After any good massacre comes the looting and pillaging.

Isaac recused himself at the start, as the drugs finally wore off he was filled with nausea half from the withdrawal, and the other half from horror at the things he'd done.

I'd finally gotten the Neurology Inspector working on him, spotty as it was, and happily pried through his innermost thoughts and feelings as he came to terms with his actions. Good, almost all baseline humans came with an innate potential for violence, which is why even in this day and age they're still so popular in Sims. There's something charming about creatures that are just above the level where they can analyze their base instincts, yet are unable to quell them.

Since nobody was looking, and the chat was under the impression that Neurology Inspector was still nonfunctional, I took the opportunity to tinker with his neurochemistry just a little bit. Shush, it was a clean edit, just to stop him from moping around while the good shit was being distributed.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much in the way of said "good shit" to be had. The previously revelrous attackers were dismayed at how poor the Akeni were, they didn't put the same stock in precious metals as humans did, their granaries were filled with inedible foodstuffs, and given the poor showing of their much vaunted arsenal, it was clear that most of it had failed or been sold off over the ages.

The Akeni had been in decline for generations. Once, their fleet had taken the Cultivator world by storm, and endless war had raged above the clouds, but it's a testament to how many OP hax the locals had that the majority were wiped out, leaving only a few tattered survivors clinging to existence in this power-capped backwater where the Qi density was too low for most Cultivators.

They'd suffered from severe nutritional deficiencies as their native crops gradually failed, each generation being born more stunted and sick than the last. They'd lost most of their knowledge, and certainly didn't have the industrial base to recover it, especially when the Empire had discovered them and taken much of what was left.

In the end, their deaths were more of a mercy killing hastening the inevitable. There was no gold or glory to be had in their murder, but that just made it good practise for Isaac, if he could get used to senseless slaughter this early, he'd shine when the stakes were actually higher.

Isaac joined a band that delved deeper into the underground hives, drawn by rumors of an ancient alien ship being buried underground. The rumor did turn out to be true, but as opposed to a massive battleship brimming with alien technology ready for the taking, the vessel turned out to be their equivalent of a lifeboat, barely the size of a barn.

It had been cannibalized over the years, everything from the wiring torn out for trade goods to hull plating removed to craft the Star Metal Armor their ignorant descendants wore. The little that remained was turned into a sort of shrine, where a few survivors had found refuge until they were discovered and brutally killed.

But what Isaac did find useful was some kind of charging pad, likely what was used to top up their remaining two laser weapons. Documentation was non-existent on why the hell it worked with an iPhone, but I think it's just because the previous dev thought the idea of "Qi" wireless charging being a thing in a Cultivation setting was super funny.

Well, that's one less thing for him to worry about, from now on he could leave it to charge in the sun and not worry about exhausting the tiny kilowatt-hour battery that was only good for a month's charge.

The Akeni dead were stripped of their armor, and while the bulk had to be smelted down and reprocessed in a better equipped town, Isaac managed to wrangle a modest set that fit him. Then, he joined the others in desecrating the dead, digging up the Akeni graveyard for any burial goods. Here, he found more of value, as Akeni warriors were often buried with their equipment. A nice little knife, a necklace made of teeth from a beast that could be powdered down and sold as a remedy, these all went into his pocket.

Some of the oldest corpses had what appeared to be power armor or exoskeletons, but they'd long become defunct. Still, more to be scrapped.

At the very end, Lord Wang's conscience couldn't take any more. He stopped the digging of the graves, and also prevented the destruction of a few eggs that panicked Akeni mothers had buried nearby, collecting them for the Imperial Court. It was a testament to his authority both as an Envoy and as a Cultivator, that his orders were obeyed unquestioningly.

Isaac picked over the remaining loot with the disgruntled survivors, and barring a pretty decent Star Metal spear, didn't get much of note.

With the "threat" to flyers mitigated, ATC opened up local airspace, and the loot laden survivors were carried back home.

Isaac barely had time to bathe and change out of his battered armor when he was informed that he was invited to a honorary banquet. The village elders, eager to forget the futility of their campaign, had thrown a feast in the honor of their new champion, inviting the other villages and clans. He got to sit pretty and look intimidating for a few hours, though the tapas alone made it worth it.

