The Undying Immortal System

After returning from the Su Clan, I gathered all the Disciples who had just turned 20 and gave them each a Rank 2 cultivation technique. I considered the trial run on Martial Master advancements that I had done with the leadership council the previous year to be a success, but I made a few changes for this next group.

This time, I abolished the six-month time limit. These Disciples could cultivate using only the information contained in the Rank 2 technique scroll for as long or as short of a time as they wished. The only requirement was that they had to reach Martial Master 1. Then, when they were ready, they could go to the Affinity Hall, have their cultivation base analyzed, and be rewarded based on how far they had advanced. For this initial advancement, they would earn ten times the regular amount of contribution points.

My hope was that this change would encourage them to push themselves as much as possible while not forcing them to waste their time on advancements that would never come. For some of them, Martial Master 1 would be all they would be able to achieve without the information stored in the memory orbs, and that was okay. I just wanted them to push themselves and test their limits.

With my obligations in the clan fulfilled, I wanted to head back to the Verdant Forest Sect and see how SuYin and Bao were coming along, but I didn’t feel safe leaving just yet.

With the island around Mount Jiang teaming with Martial Masters who were scouring the place for loot, the fighting down there was constant. While the members of my clan were safe up atop the plateau, if anyone decided to go down to the island to join this chaos, they would quickly run into trouble.

So, I decided to wait another year before returning to the sect. Neither SuYin nor Bao should be in any danger there, and if they needed my help for some reason, they could send me a message through the Blue Wind Pavilion. I had never been too good at checking for messages in the past, but recently, I made a special point of stopping at the Rosehill Pavilion every time I took the Disciples out on their day trips.

Considering the round-trip time to the sect was nearly two weeks, and that I usually only visited Rosehill once a month, if they did have any problems, it could take me up to a month and a half to get there to help them out. This wasn’t ideal, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. After the two of them learned everything that they could from the sect, I might need to ask them to return to the Wastes for a while so that I didn’t have to worry about things going wrong while I wasn’t around, but that was a discussion for the future. In the present, I just needed to make sure that my clan was capable of handling the dangers of the island.

Having been Masters for nearly a year by this point, my clan’s leadership council had started making a lot of strides in their studies of Rank 2 skills.

Mo, GuiAi, and ShouLi were all mostly interested in learning profession skills. Mo was focused on formations, GuiAi was learning herbalism, and ShouLi was among the first in the clan to try and learn beast taming.

I was easily able to provide Mo and GuiAi with everything they would need to learn their chosen professions, but I had no idea what a beast tamer might require, so ShouLi was constantly coming to me with procurement requests for items and resources that the clan didn’t yet have. The most important of these were requests for beast eggs.

There were a wide variety of demon beasts on the continent, but most of them were ill-suited for our current environment. After discussing the matter with the others who wanted to learn beast taming, ShouLi asked me to procure eggs for three types of beasts: cats, chickens, and boars. The demon cats would make solid companions for anyone who wanted to focus on martial arts, and the chickens and boars would be raised as livestock.

I didn’t stop to think about their requests for even a moment. I just went out, bought what they wanted, and handed it over. I was as eager to see what they were able to do with these supplies as they were.

As for GuiMing, he was more focused on secluded cultivation. He was already having difficulties with his Rank 2 cultivation technique, so if he wanted to cultivate a High-Profound Rank 2 technique to match his Rank 1 technique, he would need to put in a significant amount of effort.

Still, as a member of the leadership council, he had responsibilities to attend to, and he couldn’t just lock himself away all the time. The top of the plateau was getting more crowded with each passing year, and we needed to start building downward. As head of the residential areas, GuiMing was in charge of the project to design the plateau’s interior. He was working with a team of Disciples, a couple of whom had architectural-related blessings, but GuiMing was responsible for making the final decisions.

In the meantime, NiangBa and Liang were busy fighting.

