Making my new Burning Blizzard team accumulate Providence proved harder than I had expected.

I started by using a simple method, by trying to let them replicate the gardening process. Unfortunately, it proved completely useless. Low-level spiritual plants proved useless to trigger the effect, and, unlike Forests Dance, their essence wasn't geared to boost plant growth.

Which meant I needed to be more creative. I decided to pick some volunteers and spread them among the refugees so that they could do some good deeds, from dealing with the evil bandits to more ordinary activities like distributing food.

"I'm looking for volunteers for a mission that might end up in your deaths," I shouted once I arrived at the largest room at their underground training base.

All of them took a step forward, looking excited at the prospect.

During the month, I had added many new rooms to the base to handle the new recruits, their numbers surpassing thirty thousand, and almost ten thousand of them already in the Blood Essence realm.

I had to be more selective in their recruitment, relying only on the secret guard of the capital.

With the spiritual pillar recovered, I didn't have to spend my time supervising their training directly. The spiritual pillar was strong enough to maintain the purity of the essence, especially with the first batch of trainees taking my role as the trainers. Under their guidance, the new team of martial artists was growing.

Watching them gather, I couldn't help but feel impressed and scared in equal measure. Just a few months ago, when I faced two disciples of Tiger Fist, I had no choice but to run away desperately. Now, one order from me, and the army in front of me could easily subjugate the whole mortal domain and the billions of people that lived here.

Naturally, assuming no intervention from the cultivators. While they were strong enough to deal with the ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivators as long as they acted as a team, I didn't fancy their chances against a Golden Core cultivator.

Still, watching their excitement as I declared the potential risk of death, I couldn't help but feel they would still follow my orders against such an opponent. "I don't want anyone to feel obligated. It's a dangerous mission, and if you get caught by the cultivators, you might have to kill yourself rather than be traced back here," I warned. "Your martial arts are top secret, and revealing it to the cultivators means the destruction of your homeland."

It was not an empty warning. Everything I had seen about the sects showed that they wanted to be the only source of high-end power. While their main method of doing so was limiting the number of Foundation Establishment pills available through their monopoly, there was no reason they wouldn't extend it to the Blood Essence realm.

Everdawn Empire's fate was a good example of how they dealt with it.

The warning didn't stop them. "Alright," I said even as I picked a thousand warriors from them, all in Blood Essence Realm, and dismissed the rest.

Then, I went over to their mission in great detail, which could be summarized as helping people while following the prevailing cultural norms. Not bullying the weak, helping the poor, and helping the refugees while dealing with objectively evil people.

All while keeping things as calm as possible.

Once that was done, I went through the equipment I had created for them, all mass-produced thanks to my formations. A lot of essence pills, a few alchemical healing pills, several defensive talismans that could be activated by a martial artist, and, one pseudo-suicide pill.

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It wouldn't have killed them, but destroyed their cultivation and put them into suspended animation only a great alchemical master could wake them up, which would also send me a signal so I could extract them.

While I had put the idea of suicide as a possibility, I wanted to do everything I could to actually prevent it. I wanted it to be just a precaution rather than a reality.

Just making a poison pill that would have destroyed their bodies was much easier, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. I felt responsible.

Once it was done, I blindfolded them before I started deploying them in various refugee camps in teams of ten operators, not neglecting to set some detection formation in their area of operation to preemptively react to the presence of any Foundation Establishment cultivator.

As an added benefit, it recorded their actions in general terms, which allowed me to track the speed the Providence gathered based on their actions.

The first thing I noticed was that Providence was very biased toward killing. Preventing an unethical situation, whether it was killing, robbing, or another evil act according to common culture, gained next to no feedback from the world, while dealing with them permanently triggered a response in Providence.

I was glad that I had waited until my Alchemy had reached Perfection before I started the experiment, as it allowed me to understand exactly what I was dealing with.

As, interestingly, not all situations were equal from the perspective of the Heavens. It had some surprising results. For example, if the one doing evil acts was a government official, the threshold for being treated as evil was far higher than I had expected. Sometimes, even when they were committing extremely evil acts like forcing people to starve through excessive taxation, the world didn't count them as evil, and dealing with them actually resulted in a loss of providence.

I would have assumed it was about the act of taxation being too subtle to be caught by the Heavens compared to killing, but there was evidence to the contrary as well. The threshold for the merchants was just as warped, but in the opposite direction. Just the act of selling the grain expensively was enough to make their punishment a 'just' act from the Providence perspective, and actually hoarding to the point of causing starvation had been treated even more evil than banditry.

In a way, it fitted with the prevailing cultural zeitgeist of the world, where the rulers were treated as divinely ordained, the government officials were treated as elite based on their links, and merchants had been treated as slightly better than parasites culturally.

A weird sense of priority that felt foreign to me. Not that I was exactly a defender of Capitalism, but from my perspective, monarchy wasn't any better. It not only took people's money, but also lives. It was something interesting, one that I would have loved to delve deeper into if I had time, but I had other, more urgent tasks.

So, I kept my efforts to understand the Providence practical. I stayed at the Burning Blizzard base most of my time, observing the Providence-farming humanitarian efforts from a distance through formations while I focused my attention on the spiritual pillar, trying to understand how it reacted with Providence.

It wasn't as straightforward as I wanted it to be. I was able to understand how providence affected the artificial trees I used as a totem, but that was mostly because of the alchemical nature of the trees. I was competent when it came to alchemy, and the fact that I was the one who designed the tree allowed me to understand it even better.

I didn't have the same advantage for the drawing on the wall. While I had used the time to upgrade my painting skills to catch up with my calligraphy, the benefit of an ordinary skill was limited. Comparatively, my talisman knowledge helped me to understand what was going on more.

Unfortunately, that understanding was limited to Qi aspects only, and the Providence part was simply too complicated. I could barely detect the direction of the Providence thanks to my alchemy. Unlike the alchemical trees, it didn't gather around the Symbol and absorbed passively. A small part of it was devoured directly by the Symbol, almost like an active process, getting stronger in the process.

Meanwhile, the majority disappeared deeper into the mist as a tight beam. It took a lot of formation from me, and I needed to stretch my Alchemy knowledge, but somehow, I was able to track the general direction of it.

It was going deeper into the mist, farther than I could simply move, so I started creating several checkpoints on the way. Finally, I had a direction, but creating a line of formations that would allow me to reach that direction would take a while.

Meanwhile, I needed to do something else.

And, since I was starting to struggle due to a lack of advanced knowledge, I decided to try and address that.

A visit to the fake mystic land was in order.