I carefully dragged the injured spirit beast back to my stone shed, setting up a makeshift nest of dirt and dry moss in one corner for her.
Then, I quickly reburied the Young Mistress in case wolves or some other wildlife showed up and ate my precious, rare corpse and returned into the shed, facing the glowing eyes of the angry night predator.
Despite her protests and threats of future murder, Sowwy proved to be a surprisingly knowledgeable teacher once I got her talking about formation theory.
For hours, Sowwy lectured through gritted beak about the fundamentals of formation safety - proper dampening runes, energy containment barriers, stabilization anchors, and the critical importance of balanced Yin-Yang flows. Her anger gradually shifted from murderous rage to academic frustration as she realized just how little I actually knew about such things.
The night passed quickly as she covered years worth of foundation knowledge. By sunrise, her voice had grown hoarse and her remaining feathers were drooping with exhaustion. She finally dozed off mid-rant about "proper spiritual resonance harmonization," her head tucked under one singed wing.
I carefully covered the shed's small window with some moss to block the morning light from burning my resident night terror, then settled down to process everything I'd learned.
The original Wei had never paid much attention to formation theory classes, considering them "boring squiggles." But through Sowwy's reluctant tutoring, I was starting to see the elegant mathematical patterns underlying cultivation formations. They weren't just random symbols - they were more like complex spiritual circuit diagrams, fractals that channelled and transformed Qi in precise ways.
My first attempt had essentially been like trying to build a nuclear reactor without any containment or control systems. No wonder it exploded. The Young Mistress's residual spiritual energy had fed back into itself with no dampening or regulation, creating a catastrophic release.
A soft, alien-sounding, slightly musical and somewhat offputting snore from the corner reminded me that I had somehow acquired a spirit beast roommate. She looked very different in the minute sprinkle of daylight breaking through the uneven door.
The Jingwei's form was a curious blend of bird and human features. Her basic shape was humanoid - two arms, two legs, an upright posture - but covered in iridescent, green metallic feathers that shifted and rippled with her breathing. The colors reminded me of a jewel beetle shell. Her face was mostly human in structure but with a sharp, deadly beak where a nose and mouth should be.
Her entire body resembled a jewel beetle shell texture-wise. It was as if someone combined an Emerald Starling with a million sword blades with a human girl and put it all into a blender.
Her hands were human-ish and tipped with razor-sharp dark talons instead of fingernails, and her feet were distinctly bird-like with three forward-facing toes and one backward-facing toe, all equipped with wicked curved claws. A crown of longer, more ornate feathers adorned her head like hair, though most were now singed and broken from the explosion.
Her wings suffered the worst damage and were badly mangled from the explosion, with many feathers missing or burned away, revealing the delicate, metallic bone and bewildering metallic, fractal flesh cellular structures beneath. Violet, iridescent, glowing blood dripped from the multitude of holes and cuts.
I collected some in a jar.
Then I took out my trusted dream-hex grass, measured out exactly 22 grams again, rolled it into a smoking bundle, and lit it with a spark of Qi. As the sweet smoke filled the shed, I settled onto my bedroll, carefully positioning myself away from Sowwy and the door in case she woke up feeling peckish, which was highly unlikely, since she was a night killer who didn't function during daylight.
I woke to the sound of soft snoring from Sowwy's corner as late afternoon sunlight filtered through the door slit. The spirit beast was still fast asleep, her remaining feathers gently rising and falling with each breath.
I hung a bunch of moldy fabrics around her to block any sunlight from hitting her and then opened the door.
Stepping quietly outside and closing the door behind me, I took some time to properly survey my new domain. The explosion had done me a favor by clearing much of the overgrowth, revealing the old cultivation field patterns beneath. Stone-lined paths divided the valley into neat sections, with remnants of irrigation channels running between them.
The cliff walls rose majestically on three sides, creating a natural amphitheater that seemed to collect and concentrate spiritual energy. Waterfalls cascaded down at several points, their mist creating rainbow halos in the golden afternoon light.
