Sage was unconcerned with the many rumors going around about him. The Holy Flame Sect had exams for their Professions every season which was more than enough time for Sage to copy down the whole library for the tier he was at and then get some practice with each Profession. Where others spent years practicing, Sage seamlessly advanced his professions from one star to three stars, passing every exam in a single season. Prior to this time, he had five one star Professions: Alchemist, Chef, Butcher, Farmer, and Hunter. After the first season he added Astrologer, Doctor, Minster, Talisman Master, Appraiser, Prospector, and Scribe.
He took the exams to raise these twelve professions to two stars at the same time, matching them to the same level as his Weaver badge. Then a season later he took thirteen exams and raised them all to three stars to match his Blacksmith, Tailor, and Tamer badges. During this time, he had meetings with the few people in the Sect that still remembered him. Mainly his three old roommates as well as Peak Master Zhen, Peak Master Lupeng, and also a few people from the Steam Army. Pan Shun and his colleagues seemed to be less interested in speaking to him and were far more interested in finding out if he had any new innovations.
Sage wasn’t stingy and after consulting with some of the best business people on the Inner World, he shared with them the Lang Clan’s Banyan Building technique. While he called it a technique, it was actually a whole suite of techniques that had been carefully connected together into a cohesive whole. It could be used to build structures very rapidly and included the methods to grow Utili-Trees, Water Trees, and also the new Thermo-Flowers. The Thermo-Flowers were the incorporation of the Winter Lotus technique, absorbing heat in the summer or releasing it to keep a house warm in the winter. It could also be used to absorb heat from the sun and then release it for cooking or heating bathwater.
He didn’t intend to waste any more time trying to improve the living conditions of the people like he had in the past. It had always been a sort of balancing act between improving the world and making money for himself. Was he merely using the knowledge of his old life to get ahead in this one? Or was he truly wanting to make the world a better place for the people? It didn’t matter to him what the truth was anymore. What he knew was that in this world if you weren’t strong enough there was nobody to complain to. Until he reached the peak there might always be someone eager to jump out and stomp all over his sand castle.
Even so, he had always encouraged these sorts of research projects on the Inner World and he was happy to share some of his findings with the first place in this world that made him feel safe. He wasn’t going to invest any further effort, but he knew the Holy Flame Sect would be able to handle how to properly make use of these capabilities to make money. The Holy Flame Sect would be sending back a portion of the profits earned from it, so that was good enough for him.
The next season there was an uproar in the Sect. The monster didn’t take any exams! He’d been a whirlwind of accomplishment for three seasons in a row and then just as abruptly he stopped. All the Servants, and Outer Disciples of the Sect were passing flurries of rumors, and even the mortals and Inner Disciples, that were usually very far removed from this sort of event, had taken to discussing what happened.
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There was no public response from the newly famous old monster, nor were there any comments from the Peak Masters or their Personal Disciples. Without any more juicy news, and the old monster in seclusion they eventually ran out of steam and went back to their normal lives.
At the next exam, there was a big storm! The old monster that had gone missing had returned and directly passed sixteen four star exams. Sixteen different Professions. The disciples were in shock. How could a single person master so many different means? Each of them were only focused on one major Profession as well as one or two minor Professions to support their main. They studied for many years or decades to pass each exam, yet this person had pushed so many skills to four stars in the span of a year?
The truth was far simpler. Sage was no monster. It was an utterly insane concept to push sixteen Professions from one to four stars in a single year. On the other hand, if one were to spend 700 years doing the same thing it would be a simple task. In fact, the real bottleneck was that Sage had to spend months practicing each of the main Professions in the outside world. He mastered all the required techniques on the Inner World and all that knowledge was of great help to him. The problem was that all the muscle memory, and the Qi and Spirit Power equivalent to it, were not present on the outside world. He had to train many tiny muscles, subtleties of Qi manipulation, and applications of Spirit Power in order to transfer over the skills he trained on the Inner World.
It was this exact problem that caused him to make a big decision he’d been contemplating for a while. Sage’s body on the Inner World was the Jade Sky Mantis. His wives had made their own variants of the Jade Sky Mantis, and all their children and other descendants had been born with highly similar bodies. The problem was that Sage’s body on the outside world was too similar to them.
In the outside world, his body was a combination of the massive Genesis Spider along with the bloodline of the Sea Locust that he’d enhanced. While this made for a pretty powerful body on its own, when taken as a whole, his strength was much weaker than it could be. All the experience and invention that the Clan had pushed forward with their bodies was useless to him. It also meant his two bodies were quite a bit different which meant that it was only going to be even more difficult for him to raise his Professions again. The capabilities of a Profession were loosely related to a cultivator’s rank. An Alchemist's four star pills were aimed towards advancing the capabilities of a fourth rank cultivator, for example. For Sage, a rank six, to advance professions to four stars was comparatively simple, but as he wanted to push towards five stars this divide between his two bodies would greatly hamper his progress.
After disappearing for a season and then causing a huge stir the next, the ‘old monster’ had completely disappeared from the public eye. They only knew that he’d gone into seclusion, but no matter who they asked, nobody seemed to know where. A little gold ring was sealed inside a stone, and that stone was sitting at the bottom of a bird’s nest hidden among the eaves of an inn.