Chapter 225 – Life 73, Age 32, Martial Grandmaster Peak

Upon leaving my house, GuiAi went to talk with the others about taking a trip down the mountain. It quickly became clear to me that while a cost of 25 points a day was enough to deter long vacations, everyone was ready for a day off, and they were more than willing to pay a couple dozen points to get one.

I had told GuiAi that I was willing to take them anywhere in the Wastes, and that was true, but upon realizing these trips might be more frequent than I first thought, I realized that we needed to be somewhat strategic with our travel destinations.

I wanted the Su Clan and anyone else watching us to believe that our base of operations was located in Rosehill, so it wouldn’t do for us to be seen in multiple other locations but never in Rosehill. With this in mind, I informed everyone of a slight change to the price of excursions.

If they wanted to visit Rosehill, I would only charge them 20 points per person per day. If they wanted to go anywhere else, I would charge them 30 points. As Rosehill was a semi-famous tourist destination with plenty of leisure activities, no one felt the need to complain about these new prices.

The very next day, I gave all five of the Disciples sleeping pills, shoved them into my storage space, and rode west to the Rosehill Hot Springs. After nearly a month, trapped within the limited space atop Mount Jiang’s plateau, my horse was more than ready for a good run across an open landscape.

We made good time and arrived in Rosehill only eight hours later. Once there, I snuck into the city, entered the small palace complex that previously belonged to the Su Clan, and placed everyone’s unconscious bodies into separate sleeping quarters.

I spent that night scoping out the town and then woke everyone up the next morning. A few dangerous-looking Grandmasters were lurking around the place, so I gave everyone a formation-inscribed amulet to keep them safe. Then, I handed everyone a few gold coins and disappeared, allowing them to roam the town without me looking over their shoulders all the time.

Of course, while I ‘disappeared,’ I didn’t go far. I stayed close enough to monitor everything they did, both to keep them safe and to keep an eye out for any questionable behavior.

Shortly after I left, they split up into three groups. GuiMing and GuiAi went off to explore the town together, Mo left to explore on his own, and ShouLi gave Liang a guided tour of the town, showing she was intimately familiar with the place. I did my best to stay close enough to Mo and the siblings to help them if anything went wrong, but most of my focus was on ShouLi. If anyone was going to take this opportunity to betray us, I expected it to be her.

ShouLi acted nervous the entire day. She was constantly glancing at shadows, and her eyes would occasionally linger on someone for a bit too long. However, she never did anything overly suspicious. Her behavior seemed to indicate that she was worried about the Su Clan targeting her, not that she was working with them.

At the end of the day, I returned them all to my storage space and took them all back to Mount Jiang.

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After this outing, everything returned to normal. The Disciples spent their time cultivating, and I focused on improving my skills as a refiner. While I wanted to learn more about herbalism, this wasn’t the right time. With the effectiveness of the memory orb training system, it was clear that I would need a considerable number of orbs in the future, and I didn’t want to have to rely on Jin for them all the time. I needed to learn to make them myself.

A month later, the Disciples asked me to take them back to Rosehill, but this time Mo didn’t join us.

After setting everyone free to roam the city, they each went in their own separate ways. I once again kept most of my focus on ShouLi, thinking that she might take this opportunity to contact the Su Clan, so I barely noticed it when Liang took a crumpled-up piece of paper out of his robes and tossed it into an alley.

As soon as the coast was clear, I appeared in the alley, picked up the note, and read it.

It contained a lot of basic information about our base, including details on the affinity testing orb, the formation for testing qi purity, and the Qi Gathering Formations. It also mentioned that I was teaching them techniques through the use of white stones, but it didn’t provide many details on the process.

Importantly, this note didn’t contain any information on where our base was located, and it didn’t mention anything about me helping them increase their affinities.

After considering the situation, I crumpled the note back up and returned it to the alley. Giving the Su Clan a bit of information about how I was training everyone wasn’t an entirely bad idea. If they knew a bit about what I could do, they might be more eager to work with me in the future. If they knew that I could easily raise a person’s affinities, they might go a bit crazy, but there was little harm in them knowing that I could accurately test for affinities or that I had access to Qi Gathering Formations.

I would need to be careful about the clan planting more spies into my ranks in the future, but again, having enemy agents amongst my Disciples wasn’t entirely bad. Having someone trying to turn my recruits against me would be a good test to see who would remain loyal to me and whose real loyalty was to the Su Clan.

While I didn’t know much about the process of generating the karmic energy needed to ascend to Sovereign, I could guess that it would be best if the members of my clan saw me as an authority figure worthy of respect. The fact that nominal city lords could generate Lord-level karma without actually managing a city likely meant that this wasn’t a hard rule, but I felt that my clan members seeing me as their true patriarch had to play a part.

That said, while I didn’t mind the Su Clan learning any of the information contained in this note, I was worried about Liang giving it to them. I would need to keep a closer eye on him in the future.

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This pattern continued for several more months, and our trips to Rosehill became somewhat routine, but eventually, GuiAi and GuiMing requested a trip to Dragon Gate City. They wanted to spend some time with their parents and tell them about everything they had been up to recently.

This visit led to their parents asking if they could join us on the mountain. They also mentioned several other small families that might be interested in moving there as well.

These additional workers were not members of the Su Clan, and I didn’t have a bloodline connection with them, so I was hesitant to bring them along with us. However, they were skilled in a variety of mortal crafts like tailoring and pottery making.

