The next few weeks passed by without issue. Sure, we had our fair share of problems and troubles, but otherwise things went smoothly. For the most part, I focused on my own cultivation and training, including my studies in alchemy. I wanted to repair my Second Circle and reach the Foundation Establishment stage as soon as possible.
The former only required a bit of time, since I had already gone through all the hard work of creating the Second Circle in the first place. In fact, it would only take me another day or two. For the latter, I needed to do it the hard way. Well, the hard way was exaggerating it a bit.
While it took the average cultivator years to reach the Foundation Establishment stage, and even longer for those without talent, it looked like it would take me a little under seven months to reach it; and that was if I took it slow. That meant that I would be a Second Circle wizard, a Foundation Establishment cultivator, and a Second Rank body cultivator some time next spring.
Throwing myself into cultivation also distracted me from the aching hole in my heart caused by Annabelle’s absence. I sent her a letter via courier a little while ago, but I have yet to receive work back from her. This worried me a bit, but with Grandfather Gabe watching over her, she should be fine.
When I wasn’t focused on my own training and cultivation, I focused on teaching my personal disciples. They were steadfast and diligent students, even Corie, so they weren’t a pain to teach. In fact, I found a quiet sort of joy in teaching them. It made me wonder what I did to deserve such delightful students.
They weren’t like my disciples back on Spirit Earth who were all rather…headstrong and arrogant. Then again, so was I. Still was, in fact.
More than that, I considered them my friends. It wasn’t a friendship between equals, since I was their teacher, but our friendship was no lesser for it.
Thanks to their hard work, and my guidance, my disciples rose through the small realms of the Energy Condensation stage with astonishing speed. Well, astonishing by Spirit Earth standards. My disciples seemed to think it was normal, which was my fault really, since I advanced at a ridiculous rate. They didn’t have the necessary context to realize just how abnormal this was.
Mother did, however, having grown up within a cultivator Clan. She always wore a strange expression on her face when she saw just how fast me and my disciples progressed. She looked both proud of us for our quick progress, and frustrated to the point of crying.
While part of me wanted to take all the credit, I couldn’t. Yes, my tutelage played a big part in my disciples’ development. The advice and guidance I gave them helped them advance by leap and bounds. However, it was also because of their own innate talent and diligence.
Lorelei was the Chosen of Terra, the Earth Goddess, and her cultivation technique synergized with this quite well. It was as if the earth itself actively nourished her development, speeding it along, which wouldn’t surprise me at all if that were true. It helped that she had above average talent when it came to cultivation.
On the other hand, Corie was just a straight up genius when it came to cultivation. While she didn’t have a patron god helping her along, her natural talent was high enough that if she had been born on Spirit Earth, she would have been a core disciple of a top tier sect.
As for Leroy, he had a natural affinity for the sword. While he didn’t have as much natural talent in cultivation as my other two disciples, his talent with the sword more than made up for it. As he practiced the Celestial Sword style, the insights he gained helped him keep up with Lorelei and Corie.
The resources they received from Clan Sturm also played a big part. Now that we had a set number of disciples for our Clan, Mother and I could better plan for the future. While this would change as we grew in both number and power, for now we would focus on developing the disciples we did have.
As my personal disciples, Leroy, Lorelei, and Corie were the equivalent of inner disciples. Hell, they could even be considered core disciples. However, since we were a minuscule Clan, that title was meaningless, so I would stick with calling them inner disciples for now.
As inner disciples, they received a decent monthly stipend; thirty mana stones and two low-grade Energy Condensation pills. This was in addition to the welcoming gift they received as part of joining Clan Sturm as disciples, as well as the prize from winning the game of Keep Away. While consuming cultivation pills introduced impurities into their cultivation base, similar to consuming mana cores, they already knew various methods to purge those impurities so it wasn’t an issue.
Was this amount of favoritism a bit bullshit? Yes. Did I care? No. They were my disciples, and I would see them soar among the heavens if I could help it.
My tutelage, their innate talent, and the resources they received meant that my disciples soon reached the third small realm of the Energy Condensation stage. Mother needed a moment to herself when she found this out.