Near the easternmost cliff, I discovered the remains of what appeared to be a herb-drying shed - its wooden walls still standing though the roof had long since rotted through. The interior was littered with broken pottery and the faded remnants of preservation formations. Perfect for storing more supplies once repaired.
Picking through the broken pottery in the herb-drying shed, I found a few intact preservation jars still containing dried herbs - mostly common varieties like Spirit-Touch Ginger and Moon-Dew Grass. Nothing spectacular, but enough to flavor a meal.
I gathered some fallen branches and stones to build a small fire pit near the stone shed’s entrance. As I arranged the stones in a circle, I couldn't help but chuckle at how mundane this felt compared to my earlier attempts at grand cultivation experiments.
As I finished arranging the stones in a circle, I pulled out the small sack of potatoes and vegetables I'd bought from Rainbow Toad Town's market before coming here. Simple fare, but after the excitement of the explosion and subsequent spirit beast wrangling and a night of learning formations I was famished.
I diced the potatoes and vegetables, seasoning them with some of the Spirit-Touch Ginger I'd found in the old herb shed. The spicy-sweet aroma of cooking food soon filled the air, mingling with woodsmoke.
I spent the remaining daylight hours gathering materials - stones for formation arrays, salvageable bits from the destroyed farmhouse, and various herbs growing wild among the ruins.
As the sun began to set, I snacked on some dry meat and started clearing a small plot near the stone shed, using my Qi-enhanced shovel to break up the blast-hardened earth. The physical labor was oddly satisfying after years of rigid sect meditation practices. There was something deeply peaceful about simply working the soil without worrying about achieving immortality or impressing elders.
As night fell, I focused on the basics. Using salvaged materials from the destroyed farmhouse and fresh-cut timber from the valley's edge, I began constructing a simple one-room house beside the stone shed. My inherited cultivation strength made the work quick - I could easily carry heavy beams that would normally require several men.
Sowwy watched me with glowing eyes from her berm shed residence, occasionally offering sarcastic commentary.
"Your roof is crooked," she noted as I positioned the final beam. "And those wall joints will leak when it rains."
"Feel free to help instead of criticizing," I called back.
"I'm supervising," she sniffed. "Besides, I'm still recovering from YOUR damned explosion."
“Which wouldn't have happened if you were more inclined to share cultivator secrets,” I pointed out again.
Sowwy exhaled and then suddenly her head snapped up, feathers bristling as distant howls resonated across the valley.
I looked at her concerned expression.
"Wolves," she hissed. "Silver Fang pack. All twenty seven of them."
I quickly retreated to the stone shed, securing the heavy iron-bound door just as the howls grew louder through the valley.
Glowing silver eyes peered through the cracks in the door as the wolves circled the buried shed, their howls echoing off the cliff walls. Sowwy huddled in her corner, feathers puffed up defensively despite her injuries.
"Yep. They can smell your blood," I told her. "And they know you're wounded."
"Thank you for that brilliant observation," she hissed sarcastically. "Any other obvious insights you'd like to share?"
“Can you make a scary noise to make them go away?” I asked.
“No,” she shook her head. “Lungs are too busted up for that, can barely breathe.”
The wolves scratched and pawed at the door throughout the night, their howls gradually growing more frustrated as they failed to breach our shelter. By dawn, they had retreated back into the forest, leaving deep claw marks in the door.
Over the next day, I worked methodically to secure the valley against the wolf pack. Using materials salvaged from the ruins, I constructed a series of basic lethal traps - pitfalls lined with sharpened stakes and bendy trees with rope triggers.
By nightfall, the valley's perimeter featured several traps.
The wolves returned as expected, their howls cutting across the gloom. But this time, their hunting cries became interrupted by yelps of pain and death screams as they encountered my dastardly handywork.
