Sitting in his private room, a devious smile lit up Ji Kangs face and he had to suppress the urge to start laughing.

This fight between Lu Wu and Xiang Chang might seem minor and unimportant, but under Ji Kang’s careful management it would lay the foundation for a bitter rivalry that would escalate all on its own, without drawing suspicion towards Ji Kang.

In fact, Ji Kang planned to plant as many seeds of enmity between Lu Wu and others as he could while maintaining plausible deniability. More enemies for Lu Wu meant less suspicion of Ji Kang if Lu Wu were to die.

Ji Kang didn’t even need to rely on these third parties to kill Lu Wu, as long as he did it himself and destroyed all of the evidence while creating a plausible narrative for another suspect he could be rid of Lu Wu.

The contract had no clause that prevented Ji Kang or Yu Shuren from harming Lu Wu, likely to avoid troublesome situations where a little harm prevented larger harm.

For example if Lu Wu were in the path of a falling tree, tackling him out of the way could be called ‘harming’ him. Or in another case, if Lu Wu was injured and unconscious, Ji Kang and Yu Shuren carrying him away from an enemy could aggravate his wounds which would clearly be ‘harm’ without having been given an order which would override all the other clauses.

A cultivator’s life was dangerous by nature, putting such a clause into the contract could result in a hundred different situations where Ji Kang and Yu Shuren would be able to stand aside while Lu Wu was killed because they were unable to harm him even a little in the course of taking life saving measures.

With this rivalry started, it would be like a boulder rolling down a mountain, picking up speed and causing more rocks to fall as well. Ji Kang could largely sit back and wait for the results.

All there was left to do now was to ensure he had enough strength to survive the metaphorical avalanche he had kicked off. After all, Ji Kang was bound to obey and follow Lu Wu, so he would be put in the way of danger because of this. He needed to cultivate as hard as he could in order to snatch every opportunity to both achieve his goals and survive the backsplash.

Ji Kang had been meditating, sitting cross-legged in his room, while he considered this. By this point he was familiar enough with his cultivation method to be able to multitask and consider other matters without serious danger of qi deviation unless he was at a particularly delicate juncture.

His Yin-Yang Nourishing cultivation manual gave instructions for how to shape all eight of the cultivator’s meridians into 4 overlapping bagua shapes that, when considered together, would outline a sphere formed of two irregular but perfectly matching halves.

Currently his meridians looked more like a single bagua drawn on the cross section of a potato. He had made a lot of progress since he started, but had a long way to go before he would be ready to call it a success and have the qualifications to begin preparing to advance to Foundation Establishment.

The exact condition of the meridians was extremely important for Imperial System cultivators; the slightest mistake in the shape, thickness, or size of the meridians would result in disaster when attempting to advance from Qi Condensation to Foundation Establishment.

This was due to the nature of the Spiritual Plane. According to the Yin-Yang Nourishing manual’s general education section, the Spiritual Plane could be thought of as another dimension in space, overlapping and existing all throughout the commonly understood three spatial dimensions.

“Can be thought of” does not mean “is” however. The Spiritual Plane was an incredibly mysterious existence and its exact nature was disputed. Some high level cultivators even posited that the very nature of the Spiritual Plane was self-contradictory or ever changing, which if true would explain why it was so hard to grasp.

Luckily for humans though, some things can be learned through trial and error without understanding the fundamental rules that govern them. The very act of cultivation is to utilize the Primeval Qi that permeates the Spiritual Plane to empower the cultivator and the methods of cultivation that have been passed down and refined, generation by generation, were the most valuable inheritances of humanity.

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Yin-Yang Nourishing explained that in the Spiritual Plane, an object's shape was fundamentally the same as its nature. By reshaping the meridians, which were channels for the qi Ji Kang would draw into his body, he would in turn be determining the nature of the qi that he drew in.

A slightly misshapen meridian would introduce chaotic and unpredictable qi into Ji Kang’s dantain, making precisely calculated and incredibly delicate procedures like advancing to Foundation Establishment impossible. Not to mention that once chaotic qi entered the dantian the cultivator’s power would plummet.

