Chapter 220 – Life 73, Age 32, Martial Grandmaster Peak

During my time in the Verdant Fields Sect, I did a bit of research on the Wastes. As I had learned long ago, there were only three major powers in this part of the world: The Su Clan, The Twin Mountains Sect, and the Verdant Fields Sect. However, what came as a surprise was that the Wastes appeared to possess five special locations where children were born with higher affinities than normal for this part of the world.

The first was Dragon Gate City. As I had noted in previous observations, Disciples in the Su Clan tended to have unusually high earth affinities. While Disciples with seven-star affinities might not be too unusual anywhere else, such affinities were notable in the Wastes, and the Su Clan consistently produced two or three new Disciples with just such an affinity nearly every year.

Next were the areas surrounding the two sects. Those born around the Twin Mountains Sect had surprisingly high fire affinities, and those born around the Verdant Fields Sect tended to have better than average wood affinities. As I had seen evidence of essence harvesting during my time in the Twin Mountains Sect, this wasn’t entirely surprising, but it was notable.

The fourth location that caught my attention was the Rosehill Hot Springs. Nearly every metal cultivator in the Su Clan was born in this area. With the low number of births in the area, I didn’t have a large sample size to work with, but the trend was unmistakable.

This was the reason I had initially been interested in founding my new clan there. With my formations, we might not need to be as reliant on innate affinities as other clans, but being located in a place that had an abundance of metal essence would only be a benefit to us. Not only would our children be born with higher natural affinities, but our Metal Essence Gathering Formations would also be far more effective.

Centering the clan around the Rosehill Hot Springs would allow us to create a large number of refiners with minimal effort. While the outside world might fear and persecute refiners, there was little that anyone would be able to do to me or those I wanted to protect while we remained within the Wastes. With no Rulers to bother us, we could quickly become the most influential power in the region and create a domineering refiner lineage.

However, after much consideration, I eventually decided to abandon this plan.

Rosehill Hot Springs was too open. I didn’t expect the Su Clan or any of the other powers in and around the Wastes to play nice with us, so we needed to establish ourselves in a location where we could build our strength in secret.

This wasn’t because I was afraid of losing my life. I wasn’t at all worried about anyone breaking through my defensive formations and attacking my clan directly. Instead, I was more worried about the daily lives of my clan members. I wanted them to feel like they were free to go outside and explore the world if they wanted to. If the location of our clan was too public, then they would be trapped inside my defensive formations until they were powerful enough to defend themselves against Grandmasters.

Therefore, I chose to settle in the final of the five special locations that I had identified: Mount Jiang.

Mount Jiang was located in the middle of a large peat bog with few permanent towns or villages anywhere nearby. Instead, the area was rife with small tent cities that were little more than bandit camps. The entire area around Mount Jiang was well-known as an exceptional place to gather wild herbs, and that drew Masters and Grandmasters from all the surrounding areas who wanted to fight for natural treasures, and this drew thieves looking to steal them.

If we centered the clan around Mount Jiang, these cultivators would function as a shield to hide us from our enemies, there would be countless opponents for our clan members to temper themselves in combat against outsiders, and our children would gain the benefits of living in a region with elevated levels of water essence.

When compared against the Rosehill Hot Springs, Mount Jiang was the superior option by far.

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To reach the Rosehill Hot Springs, we had ridden west from Dragon Gate City for four hours. If we had ridden southeasterly instead, it would have taken us roughly five hours to reach Mount Jiang. That meant I was about nine hours away from my final destination. However, that would only have been true if I were planning to ride in a carriage pulled by Rank 3 Wind Horses. Alone and on foot, it would take me far longer to reach my destination.

I could have chartered another carriage to take me there, but the entire point of coming to Rosehill Hot Springs in the first place was to hide the location of my base from not only the Su Clan but also all the other powers invested in the area. Using the System to change my appearance might have been enough to hide my tracks, but I felt that any carriage being charted from Rosehill to Mount Jiang immediately after what I did to the Su Clan’s palace would be suspicious.

I considered purchasing a teleport from the System, but the price of teleportation as a Grandmaster was a bit high. While it was still well within my current means, it was a bit more than what I was willing to casually spend without good cause. 

Left with no other option, I focused my qi into my legs and started running.

Where possible, I used movement techniques to speed my passage, but there weren’t many good movement techniques that used wood qi in my library. The ones I did have were mainly focused on helping me to move through forested areas faster than normal. 

So instead of relying on techniques, I relied on pills.

I used a combination of Rank 3 and 4 pills to shorten my journey dramatically. Restoration Pills and Stamina Pills to keep me energized, and Swift Movement Pills to speed me on my way. I didn’t have many of these Swift Movement Pills since they required rare wind-based herbs to concoct, and their effects only lasted for a few brief hours, but using them allowed me to make the journey to Mount Jiang in only two and a half days.

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Mount Jiang was a lonely mountain that appeared to be formed from a single dark blue stone. Little vegetation grew on its steep slopes, but its crown was a jagged plateau that held a small copse of thin, scraggly trees.

Around the base of the mountain were large mounds of peat covered in thick vegetation and dense forests. These peat mounds were in turn surrounded by a large, shallow lake. The banks of the lake were formed from more mounds of peat covered in trees and grasses.

To avoid destroying a natural ecosystem that was known for producing high-quality Rank 3 herbs, no structures had been built anywhere in the vicinity of Mount Jiang. There were a few scattered encampments in the area, but the closest village was several miles away.