As for me, since I also received a monthly stipend, one twice as large as the one my disciples’ received, it didn’t take me long to reach the sixth small realm of the Energy Condensation stage. Thanks to my divine energy, I could prevent any impurities from entering my cultivation base in the first place, which meant I didn’t have to waste time purging them.
It wouldn’t be long before I reached the seventh small realm, crossing the threshold into the high Energy Condensation stage.
As for the outer disciples, their training went well. Through Leroy, I distributed the cultivation techniques that I thought would best suit each of them.
I also met with them individually in order to assess them further and figure out which fighting style would work. It was more difficult to do this with the twins, since they were squishy spellcasters, but there were fighting styles that focused on using the mystic arts; adapting them for wizards wasn’t difficult.
I handed out the manuals for these fighting styles along with the welcoming gift and prizes I promised them. Well, I had Leroy do it. As my disciple, and a senior to the outer disciples, it was only fitting. I was busy with my own stuff after all.
Besides, it was to help nurture and grow Leroy as a leader within Clan Sturm. There was only so much that Mother and I could do on our own. We were only two people, after all. That meant we needed talented people to support and serve under us. As Clan Sturm grew, this need would only become more pressing.
Since I had three personal disciples, I had no reason not to make use of them. For Leroy, I had him supervise the training of the outer disciples. I didn’t leave everything to him, since they were my responsibility for now, but I left the day to day matters to him. Everyone trained together in the mornings, but Leroy trained the outer disciples outside of that as well.
Lorelei was a godsend. Since she had worked for the Adventurers Guild from a young age, she had a lot of experience with administrative work and the like; this included a stint working within the Requisitions Office within the Icefall Adventurers Guild. She ended up helping Mother with our Clan’s small, but vital, repository.
As for Corie, I had her transcribe copies of the manuals and tomes I wrote down to fill up our Clan’s library. I wrote the initial copies, and then she would make duplicates of them. This was a rather tedious task, and Corie complained nonstop about it, but that didn’t stop her from working hard.
Still, I felt like it was a waste to put her to work like this. After all, anyone with eyes and at least one functioning hand could transcribe copies. Yet, I wasn’t sure what else I could do with her. She didn’t have Leroy’s experience dealing with House retainers, and while she had helped Lorelei with the latter’s work within the Icefall Adventurers Guild, Mother and Lorelei had that handled.
It was something of a puzzle for me.
My disciples and I weren’t the only ones cultivating and focusing on Clan affairs. Not too long after the game of Keep Away that I played with our outer disciples, Mother formed her dantian. I stood watch over her as she did, to make sure nothing went wrong. I needn’t have bothered. Since she had already formed her dantian once before, Mother knew what to expect.
As was to be expected, she formed a violet dantian.
Tears streamed down Mother’s face after she finished, as if she had recovered something precious that she had lost once before and thought she would never regain. It was a feeling I understood quite well.
We had a small feast that night, which was becoming something of a tradition. Afterwards, Mother threw herself into cultivation and training with a focus and dedication that I hadn’t seen often, in this life or my previous ones. While she couldn’t match my speed, or my disciples’ speed for that matter, she still progressed at a swift and steady pace.
The outer disciples had all gaped, their jaws dropped, when she joined us all for our morning training sessions. Their jaws dropped even further when she displayed a level of physical prowess that shouldn’t have been possible for a Fire wizard. That, more than anything, hammered in the potential of cultivation in their minds.
To help Mother along with her cultivation, I offered her advice and guidance from time to time, but made sure to not cross the line. Not only was she my mother in this life, but she wasn’t my disciple. That limited my actions. One night, I tentatively offered to become her Master, even though it felt weird to do so.
To my relief, Mother said no. She felt that accepting my offer would tangle our relationship even further, and she didn’t want that. More importantly, Mother already had a Master: Grandfather Gabe. While they parted ways decades ago, they hadn’t severed all ties between them. She wanted to become his student again.