In fact, all Qi Condensation cultivators were incredibly weak because of this. Their meridians were not yet properly shaped, thus their dantians were filled with a chaotic soup of different types of qi that didn’t cooperate well with each other and wouldn’t behave entirely predictably, making spells drop greatly in potency.

In Ji Kang’s hand was a small silk purse with a drawstring. Inside the purse was his monthly stipend, five spirit stones and a single Qi Burst pill inside a small porcelain vial.

He still had the five spirit stones and Qi Burst pill from his last stipend as well. The spirit stones were a form of currency, they weren’t particularly valuable in the greater scheme of things, but one of these stones could theoretically feed a mortal family of four with rice for a month.

The spirit stones were all about the size of the knuckle connecting Ji Kang’s thumb to his hand, they weren’t large or cumbersome. Each one was a single uniform color, but among the ten he had already received not a single one was the same color.

Ji Kang knew their color was indicative of their elemental attunement. Cultivators in areas with low Primeval Qi density could use spirit stones to replenish their qi, either using the correct elemental attunements for their cultivation or converting the qi inside their meridians, which would inevitably result in some degree of inefficiency.

This could be understood by imagining the nature of qi as different shaped keys or puzzle pieces, and a cultivator’s meridians as a lock or puzzle. Qi of the correct elemental attunement would slip through a properly formed meridian with little to no obstruction, but qi of other attunements needed to be forcibly reshaped in the process of going through the meridians, increasing the effort required to bring the qi in, as well as slowing the process.

Since Yin-Yang Nourishing had no elemental attunement Ji Kang would never get the benefits of full conversion efficiency, but he would also never suffer even worse qi wastage attempting to absorb spirit stones of directly contradictory elements.

If a fire cultivator attempted to replenish their qi with a water-aspected spirit stone they would only be able to gain about ten percent of the total qi. After all, once a cultivator disrupts the delicate balance that traps qi in the physical form of a stone the chain reaction from that disruption will entirely unravel the stone and what percentage of that qi a cultivator is able to absorb will entirely depend on the efficiency of bringing it through their meridians.

He put away the spirit stones with the others, and also put the two Qi Burst pills together. The Qi Burst pills when swallowed would unleash a large amount of qi inside the cultivator, this was helpful for cultivation in general but would be largely wasted if not used to help during a breakthrough.

The Qi Condensation stage was all about delicately shaping your meridians and slowly accumulating more and more qi inside your dantian at a higher and higher density.

A Qi Burst pill would be helpful for opening a cultivator’s dantian in the first place or in cultivation in the later stages, but at Qi Condensation the cultivator’s meridians were in a delicate, malleable state and could be harmed by taking a Qi Burst pill if the cultivator were even slightly careless.

The sect gave them out to Qi Condensation cultivators but officially advised them not to use the pills for cultivating until they reached Foundation Establishment. Until then, the Qi Burst pill could be saved up or they could be used as a bartering tool to allow lower rank cultivators to more easily trade for mystical items, techniques, and weapons from higher rank cultivators.

Shen Lan had given all three of her disciples fairly comprehensive collections of basic techniques that covered most if not all of the aspects a cultivator needed techniques for; those aspects being perception, attack, defense, and stealth.

Ji Kang had at least one technique or spell for all of those aspects, as well as many spells that were less critically important, like a spell that allowed Ji Kang to release a fragrance that would be enticing to wild animals.

That spell might seem ridiculous, but if Ji Kang ran out of provisions while on the road it might be helpful, or if he was traveling with a caravan of people he hated he could attempt to attract disaster.

Although the book of spells and techniques Shen Lan gave him contained many spells of similarly varied and dubious utility, one thing they all had in common was their weakness.

With Ji Kang’s current Qi Condensation cultivation, he was unable to cast any truly potent spells, so all of the spells in the book had built in limitations in scope or potency to allow lower rank cultivators to cast them.