While there were memetic fields all over the place that nudged society and culture towards standard Xianxia tropes, especially when it came to manifesting ancient Chinese culture, this didn't extend to the food. After all, what good Xianxia didn't delve into the weird and wonderful oddities that might end up on your plate? Thus, Isaac snacked on Heavenly Dragon Duck, which like Bombay Duck, was some kind of fish, the brains of the six-limbed octopus (!), and a type of noodle that for some inane reason reminded him of garlic bread sticks from Olive Garden.

This precipitated the first serious bout of nostalgia he'd had since his arrival. Memories flashed through his mind, of the Earth he'd left, his parents and younger siblings, that girl he'd always meant to ask out but never got around to (this caused a 1% spike in viewership alone, both from melodrama fans as well as more Ancestor Worshippers who were descended from that woman).

He excused himself and stepped out onto a balcony overlooking a river, and was surprised to see Lord Wang there. The Envoy was currently putting something in his mouth, which to a startled Isaac's eye resembled a Terran inhaler.

"Oh, Isaac? Excuse me just one second-" He took a large puff and sighed with relief -"Sorry, the Qi density here is truly far too low, it's a struggle to even breathe."

He chuckled ruefully, "It's not that the Empire really wants or needs all the Cultivator seeds here, Ancestors know that we have no end of applicants from the Mortal Realms up there, it's actually more of a humanitarian thing, if those people broke through here, they'd exhaust even the thin Qi and the mundanes would just die."

"Lord Envoy, I wish to learn the ways of Cultivation, could you please teach me?" Isaac requested, doing a rather good bow even with his stiff American back. Probably a relic from when he was taken as a child to pester his grandparents in China.

"From me? This old cripple?" Lord Wang pointed at himself. "My Meridians were damaged a long time back, ruining a promising career before it even started. To be a good tutor, I must be able to demonstrate Qi flows and not just describe them, if the Court wishes you to be trained, they'll find someone suitable soon enough."

"It's just.. I'm in a rush, Lord. I was told by the deity that sent me here that I have a certain sickness that might take my life if I don't get it treated, and I might need to Cultivate to find out the problem." Isaac stated earnestly.

Wang stroked his beard, "What kind of illness?".

"I'm not sure your world has an equivalent, Lord, it's something from-"

"Cancer?" Wang interrupted.

"Eh? No, you're right."

"My condolences, the invasion of one's Dantian by microscopic crab demons has taken many a great man to an untimely grave."

"... Not that kind of cancer, Lord Wang."

"Oh, you mean like Small Cell Carcinoma of the lungs?"

"What? Uh, yeah, exactly! I'm afraid it might kill me."

"In that case, I regretfully inform you that while a cure might be available, it's unlikely to be found outside several realms above this one. I heard they've rolled out Universal Healthcare, you might get lucky."

Isaac swore under his breath, for all he knew he had a fatal brain tumor that could kill him at any moment, not a slow growing and indolent melanoma that might come back to bite him in like 20 years. Since this certainly increased his drive to Cultivate faster, I was reluctant to correct his misconception. Trust me, I feel a little bad about it too!

Despite his hopes of being taken as a disciple being dashed, he still took the chance to badger Lord Wang for more details regarding Cultivation, even if only from a theoretical standpoint.

He came to mildly regret this, because several hours later, after the banquet had packed up and the drunk guests rolled down the hill, Lord Wang was still waxing eloquent on Cultivation Paradigm #2801.

"So you see, when it comes to myriad ways of comprehending the Great Dao, one should keep in mind the difference between all the forms of Qi. Remember, we have White Qi, which is free-flowing and generous, Black Qi, which tends to collect and must be unstuck, and then who can forget Asian Qi and Hispanic Qi?"

Isaac surreptitiously smacked his head to make sure the translator software was working. It was. He simply resolved to ignore this part of the lesson for the sake of his mental health.

Another week passed while Isaac threw himself into training, till the point where he was a passable swordsman, at least when it came to mundane techniques. In the meantime, he eyed the sole remaining laser rifle that was taken as loot, but sadly his requests to claim it were denied. The villagers knew he was a paper tiger, and at any rate, he was likely going to be taken away by the Empire, so why invest too much into him?

