After appearing in an alley in South Gate City, I headed directly for the area of town with the Blue Wind Pavilion. When I found an inn that looked nice but not too fancy, I went inside and booked a room.
Before anything else, I needed to get cleaned up and make myself presentable. After all, it wouldn’t do to enter the Pavilion in the ratty robes of a Su Clan orphan.
Once inside my room, I sat down to decide on a proper wardrobe for this life.
I had a general idea of everything I wanted to accomplish, but I still had a lot of research to do before I would even know if my plan was viable. It would be nice to match my robe with my future peak, but with so many unknowns, it was best not to worry so much about that.
Should I just purchase the fanciest robe possible? Something that screamed Sovereign clan scion? Maybe. It would be interesting to see what the System would design for such a situation.
As I was thinking through different possibilities, I felt a pang deep within my soul. A small part of me vehemently rejected my idea of planning out a new wardrobe like this.
I had only purchased a new robe from the System twice. Both times were at the start of a new adventure. This wasn’t supposed to be a new adventure. I was only supposed to be completing my unfinished tasks. I wasn’t supposed to be starting anything new.
My face turned grave, and I nodded silently in acknowledgment of this promise.
Instead of purchasing something new, I changed into the formation specialist robe of my last life. They might not be a perfect match for where I was headed, but they looked fancy enough to not stick out too much.
Dressed to impress, I headed out of the inn.
----------------------------------------
When I entered the Blue Wind Pavilion, I was greeted by an all too familiar face. It was far, far younger than the one I had spent so much time with, but it was undeniably the same person. She looked exactly like the version of LiTing I remembered most. It was the face of the disguise I had given her.
I may have stared at Meng LuYao a bit too intently. She blushed and looked like she wanted to run away, but she was well-trained enough not to do so.
“Hello, sir. Welcome to the Blue Wind Pavilion. How may I help you today?”
This snapped me out of my trance, and I gave her a polite smile.
“Yes, sorry. I’m looking to purchase a manor on the outskirts of the city. Is this something the Pavilion can assist me with?”
“Of course, sir. We can help you arrange any purchase you wish within the city or abroad.”
She handed me off to a middle-aged man who quickly noted down details of what I was looking for. This was pretty straightforward. I wanted it to have at least a dozen rooms and be in an area with the densest qi possible.
Because of the latter half of this request, I had to provide a down payment of several dozen spirit stones, but I handed them over without complaint. I even offered to pay double the asking price for any place suiting my needs if I could purchase it immediately. Money was no object.
Simple as that, through the power of cold hard cash, I easily acquired a fitting home where my friends and I could prepare for the road ahead.
Just before I left the Pavilion, I took out Yan’s note and handed it to an attendant.
“I want this letter delivered to Zhuge Yan. He’s staying with Ning ChenKun in the Ning Clan’s South Gate City manor.”
Task complete, I headed back to my inn room.
----------------------------------------
The next day, I arrived at the Pavilion slightly before noon and accepted the deed to my new manor. Then, I went to a conference room to await my friend.
Only a few minutes later, the door opened, and Yan walked inside. He gave me a suspicious look but quietly sat down opposite me. He didn’t speak. He was forcing me to be the one to initiate contact.
“I have something you need to take a look at.”
I pulled out his memory orb and rolled the jade ball across the table to him.
He reached out to grab it, and the moment it was in his hand, I activated my Memory Implantation ability.
Yan’s eyes went blank for several moments. When the transfer was complete, he nodded to me.
“How did the experiment turn out?”
“The older man died during the process, but the younger one survived it.”
“Good to know. What’s the plan?”
I passed him the deed to my new manor. “I purchased a new place. I’m going to fix it up and then seclude myself to cultivate, but first I’ll install Qi Gathering Formations for each of us. It should be an ideal place to raise our cultivation bases as quickly as possible.”
“I’ll have to make an excuse to leave ChenKun’s manor. He’s excited at the prospect of me becoming one of his future subordinates, and I’ll have to let him down carefully.”
“You know what you need to do better than me. Just do what you think is best. By the way, are you going to stick with dark qi this time, or do you want to try a different element?”
