It soon became apparent to Benton that the battle with the rank three had scared off all the other spirit beasts, leaving the area safe for the harvesters. He released the siblings to cultivate while he periodically scanned with his spiritual sense.

Once he felt fully recovered, he cleaned up the site, storing all the beast corpses in his spatial ring, and going to each of the spots of the other battles and doing the same. With that done, he didn’t have a lot to occupy his time.

There was a small shed constructed of the area’s abundant spiritual wood that held axes and saws and the like, and the harvesters had quickly gone to work. Observing them occupied his attention for a while, but the process wasn’t all that interesting. It wasn’t all that different from something a normal lumberjack would do, just using internally manipulated qi and superior tools to hit harder and work faster than a mortal could do.

Benton settled in to consider his next steps. Yang Ru getting hurt had been scary and disturbing. While Yang Xiu favored a slashing, dart in and dart out style that largely kept her from being hurt, the boy’s entire fighting style revolved around dealing more damage than he took. That attitude wasn’t sustainable until he was a lot tougher.

He needed body cultivation. But that was too expensive.

Or was it?

Body cultivation required three elements—a cultivation method that included an alchemical recipe, alchemical ingredients mainly consisting of various qi infused plants, and an infusion of qi into the bath, typically requiring an appropriately ranked spirit beast core for Qi Gathering cultivators since they couldn’t add the qi themselves.

Benton obviously could cover the first of those once he’d recruited enough disciples to develop a steady source of Sect Points. The second, hopefully he’d be able to supply either by purchasing on his shopping trip or by foraging. Though, his ability to do so was really dependent on what the recipe actually called for. He’d need to check that. The third had been the most problematic due to sheer expense, but his spatial ring was packed with cores. He had two-hundred-ninety-nine rank ones and four-hundred-fifty-eight rank twos stored, and they were fairly equally divided among the elements.

He pulled up his Cultivation Method Creation Menu and realized he didn’t see a way to create a body cultivation method. That lack was weird considering he’d been able to increase his personal body cultivation. He mentally queried the system about it.

Host’s request is accepted.

Please select a Body Cultivation Realm

Bronze

Silver

Gold

Platinum

Irridium

Unlike spiritual cultivation which listed realms far beyond those known to Su, the list of body cultivation realms did not exceed his experience.

Benton chose Bronze, obviously, and followed by selecting Targeted to Specific Qi Aspect, mentally specifying Yang Ru’s. Other than the realms being different and fewer, the biggest difference between the menus for spiritual versus body cultivation came in the next submenu.

Please allocate 100 Body Cultivation Method Creation Points in the following categories:

Ingredient Flexibility

Physical Attribute Enhancement

- Agility

- Strength

- Toughness

- Vitality

The four attributes seemed pretty self explanatory, but though he thought he understood what Ingredient Flexibility might signify, it was best to make sure. He asked the System to expand on that one.

If zero points are attributed to the Ingredient Flexibility category, Host must supply specific ingredients in exact quantity and quality in order for a bath to successfully advance the cultivator toward the next realm. Allocating points in the category allows the Host to substitute ingredients, makes the recipe less sensitive to variations in exact measurement of each ingredient, and permits the use of some ingredients of a lesser potency.

That category sounded handy. Until he had a steady source of spirit plants, the ingredient list was the biggest risk of proving to be a fatal flaw that would prevent him from recouping his sect points.

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It was also nice that he could tailor the physical attributes to the cultivator. Giving agility to Yang Ru made no sense. He just wasn’t equipped to use it well.

Strength was more complicated. His qi aspect would push him to higher and higher levels, making him an inexorable force. The question was whether body cultivation should lean into his forte or shore up his weaknesses.

The next two categories defined his weaknesses—toughness to keep him from getting hurt and vitality to allow him to better survive damage. Both were the exact reasons Benton was looking into creating the method in the first place. Since he had to decide the relative merits of each, though, he leaned slightly toward vitality. His reasoning was that it was impossible to be tough enough to never get injured, making it more important to be able to shake off wounds and heal faster.

After a few minutes thought, he decided on twenty-five points devoted to Ingredient Flexibility, zero for both Agility and Strength, thirty for Toughness, and forty-five for Vitality.

He followed the menu to next one, choosing a throwaway name of “BCTest01.” The system obviously didn’t let him save it, telling him it would have cost him ten points.