Outside of cultivation and Clan affairs, we minimized our interactions with the outside world. While we weren’t complete hermits, we kept to ourselves for the most part. That said, we did keep an eye out for news regarding House Icefall’s conquest of the Icefall Region.
According to Captain Jeffers, House Icefall’s efforts had met with some opposition, but their reputation and the House Sturm retainers we lent them kept things from getting out of hand.
Things were going well with the mythril mine. The airship from House Solaria already flew south once to deliver the first shipment of mythril, and it would return in a few days. The airship for us and House Icefall hadn’t arrived yet, so Lord Icefall decided to just stockpile House Icefall and House Sturm’s share of mythril rather than risk sending it south via caravan.
We did hear from Father and Kaylee. Work had piled in Father’s absence, so they were busy taking care of that. However, he said that he would soon send the funds and the people necessary to renovate Sturm Hill Hall, so we could get started on that.
Kaylee shared with us some of the latest gossip from Sunheart, including news about Annabelle. Because of what happened with Lord Miles, my beloved was busy keeping House Thorne together in her parents’ absence, which would explain why she hadn’t replied to my letter yet.
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While there were rumors that Lord Miles had been injured in some kind of fight, no one knew the truth behind his condition. Good. If the real reason became public, it would cause Annabelle trouble.
I smiled when I read the letters, and I looked forward to seeing the rest of my family again. While I missed Annabelle the most, she wasn’t the only one I cared about. For now, Mother and I settled on sending replies.
Outside of House/Clan Sturm business, my disciples and I made sure to fulfill our guild obligations when we could spare the time. Part of it was to maintain our membership with the Adventurers Guild. However, it was also to keep Guildmaster Sinclair off my back. She loved Lorelei and Corie, and if their guild memberships lapsed, I knew that she would just give me an earful about it.
It was easy to lose track of time when one focused on cultivation and training. Lorelei and Corie were adults, and therefore responsible for their own actions, but they were still newcomers to the world of cultivation. As their master, it was up to me to remind them that there was more to the world than Sturm Hill Hall.
The jobs we took were a bit more challenging than simply picking medicinal herbs. Instead, we focused on hunting magic beasts. While we didn’t get to keep anything from the magic beasts that we hunted, such as their mana cores, the combat experience itself was still valuable.
As an added benefit from doing all of this, I learned that I had a lot more merits than I realized. It turned out that Guildmaster Sinclair rewarded a substantial amount of merits to every adventurer who fought the Black Wolf Gang at the mythril deposit. It was easily triple of what I earned when I escorted Lorelei to Rosewood City; in short, I had enough merits to buy nine bottles of Spiritblood Ink.
When I first saw this, I almost didn’t believe it. I had to ask Guildmaster Sinclair herself to verify it, which she did. Afterwards, I held off from rushing to the Requisitions Office and going on a spending spree. I didn’t need anything from the Adventurers Guild at the moment, so I decided to save my merits for now.
Unfortunately, while things went well for the most part, there was one area in my life where I faced a major obstacle.
My studies in alchemy had stalled.
----------------------------------------
I glanced about my alchemy lab, overcome with despair. My alchemy equipment, a set of complicated looking tools and glassware designed to aid alchemists in refining and perfecting their elixirs, occupied two tables while my pill furnace occupied a third.
My alchemy lab was a medium sized room on the first floor of Sturm Hill Hall, with several windows for ventilation. Originally, my lab was located within the basement, in case of explosions, but I moved it after the stink bomb incident.
The room was a barren space, except for the tables that held up my alchemy equipment and as well as two cabinets: one that contained all of the ingredients and reagents I needed for my experiment, and one that contained all of my finished potions.
Several magic circles, courtesy of Mother, protected my lab from intruders and spies. They also protected the rest of Sturm Hill Hall from any…unintended consequences from my experiments.
No one wanted a repeat of the stink bomb incident. Nor did they want me to burn the place down.
I stared at the black sludge that I pulled from my pill furnace using my mana. I had intended to create healing pills, but instead, I ended up with this gunk.
Damn it. It turned out that combining two different kinds of alchemy was more difficult than I expected.