Yan tapped his fingers on the table. “You keep talking about rushing up the mountain. You’re looking to ascend as quickly as possible?”
I nodded.
“Then I’ll stick with dark. I’d like to try something new, but that would take time that I don’t think you want me to spend.”
“Thank you. If you have any problems with ChenKun, just let me know.”
After Yan left, I headed out to my new manor to get things arranged properly.
----------------------------------------
I didn’t bother with our new home’s furniture or decor. Those things weren’t important to me. What I cared about was having a place to help us cultivate safely and privately.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
First, I took out several Rank 6 formation nodes created by Shen and placed them around the manor, creating a powerful defensive grand formation. Because I was using plates instead of carving them directly into the surrounding landscape, and because I didn’t have the qi needed to activate the formation properly, these defenses were not as strong as I would have liked. However, by supplying the main node with a large pile of spirit stones, I was able to create a barrier that could defend us from all but the most powerful assailants.
Then, I worked on setting up several different cultivation rooms. A metal area for LiTing, a dark one for Yan, and a water one for JiaQi. In each room, I placed a set of plates inscribed with Rank 1, 2, and 3 Qi Gathering Formations. These formations would condense and purify their specific qi types far above what was normal for their Rank.
Usually, this would be considered a bad idea. Placing someone in an area with too much qi can cause problems if they don’t know what they’re doing, and letting new Disciples cultivate in an area of purified qi can lead to them forming bad habits. For us, neither of these was an issue. My friends knew what they were doing.
I did not, however, create a cultivation area for myself. I wasn’t quite ready to do so. I needed to see if my experiment would work first.
Once all the formations were set up to my liking, I took out four small jade stones shaped like large blank coins. I placed each coin on the main node of the defensive formation, and a small burst of qi from the formation caused tiny lines to appear on each of them.
To a layperson, the coins would have only looked like they had been badly scratched up at random. In truth, these scratches transformed the simple jade coins into formation keys. Anyone holding such a key would be allowed to pass into the manor freely, but anyone not holding one would be blocked.
With everything set up, I went to the Pavilion and left letters for LiTing, Yan, and JiaQi along with one of the jade keys for each of them. Keeping the last key for myself, I returned to the manor and secluded myself in a small room in the back.
If anyone needed me, they would be able to find me, but I would need to concentrate to pull off what I wanted to do next.
----------------------------------------
While my friends had all advanced to Martial Emperor in their last life, they still didn’t have the breadth of knowledge and experience with low-level cultivation that I did. Recovering their previous cultivation bases wouldn’t be much of a challenge for them, but my additional experience meant that I would be able to advance slightly more rapidly than they did.
This gave me a bit of extra time to play with, and I knew exactly how I wanted to use it. I was going to create a novel cultivation technique.
Even if I had the extra time, the part of my soul that wanted me to return to the Wastes balked at the idea of me not only cultivating a new technique but also first spending time to create said technique. However, its dedication wasn’t actually to my promise to return to the Wastes specifically. It was more focused on forcing me to start repaying my debts in the abstract. Instead of waiting until I returned to the Wastes, I could satisfy this part of my soul by starting to repay certain debts to people in the Nine Rivers Sect.
While I had dealt with several people in the sect, such as my combat trainer Lord Gong, most of this was done through equal exchanges. I might decide to give the ones who were nice to me a little something extra, but no debt existed between us. However, there were three people in the sect who I felt I owed a deep debt to, and I needed to repay them for what they had done.
The first of these debts was to the Master of the Lightning Peak. He had sent gu to invade my soul on our trip to Heaven City. I needed to repay him for that. Since the cultivation technique I wanted to create was central to my plan for repaying this debt, that core piece of my soul was easily soothed.
While my idea seemed rather straightforward, I had already noticed a few quirks that could be a problem. I had time to work on this technique, but it wasn’t unlimited, and I couldn’t allow myself to get bogged down. So, before I began my work, I made a purchase to speed things along.
“System, boost my comprehension of cultivation techniques to a total of 100 billion credits.”
