The Undying Immortal System

Chapter 468 – Life 120, Age 27, Martial Grandmaster 5

While I dealt with the Hall’s leadership, my sect ended the lives of its remaining disciples. A handful of those who had hidden in the mists tried to escape, but they were quickly spotted and brought down.

Blackblade Hall had been eradicated, and Pale Mist Mountain was ours. Our mission from the Bureau was a complete success.

However, this was only the beginning.

Pale Mist Mountain was a complete wreck. The lower slopes were a wasteland, the middle third was a blood-soaked battlefield, and the peak was a ruin of dilapidated stone buildings. Whatever glory this place might once have held, the Hall had neglected it for generations. Now, it was on us to restore it.

Back in Broken Spear Outpost, Meng LuYao and I started working on designs for a new stronghold, one that blended the architecture of this continent with that of the Nine Rivers Continent. Since the shattered remains of Blackblade Hall didn’t fit this vision, our first task was to clear them away.

While I joined the crafters in search of hidden traps, YuLong and our fighters followed close behind, checking each building we cleared for anything of value. Once they were done, Meng LuYao signaled our wood and water cultivators to demolish these buildings.

After each structure was reduced to rubble, they tore up the ground beneath it, ensuring the destruction of any formations we might have missed. Then, our earth cultivators stepped forward and reshaped the mountain into a pristine foundation for our new stronghold.

This was slow, tedious work, but it was necessary. After witnessing the horrors of that blood formation, no one would sleep easily until every last trace of the Hall was destroyed.

Kan and JiuLi, meanwhile, led a team back to Whistling Arrow City to report the completion of our mission. Our most important reward—promotion to a Seven-Star Sect—had been granted in advance, but the Bureau had promised a bonus for every member of the Hall we slew. There was also the special reward we were supposed to receive for following the Saint’s rules and not attacking anyone of a lower Rank.

Honestly, I didn’t expect this to amount to much. The Bureau had already shown that its greatest ‘rewards’ were simply new trials. At most, I expected a few tokens for entry into more challenging Secret Realms.

To my surprise, what they actually gave us was a storage bag filled with dozens of technique manuals. It contained Peak-Earth cultivation techniques for all nine of the domain’s weapons, as well as half a dozen martial techniques for each one.

On its own, such a reward might have seemed overly generous, but by the time Kan and JiuLi returned with it, we had already finished excavating the Hall’s library.

Sovereign Rothariel had said that he had added a few cultivation techniques to this library as compensation. What he hadn’t said was that these were complete sets of Peak-Earth Warrior Tier cultivation techniques for poison, blood, and shadow qi. There were also dual-element techniques that allowed a cultivator to blend these elements with one of the domain’s weapons.

The library also contained a Low-Profound soul cultivation technique, which surpassed everything that I had ever seen—except for the technique I had purchased from the System, of course.

This suggested that the Bureau’s generosity wasn’t about giving us a reward. They didn’t want us to use techniques from the Devil Domain, so they had buried us under manuals of their own choosing.

Scanning these techniques with my analysis ability, I found that those that came from the Bureau had mental effects related to honor and loyalty. Those that came from the Devil Domain were focused on large-scale death and destruction.

Neither set was overly enticing, but I dutifully copied everything into my mental library. If Saints and Sovereigns wanted to hand me gifts, who was I to refuse them?

Of course, as valuable as these manuals were, our real prize was still buried deep within the heart of the mountain.

Pale Mist Mountain was a spirit mountain. None of the books I had read ever explained exactly what that meant, but they all agreed on one thing: spirit mountains produce spirit stones. Pale Mist Mountain was one of the weakest spirit mountains in existence, producing only three or four stones a year, but it produced them, and I needed to understand how.

So, after setting up a layer of defensive formations, I left our rebuilding efforts in the hands of Meng LuYao and made my way to the peak of the mountain, where the building that housed the Hall’s leadership had once stood. There, I entered a tunnel and began my descent, heading deep into the heart of the mountain.

We had located this tunnel during our initial cleanup, but it was lined with so many traps and formations that investigating it had to be put on hold. Now that Pale Mist Mountain was firmly under our control, I finally had time to explore.

Like the nodes of the blood formation, the formations that lined the tunnel were buried beneath several meters of solid stone. Unlike those nodes, however, these formations were brimming with excess power. This made them easier to detect, but it made them more difficult to remove.

Every other step, I had to reach out with earth qi, locate a buried formation, mentally unravel its structure, then inject energy at key points in its inscriptions to defuse it. The newer formations were still in good working order, which made them relatively easy to deconstruct. Some of the older ones, though, were relics on the verge of collapse. Taking these apart without triggering an explosion was a true test of skill.

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As I worked, the days slipped by. On the surface, Meng LuYao finished our initial settlement—a modest village encircled by a marble wall. It wasn’t much, but after I went up and inscribed the wall with a Rank 3 formation, our people could sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that no one who was allowed to attack would be able to break through our defenses.

Once this was done, Meng LuYao shifted her focus to the base of the mountain. The domain’s blessing ceremony was only a few weeks away, and my goal was to recruit 100 people each year, allowing us to build a force capable of defeating the Li Clan’s invasion. Half of these recruits could come from the Su and Shi clans, but the other half would need to come from the nearby villages.

