Chapter 204 – Life 72, Age 16, Martial Disciple 1

The servant led me out of the residential complex and back to the ornate building I had just left. When I entered, I approached the orb to test my affinities.

As I approached, the elderly man folded his arms across his chest. As he did, I noticed a ring inset with a small shard of white stone. 

Was that white gem a truth stone? Was that how they were verifying people’s answers? If so, I couldn’t imagine that such a small shard would yield great results. The System had claimed that the size of the stone was irrelevant, but how easy would it be to see gradations of gray on a stone less than two millimeters in diameter?

A complete falsehood might be easily detected, but skirting the truth shouldn’t be an issue.

I stopped in front of the elder, and he gave me a pleasant smile, but I could see falseness in it. He was only waiting to figure out if there was any value in being respectful toward me.

“What is your name?”

“Su Fang.”

The sound of the scribe noting this down came from my left.

“Place your hand on the orb and channel your qi into it.”

I casually lifted my right hand and placed it on the orb. Then, concentrating as much as I ever had during one of the tests, I sent what little qi my energy body contained into the orb.

At first, there was just a faint glow in a rainbow of colors, but almost immediately, a dull brown rock appeared in the center of the orb. It brightened once, but that was it.

“Earth affinity. Mid nine-star.” 

The elder’s voice was neutral, but I sensed that most of my ‘potential value’ had just disappeared.

Having studied the rest of the new Disciples, I understood that this affinity placed me near the bottom of the pack. The only ones worse off were those who had been graded as lacking any affinities at all.

However, the elder kept things cordial.

“What can you tell us about the blessing you have received?”

“It allowed me to gain a basic understanding of fighting techniques.”

The elder’s eyes flicked to the ring on his finger as I spoke. When he confirmed the ‘truth’ of my words, he looked back up at me.

“Hmm, that works well with an earth affinity.” He glanced at the servant who was standing behind me. “Very well, give him the Earth Heart Mantra and return him.” 

After bowing to the elder, I followed the servant into the side room and collected my ‘new’ cultivation technique. Then, I was taken back to my small house and was discarded.

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

While I could have shown affinities that would have shamed everyone in the clan, that wasn’t my goal. I was here to suborn their disciples and create my own clan. I needed to be in a position to learn who was salvageable, and I needed to be able to interact freely with those disciples to bring them over to my cause. Also, I couldn’t help but wonder how far I would be able to go in this clan with all the skills I had learned.

Back in my tiny house, I had a couple of decisions to make. What cultivation technique should I use? How quickly should I increase my level?

I did my best to remember back to my early days in the clan. There was a competition at the end of the first month. Was it that the normal disciples hadn’t advanced and the elite disciples had advanced once? Or had the normal disciples advanced once and the elites had advanced twice?

After flipping through my journal, I found the truth. None of the normal disciples other than myself had advanced at all during this first month. That meant that if I wanted to fit in, I couldn’t take even a single step forward.

This seemed… wasteful. If I wasn’t supposed to cultivate in this first month, what was I supposed to do? 

I considered taking a Shadowed Soul pill and teleporting around the clan to stealthily learn what information I could, but I had no interest in any of the clan’s secrets. My concern was more for what kind of person each individual was and how they treated others. I couldn’t learn that through being a mere disinterested observer. I needed to be a participant in their lives.

Another possibility was to make a quick hop over to the Blue Wind Pavilion and start dealing with matters there, but that felt out of place. I doubted this life would last long enough for anything I started in the Pavilion to bear fruit, so it would be best to reserve that journey for when I had a longer life expectancy.

After considering my options, I left my house for a walk around the compound. Since I was here to interact with the other disciples, that was what I should do. However, after more than an hour of wandering, no one left their houses even once. They were all hunkering down to learn to cultivate.

I couldn’t blame them for this. If they didn’t learn, they would likely end up dead, but it did make my task of getting to know them that much harder. 

I thought about forcing my way into one of their homes for a private chat but decided against it. I would let them study in peace and see what came of it.

With nothing else to keep me busy, I began learning the mystical art of refining.

Using a Peak-Yellow metal qi cultivation technique, I was able to break through to Martial Disciple 2 in only a single day. The low density of qi in the Wastes slowed this process down a bit, and it would make recovering any energy I expended far slower, but that was fine. I wasn’t in any rush.

Once my breakthrough was complete, I turned to the System to give my studies a bit of a boost.

“System, increase my comprehension of refining by ten billion credits.”

Purchase confirmed. 853,911,658,560 credits remaining.

Since I didn’t expect to get any large cash injections in the near future, I needed to be a bit thrifty, but ten billion was more than enough to help me learn low-level refining.

I opened my mental library and retrieved Jin’s guide to Rank 1 refining.

According to Jin, there were two primary aspects to refining. Restructuring the base materials and infusing those materials with energy.

The ‘restructuring’ process wasn’t new to me. It was similar to how a formation specialist would restructure a stone. The difference was that while a single monocrystalline stone was ideal for formations, the crystalline structure of a refined item was complex and varied based on which attributes were desired in the final item.

