The Undying Immortal System

Chapter 478 – Life 120, Age 57, Martial Lord Peak

After failing to eliminate Jon’s army, I threw myself into the task of improving the defenses of our cities. I redesigned every single formation that was in any way related to keeping our people safe. Then, I threw out those redesigns and used what I had learned to design even better formations.

My aim was to design the perfect layered defense.

First, I created a low-level barrier formation. This formation couldn’t stop even the weakest of Martial Masters, but not even a Lord would be able to walk through it without breaking it. And, since this was a mere Rank 1 formation, it could remain active without damaging the formation nodes or disrupting a city’s ambient energy flows.

While this barrier wouldn’t be able to withstand even the weakest of probing attacks, it would detect anyone who tried to force their way into one of our cities.

Nearly anyone, at least.

The reference books in my mental library did contain several accounts of cultivators with special blessings that allowed them to bypass standard barrier formations. So, the second layer was a series of formations that used various other methods to detect anyone who slipped past that first shield.

Once an intruder was identified, a far more powerful formation would activate, creating a barrier that not even a Martial Emperor could penetrate. Deploying such a powerful shield across an entire city would consume a mountain of spirit stones. With the shield only covering the area directly in front of active invaders, however, it could run on nothing but ambient energy.

Improving our defenses wasn’t just a matter of having better formations, though. Kan and JiuLi worked with the Elder Council to design and implement new protocols for detecting and eliminating spies and saboteurs. This included using a truth stone to screen everyone who passed through a city’s gates and keeping detailed records of every cultivator living in our territory.

The regulations that the Council came up with were rather burdensome, but thankfully, a few gold coins were enough to hire an army of mortal bureaucrats to deal with them. More importantly, these regulations, combined with my enhanced formations, ensured that no more assassins snuck into our cities.

Upon encountering these enhanced defenses, our enemies didn’t try to force their way through. They simply changed their targets.

Each of our cities housed more than 100,000 civilians. Around half of them were mortals with no affinities, while the other half were low-level cultivators. In order to keep these people fed, the lands surrounding each city had been turned into vast farmlands for growing crops and raising livestock.

Jon did not target these farmlands. Instead, he sent his armies to destroy the fields that lay beyond these farmlands. The fields where we grew Rank 1 and 2 herbs.

This didn’t damage our sect directly. All of our herbs were grown in the fields near Black Eagle City, which lay beyond the reach of Jon’s armies. However, for the ordinary cultivators in our outlying kingdoms, Qi Gathering Pills soon became a luxury that few could afford.

Over the course of the next year, the price of herbs and pills skyrocketed, while the amount of karmic energy our cities were generating dwindled. We were still able to use Ascension Pills to gain several new Martial Lords, and a dozen of our older Lords used Rank 5 pills to ascend to Martial King. However, while this improved our sect’s overall strength, it also depleted our reserve of Ascension Pills.

Worse, Ascension Pills only helped with qi cultivation—not body cultivation. To achieve Rank 4 of body cultivation, one needed to infuse karmic energy into their muscles. And since our reserves of karmic energy were running low, this was a step that only a few of us had been able to take.

If we wanted our sect to continue growing, we needed to start generating more karmic energy.

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We could try to do this by expanding our defenses to encompass our fields and surrounding territories, but that would require a significant amount of both time and resources. Instead, why not use these fields to learn more about our enemies? If we could track the people sabotaging our fields back to Jon and his commanders, we could end this war, and we wouldn’t need to worry about protecting our fields.

Decision made, I went to my study in Black Eagle City and pulled out a map of each of our outlying kingdoms. If this plan was going to succeed, I did still need a way to detect and track my opponents. I just had to do so without them knowing that they had been identified.

Luckily, I had plenty of formation designs just waiting to be used, and several were perfect for the task at hand.

Over the next six months, I learned a lot about our enemies, but none of it brought me any closer to finding Jon or his commanders.

I could now confirm that Jon—or whoever it was that Emperor Li had taken as his disciple—definitely had access to an information blessing. Of course, this wasn’t really a surprise. I had suspected as much ever since he started exploiting the rifts within our Council of Elders. Now, I was absolutely certain.

I had installed detection formations around all of our herb fields, then connected these formations to a series of communication relays. This allowed me to know the instant one of these fields came under attack.

At first, it didn’t seem like Jon was aware of my formations. His troops attacked the protected fields at the same frequency they attacked every other field. However, as the number of fields protected by detection formations continued to grow, an undeniable pattern emerged. Specifically, Jon’s troops never attacked any field that was in the same kingdom as myself.

Sometimes, I would move around with utmost secrecy, not letting a single soul know where I was.

It didn’t matter. Whatever kingdom I was in was utterly safe. No cities were attacked. No fields were burned. The only way I could explain this was through the use of an information blessing. Jon was actively preventing me from getting anywhere close to his troops.

Considering the show I had put on back when we fought against Blackblade Hall, I couldn’t really blame him. Why would he send troops to fight someone who could so easily destroy their souls?

I could understand this strategy, but it still annoyed me. I had yet to catch even a single glimpse of our enemy, so I could only rely on secondhand reports to understand their tactics.

Still, after more than a year of fighting, I had a fairly good understanding of what we were up against.

Our enemies always attacked with lightning speed. Then, before we could organize a response, they ran away, split into smaller groups, and disappeared. Much of this could be attributed to the aforementioned information blessing. But why were they always able to run away so fast that our people could never catch them? How did they disappear so completely that we could never find any traces?

The answer to the first question was simple: they were all body cultivators. Unlike our body cultivators, though, our enemies all chose to start by enhancing their muscles. While dangerous, this gave them a level of speed and endurance that our people simply couldn’t match. Over a long enough distance, even a lowly Rank 1 cultivator might have been able to outrun one of our Martial Kings.

This was likely one of the reasons Jon never let me catch sight of his troops. I was the only person in our sect with true energy vision, so I was the only one who would be able to pick up on the peculiarities of our opponents’ body cultivation. Now that I knew, we could start planning our defenses accordingly.

How did our enemies always disappear, though?

In truth, saying they ‘disappear’ was more than a little misleading. They were simply blending in with the local populace. After the armies ran away and dispersed, there might suddenly be three or four more teams hunting demon beasts in the nearby foothills. A merchant caravan might gain five or six new guards. The cousins of a family in a nearby village might choose to pay a long-overdue visit.

The moment Jon’s armies were out of view, they were no longer soldiers—they were civilians.

How were we supposed to fight such an army? Expel all the cultivators from our towns and villages? Kill every wandering cultivator who chooses to go out and hunt demon beasts? Prevent merchant caravans from traveling our lands?

We could do this, but what would happen to our already meager supply of karmic energy?

We were in the middle of the Nine Rivers Domain. In the very heart of the Li Clan’s territory. There was no way that Emperor Li’s Disciple hadn’t been given a kingdom or two to continue boosting his strength. If we wrecked our economy by implementing draconian policies, then our sect would be stagnant while Jon grew stronger.

Thankfully, now that I could be relatively certain that Jon’s people were all body cultivators, I had a way to fight back. Kill everyone who chooses to go out and hunt demon beasts? No. Kill every body cultivator who chooses to go out and hunt demon beasts? Why not?