In terms of Luminan alchemy, I had already mastered the basics. Brewing healing potions and other low-grade elixirs wasn’t that difficult for me, and I could probably do it in my sleep by this point.
Well, maybe not in my sleep. Ever since Aurora and I found ourselves dreaming of the Stone Corridor in order to learn about cultivation and wizardry respectively, we kept going back there every few days in order to continue our lessons. This always happened at random intervals, so I didn’t know on which nights I would have regular dreams and on which nights I would dream of the Stone Corridor.
Thankfully, it wasn’t every night. While my body rested when I slept during those dreams, my mind remained very active. In the morning, I would wake up physically rested but mentally exhausted. It was a strange sensation.
Still, it was worth it. My education in wizardry proceeded at a rapid pace. It was like attending cram school, where several years worth of wizardry education was shoved into my head within a much shorter time frame. I figured that by spring of next year, I would be ready to solve the tile puzzle at the end of the Stone Corridor and move onto my next lessons.
There were those out there who would literally kill for an opportunity like this.
However, while my education in wizardry proceeded at a rapid pace, my studies and experiments in alchemy had hit a wall. Thanks to the knowledge and experience of my past life as Immortal Celestial Thunder, I was a master at Spirit Earth alchemy. This translated somewhat into mastery in Luminan alchemy, meaning that I learned the latter at a quick pace.
It was when I tried to combine the two that I ran into problems.
I knew it was possible, thanks to the pills my Clan received from Grandfather Gabe, but replicating them turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. Studying said pills didn’t help, since doing so just gave me their properties, not the process necessary to create them.
At first, I thought I would just need to extract the essence from the ingredients I needed in order to make the pills I had in mind. For my experiments, I settled on healing pills since they were easy to make, thanks to the abundance of medicinal herbs in the area.
After extracting and refining the essences I needed, I would then combine them in the pill furnace I received from Grandfather Gabe in order to create the pills I desired; at least that was the idea.
However, all my efforts just ended up creating useless sludge. In one case, I even ended up creating a mild poison. This poison wouldn’t kill a person, but it would leave them feeling miserable for several hours.
No matter how I went about it, I couldn’t make pills using the essence I extracted from the medicinal herbs. Nothing worked. No matter what order I put them into the pill furnace, no matter how much I changed the timing, no matter how much I adjusted the mana I used, nothing worked. I even changed up some of the ingredients to no avail.
The results were all the same. I ended up with black sludge, or poison in one case. It was baffling.
Just to make sure that it was possible to create healing pills with these ingredients, I created some using just Spirit Earth alchemy. I had to change the recipe a bit, since the medicinal herbs were somewhat poisonous in their raw form, so I needed to add new ingredients in order to counteract this.
The pills I created worked just fine. They were more powerful than low-grade healing potions, but required far more ingredients to make. It was more efficient and cost effective to just create healing potions.
I theorized that by combining Spirit Earth alchemy with Luminan alchemy, I would get the best of both. More powerful pills, or elixirs, that used less ingredients. However, I needed to figure out how to do that.
A knock at the door to my lab pulled me out of my thoughts. While I usually loathed being interrupted while I worked in my lab, since a distraction at the wrong time could result in a disaster, I welcomed it this time. Maybe a distraction was exactly what I needed.
I opened the door a crack to find Corie on the other side.
“Yes?” I asked in a short tone.
Just because I welcome a distraction this one time, didn’t mean I would encourage this sort of behavior. Everyone knew not to distract me when I worked in my lab, my disciples especially. Leroy knew from the get go how dangerous it was to distract an alchemist at work, and I hammered the point home to Lorelei and Corie when we returned from Rosewood City.
“Sorry to distract you while you’re working in your lab, Master Celestial Thunder,” Corie said, a contrite expression on her face. “There’s something that I wanted to talk with you about.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“And this couldn’t wait until later?” I asked.
Corie looked down.
“It could have,” she said. “But something happened recently, and I think it’s related to something that’s been bothering me for the past few weeks.”
I studied her for a few seconds. Corie looked concerned and worried, but not panicked. Whatever she wanted to talk about was important enough to interrupt my work, but not urgent. At least, that was the impression I got.
