Chapter 223 – Life 73, Age 32, Martial Grandmaster Peak

After leaving the Affinity Hall, I moved to a location roughly a dozen meters away and started building a new Technique Hall. However, as I worked, I kept all my focus on what was happening inside the Affinity Hall. I was certain the Disciples were unaware of how easily I could detect what was happening in there, so I expected the behavior to be a bit more genuine than when I was in the room with them.

Shortly after I left, Liang, who had been deep in thought, lifted his head and started walking toward the Lightning Essence Gathering Formation.

Mo moved to block him. “What are you doing? Weren’t you listening when the Patriarch said that was a bad idea?”

Liang ground his teeth together. “The Patriarch promised me I could learn to control lightning. Then, he forced me to push dirt around for three months. I’m done with that. I am going to learn to control lightning!”

“Liang–”

Liang was no longer listening. He walked forward and pushed Mo to the side.

Mo could have resisted this. He was a Martial Disciple 7, and Liang had just had his cultivation base wiped clean. Mo could have stopped Liang, but he didn’t. He turned away and gave up on trying to talk sense into the other boy.

To the side, ShouLi was biting her lower lip in thought.

“I’m supposed to help these fellow clan members, right?”

Her mutterings were barely audible. Staring at Liang, she let out a soft snort and straightened her back.

Just before Liang reached the formation plate, she rushed forward and tugged on his arm.

“Liang…”

He tried to pull free, but unlike Mo, ShouLi didn’t allow him to escape her grasp.

“Liang, look at me.”

He turned to face her. “What?”

She looked up at him with wide eyes and pouting lips.

“Liang, won’t you at least talk to us before making such a big decision? I’ve never had a chance to use these formations before. Can’t you tell me what it’s like first? Please?”

“I… I…”

ShouLi’s puppy dog eyes instantly turned Liang into a puddle of goo. 

The moment Liang gave up on resisting, ShouLi took the hand she had been using to hold him in place, looped it through his arm, and carefully pulled him back to where the other Disciple were standing and watching the scene. 

While patting Liang’s arm, ShouLi started talking with a somewhat affected voice. 

“First Disciple Liang, please, tell us about how we can raise our affinities.”

“Uh… Right…” His cheeks turned a shade redder. “You… You just need to sit down on the plate and your affinities will go up…”

ShouLi gave him a bright smile. “Oh? How long does it take? I only have two hours in here. How high can that raise my affinities?”

“This…”

Mo stepped up to help him out. “Liang has had eight hours on the formation. He was able to raise his earth affinity to low nine-star after about half an hour. Improving it to mid nine-star took another hour and a half. Since then, he’s spent all his time on the lightning formation, but his lightning affinity hasn’t increased at all.”

Liang winced at this. “Just a little more. I can feel it. Just a little more is all I need.”

ShouLi patted his arm playfully. “Of course.” 

Then, she turned to Mo. “What about you?”

“My earth affinity didn’t increase at all until after a full three hours. I’ve already used up another four hours since then, but it still hasn’t improved any further.”

“So, it takes longer the higher your affinity is?”

Mo shook his head. “Yes, but no. I started with zero affinities, the same as Liang. It seems to take longer the higher your affinity is, but it also just seems to be different for different people.”

I had already made several mistakes with this group, and this conversation highlighted yet another one. It didn’t matter to me, personally, whether they had a nine-star, a seven-star, or even a one-star affinity. Their affinities wouldn’t change how I treated them, and I planned to give everyone equal access to resources regardless of their affinities. So, to me, there wasn’t much value in retesting everyone to find out what their true affinities actually were.

However, while their affinities didn’t matter to me, I was asking them to make important decisions about which affinities to raise and which techniques to cultivate. Without a solid understanding of their current affinities, making informed choices in these matters was impossible.

I also felt that I needed to provide them with what little information I could about how long it would take them to raise different affinities. This was a bit difficult since exact times would fluctuate with ambient essence levels. For example, water essence should be more abundant here, so water affinities should rise faster than any other element. On the flip side, lightning essence seemed scarcer than normal, so it might take even longer than I would normally expect.

Even if I couldn’t give them any solid information on how times would vary between different elements, I could at least tell them what to expect at different affinity levels. The cost of purchasing affinities through the System had to be at least partially connected to the amount of essence required. Even if there were other factors, I could provide these cost ratios to give them an idea of what to expect.

I needed to fix this mistake, and I wanted to do so before anyone used their limited time in the Affinity Hall in a way that they might later regret. However, I didn’t feel that I could just run over there and explain things directly. That would indicate that I had been listening in on their private conversations. So, I did the only thing I could think to do.

Using the network of roots that I had established under the Affinity Hall, I sent a bust of qi into each of the Essence Gathering Formations, disabling them.

None of the Disciples noticed this, and their conversation continued unabated. 

Eventually, GuiMing decided to try out the earth formation. When he sat down on it and nothing happened, everyone thought he had just done something wrong. Others tried, and ShouLi even tried using the water formation, but nothing they did worked. 

After a few more minutes, they came to look for me.

“Yes, the formations are disabled for now. I want you all to go back home and carefully think about your decisions. Then, come back here at noon tomorrow. The Technique Hall will be ready by then, and I will offer each of you the opportunity to switch to any cultivation technique you desire. After tomorrow, you will only be allowed to change techniques upon reaching Peak Disciple, so think carefully about your decision.”

