy filters, neither for qi nor for wu. Instead, it gathered all the energy from the surrounding environment and cycled it through a field in a complex pattern. It weaved the energy into and out of the ground several times before looping back and starting the cycle again.

As I had never heard of a filter for ‘wu’ or demonic energy before, I had to assume that it did not exist, or at the very least, that it was so uncommon it might as well not exist. Therefore, the specialists who had designed the Plant Growth Formation had to find other ways of infusing the soil with wu. The purpose of this complex weave of energy was thus to deposit wu into the ground and qi into the air, bypassing the need for discrete filters.

I could appreciate the work of my predecessors, but this formation wasn’t nearly good enough. It amplified the amount of qi and wu available, but it did nothing to adjust their proportions. It could help plants grow faster, but it couldn’t help them grow better.

This formation needed to be completely redesigned, but making something better without wu filters would be challenging. While I didn’t like the idea of directly buying crafting knowledge as a general rule, I felt compelled to do so in this case.

“System, I would like to purchase schematics for ‘wu filters’ for each of the basic and secondary elements. How much would that cost?”

Calculating… Cost 1 shard.

I narrowed my eyes at this.

“How much for just the schematics for a wood wu filter?

Cost 1 shard.

This told me two key pieces of information. First, no one in this world possessed this knowledge. Basic filter diagrams should not be considered ‘immortal knowledge,’ so the only reason they would cost a ‘shard’ would be because the knowledge didn’t exist in this world. Second, the fact that the System gave me a price in shards without first asking for any credits suggested that knowing this first piece of information wouldn’t do me much good.

Whether ’wu filters’ were immortal knowledge or not, whether anyone in the world knew about them or not, in either case, I arrived back in the same place. I had to design my new herb-growing formation without them.

After a day of research on the different formation schematics tucked away in my mental library, I was able to come up with two viable paths forward.

The first one would be an incredibly complex formation consisting of countless subcomponents. My idea was to try and use my knowledge of fire qi filters and fire essence filters to create a more generic ‘fire energy filter.’ I could then use combinations of generic energy filters for each of the elements to adjust a field’s elemental energy to the correct proportions. After that, it would be a simple matter of using standard qi filters to raise the level of qi in the environment until the qi and wu reached a proper balance.

However, aside from needing to design an entirely new form of energy filter, this design would also require a significant amount of work to ensure that the energy levels within a field remained constant with sifting environmental qi levels. I was somewhat confident that this could be done, but making this plan a reality would take years of research and development.

The other idea I came up with was much simpler. Instead of relying on standard formations and filters, I could use spirit fires. As I had learned previously, certain fires were capable of transforming energy from one state into another. A carefully designed array of spirit fires should be capable of regulating a field’s qi and wu without the need for novel filter designs.

While this seemed possible, there were still many details that would still need to be addressed. The most important of these, though, was the question of whether spirit fires retained the conversion properties of their fire seed. If the only way of creating this form of conversion array was by utilizing fire seeds, then it wasn’t something that I could just leave lying around.

As this second idea seemed like the best short-term solution, this was where I directed my research. Even though formation was simple in concept, it would still take time to design properly.

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Over the following months, while SuYin worked on mastering her herbalism skills, I dove headfirst into my study of formations.

As it turned out, yes, a spirit fire retained the conversion properties of its seed, but its efficiency left something to be desired. Where the seed of the Profound-Rank Blazing Inferno Fire converted any energy that passed through it into fire qi, its spirit fire was only able to convert about 70% of the energy, and the amount of energy that could be converted at any one time was much lower. This led to me needing to cycle the energy through the spirit fire several times to purify it as much as possible.

In fact, as I later found out, this effect was not unknown to ordinary herbalists in the sect. Aside from using the methods discussed in the opening lectures, members of the sect would also employ spirit fires to adjust the energies of their field where needed. Since each person could only hold a single fire in their body at any given time, and since randomly waving a spirit fire around a bunch of medicinal herbs was a terrible idea, the effect of this process was somewhat limited, but it did provide an additional way for regular herbalists to adjust their fields when necessary.

The primary advantage of my planned formation was that it would be able to set and maintain energy levels at precise proportions throughout an herb’s growing cycle without any assistance from an herbalist. It would be adjustable so that these levels could easily be changed with each new herb planted.

To do this, aside from needing to design several key formation components from scratch, I also had to get my hands on spirit fires capable of converting energy and matter into the necessary forms. Since I only needed fires, not the seeds, this was a bit easier than it could have been, but it still took time.