“Very well,” I said, opening the door wider. “Come in. However, next time, wait until I’m finished. You’re lucky I wasn’t in the middle of an experiment. If you had interrupted me at the wrong moment, I might have created another stink bomb or worse.”
Corie’s face twisted with disgust when I said this, but entered the lab. I shut the door behind her. Since I didn’t have any chairs or stools in my lab, the both of us remained standing. I waited for Corie to speak up first. It didn’t take her long.
“Remember how I almost died when we escorted Lorie to Rosewood City?” Corie asked. “When that Wood wizard working for the Black Wolf Gang poisoned me?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget that night.”
It was the night when I almost lost one of my disciples, and had to feed Corie some of my blood in order to purge the poison running through her veins.
“Ever since that night, my body has felt strange,” Corie said with a frown. “I ignored it at first, thinking it was an aftereffect of the poison, but it lingered. The feeling never grew stronger, but it never went away either. I had Priest Sinclair take a look at me a few weeks ago, but he found nothing wrong.”
I frowned at this.
“What sort of strange feeling?” I asked.
“I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s a subtle feeling, one that’s very easy to ignore. Most of the time, I don’t even notice it.” Corie’s frown deepened. “At first, I was worried but my worry faded when nothing happened.”
“Until now,” I guessed.
Corie nodded.
“Two weeks ago, I sparred with Jack in the new training yard,” she said. “We were practicing unarmed combat.”
I found it amusing that everyone called the clearing we created the new training yard, while they called Sturm Hill Hall’s front yard the old training yard. I didn’t know why I found it funny, I just did.
“He gave me a bloody nose,” Corie continued. “And a few drops of blood landed on a nearby plant. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but when I noticed the same plant a week later, it was dead. Meanwhile, the plants around it were fine.”
I blinked at her.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
Corie nodded.
“I thought that maybe it was a coincidence,” she said. “I mean, it’s autumn. Plants die all the time. However, it bothered me, so I decided to test it out. I dripped some of my blood on another plant earlier last week, and kept an eye on it. The second plant died slowly over the past week, until it perished yesterday.”
I studied Corie for several long seconds after she finished speaking.
“So,” I said, drawing out the word. “What you’re saying is that your blood killed those plants. Is that right?”
Corie flushed.
“Yes,” she said. “It sounds stupid when you put it like that, but yes. Please, believe me. I’m not making it up.”
I stroked my chin.
“I believe you, Corie,” I said. “You wouldn’t lie about something like this.”
Corie looked relieved by my words
“Thank you, Master,” she said. “I thought you wouldn’t believe me because of how fantastical it sounds. I mean, who ever heard of blood killing plants like that?”
“Actually, I have,” I said. “Back on Spirit Earth. There are plenty of ways to weaponize one’s own blood, if you know how.”
Corie stared at me.
“This Spirit Earth of yours sounds more and more terrifying each time you mention it,” she said. “I don’t know if I would ever want to visit that place.”
I shrugged.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “Spirit Earth can be a deadly and dangerous place, but it can also be beautiful and wondrous. It’s just like Lumina in that regard.”
Despite living here for almost eighteen years at this point, I had only seen a fraction of Lumina. There was a whole wide world out there, and I intended to explore all of it when I reached a certain level of power.
“I’ll take your word for it, Master,” Corie said after a brief pause. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with me? Why did my blood kill those plants?”
“Let me take a look.” I gestured to the floor. “Sit down. This will take a while.”
Corie and I sat down right on the floor. I took her hand and used my divine sense to study her, similar to the way I studied Annabelle and Mother some time ago. It was something I planned on doing anyway for her and Lorelei, to figure out what body cultivation techniques best suited them, but I kept putting it off because of all the stuff that kept happening. At least now I could get it out of the way.
Nothing I saw surprised me, with one exception. Corie was a healthy young woman in the prime of her life, and thanks to her cultivation, she would remain that way for as long as she lived. However, as I examined her, I noticed something strange about Corie.
Her body was poisonous.