As they left, everyone looked a bit disappointed. I couldn’t really blame them, but I felt that it was better for them to leave disappointed than for them to make a costly mistake.

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

I had only given myself a single day to upgrade the Affinity Hall and construct a Technique Hall. I had several ideas for how I wanted these halls to function, and one day was nowhere near enough time to make my vision into a reality.

This was mostly because I wanted to integrate a multitude of complex formations into both halls to make the process of using them more intuitive and streamlined. At the moment, I had to manually keep track of how much time each person was allowed to spend in the Affinity Hall and which techniques they were allowed to study. With only five Disciples, this wasn’t much of a problem, but as the clan grew, this task would quickly become impossible.

Therefore, I wanted to use formations to automate the entire process. The formation guides I had gotten in the Nine Rivers Sect included references for some of my ideas, but it would take time to find and understand these diagrams. Anything not included in these guides would require countless hours of research.

I was certain that with my current knowledge, I could figure out a way to accomplish everything I wanted, but how much time was I willing to spend researching and designing these formations? I wanted to focus on studying herbalism and learning to create a habitable environment within my storage space. Researching formations to help train Disciples felt like it would be nothing but a distraction.

After a bit of soul searching, I decided to concentrate my efforts on what was important to me and to take the quick and easy route with everything else.

“System, I would like to make a series of purchases. First, I want to upgrade the defensive formation surrounding the mountain to include a variety of features common to the grand formations that surround most sects. Most importantly, it needs to be able to keep track of how many contribution points a person has. Set everyone’s current points to zero and give me a way to change these values at my discretion.”

I then added a couple of additional features common to sect-protecting formations that I thought might come in handy.

Cost 150 million credits.

I took an affinity testing orb out of my storage space.

“Second, I want a pedestal in the Affinity Hall where I can place this orb, and I want a formation within that pedestal that will inject the orb with qi so that it always displays a person’s true affinities. If it makes it cheaper, the orb only needs to show the five basic and four secondary affinities. It also only needs to work on cultivators below the level of Martial Lord.”

Cost 10 million credits.

“Next, I want to purchase a formation for assessing a person’s qi purity. First, it needs to track a person’s cultivation level and store that information in the upgraded sect-protecting formation. Then, whenever someone advances, I want them to be able to come to this formation and have it check the quality of their breakthrough. 

“If they advanced with 100% pure qi, they should be awarded 60 contribution points, with lower levels of purity rewarding lower amounts of points. 54 points for 90% purity, 48 points for 80% purity, and so on.”

I then went ahead and added a couple of security features to prevent fraud. I didn’t want anyone dispersing their cultivation and recultivating the same technique just to rack up points, after all.

Cost 50 million credits.

“Finally, integrate the Essence Gathering Formations into the new sect-protecting formation. These formations should only activate if a person has sufficient contribution points, and each minute they remain in a formation, one point should be deducted from their account.”

Cost 5 million credits.

“Purchase all of that.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 215 million credits. 743,435,801,897 credits remaining.

I was certain there were loopholes I was missing and that things needed to be refined further, but this should be good enough for now. So, with the Affinity Hall taken care of, I turned my focus to the Technique Hall.

Using the same methods I had employed when building the Affinity Hall, I constructed another basic one-room building. In the future, I would want to have a place large enough to store every cultivation and martial technique I had gathered over the years, but for now, this was sufficient.

I took out the simple bookcase I had used in the Su Clan’s training compound and placed it in the center of the building. This bookcase still contained all the same techniques that it possessed while we were in the training compound, 35 different scrolls and a single memory orb.

Liang’s progress with the Earth Heart Mantra proved that my idea of using a memory orb to train cultivators was viable, but how far could I take it? If someone learned all the basics through memory orbs, would it hurt their future potential? If, say, a person learned everything from Rank 1 to 5 from memory orbs, would they be incapable of learning Rank 6 techniques?

This was a slightly worrying possibility, but this was the perfect group to test things out on. It would be a long time before anyone in my new clan was able to earn karmic energy and ascend to Martial Lord, so it wouldn’t make much of a difference if learning everything through memory orbs limited their future potential.

I picked up the Low-Yellow Rank 1 fire cultivation technique from the bookshelf and pulled a memory orb out of my storage space.

“System, how much would it cost to create memories inside this orb for this technique equivalent to what I did for the Earth heart mantra.”

Cost 1,000 credits.

“How much would it cost to instead create detailed memories of everything a person should know to cultivate this technique properly? These memories only need to extend to the limits of my current knowledge, but they should include things such as closing acupoints to limit the effects of cultivation madness.”

Cost 10,000 credits.

I picked up a Mid-Yellow technique.

“What about creating such memories for this one?”

Cost 25,000 credits.

Making my choice, I laid out 36 memory orbs on the ground.

“System, create detailed memories for each of the techniques in the bookcase and store them in these orbs.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1,440,000 credits. 743,434,361,897 credits remaining.

After replacing all the scrolls with their corresponding orbs, I made one last purchase to protect my investment and ensure the Disciples could only access the techniques they were supposed to have access to.

Purchase confirmed. Cost 8 million credits. 743,426,361,897 credits remaining.