Come morning, four dead wolves greeted me, their silver-streaked fur matted with blue blood. I dragged the carcasses out of the traps and then attempted to skin one, cooking some of the meat. It turned out to be tough and bitter.
Come night, I offered the wolves to my shed-monster.
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The Jingwei devoured the wolf carcasses with surprising enthusiasm, her beak making quick work of flesh and bone alike. As she ate, her injuries seemed to improve ever so slightly - the metallic feathers beginning to regrow and her wings slowly mending.
Over the next few weeks, a routine developed.
During the day, I worked on rebuilding basic infrastructure - repairing the irrigation system, clearing the fields, and fortifying our defenses against both mundane and spiritual threats. At night, Sowwy would lecture me about cultivation theory between snacking on whatever wildlife wandered into my dastardly traps, drawing out formations on the ground for me to replicate.
I learned that sprinkling Jingwei's blood around my traps acted as powerful bait, drawing in all sorts of creatures from miles around. Anything that smelled a wounded spirit beast apparently couldn't resist investigating. Within weeks, we'd accumulated quite a collection of spiritual beast cores and materials from the various creatures that met their end in my increasingly elaborate traps. Jingwei handled the skinning quite effectively with her knife-like talons.
The wolf pack never returned after losing a bunch of their members, but other things came - mountain cats with crystalline fangs, long-faced deer with metallic antlers, even a small earth dragon that I managed to take down with a particularly clever pitfall trap. Sowwy was delighted with the variety in her diet, and her injuries healed further with each spiritual beast she consumed.
Meanwhile, I focused on my original goal - corpse farming.
Armed with arcane birb-dispensed wisdom, I properly prepared the field this time, laying down multiple layers of containment and dampening formations carved into large rocks before attempting to grow anything.
The Young Mistress's corpse remained my primary "seed," but I had once again dug up her body to 'safety' it up as much as possible.
With Sowwy's guidance, I inscribed precise formation patterns across the Young Mistress's unrotting corpse using potent earth-dragon-beast blood that burned into her violet-tinted skin as green ink. The formations would hopefully contain and direct her residual spiritual energy rather than letting it explode again.
Then I covered her in wooden boards inscribed with even more dampening formations and reburied her once again.
Over the following days, progress was slow but steady. The first visible changes appeared after about three weeks - tiny purple sprouts emerging from the soil around the burial site. They looked like normal plant shoots at first, but their color and the way they pulsed with spiritual cursed energy was decidedly unnatural.
Sowwy, now fully recovered and back to her terrifying night predator glory, took great interest in the sus-looking sprouts despite her constant protests about the obvious insanity of my project. She'd often perch on a giant jagged boulder near the field at night, offering commentary and criticism about my formation adjustments.
As spring deepened into summer, the purple sprouts grew into what could only be described as "people-cabbages" - vegetables with disturbingly flesh-like qualities. Their leaves were an unsettling violet color and seemed to pulse with an inner heartbeat. Some even developed what appeared to be rudimentary facial features.
"This is truly the most cursed thing I've seen," Sowwy remarked one night, poking at one of the purple cabbages with a talon. “How can a cabbage even grow from dead manflesh without seeds?”
“It’s the base formation runework,” I said. “Essentially, it forces ‘cabbage growth’ to occur. With enough Qi poured into it, anything it’s targeting becomes a cabbage seed. It’s sort of like anything catches fire when a cultivator creates fire using QI, even a metal sword. I set my Immortal Master’s tea on fire once accidentally by using too much Qi.”
“I see,” she said simply.
"So, what do you think? Are they alive?" I asked her.
The spirit beast studied the pulsing purple cabbages thoughtfully, her metallic feathers gleaming in the moonlight. "They do have spiritual energy, but it's... different. Horribly wrong somehow. Not quite alive in the normal sense, but not truly dead either. They're more like... echoes. Fragments of the Young Mistress's essence manifesting in vegetable form."
"Yes, but can they think?" I asked, examining one of the more developed specimens that had what appeared to be a tiny face forming in the center of its leaves.