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Finally, a month after Isaac had arrived in Cultivation OS, official orders regarding him arrived from the Imperial Court. Lord Wang was to dispatch him on a caravan to the nearest town, where they had a research facility that would examine him.

Isaac bid tearful farewells to the villagers, especially this cute little minx that he'd taken to warm his bed. In turn, the minx howled and barked, Isaac's hairy feet were just the right temperature to lie on and it felt dismayed that he would be gone. Like the rest of the village, he'd already forgotten about that little orphan girl who had brought him in. I believe she died of consumption a week later, her weakened immune system unable to handle the pathogens brought along by Isaac.

The ride up on the giant bird was uneventful, I hadn't isekai'd anyone else with irresponsible access to blinding lasers after all. He soon disembarked at the trading outpost, where would spend a day or two in waiting for next caravan.

The outpost wasn't all that large, perhaps the size of an Olympic swimming pool. A mysterious green rock was what actually kept it afloat, everything else was chained or bolted on. Half the space was dedicated to storing tithes till an Imperial caravan arrived, a quarter to housing the giant birds. In the remaining space were a few stalls and random corners where Isaac and a handful of others could place their bedrolls.

The moment he saw the stalls and their wares, his eyes gleamed. Flying swords, self-sewing needles (medical training add-on not included), a knockoff video game console with an emulated copy of Super Mario 64 (I quickly wiped it, we didn't want Nintendo on our case), exotic pets, he was entranced.

What snapped him out of his trance was the realization that he had no money. Oops. While the genocide of the Akeni had been a good character building exercise, they were dirt poor, and didn't have much in the way of gold, silver, jewels or the hardest of currency, essence stones.

He managed to barter some Akeni weapons for a little bit of real cash, but still found that the majority of the stuff on sale was outside his budget. This sparked a burning lust for money in his heart that I'd do my best to fan, a combination of sociopathic addiction to killing and incredible greed would only increase his appeal to the viewers. Who wants to read about an Isekai protagonist who goes and settles down on a farm with a chicken and cat?

Huh. Turns out quite a few people, but even then, I have the power of anime and market research on my side.

Soon enough, a messenger chicken managed to fly up to the outpost, squawking and panting, handed over a scroll, and then died from heart failure. The outpost supervisor quickly read through it, it seemed the caravan was running behind schedule, so instead of stopping by as planned, they requested that Isaac and any high value cargo should be flown over to their position a few kilometers away.

The next morning, Isaac found himself sitting on another bird as they flew over to the caravan, initially visible only from the columns of smoke from their camp fires.

Simadril province was lightly populated, being one of the regions of the Jiangshu province worst hit by the disasters of the last epoch. Isaac's guide pointed at the ruins of great cities buried beneath the trees, and in the distance, the rise of frost covered peaks representing the Pampers mountains, where the Heavenly Toddler had finally been discovered by his parents and was taken away to the realm where he belonged.

Even after thousands of years had passed, the rich nutrients leaching out from "gifts" left behind by the toddler had supercharged agriculture in the region, but in the sparsely populated sections this had the effect of causing a riot of plant life, with forests springing back up as fast as they were cut down.

Since the continent was still well below its carrying capacity, nobody was particularly interested in building roads to a backwater like Footfall Crater, so the caravan would be finding its way through the lowlands, following the Slumbering Dragon river and trading with the settlements along the way till they reached the Scholar's Township near the coast.

The caravan was quite large, several thousand people from what Isaac could ascertain, riding on all manner of beasts. There were horses, donkeys, quarter-qilins, giraffes, elephants, giant grasshoppers and even what was clearly a Monster Truck, albeit more practically oriented.

The caravan master, a Mr. Luo Feng was surprisingly cordial to Isaac. Apparently he hadn't gotten the message that Isaac's Lord of Destruction abilities were completely useless, and held him in some esteem. Isaac was invited to ride with him on top of the Monster Truck, which he was proudly informed was the wise ancient steed of another Transmigrator.

Isaac handled his introduction to Truck-kun quite well, but he was bemused at how different it actually was from what he knew about the real deal from the USA (Monster Trucks normally didn't talk for one, at least not till 2028). His confusion was only exacerbated as the truck told him about its original owner, a certain Bai Yu of the Speed Devils, a respected racing clan of the Xinjiang Wastes in the 1980s.