Convincing so many locals to take a chance on a new, unknown sect would be difficult, though, so we needed to get a proper gate set up to impress them and draw them in.

The base of the mountain would be home to our outer sect, while the settlement at the peak would be home to our inner sect. Between these two areas, Ye Sheng and Bao Ming were working on constructing a terraced garden, where our sect would be able to grow a selection of low-level herbs. Given the mountain’s environment, the types of herbs that we could grow here were limited. Once we got our hands on the right spirit fires, though, we would be able to grow everything we needed for Rank 1, 2, and 3 Qi Gathering and Attunement Pills.

I could have helped with this—and maybe I should have—but instead, I spent nearly every day slowly excavating my tunnel, digging ever deeper into the heart of the mountain.

Finally, halfway through the second week of this, the passage ahead of me began to brighten. A few days later, my efforts brought me to a chamber with walls that were fully encrusted with spirit stones. Each was a crystal the size of my fist, and the slightest bit of force was enough to break them off the walls.

These were all basic, low-grade spirit stones, but there were more than a hundred in this chamber, telling me that it had been quite some time since the Hall last harvested them.

What truly caught my attention, though, was the object that floated at the very center of this chamber. It looked like an ethereal, glowing strand of hair, or maybe the fine, fibrous root of some ancient plant. A thin thread of power connected this root to an undersized spirit stone on the chamber wall, feeding the stone with a slow, almost imperceptible trickle of energy.

I instantly knew that this ‘root’ was what I had been seeking, and I realized that I had seen something similar during my visit to the Heroes Treasury.

One of the items in the row of crystal pillars was an ethereal root that was several times larger than the one in front of me. If size was a marker of the quantity of spirit stones these roots could produce, then the 10-billion-point price tag made sense.

The System had already given me the cost of basic knowledge about what these roots were: 1,000 credits. I hadn’t wanted to pay that at the time, since earning 10 billion points in one of the Saint’s trials seemed impossible. Now, however, I needed to know.

“System, what is this? Go ahead and purchase the information.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1,000 credits.

The object in question is a Dragon Vein. More specifically, it is the broken fragment of a Dragon Vein. Dragon Veins act as conduits, connecting this world to the Sea of Primordial Chaos. They pull in energy from that realm, refine it, and deposit it in the form of spirit stones. Excess energy flows into the surrounding environment.

Since this Vein is broken, the energy it refines is of limited value. Repairing the Vein will increase the quality of the stones created. Increasing its size will increase their number.

Dragon Veins present no known risk to the host world. They are commonly used to fill new worlds with energy, and there are no known incidents of the connection to the Sea of Primordial Chaos causing adverse effects.

That last statement… Was the System—was the Earthly Dao—actively encouraging me to stick this “Dragon Vein” in my inner world? I had been hoping to find a way to let my inner world start producing spirit stones, but this kind of encouragement, along with the “Sea of Primordial Chaos,” had me more than a little worried.

“System, what effects will this Dragon Vein have on my inner world?”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 500 credits.

The only known effect is to raise the world’s total energy level.

“Known. What do you keep saying ‘known’?”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 2,000 credits.

No additional information is known on this world. Researchers suspect that complete Dragon Veins may provide additional benefits, but such ideas are only conjecture, as no complete Dragon Veins have ever existed on this world.

“I see. And how much would it cost me to purchase a complete Dragon Vein?”

The cost cannot be calculated at this time.

Nodding, I rubbed my chin and made one last request. “System, I want an analysis ability that will show me as much detail about a Dragon Vein as possible. I would like it to include information on the best way to enhance or fix a Vein. Allocate 10,000 credits to this.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 10,000 credits. 44,453 credits remaining.

I closed my eyes for a brief moment, then opened them and focused on the Vein in front of me.

Minor Dragon Vein (Broken)

Quality: Low-Grade

Output: 3.2 spirit stones per year

Upgrade Requirements: 5 jin of Origin Vein Steel

10,000 credits. What did I learn? Basically nothing.

The only new information was that I needed “Origin Vein Steel” to upgrade the thing. But, what was that? I had never even heard of such a metal before.

I almost asked the System, but as I stared at the faintly flowing Vein in front of me, I suddenly had an epiphany.

I reached into my inner world’s treasury, pulled out a copy of the metal that I had traded Ancestor Wong for my new furnace, and shoved it into the Dragon Vein.

The Vein flashed with light and dissolved the metal on contact.

Minor Dragon Vein (Broken)

Quality: Low-Grade

Output: 7.3 spirit stones per year

Upgrade Requirements: 3 jin of Origin Vein Steel

Four extra spirit stones a year. That’s not much. It definitely wasn’t worth a Rank 9 pill furnace. However, what if I continued upgrading it?

Also, the System said that excess energy flows into the surrounding environment. What effects would a more powerful Dragon Vein have on Pale Mist Mountain?

I wanted to find out, but not yet. Before improving this Dragon Vein, I needed a sect that was powerful enough to defend it.