The first place I went in search of fires was Green Leaf City. As the capital of a kingdom and a place where people trained before entering the Verdant Forest Sect, it had several stores that catered specifically to cultivators, including a shop that sold spirit fires. Unfortunately, the shop’s level was too low, and I was only able to pick up a few Yellow-Rank fires.

Next, I chartered a carriage to South Gate City. As the gateway to the Nine Rivers Sect, the spirit fire store there was of a much higher quality. They sold a range of Profound-Rank fires, and they had copies of almost any Yellow-Rank fire I could want.

While these two cities were able to provide me with a range of fires for converting energy into qi, getting a fire for every element of wu was a bit more difficult. They were simply too rare.

This was where the Blue Wind Pavilion came into play. By putting in a request through the Pavilion, I could essentially put out a continent-wide bounty on the spirit fires I was missing. Of course, I could have simply gone this route from the very beginning, but visiting these other shops allowed me to get a better sense of what fires were typically available on this continent.

With the Pavilion’s assistance, I was able to collect a full suite of Yellow-Rank fires, but even they were unable to procure some of the rarer Profound-Rank ones. It didn’t help that, aside from qi and demonic energy, I was also trying to buy fires that produced medicinal energy. These medicinal fires were even rarer than the demonic ones.

Once I felt that I hit a wall and wouldn’t be able to get anything else, I considered purchasing the remaining fires I needed from the System, but I decided to hold off for the moment. I already had a full array of Yellow-Rank fires, so it would be better to see if my idea was even feasible before spending credits.

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As I worked on creating my new formation, time flew by.

SuYin was able to master the sect’s standard method of growing herbs without much difficulty. She still struggled with keeping the energy levels balanced throughout an herb’s entire lifecycle, but she did well enough to secure her spot in the inner sect.

Bao was stuck in the outer sect, so I hadn’t heard too much from him during these months, but on the rare occasions when I saw him, it was clear that the sect’s knowledge was helping him finally understand the more esoteric information his blessing had been telling him. He still had a long way to go to memorize all the knowledge and master all the techniques that were expected of an inner sect disciple, but he was making solid progress.

As for myself, near the end of the year, I was able to complete a prototype formation for maintaining and adjusting the energy levels of an herb field. For the moment, it could only affect a space the size of SuYin’s garden, and it could only provide enough energy to grow a crop of Rank 2 herbs, but it was a start.

The formation used a Rank 3 Qi Gathering Formation to pull energy from the surrounding environment. Then, it split this energy in 27 different directions, one for each element of qi, wu, and medicinal energy. The qi the fires produced was directed into the air, and the wu was directed into the ground. Since I wasn’t certain what to do with the medicinal energy, I made the formation adjustable so that it could be sent into the air or ground as desired.

The percentage of the energy going down each path was configurable, so the operator could, for instance, set the fire qi to consume 50% of the energy input with 2% going to each of the other paths. Unfortunately, this prototype wasn’t able to detect the current status of a field’s energy levels, so a skilled herbalist would still need to control it and determine how much of any given element needed to be added.

Overall, the qi and medical energy sections of this formation weren’t too bad, but the wu part was a bit of a kludge. I couldn’t find any spirit fires to directly convert ambient energy into demonic energy. They could only convert matter into demonic energy. So, I had to first use something like the Cold Mountain Fire to convert energy into matter and then use another flame to convert that matter into demonic energy. With a fire seed converting 100% of the matter into demonic energy, this wouldn’t have been so bad, but with the low efficiency of the spirit fires, converting matter to demonic energy got messy rather quickly.

At first, I thought about converting the energy into air, but that was a bit trickier than expected. Not only was controlling air within a formation a bit difficult, but its low density also affected the conversion process.

In the end, I settled on using the Flowing Metal Fire to convert energy into mercury. Then, I converted the mercury into demonic energy. This worked surprisingly well, but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of large amounts of mercury hanging around a farm. After testing the formation out for a while, I would need to look for a fire capable of creating a less toxic liquid.

My prototype formation included 36 spirit flames and was inscribed into a block of marble 5 meters long and 3 meters high. It was a massive beast of a thing, and I could only hope that it would prove to be worth all the effort I had put into it.

As the year came to a close, I handed off the formation to SuYin, taught her how to use it, and left the sect to return to the Wastes.