"Hard to say," she replied. "They might have some rudimentary awareness, like how spirit herbs can respond to spiritual fluctuations. But I doubt they're truly conscious. More like... spiritual recordings playing on repeat through biological matter."
Months passed as I carefully tended the cursed cabbage patch, feeding them my Qi and adjusting the formations based on their development. Most of the sprouts sadly perished due to my incompetence and rune formation inconsistency, but twelve cabbages survived and gradually grew increasingly humanoid, developing distinct head-like shapes and limb-like protrusions. Their violet coloring deepened, and the pulse of spiritual energy within them grew stronger.
As summer ended and autumn began, the cabbages continued their disturbing evolution, developing more pronounced human features as the weather grew cold. Their faces, bodies and limbs became more defined, tougher, featuring fibrous muscles.
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The autumn sun beat down mercilessly as I climbed the steep mountain path, following the flow of cursed emerald-colored Qi that tainted the valley's waterfalls. The corrupted spiritual energy originated from somewhere high in the glaciers above, likely from some ancient battle.
My trusty shovel was strapped to my back, reinforced with fresh formation carvings I'd learned from Sowwy's lectures. The spirit beast herself was back at the farm, sleeping through the daylight hours in her cozy shed corner. She'd refused to accompany me on my "foolish expedition to poke at things better left unpoked."
"Only an idiot goes looking for the source of a curse," she'd muttered before dozing off. "The smart ones run away from such things."
But I wanted to understand what was affecting my valley, wanted to confirm the nature of curses.
After hours of climbing, I finally reached a massive glacier nestled between jagged peaks. The emerald-tinted spiritual energy was much stronger here, seeming to pulse from deep within the ice.
Climbing to the top, I peered into its depths across layers of azure cracks and bubbles.
There was indeed something deep beneath the glacier, a gargantuan dark shape. Bones. A skeleton of a long dead god, as big as a mountain.
I channeled Qi into my eyes, gazing deeper into the glacial ice.
The bones glowed with that same cursed emerald sparks that flowed down into my valley.
The creature's skull alone was larger than a house, with eye sockets that could have fit a wagon. Row upon row of sword-length teeth lined its jaws. Its ribcage formed vast archways of bone, and its spine stretched back into the depths of the glacier.
As I looked, the leviathan's skeleton took on new clarity, and I could now make out more anatomical details. Massive wing bones stretched out across the glacier. The skull's structure was distinctly avian despite its enormous size.
It was some kind of primordial bird. An ancestor, a divine level beast, the kind of a thing that leveled entire cities with the bear of its wings pulling supercell storms into existence.
The leviathan's death had clearly released an enormous amount of spiritual energy, which had gradually seeped into the glacier over centuries. The melting ice carried that energy down the mountain in the form of cursed water, explaining the unique properties of my valley.
The emerald curse energy seemed to pool most densely around its chest cavity, where the massive sternum would have supported flight muscles capable of generating hurricane-force winds.
As I studied the ancient remains, something caught my eye - another shape beneath the beast's bones, perfectly preserved in the vast layers of ice, nearly a kilometer deep in.
Focusing even more Qi into my vision, until my eyes started to throb I finally made out a humanoid figure, frozen in time.
It was a cultivator, their body mummified and ossified by the curse energy, untouched by decay, reshaped into crystal that glowed like a nuclear reactor.
They wore ancient-style armor, now fused to their body by the curse. Their hands still gripped a massive spear that pierced upward through the leviathan's chest, likely the killing blow that brought down this titanic creature.
The cultivator's body was saturated with the same emerald energy that flowed through the beast's bones, as if the curse had preserved them both in this eternal tableau of mutual destruction. Their flesh had a crystalline quality to it, more like jade than human tissue.
I studied the frozen scene more carefully, channeling Qi into my eyes to examine the entire view, until distinctive spiritual flows became visible like rivers of light. The curse energy wasn't just pooling randomly - it was cycling between the leviathan and its slayer in an endless loop.
