Sage studied hard. He was of course interrupted a few times to create more devices, but otherwise he kept to a strict schedule. Every morning he would wake at dawn and start training, practicing his techniques. A few hours later, when the sun was at its highest, he would have breakfast and then work on his own Cultivation, performing Connecting Heaven and Earth to increase his strength. In the afternoon, he’d eat lunch and then work with his insects. Experimenting with different mutations and breeding combinations. When evening rolled around, Sage had dinner before reading books and scrolls until midnight.

From the rate he was going, he would likely finish reading all the books within a year or two, but he had to change his plans given some of the knowledge he ran into. It had to do with one of the things that Sage thought nobody knew much about. Spiritual Roots. Sage had heard them talked about before and the many Sects he tried to get recruited to had mentioned them off-hand, but nobody ever spoke any concrete details. Sage only ever learned that those with ‘heavenly spiritual roots’ were blessed by the heavens and could train many times faster than those that weren’t. In the end, each Sect merely tested a person’s bone age and their level of cultivation. They also factored in the time they started cultivation and then made guesses about how great their spiritual roots were from there.

Sage was engrossed in this new book as it actually had more information then he’d ever heard. It was likely, this sort of knowledge was something most people only ever got second hand now, which made Sage ecstatic to read it from the source. It turns out ‘Spiritual Roots’ are a term used to refer to a person’s ability to sense and perceive the energy of the world. The better the roots, the greater their perception and in turn their ability to affect energy. ‘Spiritual Roots’ turned out to just be a sort of technical term for measuring a person’s innate talent. It also encompassed the innate element of a person’s Qi. In most cases the ‘innate element’ was merely an indicator that their spiritual roots were more highly tuned to a particular type of elemental energy which then made it easier for them to manipulate and sense that type of energy. There were rare cases in which people were born with special body types that were the exception, but for the most part anyone could use any element, it was just many times harder than what their innate affinities matched up with.

While this knowledge might seem like a bit of meaningless semantics, to Sage it was very important. It took him one step closer to knowing the source of the so called ‘talent’. If the spiritual roots are a part of the body that he could find, that means he could try and alter them. If he could alter his spiritual roots he could transform from a person with mediocre talent and a limited future into something more. Now that he knew it had to do with the perception of energy that was a huge clue to the true source. While it may have been possible to deduce this in the past, it was also possible he could take a wrong path and waste many years studying a false lead. Now that he had a pretty conclusive pointer in the right direction it was possible for him to start experimenting.

Sage altered his schedule, cutting his reading time in half and using it to start experimenting in the search of spiritual roots. He’d also finished reading Forging the Forest and Introduction to Plant Cultivation. Along with them came bad news. The seed he’d obtained with much effort from the Demonic Plant back in that Solarium was not properly germinated and so it would never sprout. It was still a valuable resource, so Sage sold it off, but it put a halt to his pursuit of Gardening for now. The book was only an introduction, so it was only the bare basics of growing, taming and commanding a Demonic Plant in simple manners. It was similar to the Beast Taming manuals that were used to rear mounts, in that they were very limited in scope and the resulting beasts or plants wouldn’t be capable of anything complicated.

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Forging the Forest on the other hand, was quite useful. It was a method to rapidly shape and grow trees and bushes, along with another method to embed arrays within them while they grew. In this manner, Magical Tools could be grown, rather than forged or carved out of rare materials. It was quite an interesting alternative to normal Smithing and Sage was happy to start experimenting in his yard. It turned out that an Arborist could produce magical tools far cheaper than a Smith could, but at the same time they had to put in far more effort and time instead. They still consumed rare materials, feeding them to their plants as special nutrients, but it was far less than a normal Smith would use for a similar magical device. It seemed to come down to a matter of labor versus materials. Sage was eager to include it into his repertoire, but it’s just too bad that it was also a sort of introductory book for Arborists. He could only gain a basic grasp of the techniques and didn’t have any guidance on advanced materials and nutrient supports. At best, he could grow some low level replacement materials to use with Smithing, or craft some simple devices.

Barely an apprentice Arborist or Gardener, Sage wasn’t depressed. Instead he was excited. The concepts used by an Arborist weren’t so useful on their own for him, but they were actually quite inspirational as paths of research for his Insects. As the plants grew array inscriptions were inlaid in them in special ways that when the plant finally reached its planned size and shape the array symbols would naturally align into perfect array formations. In this way very complicated arrays could be made. Each symbol could have more time and effort focused on them, since the whole formation would end up taking months to complete when the plant finished growing.

A Smith was limited to adding arrays throughout their forging time. Once their weapon finished cooling down the time to add arrays was no longer ripe. Arrays added after that time were actually more like formation plates, merely external carvings that greatly relied on the weapons durability. A highly skilled Smith would spend days or even weeks forging a single item, but there was still a limit to their stamina and energy reserves. Arborists on the other hand could spend weeks, months, or even years creating a product. They would grow a whole garden full of weapons or tools, spending a few minutes a day on each one. It took far longer, but they incorporated far more powerful and complicated array formations in order to make up for the difference in expensive materials.

Sage included a few new avenues of study into his research and also picked out a set of weapon techniques to make up for his deficiencies in direct combat. Although it was somewhat of an unusual choice, it was quite in line with his usual way of handling things. He also picked out a few wrestling and grappling techniques and asked Yuan Hu over to help him practice them. After Sage learned the first level of a dozen of them, he actually deactivated his Human Seal and began to practice them along with his serpentine lower half, spending an hour a day training with one or the other of his friends and then treating them to lunch afterwards.

Time passed. The businesses started to prosper and expand, transforming from a drain on their time and resources into a source of income. Sage made progress in many areas, even making time for research on the materials he brought back from the Hidden Domain, and studying the techniques used to create the weapons and clothing from the Soul Taming Abode. As their popularity increased, Sage finally made a deal with the Sect to outsource production of the magical devices. With the Palace of Prosperity and Movie Troupe as a successful example, the Sect used it’s massive influence to spread the new devices to all the neighboring provinces and even further beyond.

It wasn’t exactly a massive source of income, but it was a more efficient use of manpower. Sage got Peak Master Zhen to get him an audience with the Blacksmithing Hall and the point that finally brought them over was that the devices could be constructed by Blacksmithing apprentices. Normally, apprentices were only used to forge arrows, and bolts. They could also do other things like horseshoes or weapons, but those were only done in small volume. Anyone who could afford a magical weapon would want it created by a true smith, so apprentices were forced to make high volume consumables. While Sage’s devices weren’t consumables, they were very simple and as new and popular items there would be a need for many of them. Also, all but the Movie Projector and Movie Sphere could be built with simple materials which made them extremely cheap and good for practice.

Time to put that money to use.