I had to delegate some of the tasks I needed to be done if I wanted to get some of the more pressing matters dealt with before it was too late. I sent Storm out to look for the lost hunters. We had a passing idea of where they should be from the itinerary they had filed. It was standard procedure within the town for any excursion outside of the town's walls to leave a report for the general area they would be visiting and how long they planned on being gone.

I wasn't sure why they had bothered tracking that information before now. Lord Chon would never have wasted resources or men searching for lost or missing people. Maybe the guards took it upon themselves to find volunteers from other hunting groups willing to help out. I had taken a look at the procedures they had in place and decided to keep the structure intact, it would make a great foundation to build a Contribution Hall that the citizenry could make use of.

If I could post gathering and resource quests in the one location Hunters were certain to visit, it would go far in introducing the system to the populace at large. It would also help me distribute some of the massive wealth I had confiscated from Chon, Lyle, and Elis, to say nothing of the cores I had impounded from the warehouse and ship.

I had been spending some of the cores as rewards at Four Element's Contribution Hall, but even that had barely put a dent in one crate of core I possessed. With the agreement Clement had penned for me, I would be getting the labor I needed now, in exchange for access to the Rift. That freed up the cores I had planned on allocating for Four Element's help.

Whoever had been the recipient of this smuggled largess was going to be very angry at finding their supply cut off. Even if they had managed to cultivate other fields of the plant, the number of pods and cores I had confiscated had to be a sizable share of this season's crop.

That was something for Four Element and Patriarch Umbra to worry about now. I hoped my decision to change my affiliation and take up the mantle of roaming cultivator would exclude me from any response meddling with the smuggling operation might engender. My provocation could be laid at the feet of the Sect, hopefully.

I wasn't counting on it. I had been too involved in every aspect of bringing the smuggling ring to a close. But I was sure the Sect would find the place the seedpods were being farmed, eventually. I wasn't sure how I felt about not controlling those fields, but that much wealth in the hands of one cultivator was only asking for trouble.

I did plan to examine the talismans used thoroughly. The talismans served as a warning system when something went wrong. Someone easily created them, just bits of coral with the most basic enchants placed on them that linked the pieces together.

The fact that coral was a living organism, and the pieces that were linked were part of a larger organism, seemed to be the basis for the talisman's success. Somehow, the coral retained a connection across the astral that replaced or supported the physical connection that existed before they farmed the coral.

I spent the rest of the day getting cultivators settled and organized. I had snagged a skilled architect, Bob, who had been languishing within the Sect. He had hoped by transferring to Four Element that they would appreciate his skills and vision. Unfortunately, the Sect found his ideas too unorthodox to implement.

He had shared his drawings, the schematics he had painstakingly crafted with me during his interview. His merging of old-world aesthetics with modernistic applications was intriguing. But it was his depiction for the vision of what my Dojo would look like if I implemented his plans that had sealed the deal for me.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

At first glance, it was hard to understand what he had created. He had blended elements of a pagoda with the natural construction found in a beehive. Octagon cells were linked together to give structure and form to the building.

The honeycomb design allowed him to channel the elements throughout the building naturally. He used a lattice of balconies to create hanging gardens, each designed to be aligned with a specific element. It funneled the energies from these gardens towards the highest point of the building, gathering together at an array placed on the roof that allowed for a harmony of the four elements.

His architectural design replicated artificially what the mountain where Four Element Sect was located did naturally.

He had created five outbuildings instead of four. Each was dedicated to an element to add additional collecting and gathering techniques. The honeycomb design of each room was perfectly suited, the shape working with the arrays that were laced throughout each structure to store energy, much like a real honeycomb would store honey.

The fifth outbuilding was meant to be allocated for spatial elements, but Bob suggested I set it to work with lightning instead. I decided to keep his original idea and mix it with his new suggestion, adapting this fifth building to collect lightning and spatial elements.

The five buildings with the pagoda in the middle formed a pentagram. He had another use for the design. The six buildings would harmonize and meld together to not only form an attack and defensive array, but one that took advantage of the spatial element to empower illusion and space to create combat arenas when needed.

This last tweak to his design he had managed in the weeks we spent traveling from Sect to Xiwang. Once he knew that I planned on holding tournaments, he had turned his mind to make it feasible.

He wasn't an array master, but he had enough practical knowledge to incorporate elements of every profession into his designs. It made no sense for him to draft a building that was beyond the abilities of even cultivators to create.

Bob, the builder, and Moa were placed in charge of construction. I had shown them the general location of where I wanted the Dojo to be created and left it for them to work out the finer details.

The outlying buildings would serve as my version of Profession Hall, Cultivator Hall, Contribution Hall, Combat Hall, and Closed-door Meditation Hall. I would never have the number of members that Four Element Sect had, so it made more sense to combine the professions into one hall.

I was planning on building additional infrastructure for beast taming in tandem with the construction of the Dojo. I wanted a building devoted to the Beast Taming cultivators and their bonded. An area exclusive to that profession.

I wanted a place that was close to the forest, had plenty of access to fields for grazing, and within easy reach of the river.

There was one spot where all three environments intersected. A place that had maintained a slope, even with the changes made when earth aspected cultivators had leveled the plateau. It created a small inclination in the river, enough to make a few white-water rapids before slowing down to merge a few miles downriver with the ocean.

The access to plains, forests, and water would allow a diverse number of beasts to be raised and supported. Not every beast type. Those that resided in mountains, deserts, or swamps would need to be nurtured independently.

Siam had assured me that we could create those environments using an array and illusion. In fact, he possessed an array that replicated a mountain. It required the use of formation flags to be truly realized, but once the formation was activated, there was no way to tell the difference between illusion and reality.

I asked the new cultivators that had chosen arrays and formations as their secondary professions to study the formation Siam shared. I hoped that they could learn to create a place that mimicked desert and swamp.

For those professionals that I had recruited from the Sect, I had them work with Bob and Mao to create the arrays and formations the Dojo would need. I would have liked to have a Master Arrayist on hand to help, but Ming promised me that any problem that he and the others couldn't resolve would be reported instead of hidden or a bastardized solution attempted.

The Sect had the Master's I might need, and Clement had negotiated a deal robust enough that I could call on their help if needed.