My goal was to create a true, thriving city inside of my storage space. That would require a large number of skilled laborers, and if I limited myself to only recruiting members of the Su Clan, I might have a hard time finding knowledgeable people who wanted to join me. In any event, expanding the gene pool of my city would only be beneficial, and nothing said that the children of these people couldn’t marry into the Su Clan in the future.

In total, four small families joined us, and I settled them all on the south side of the plateau. At first, they were a bit dismayed to find that they would be living on a desolate mountaintop, but watching the Disciples quickly construct a series of brand-new stone houses and workshops calmed them down.

While this expansion to our settlement would no doubt be beneficial in the future, it did highlight a problem for the present. How were people supposed to be compensated for their labor?

Typically, bakers and weavers would make goods and sell those goods for copper or silver, but on this mountain, copper and silver were somewhat worthless. On our trips to Rosehill, I had been providing everyone with a bit of gold to have fun, but none of the Disciples cared about gold. Base metals weren’t important to them. What they cared about were contribution points.

So, after a bit of research on how the formation in the Affinity Hall worked, I created a simple formation that functioned as a point-of-sale system. These allowed everyone to sell their goods and receive contribution points in exchange.

Of course, since one contribution point equaled one minute on an Essence Gathering Formation, no one was crazy enough to pay an entire point for something like a loaf of bread. This meant I needed to implement a fractionalized point system so that people could pay .1 points, or even .01 points for simple goods.

My hope was that allowing mortal laborers to spend these points in the Affinity Hall would only increase the production of karmic energy from my clan and city in the future.

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As time passed, the Disciples began to make significant progress. As their affinities grew and they got more practice, they reached the point where they could advance from Marital Disciple 1 to Peak Disciple in only a matter of weeks.

Their qi purity when advancing so rapidly wasn’t exactly impressive, and only ShouLi had gotten anywhere close to the pristine foundation I demanded of them, but they were all showing marked improvements in their cultivation skills.

However, they were developing a tendency to rush their cultivation to earn contribution points from rapid advancements, so I made a slight change to the rules. Previously, I had said that they could only earn points from a given technique a single time. If they advanced to Martial Disciple 2 with a weak foundation, they might only get 30 points for doing so, and the remainder of the points available for this advancement would be forever lost to them.

I changed this policy to encourage them to cultivate the same technique multiple times. If they only had a qi purity of 50% the first time, they would still only get 30 points, but if they cultivated the same technique again and had a purity of 75%, they would earn an additional 15 points. If they then cultivated the technique a third time and were able to form a pristine foundation, they would be awarded the remaining 15 points plus a bonus of 60 points for their achievement.

This was to encourage them to acquire mastery of each technique instead of just rushing through as many as they could. Of course, since a 100% pure foundation was only possible with a Peak-Yellow technique or better, the impact of this change was somewhat limited, but everyone did start cultivating each technique at least twice after it was implemented.

Eventually, everyone was able to reach Peak Disciple with a Peak-Yellow technique. While no one had a solid enough foundation for me to let them advance to Martial Master, I did give them access to a scroll for a Low-Profound technique.

Unfortunately, no one had much luck cultivating this technique. For most of them, I could attribute this to them not being very talented. Liang, for instance, had a hard time learning even the most basic cultivation technique from a scroll. ShouLi was different, though. I felt that she should have been able to learn a simple Low-Profound technique, but after weeks of trying, she was only able to advance to Martial Disciple 3.

This made me a bit worried that the process of learning to cultivate through memory orbs was doing long-term damage to their ability to learn normally. I wanted to keep this experiment running, but it was definitely something I needed to keep an eye on.

Another change I made during this time was to my policy on Energy Expulsion Pills. Previously, I was handing them out for free whenever anyone reached Peak Disciple. I changed this to selling them for 10 contribution points apiece. This would allow the Disciples to reset their cultivation base at any time while also, hopefully, encouraging less rushing.

I would have liked to start everyone down the path of learning a profession so that they could make and trade pills amongst themselves without needing my involvement, but I just didn’t feel they were ready for that yet. They needed to spend their time learning to cultivate better instead of trying to learn ancillary skills.

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During this first year, while I spent most of my time mastering Rank 2 and 3 refining, I also spent time on my goal of turning my storage space into a viable ecosystem.

As I saw it, there were several things I had to accomplish before the space would be suitable for long-term habitation. It needed land, clean water, a day/night cycle, the ability to grow food, some type of sanitation system, and several other things.

There were a lot of things that I knew I had to do, and there were other things I needed to do that I didn’t even know about yet. However, I could only take things one step at a time. So, I decided to first focus on what I considered most important.

I needed to find a way to ensure the space maintained a breathable atmosphere.

So far, I had done this by transferring copious amounts of air into and out of the storage space at regular intervals, but this was a huge hassle, and it wouldn’t work if I wanted to store a large population.

People consumed a lot of oxygen, and they produced a lot of carbon dioxide. A bit of this could be offset by growing plants, but maintaining a proper ratio of oxygen to CO2 would be extremely difficult.

What I needed was a formation. My idea was to design a formation that would pull CO2 from the air, release the oxygen back into the atmosphere, and form the carbon into a solid brick. Then, if the oxygen levels got too high, it would just need to burn the carbon to create more CO2.

After several months of work, I was close to figuring out a Rank 2 formation that could make this happen, but this only created a new problem for me to solve. The formation I was designing would require a large wind qi to function, and I would need to find an efficient way of supplying it.

With solid progress on several fronts, my first year with my new clan came to a close, and it was soon time for me to return to the Su Clan’s training compound.