From the cultivator's crystallized form, emerald energy spiraled upward through the green, metal spear, feeding into the beast's massive chest wound. It then flowed through the creature's skeletal structure before cascading back down to the cultivator, completing the circuit. The cycle had likely repeated for millennia, each revolution further crystallizing the remains of both beings.
It was a perfect, horrible harmony - slayer and slain locked in an eternal dance of cursed energy. The cultivator's killing blow had pierced, shattered the leviathan's core, but in that same moment, the beast's death curse had caught them both.
"Now that's interesting," I muttered, sketching the energy flow patterns in my simple leather notebook. The curse's circular nature was remarkably similar to some of the formation patterns Sowwy had taught me, but on a massive scale. It was like looking at the world's most horrific cultivation battery - storing and cycling cursed spiritual energy through an endless feedback loop of death.
This explained why the valley's cursed water never ran dry despite centuries of flow. The glacier wasn't just preserving a leviathan corpse - it was housing an perpetual engine of cursed essence, powered by the perfect balance between two killers.
An equation of hatred, despair and pain.
"Thank you for the inspiration," I bowed slowly to the dead leviathan and cultivator. "Your eternal cursed dance will help grow some really interesting cabbages."
Walking across the glacier, I spotted what appeared to be a tunnel in the ice and rock.
I examined the ancient tunnel attempt more closely, noting how the ice had partially refilled it over centuries. The excavation had been methodical, with clear tool marks still visible in the glacial walls. Whoever had tried to reach the cursed core had known what they were doing.
There were strange marks carved into tunnel walls - old formation patterns, barely visible after millennia of glacial movement. Someone had tried to fight the curse off, tried to reach into the heart of it all and failed. I sketched the ancient formations in my notebook for later study.
The tunnel stopped abruptly about thirty feet in. Beyond that point, the emerald energy grew exponentially more intense. Even standing near the tunnel entrance, I could feel the cursed power trying to seep into my meridians, attempting to crystallize my Qi pathways just like it had done to that ancient Immortal cultivator.
"Smart of them to give up," I muttered, backing away from the tunnel. The deeper curse energy felt like spiritual radiation - the kind that would slowly turn a cultivator's body to crystalline jade from the inside out. No wonder they'd abandoned the attempt. Getting too close to that eternal death loop would probably trap you in it, adding another layer to the cursed battery.
I gathered a few ice samples and sketches, taking care not to linger too long near the exposed remains. The curse's influence was subtle but persistent - like a spiritual poison that accumulated in small doses. Even my brief examination had left my meridians feeling slightly stiff and crystalline.
As I descended the mountain, I couldn't help but wonder about that ancient tunneling attempt. Had they been trying to break the curse? Or were they after the immense spiritual energy stored in that eternal feedback loop? Either way, they'd been wise to retreat. Some power sources weren't meant to be tapped, could not be stopped by the hands of men, as even an Immortal would succumb to rapid crystallization in that ice furnace.
The sun was setting by the time I reached the valley floor. My trusty shovel felt heavier than usual, and my Qi circulation was sluggish from exposure to the curse.
I'd need to meditate carefully tonight to cleanse my meridians of any lingering crystallization effects.
But the expedition had been worth it. Understanding the source of my valley's curse was pivotal to my work, pivotal to everything I was doing.
If this loop could be created with death, then perhaps something similar could be created with life.
A single cabbage wouldn't do it... but maybe hundreds of them, functioning all at once, pulling at Qi in just the right way...
A hundred thousand formations, entwined into one.
How long would such a thing take to make alone? A lifetime? It definitely wasn't a job for a single cultivator, it would require a legion of dedicated, neurotically obsessed employees who would do nothing but create exact formation after formation around themselves.
A cultivator factory mass producing formations.
I daydreamed about a field of violet cabbages as I climbed down the mountain back to my green valley.