A little more investigation revealed that the Sect Point expenditure and gain for body cultivation worked exactly like spirit cultivation. That fact gave Benton pause. With all those rank one and rank two spirit cores in his spatial ring and the ability to get more almost anytime, he should at least consider body cultivation for his newest disciples.

That idea came with a couple of big advantages. First, it was fast. It took three baths to advance from one minor realm to the next, and a body cultivator could handle a bath every other day. And second, it yielded fantastic results as early as the middle Bronze realm, making the disciples much more combat ready and harder to kill.

Benton grimaced. The combat ready portion of that wasn’t necessarily a positive. He was not ready to raise an army of child soldiers. Even if he never planned on them fighting, though, it was better for them to be prepared. A cultivator’s life was brutal at times. A much as he wanted the kids safe behind large walls, he simply could not guarantee they’d be able to avoid danger. Being harder to kill as well as being more able to defend themselves were both good things.

The big question was how many Sect Points would it profit him to implement the idea. Hmm. Counting Wan Ai since it probably wouldn’t make much sense to give her a uniquely aspected body cultivation method, he had eleven new disciples that could use one tuned to nature, and each of them would use three rank one cores to get to bronze minor realm three and three rank two cores to get to minor realm six. So for thirty-three of each type of core, he could gain sixty-six Sect Points in about two weeks.

It would cost him twenty points to create the method. That was practically an immediate profit of forty-six points.

Score!

Even better, every disciple who even tangentially used nature aspected qi would be pure profit. The whole deal was basically converting a resource he had in plenty, spirit beast cores, into a resource that was quite scarce, Sect Points.

That potential windfall depended on one huge unknown, though—the availability of the necessary alchemical ingredients.

“System,” he said mentally, “can you give me a list of the types of ingredients I’d need for a bronze realm body cultivation method.”

Exact ingredients are dependent on the method created, but some examples are Spirit Grass, Ginseng, and Qi Infused Tea Leaves.

All those were common. Any herbalist might have those. Crap, he might have been walking past those ingredients all over the place. While his senses hadn’t picked up any heavily qi infused plants in his journeys thus far, the amount of grass and leaves and various other flora he’d passed that contained low levels were so numerous that it hadn’t even seemed worth it to gather any.

The answer had made it much more probable that body cultivation was at least a short-term solution to all his Sect Point needs, but he needed to make sure before he committed to it. From Su’s memories, he knew that a body cultivation method attuned to a specific element required a core’s qi to match that element. Using fire qi cores for Yang Ru and ice qi cores for Yang Xiu would be pretty easy given what he had in his spatial ring, but things might get difficult fast if all the nature aspected cultivators had to draw from that single element.

He mentally asked the System that question.

A Bronze Body Cultivation Method targeted generically to nature qi aspect may use any spirit beast core as the catalyst. Higher tier methods will require nature qi aspected beast cores, but starting at Foundation Establishment, the disciple’s own qi may be used to power the bath in lieu of the cores. All methods targeted to a uniquely specific qi aspect will require cores that correspond to the element closest to that specific aspect.

Awesome. It seemed that Benton had a probable solution to rapidly increasing his supply of Sect Points. He just had to found his sect first.

And he had to find the necessary spiritual plants.

One solution to that supply problem would be to invest a couple of points in learning Herbology. After all, he’d soon pass his next ten points earned mark, giving him one to spend. In fact, since he would be teaching eight disciples how to cultivate, he’d be only three points from his next ten. By the time he had his sect founded, many of the new disciples would likely have earned him their second point, taking him over that mark.

Still, Herbology felt somewhat … limiting. The best use of his time surely wasn’t running around trying to find low value spirit herbs. It would be better to have disciples like Wan Ai handle that.

It sure would be nice to have something like an Analyze skill that allowed him to look at a plant or weapon or opponent and have the System supply him with information about it.

“System,” he said mentally, “do you have anything like that?”

Host could define a technique that synergizes with Host’s Enhanced Spiritual Senses perk. Such a technique would give a limited version of something resembling the desired Analyze skill that could be expanded in upper realms.

Benton had been doing pretty well so far leaning on Su’s memories, and he’d been planning on using his points almost exclusively on increasing his cultivation in the near future. On the other hand, Analyze would be something that helped him in a million tiny ways as a sect leader, and if he truly had discovered an exploit to net him a bunch of Sect Points in the near future, upping his level was a lot less urgent.

It was a tough call. He’d have to give it a lot of thought.