If a bar of iron were entirely formed from a single crystal, it would be far harder than normal, but it would also be incredibly brittle. When formed from a collection of smaller crystals, the hardness of the metal decreased, but so did its brittleness. Therefore, managing the crystalline structure of a metal had an immense impact on its mechanical properties.

This was one of the reasons LiTing had found it difficult to make a weapon that was both durable and deadly. These two attributes required a careful balancing of the mechanical properties of the base materials.

While Jin’s Rank 1 book only covered basic metals such as copper and iron, I could see how these concepts could be translated to stone or even wood. The structure of wood was far different from metal, and it would require an entirely different understanding of material science, but the basic idea of needing to adjust the molecular organization of the material to achieve optimal results would still hold true.

Of course, this was only talking about the basic physical structure of the object. Refining was far more than that. Once a sword was fully forged, it would then need to be infused with energy. This energy would connect through the various grains of the metal to enhance, diminish, or change their normal properties.

With Rank 1 alchemy, all I had needed to do to get started was burn away a few toxins and mix the resulting energies together. From even a cursory glance, I could see that refining would be a far more involved process.

Thankfully, I had time, ample materials, and Jin’s expert knowledge to guide me.

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

During my first week of studying refining, I didn’t make much progress. I spent most of my time just getting a better feel for altering the crystalline structure of metals.

As the end of the week approached, I took out the herbs for a Rank 1 Energy Expulsion Pill and quickly concocted it. I didn’t have an alchemy cauldron as I hadn’t thought about buying a new one after everything in my storage space had been destroyed, but for such a trivial pill, I didn’t need one. I just floated the herbs in the air and quickly condensed a pill. 

I found that metal qi wasn’t nearly as good at destroying toxins as fire qi was, but again, these were low-level herbs. Such details were unimportant.

Once the pill formed, I popped it in my mouth and then stood and headed to the martial arts training yard.

When I arrived, I looked around at the children of the Su Clan. One of them was going to die today. I didn’t know which one it would be, but I knew that our instructor would decide someone needed to die.

I focused on the man in the middle of the training yard. He looked to be in his late 40s, and a quick check showed he was a Martial Master 1 earth qi cultivator. His hair was shorn short, and he wore a faded blue robe with cut-off sleeves to show off his bulging muscles.

Once everyone had arrived, he began our ‘lesson.’

“Quiet! Spread out and circle around.”

He waited in a stiff pose as we followed his orders.

“For the next three months, you will all be undergoing extensive martial training. Every hour of every day you will either be exercising, cultivating, or recovering. After three months, many of you will no longer be members of my clan. If you want any hope of remaining one, you will push yourself to do your best at every moment. If you do not want to be one, you will still push to do your best at every moment, because if you don’t, the moment you leave this place you will learn what it’s like to live as a commoner. Basic martial skills are a necessity.”

His eyes roamed across everyone as he gave us all a disgusted look. I could feel a deep hatred radiating from him. He didn’t want to be an instructor, and he didn’t want to spend time around children.

“This training won’t just be hard. It will be deadly. If you relax for even a moment, you might find out that it was your last.” He smirked and looked around the circle. “Now, time for a little demonstration. Do we have any volunteers?”

Everyone froze. No one wanted to be the first to offer themselves up for a beating. 

As I looked around, I knew someone would be selected as the day’s sacrifice. Should I step in and stop it? Could I?

He was a Martial Master 1, but his foundations were terrible. With the knowledge and experience I possessed, I might be able to defeat him. This likely wouldn’t help my chances of surviving the clan’s tests and trials, but it might give me a better in with the disciples I was trying to connect with.

The bastard didn’t wait for me to make a decision.

“Hmpf, not a single person brave enough to even demonstrate what they know. Fine. You! Step forward and show me something.”

He pointed at a young man to my left. A quick check of my journal showed that he was Su Yan. No affinity detected, no known blessing.

The instructor wasn’t kind to poor Yan. He used an earth qi technique to shove the boy forward onto the training yard. Then, he proceeded to torture him. It was almost a relief when the boy finally died.

“This is your lesson for today. In this training, slacking for even a moment means death!” He looked around at us, and I could feel he was hoping someone would step out of line. “Now, pair up and fight. I want to see if any of you have any possibility of being worthy of my clan in the future.”

Slowly the crowd started to move as people paired off. My neighbor and I nodded at each other and moved into position to begin sparring. As we did, I didn’t pay much attention to my opponent. I kept my focus on the groups surrounding us so that I could study everyone else’s skill level.

Suddenly, I sensed a build up of earth qi on the other side of the training yard. A quick glance proved that it was the instructor, and he was looking at me with deadly intent.

The moment he caught eye, he screamed at me. “What the hell are you doing?”

Then, he punched out and sent a wave of earth qi hurtling toward me and my partner from the other side of the training yard.

I shoved my opponent sharply and then jumped backward, preventing either of us from being hit by the blast.

“What was that!? I told you to fight, not—”

The instructor had instinctively continued his tirade, but when he saw both of us completely uninjured, his words cut off. A wave of emotions roiled through him, anger, confusion, and a tinge of resentment, but he didn’t strike at us again.

“Focus on sparring.”

With that, he snorted and turned away.