The Undying Immortal System

Chapter 462 – Life 119, Age 26, Martial Master Peak

Having studied the manuals that we acquired in the Heroes Treasury, I had already completed a basic design for my Rank 3 cultivation technique. However, there were a couple of details that I wasn’t quite satisfied with. So, taking advantage of our new status as a First-Class, Seven-Star Sect, I went to the Bureau and purchased a few of the techniques that were now available to us.

This ate up a significant percentage of our contribution points, but it helped me make several notable improvements to my design. It also allowed me to quickly customize techniques for YuLong and the others.

In the distant past, I cultivated a three-element wood-fire-earth technique, where wood qi empowered fire qi, and fire qi empowered earth qi. The three-element earth-metal-guandao technique I created here was similar, but the metal qi didn’t empower the guandao qi. The two just blended together into a complementary mix of elemental qi and weapon qi.

After finalizing this new technique, advancing through the Grandmaster realm was as easy as breathing. With the pills, formations, and spirit fires at my disposal, I could have made a minor breakthrough every other day. However, to keep my energy body from becoming dangerously unstable, I had to slow this pace down to one advancement every few months.

This time between breakthroughs wasn’t wasted, though.

Blackblade Hall might have only been a Seven-Star Sect, but Pale Mist Mountain gave them access to spirit stones. This mountain generated three or four stones each year, and after centuries of accumulation, the Hall would have easily been able to purchase multiple Rank 4 weapons.

Having already witnessed the dangers of fighting opponents with higher-level weaponry, I knew that I needed to take care of this before our invasion began.

Therefore, after purchasing all the cultivation techniques I needed, I spent the remainder of our sect’s contribution points on Rank 4 woods and metals. The Bureau had placed tight controls on the number and types of Rank 4 materials that we could purchase, but I was still able to piece together all the materials necessary to craft a decent weapon for each of our elders.

Once complete, I used a modified Qi Gathering Formation to infuse each of these weapons with compressed guandao qi, turning them into true Rank 4 weaponry. These guandaos were slightly inferior to weapons that had been infused through the use of a Cicada Pill, but with how little time we had before our assault, this was the best I could do.

After several days of private negotiations, YuHua and Suba HaoRong finalized the list of requirements that they would use to evaluate new recruits. HaoRong left these negotiations smiling, clearly pleased with his performance. YuHua, meanwhile, just gathered everything up quietly and reported the situation to YuLong and me.

“We’re planning to divide the Nominal Disciples into three distinct groups—warriors, crafters, and auxiliary. The warriors will be given most of the cultivation resources you’ve allocated, while the crafters and auxiliary members will be expected to earn their resources by contributing to the sect.”

YuHua shook her head and let out a heavy breath. “HaoRong is clearly trying to favor his Ba family. Considering what we’re up against, his suggestions aren’t entirely without merit, but I’m worried that he’ll end up creating a rift in the sect that we won’t be able to repair.”

Looking over YuHua’s documents, a small smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.

The Ba family focused all their attention on training skilled martial artists. The Liang family, meanwhile, tended to be more involved in the clan’s administration and internal security. This meant that anyone recruited from the Ba family would end up in the warrior group, where they would be showered with free resources. Those from the Liang family would end up stuck in the auxiliary group, receiving fewer resources and limited ways to earn them on their own.

I handed the papers back to YuHua with a soft grunt of amusement. “It’s fine. Just consider this a small test of our Sect Master’s leadership abilities. HaoRong is attempting to form his own bloc of supporters, but he isn’t being very subtle about it. If Kan can’t handle this, we might need to look at shifting some of his authority over to JiuLi.”

YuHua still looked concerned, but HaoRong’s antics wouldn’t put the sect in any real danger. The only threat was to Kan’s authority as Sect Master.

With recruitment guidelines agreed upon, HaoRong and YuHua entered Chang’an in search of Nominal Disciples.

HaoRong appeared in the Su Clan, where he was offered little more than the bare minimum of respect. In the eyes of the clan’s leaders, he was nothing but an unremarkable Martial Master who had been given a mission by his elders. He didn’t hold any official position within our sect, so the elders didn’t make any effort to court his favor.

The Su Clan’s leaders were eager to bolster their presence within our sect, but none of them were happy to hear that HaoRong was only recruiting Nominal Disciples. The Ba Patriarch still ordered all of his best warriors to follow HaoRong and obey his every command, but after a few private conversations, the other families all decided to only offer him their weaker Disciples.