The goals of these two were simple: learn to fight, earn contribution points.

While NiangBa remained in charge of the arena, he left one of the newer Martial Masters to oversee it on most days. As for Liang, his position as head of the enforcers had never taken up much of his time because there simply wasn’t much need for law enforcement in our small community yet. This gave both boys ample time to visit the island and fight against the invaders.

During their first few forays down to the island, the boys ran across members of the Su Clan and disciples from the Twin Mountains Sect. Even though these invaders outnumbered them, and even though the level of the invaders’ cultivation bases were higher than theirs, Liang and NiangBa were still able to easily defeat these invaders. With the boys’ strong foundations, pure qi, and years of training, they were far stronger than what could be expected from most cultivators in the Wastes.

These easy victories made the boys overconfident, and that was when tragedy struck.

The people invading our island weren’t just from around the Wastes. The powers that bordered the Wastes frequently sent in youths for experiential learning in the safe environment it provided.

On their fourth trip down to the island, NiangBa and Liang encountered a group of five young cultivators from the Rising Sun Empire led by a proper young master who had been given all the best resources and training ever since he was a child. He and his guards had all cultivated Earth-Rank techniques, and they all had affinities that far surpassed either of the two boys.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

At the start of the fight, it had looked like NiangBa’s talent and training might have been enough to at least let him escape, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. NiangBa was swiftly defeated, and Liang’s defeat soon followed.

Just as one of the young master’s guards was about to send out a strike to end NiangBa’s life, I used a wave of qi to absorb the boys’ bodies into the island’s peat and transport them to safety.

The boys might have a hard time dealing with the mental blow of having been defeated so soundly, but I could only hope that it would make them stronger in the end.

Aside from occasionally saving Liang and NiangBa, there wasn’t much for me to do in the clan on a day-to-day basis. Until there were at least a few more Martial Masters capable of fighting against the invaders on the island below, I still needed to be around in case something went wrong, but thanks to the automated systems I had put in place, there wasn’t much that needed my personal attention.

So, to help pass the days, I turned my attention to herbalism and transformed the roof of my house into a large garden.

The soil of this garden came from the peat bog surrounding Mount Jiang and was rich in energy and nutrients. However, I had no plans to rely on only the natural energies in the environment.

Once the soil was in place, I then constructed a new prototype formation for balancing the garden’s qi, wu, and medicinal energy. Using the lessons I had learned during my work on my first prototype, I added a few extra features to make controlling the various energy levels a bit more intuitive.

After everything was all set up, I planted a batch of blue peony seeds to test it out.

These seeds sprouted and grew far faster than they should have, reaching maturity and blooming in only a few short months. However, while these herbs had grown fast and contained an abundance of medicinal energy, I still considered them to be failures as they were rife with toxins.

This made me question the energy proportions given to me by the Verdant Forest Sect. My formation should be pumping out exactly what the sect had said these plants needed, so why did they contain so many toxins?

Thinking that this might have just been a failure of my formation, I took out a device for measuring ambient energy levels and tested my garden. While these devices weren’t entirely accurate, they were considered good enough for most situations, and in any case, I was just double-checking my existing formation.

The result I got back was just as I had feared. The ambient energy in the garden was a close match to what the sect considered ‘optimal’ for blue peonies. The numbers were a bit off, but there were several possible explanations for this, and none of them would explain the elevated levels of toxins in my plants.

Without any better ideas, I uprooted all the plants and started again from scratch. This time, instead of relying on my formation so much, I did my best to follow the sect’s teachings for monitoring and regulating a garden’s energy levels.

As I worked, I began to get a sense of what had gone wrong with my formation. It wasn’t so much that the sect’s numbers for ideal energy proportions were wrong. It was more a problem of these flowers being living organisms, not machines. The energies they needed were in constant flux, so no one set of numbers would ever be entirely accurate.