(I have no idea why we ever isekai'd a character from a parafictional sim set around the idea of the settlement of the Chinese West by West-aboo cowboys and car ricers, but it's hardly the weirdest thing you'll find in Cultivation OS. Just roll with it.)

Bai Yu had struggled to find fuel to keep Truck-kun running, and in the end out of desperation had tried to harvest the urine of the dangerous Petroleum Dragon, which had ended in his untimely demise. Truck-kun had been buried under the fast growing vegetation until using the last of its battery, it managed to blare out with its horn and draw the attention of Luo Feng.

Feng was unusually well versed in the affairs of Otherworldly Demons, and he told Isaac that Simadril province was absolutely littered with their corpses. Imperial scholars conjectured that only about 0.5% of new arrivals successfully left the province and made it to more developed lands, though the few that did make it had far more eventful lives. The villagers in Footfall were simply ignorant, Transmigrators did still show up in wider world, albeit Isaac was the first one in decades.

I was rather confused as to why the little shits were still spawning, but it turned out that when I first took this job, I'd fixed a bug that had caused a mile long queue of batched Isekai characters, and given the massive delta in the rate of passage of time, this meant that in the few days I'd been working, a massive number of them had been spawning in, usually in absolutely terrible starting locations where they ended up getting unceremoniously killed.

The caravan set out without delay, Truck-kun and other large beasts lead the way, flattening trees and shrubs and making it easier for the smaller beasts of burden to follow in their steps.

Isaac listened to the absolutely wild collection of music that Truck-kun's cassette player held, everything from Mongolian Throat Singing to Taiwanese Hip-hop. While not quite what you'd expect from real Earth music, it still soothed his nostalgia. He even considered buying Truck-kun, but remembered he was broke as hell.

The overwhelming majority of the caravan were mundane folk, with only two Cultivators, both of whom had crippled meridians and thus needed less ambient Qi to survive. It was a motley crew, full of bog standard humans, variant humans, and even one weird Xeno that was suspected to be sapient which had just shown up and joined the caravan one day. It didn't object to being loaded up with goods, so nobody was inclined to evict it.

A few more days into the trip, Isaac asked the Caravan Master why they hadn't simply used boats, wouldn't that greatly simplify their journey? This prompted plenty of chuckling, and eventually Truck-kun was moved to the side of the river and Isaac told to watch carefully.

One of the crippled Cultivators held a piece of fragrant meat and on cue, tossed it towards the river. It had barely gotten a few dozen meters when something massive erupted out of the waters and swallowed it in a single gulp, before vanishing back under the surface. The onlookers laughed and patted Isaac on the back, and with an air of wisdom, told him to avoid waterways that weren't shallow enough to ford.

The remaining time passed quick enough, the caravan occasionally stopped to trade with a few walled settlements and kept up their guard for bandits, but managed to pass mostly unmolested. Soon enough, they reached a dam that regulated the river, guarded by Cultivators with Qi-tanks strapped on wielding massive harpoons. Just beyond, they saw the beginning of Scholar's Township, one of the larger settlements in the Simadril region.

High walls girded it from external threats, with a handful of floating watch towers attached to the same kind floating rock used over Footfall.

The region closest to the walls was residential, but from the elevated caravanserai, he could see all the way to sheltered port, where hundreds of ships of all shapes and sizes sheltered from the waves. There were Junks, something akin to a a tramp steamer, a massive ship towed by a tame whale, and just about any means of getting about on the water could be found here.

And there, just a little closer, was the The Imperial Institute of Esoteric Cultivation, surrounding an arcane structure from when the world was young, a Wizard's Tower. It had absolutely no utility in the modern age, where Cultivation had replaced Western magic for millions of years, but it looked damn cool and resisted the erosion of time, so almost inevitably ended up as the center of a new settlement just as soon as the old was destroyed.

Isaac bid farewell to his traveling companions, bowed to Truck-kun as she sounded the horn in his honor, and then went over to where a gaggle of low-level Cultivators were awaiting him, and was taken off to see the Wizard.