The reception YuHua received in the Shi Clan, in contrast, went about as well as she could have hoped. Though not as famous as the Dragon Ancestor, YuHua was still instantly recognized as the clan’s “Flower Ancestor.” When she announced that our sect was recruiting Disciples, the Shi Patriarch ordered every eligible youth to apply.

The relative sizes of the two clans meant that there were still far more people from the Su Clan looking to join us, but the best and brightest of the Su Clan chose to stay in Chang’an. The best of the Shi Clan joined our sect.

Of all the elders, Meng LuYao was the least pleased with the outcome. “Are you sure this is okay, Fang? Maybe we should step in and deal with the Su Clan ourselves.”

I gave her a short, humorless chuckle. “No need. The Su Clan holding back their best Disciples is probably for the best. The warriors from the Ba family are more than enough to help us take Blackblade Hall, and once that’s done, the Bureau’s regulations will keep their future contributions to a minimum. If anyone else joins us, they’ll just end up being held back, forced to wait for our sect’s next advancement. Meanwhile, their peers in Chang’an will be able to continue pushing forward.”

Of course, this sentiment only applied to Nominal Disciples. When the blessing ceremony rolled around, I sent YuLong and Meng LuYao along to oversee things.

Upon seeing that the Reverend Elders were personally involved this time, the Shi and Su Clans were both more than eager to send their most talented youths to join our sect. We only had 125 slots for Premier Disciples, though, and we wouldn’t be getting any more anytime soon. So, while we accepted nearly everyone who volunteered to join us, they were all relegated to the status of Outer Sect Disciple.

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These youths would be trained entirely by the sect, using our techniques and our resources. Therefore, the Bureau would allow us to promote them to Premier Disciple whenever we wished. We didn’t plan to hand this title out to just anyone, though. If they wanted it, they would have to earn it.

After finishing things up in the Shi Clan, JiuLi brought Ye Sheng to the Plane of Wood to recruit volunteers from the Ye and Bao Clans, but this effort proved far less fruitful. Most were more than happy with their lives as they were, with only a handful of the more adventurous souls choosing to follow them.

After four months of recruitment, our sect had gained 142 new Disciples, all of whom needed to be trained, fed, and housed. This put a huge strain on our existing Masters, but it shored up our biggest weaknesses against Blackblade Hall. If a dozen of the older Nominal Disciples could advance to Martial Master, we wouldn’t have anything to fear from the Hall’s numbers.

Countering the Hall’s poison qi, however, was a far more complicated process.

How did poison qi work? What methods could the Hall use to introduce it into a person’s body?

None of us were poison cultivators, and I didn’t want to reset my cultivation base this close to our attack on Blackblade Hall. So, I instead built a Qi Gathering Formation and installed it with one of the poison filters I had copied down during the Heavenly Ascension Tournament. This produced a bubble of pure poison qi that we could experiment with at our leisure. Then, I offered several Disciples a generous allotment of cultivation resources in exchange for serving as test subjects.

We exposed these Disciples to poison qi in every way imaginable. We fed them tainted foods, made them bathe in infected water, and hit them with sticks that were saturated in the stuff. In the end, we didn’t learn much more than what I had originally observed during the tournament.

Poison qi was fundamentally the same as any other type of elemental qi. It could only enter through the skin unless it was present in extremely high concentrations, such as in a medicinal bath. Under normal circumstances, it would need to be ingested or injected directly into the body.

To remove poison qi from a person’s body, one needed either a high affinity or a specialized Poison Qi Expulsion Pill.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a recipe for this type of Expulsion Pill, and even if I did, it wouldn’t do much good. Fire Qi Expulsion Pills were heavily reliant on fire herbs, so concocting Poison Qi Expulsion Pills would almost certainly require poison herbs, which were hard to come by in this domain.

I had more than enough poison herbs stored away in my inner world, but I couldn’t use those while under the Bureau’s surveillance.

With the packet of seeds that Meng LuYao had picked up in the Heroes Treasury, we could have grown our own poison herbs, but we didn’t have enough time to do so before our assault. Though, even if we did have the time, it wouldn’t have done us much good. Poison herbs had to be planted in the carcasses of poisonous beasts, and those were in short supply as well.

Alchemy wasn’t a solution to the Hall’s poison qi. Therefore, I redirected my efforts toward formations.