In the end, I had to concede that my formation was pretty much a failure. It still had its uses, especially since it enriched the soil with wu without the need for demon beast ‘fertilizer,’ but the expenses involved in creating it, both in time and resources, were hard to justify. If an herbalist would need to be heavily involved in managing the energy levels of a garden anyway, I didn’t see much value in this formation over the more standard Plant Growth Formation.

Still, I wasn’t ready to throw the entire idea out just yet. I had only had enough time to run two tests, and there might have been variables that I had overlooked. I needed to wait until I returned to the Verdant Forest Sect to get SuYin’s opinion on the matter.

At the start of the new year, I attended the Su Clan’s training camp once again, and like the previous year, there was an overabundance of new Disciples to choose from. I had to wonder just how wide of a net the Su Clan was casting to try and find more Disciples for me to recruit.

Overall, there weren’t any real differences between this year’s training camp and the previous ones, but I did notice the Grandmasters were starting to take the normal Disciples a bit more seriously than they had in the past. At several points, I caught them actively discussing which ones were worth an investment of time and resources.

It didn’t take me long to figure out the source of this change. With the number of Disciples I was recruiting each year, the clan now had an overabundance of Perfect Rank 1 pills. What was once a precious treasure was now becoming a standard commodity available to even the regular members of the Su Clan.

Surprisingly, this change in the value of Perfect pills had little effect on how the Grandmasters treated me. Instead of lowering their valuation of me as their need for pills lessened, they increased their valuation of Disciples they had previously disregarded.

I was happy to have made the lives of these normal Disciples slightly better, but it did come at a risk to my plans here. If the Su Clan started valuing them too much, they might try to renegotiate our deal. While I didn’t mind paying a little more, capitulating to any demands for more compensation would set a bad precedent.

In any case, these were just random fears for the future. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be something I would need to deal with. In the present, the shifts in the Su Clan’s behavior simply meant that I was able to walk away from this year’s recruitment drive with 57 new Disciples.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

After returning to Mount Jiang, I called for a gathering of every Disciple who was now 20 years old to introduce them to the process of ascending to Martial Master. Unfortunately, this year, we had our first failure. One of the Disciples hadn’t been able to create a perfect foundation in time and was thus not allowed to learn the Rank 2 cultivation technique.

The foundation of the young man in question wasn’t terrible. He had only made mistakes on two out of nine acupoints, so part of me wanted to go ahead and give him the Rank 2 technique, let him advance to Martial Master, and then have him fix his Rank 1 foundation later, but I couldn’t.

The criteria I had set for being allowed to advance to Martial Master was a flawless foundation as a Martial Disciple, and I had to be firm about sticking to this rule. In the future, I would hand off the responsibility of judging who was allowed to advance to others, and if there weren’t firm requirements, the quality of the cultivators in my clan would begin to decline over time.

However, while I didn’t want to let the standards of my clan slip even the slightest bit, I also didn’t want to ruin the future of the boy standing in front of me. So, I gave him a chance.

He needed to reset his cultivation base and start over. If he could advance to Peak Disciple with a pristine foundation within the next few months, he would still have time to advance to Martial Master before turning 21. If he couldn’t, then stagnation would inevitably set in.

Sadly, I couldn’t stick around to watch this kid develop. There were other things I needed to deal with.

I hadn’t heard any word from Bao or SuYin in over two years, and I wanted to check in on what was happening in the Verdant Forest Sect. So, as she was the head of the leadership council, I handed off judging the boy’s qualifications for advancement to ShouLi. While her qi vision was still rather limited, she could use the formation in the Affinity Hall to assess the boy’s cultivation and check if he should be given the Rank 2 technique.

After that was done, I went around the sect, ensured that there were no issues that I needed to handle personally, restocked the various warehouses, and then left for the Verdant Forest Sect. There was a danger that something would go wrong while I was away, especially down on the island, but the clan now had enough Martial Masters that they should be able to handle any problems without me.