Purchase confirmed. Cost 99 billion credits. 640,049,168,410 credits remaining.
Taking a deep breath, I reached into my storage space and pulled out two of the books Jin had given me, the Rank 1 technique for cultivating metal essence and the Rank 1 technique for cultivating lightning essence.
If this was going to be my last life in the sect, at least for now, I wanted to take full advantage of it, and the best way to do that would be by draining it of as much essence as possible. Jin had already promised me access to the metal essence as part of our earlier deal, and I would repay my debt to the Master of the Lightning Peak by absorbing every drop of lightning essence I could.
Shen hadn’t seemed too happy about me cultivating earth essence since I needed ten times as much as a normal disciple. How would the Lightning Master feel about me absorbing something ten times as precious? I would just need to rely on Shen, Jin, and the sect rules to prevent him from doing anything too reckless in response.
However, before I could make that dream a reality, I first needed to create my new cultivation technique.
In theory, my idea was simple.
I wanted to use the Writ of True Earth as a base. At this point, I was most comfortable fighting with earth qi, and I didn’t want to spend time learning combat techniques that used other qi types. However, I would strip out all the earth essence filters from the technique and then add filters for lightning and metal essence.
Making the process easier, all three techniques used the same set of 361 acupoints. While the exact filter types used at each point varied, they had roughly the same distribution of filter types. About a quarter of them were pure essence nodes, and about two-fifths were pure qi nodes. The rest were mixed nodes. However, which acupoints were qi and which were essence varied by technique.
My first pass at making the combined technique was crude and direct. I laid out each node on a large sheet of paper and marked the ones that were used for qi gathering in the Writ of True Earth, either pure or mixed. After that, I marked the nodes that were used for essence gathering in the metal technique, and then I marked the essence gathering nodes of the lightning technique.
Once that was done, I worked on creating new filter designs. I had the pure qi filters and the qi-plus-essence filters from the technique manuals, but I needed an essence-plus-essence filter and a qi-plus-two-essence filter. I also had to modify the qi-plus-essence filters to work with earth qi instead of lightning or metal qi.
One complicating factor that I wasn’t yet sure how to address was that each technique contained two different designs for the qi-plus-essence filters. I didn’t even know what purpose these differences served. I could only push forward and hope that the reason for this became clear during testing.
Using the designs from the existing manuals as a guide, it didn’t take me long to create a few prototype filters. I didn’t expect these first iterations to function properly, but I just needed them to be safe enough for a trial run. When I was confident they wouldn’t kill me, I was ready to begin experimenting with using them in an actual cultivation technique.
However, that was when I felt a ping from the manor’s defensive formation. Someone had used a key to enter the manor.
----------------------------------------
I exited seclusion to see who had entered and was happy to find that JiaQi and LiTing had arrived together.
LiTing just gave me a complicated smile, but JiaQi ran forward and hugged me.
“Thank you.”
My return hug was only slightly awkward, but she didn’t care. “Where’s LuLu?”
She snickered at that. “I didn’t think bringing a Rank 6 demon beast near the city would be a good idea. Besides, she’s been trapped in the sect for far too long. I told her to go out and explore the world for a few years. She needs to have some fun for a while, and at her level, there aren’t many things around that can hurt her.”
I looked at LiTing who had just been staring at me strangely.
“Anything wrong?”
“I…” She breathed deeply. “The memories you gave me feel… strange. I… The girl from those memories… she… I don’t understand why she felt certain things.”
I gave her my best comforting smile. “Those impulses were partly from your qi cultivation technique, but most of it was from your soul cultivation.”
I looked back and forth between the two girls. “This was something I had to grapple with at first too. When you start a new life with your old memories, some of your actions won’t make much sense. This… world… imposes changes to our thoughts, but that gets undone at the start of a new life.”
I struggled trying to explain things. “I would suggest you think of it like this. You have the memories of what happened, but in a way, that person wasn’t you. The memories are from a different possible you. Don’t try to recreate anything from that life. Just use what you learn from them to create something new.”
LiTing bowed her head. “Thank you, Tea— Thank you, Fang.”