We had found three primary methods for infecting a person with poison qi. They could eat tainted food, breathe corrupted air, or be cut by an infused weapon. So, instead of worrying about how to treat those who had been infected, we just had to stop people from being infected in the first place.

Avoiding tainted food and water was simple enough. Everyone could just carry their supplies around in a storage bag and prevent anyone from messing with them.

Avoiding tainted weapons was only slightly more difficult. It would be impossible to ensure that no one got cut during the middle of a large-scale battle. However, from what I had seen, Blackblade Hall didn’t actually have many poison cultivators. With energy vision, I could find the cultivators who were carrying poisoned weapons and send our best warriors to bring them down before they could do any damage.

The only real danger was poisoned air. If the Hall covered the battlefield in specialized Qi Gathering Formations, they could blanket the entire area in toxic air, and there wouldn’t be much we could do to stop them.

To solve this problem, I turned to JiuLi.

She developed a lightweight, refined mask that could cover a person’s entire head. Then, I instructed our embroiderers on how to sew a simple formation that would block out any foreign sources of qi. If the Hall resorted to physical poisons, these masks wouldn’t be of much help, but they were perfect for dealing with qi poisons.

This left us with one last problem to solve: storage.

Every member of our sect would have to carry enough food for a month-long campaign against Blackblade Hall. They would also need to carry along weapons, pills, and formation plates. To make this possible, everyone needed their own storage bag.

Since we didn’t have enough contribution points to purchase 150 storage bags, we needed to make our own, which meant we needed a spatial spirit fire.

The Bureau had somehow gotten ahold of enough copies of the Expanding Realms Fire that even Second-Class Sects were allowed to purchase it. However, we didn’t have enough contribution points to afford it. I did have multiple seeds of the Expanding Realms Fire in my inner world, but using them would have led to the destruction of our entire sect.

Thankfully, the fire that I had obtained in the Heroes Treasury was more than up to the task.

When I first got it, there didn’t seem to be any meaningful difference between the Hidden Vault Fire and the Expanding Realms Fire. They both burned energy to create space. Being Earth-Rank, the Hidden Vault Fire was more difficult to control with my five-star space affinity, but that was about it.

When I used the Hidden Vault Fire to create a storage bag, though, I immediately encountered a problem.

Creating a bag with a volume of 8 cubic meters required twice as much energy as usual. Creating a bag with a volume of 27 cubic meters required three times as much energy as usual. As I continued to experiment, I found that larger bags required ever-larger amounts of energy.

After double-checking these amounts, it didn’t take me long to understand what was going on. The Hidden Vault Fire wasn’t expanding space in three dimensions—it was expanding space in four dimensions.

While this sounded impressive, it didn’t take me long to understand why this spirit fire was among the least valued of the Saint’s treasures.

First, if a person didn’t have an extremely high space affinity, they wouldn’t be able to control the direction of the flame. It would expand space equally in all four dimensions. Without a way to reach into the fourth dimension, all of this extra space would just be wasted.

Worse, storage bags needed formations to keep the expanded space from collapsing. With a normal, three-dimensional formation, all of that extra, fourth-dimensional space would collapse the moment the flame was removed. A four-dimensional formation might be able to stop this, but those could only be crafted by Formation Sovereigns, and there weren’t many Sovereigns who were willing to spend their time making storage bags.

In short, this fire was nothing more than an energy hog. Why would anyone waste their time with it when they could simply buy a copy of the Expanding Realms Fire from the Bureau?

Of course, with a high enough space affinity, things changed.

The possibility of creating a four-dimensional storage bag was intriguing, and I couldn’t help but wonder what this might mean for my inner world. However, to reach into four-dimensional spaces and create four-dimensional formations, I first needed to ascend back up to Martial Sovereign. I also needed to figure out a way to acquire an overly expensive three-star space affinity.

That said, while my control of the Hidden Vault Fire was somewhat lacking, I was still able to limit the amount of wasted fourth-dimensional space it created. This allowed me to use it in place of the Expanding Realms Fire and create all of the storage bags we needed for our upcoming campaign.

After 13 months of preparation, our sect had swelled to over 200 members. We had 167 Disciples, 48 Masters, and 4 Grandmasters. Though not as numerous as our opponents, our pills, weapons, and formations were more than a match for anything that some random Second-Class Sect might throw at us.

With only two months left until the Bureau’s deadline, we gathered everyone up, activated our stronghold’s automatic defenses, and marched to war.