The quality of the herbs that grew here was a product of both the energies present in the environment and the high quality of the peat that they grew in. As such, while there were always many Masters and Grandmasters roaming the area, few if any would ever venture to the peak of Mount Jiang. The ground there was far too rocky to grow quality plants, so there was simply never any reason to go up there. This made it the perfect place to establish my clan.

Wearing cheap robes allowed me to not stand out as I moved about the area, but after crossing the lake and approaching the base of the mountain, I found a secluded spot and consumed a Shadowed Soul Pill to disappear from sight. Then, I made my way up the mountain.

Mount Jiang didn’t have any ‘slopes.’ Instead, the sides of the mountain were composed of nothing but a series of near-vertical cliff faces. If I were still an earth cultivator, this wouldn’t have posed much of a challenge. I could have easily shaped the rock of the mountain into a stairway and simply walked up the mountain. However, as a wood cultivator, I didn’t have much to help my climb that wouldn’t have been far too noticeable.

With the strength of a Grandmaster, I was able to empower my legs with sufficient qi to leap up to ledges two dozen meters in the air, and this assisted my ascent, but there were still a few spots where I needed to slowly pull myself up the mountain on arm length at a time.

When I finally reached the wide plateau that was the top of the mountain, I was greeted by both an amazing view of the surrounding landscape and the slightly elevated qi levels present at higher altitudes.

This location provided me with a sense of security and seclusion that had not been present in the Rosehill Hot Springs. However, as soon as we started constructing a large building complex up here, we would quickly attract unwanted attention from the cultivators who hunted around these parts.

To stop this from becoming a problem, I needed to establish a defensive grand formation. It needed to be able to protect us from any number of Masters and Grandmasters, but it also needed an illusion component that would prevent anyone from even knowing we were up here in the first place.

Making a decent defensive formation wouldn’t have been any problem for me. The blueschist of the mountain was more than good enough to serve as the base for a Rank 3 formation. By strategically placing a few formation nodes made from high-grade stone, I would easily be able to create a solid Rank 4 shielding formation. However, once again, I ran into the problem of not being adept with illusions.

I might be able to create a good enough illusion to fool some people, but there was no way I would be able to create one good enough to fool every single Grandmaster who visited this place. We needed a formation beyond my abilities, and there was only one easy way to acquire it without anyone knowing about it.

“System, I would like to purchase a grand formation. It needs to cover this entire mountain, and it needs to be composed solely of formation plates and nodes that can be deactivated, removed, and then later placed back into position and reactivated. I want it to be a Rank 4 formation that no number of cultivators below the level of Martial Lord would be able to damage in the slightest.

“It needs to be a combination defensive and illusion formation that is designed in such a way that anyone without an appropriate formation key will continue to see the mountain as it stands today. When a cultivator approaches the mountain, no matter how close they get, even if they are touching it, I want them to see the mountain as it stands right now. Any structures we build on top of it need to be completely hidden from anyone without an appropriate formation key.”

After that, I detailed exactly how I wanted the formation keys to work. I wanted the formation to have different access levels for different members of the clan so that certain areas would be accessible to everyone, and certain areas would only be accessible to the clan elders or the like. I also wanted a series of safeguards put in place so that we wouldn’t need to worry about these formation keys being lost or stolen.

“How much would something like that cost.?”

Calculating… Cost 300 million credits.

The cost was a bit high from a Rank 4 formation, but not exorbitantly so, and I would much rather spend credits than spend the time that would be needed to design and construct such a formation myself.

“Purchase.”

Purchase confirmed. 743,650,801,897 credits remaining.

The plateau that formed the crown of Mount Jiang was somewhat jagged, with the western edge rising 20 or 30 meters above the rest of the peak. Following my guidance, the System created the main node of the formation on top of this outcropping. This was where I planned to build my home in the near future, and placing the main node inside it would ensure the node’s protection.

Scanning the rest of the mountain, I found several additional formation nodes had appeared at regular intervals around both the crown of the mountain and its base. Even if over half of these were somehow destroyed, the formation should remain functional.

I took out the jade token that had appeared in my System storage and attached it to my waist. This was the master key for the formation and gave me complete control over it. After much thought, I had chosen to have the System inscribe it with the character for ‘ancestor’ since while this token would always remain with me, I wouldn’t necessarily want to remain the active Patriarch of the clan in the future.

After spending a solid two hours appraising the formation, I took out five blank jade tokens and placed them on top of the main formation node. An instant later, the character for ‘outer’ appeared on them. For now, these badges would grant full access to anywhere on the mountain except the areas immediately surrounding the formation nodes. That would change in the future, but until the clan was more established, there was little reason to set up any protected areas.

With everything now in place, I took my five Disciples out of my storage space and placed them down on the ground in front of me. Starting with Liang, I drew a drop of blood from each Disciple and smeared it onto a jade token, binding the token to the Disciple and preventing the token from working as a formation key for anyone else.

Then, I placed a pill into each of their mouths and sent a surge of qi into their bodies to wake them all up at the same time.

As they sat up, their eyes roamed around the open landscape surrounding us. When they had fallen unconscious, they had been in the middle of a prosperous resort town, and now they were on top of a mountain in the middle of the wilderness.

I could tell they wanted to ask what had happened, but I didn’t give them the chance. Once everyone was awake and on their feet, I clapped my hands to get their attention.

“Welcome to your new home. This is where we will build our clan. It’s time for you all to get to work.”