Benton had the necessary materials for four of the seven qi sources he planned to create. Kind of. He’d agreed in principle to the terms of the trade for the last Fire material, but it wouldn’t arrive at his sect for another little more than two weeks. That left him with the ability to make Ice, Nature, or Shadow imdiately.
Hmm. Ice and Shadow only helped one of his disciples each, while Nature had the potential of speeding the cultivation of a large number of sect mbers. On the other hand, Yang Xiu and Zou Tian were, quite honestly, more important than all the regular mbers put together.
Benton sighed. He hated to think of the relative worth of people like that, but his decision required him to be honest. The rank-and-file Nature aspected sect mbers were, in aggregate, crucial to his sect. They would eventually all reach at least Foundation Establishnt and contribute in ways big and small, filling the Pavilions and creating resources and fighting battles.
The sect would absolutely be nothing without them.
But they were also easy to replace. Literally more than ninety-nine point nine percent of the billions and billions of people on the planet could take the place of his current sect mbers and achieve the sa results.
Not only that, but sects weren’t judged by their workhorses for a reason. A single Golden Core could decimate those junior mbers. Well, such a high-ranked cultivator could easily destroy more than just one in ten juniors, but the point still stood.
The old man who ca from Earth still bristled at that way of thinking, but honestly, his prior planet wasn’t really all that different. Fans cheered for the star of the team not the benchwarr. Celebrities were adored. Trash collectors weren’t.
At the end of the day, all his sect mbers deserved respect, courtesy, and common decency. The top mbers simply deserved more. Which left Benton needing to determine which of the two possible disciples got the qi source first.
Yang Xiu possessed phenonal talent and was pretty much destined to end up astride the cultivator world. She had a real chance of finishing near the top, if not at the top, of whichever bracket she ended up competing in at the tournant. And she was the one most likely to be disappointed if Benton didn’t make the source for her aspect first.
Zou Tian’s spiritual roots weren’t nearly as impressive, but he was probably the smartest disciple. More importantly, he’d recently increased his already strong affinity with Shadow. His enhanced natural ability to hide from spiritual sense was second only to a System given perk.
Most importantly, with his intelligence, stealthiness, and new Knowledge of Spycraft technique, he might actually provide important information about the Jade Chaleon Sect’s plans. He might save lives.
Benton was well aware that he played favorites with his designated heirs, but there was no contest regarding who to give the first source to. Zou Tian’s mission to save his fellow sect mbers’ lives was orders of magnitude more important than Yang Xiu’s placent in the tournant.
Besides, if things worked out okay, it wouldn’t be long before Benton had the other two qi sources made, anyway.
Ti to get to work.
Of the five steps required to create a qi source, Benton had only completed the first—acquiring the materials. Second was extracting the essence from those materials in a cauldron and then combining and infusing them with origin qi for the third step. The fourth was using his skills as a Master Blacksmith to create the container.
He frowned. It made no sense to him to leave the mass of mixed qi-rich materials in a lump while he forged the holder. Logically, it seed like having the container ready first just made sense.
The thing about cultivation thods and knowledge was that it wasn’t always straightforward, and that problem even extended to System-produced techniques. Sothing that seed one way on the first read often turned out to be different later. It was like the technique’s creators took a certain poetic license, leaving their works open to interpretation.
The most probable explanation was simply that the genre of technical cultivation literature utilized its own style. After all, business writing on Earth tended to use buzzwords and be carefully crafted so that the reader couldn’t possibly draw a negative connotation of the actions of the writer. Technical writing, on the other hand, emphasized a straightforward and logical recitation of the facts. And writing fiction, which strove to entertain the reader, required skills that were foreign to the other two types.
Cultivator writing was its own thing, consisting of a lot of flowery language. The author left figuring out the often misleading prose as an exercise for the reader.
All that to say that the manual listing steps in a certain order absolutely did not an that there was an intention to have the reader perform the steps in that order. Even knowing that, though, Benton hoped he was right about the sequence being optional. Otherwise, he might be about to make a really expensive mistake.
Having made the decision, his first stop was the Blacksmith Pavilion, his favorite forge in particular. Not being a complete idiot, he’d already acquired several dozen ingots of celestial duralumin. When he’d asked around for the best qi-inert material to use in crafting, celestial aluminum was the clear winner, but there was a problem. The material’s strength was lackluster compared to other cultivator materials.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringent.
Benton thought about using the tal to create the housing, anyway. After all, the qi sources were presumably just going to sit in a room. It wasn’t like he was building a weapon or structural support out of the stuff.
The counterpoint to that way of thinking was that qi sources were so rare as to be practically mythical. No one could make the things. Acquiring the materials was easy enough, as was making a container. The formation required to finish it, however, was unknown to anyone besides him as far as Benton knew, and a literal Master Alchemist was required to perform the initial mixing. Another hurdle any other cultivator would have was finding a source of origin qi, which was simply much rarer than any other elent.
Basically, no one knew how to make these things, and Benton didn’t have much to go on as far as details went. It might be that the molten mixture he created would exert a weight or taphysical force that was too strong for the celestial aluminum to handle.
Since there was a solution available, an alloy of celestial aluminum that was just as inert but had a higher strength, there was no reason for him not to acquire that instead. So that was what he had done.
With his first ingot of celestial duralumin, he simply played with it, getting used to how the material responded to the heat of the forge and being shaped. It didn’t take long for him to get a good feel for it, and he threw the resulting flattened lump on the scrap tal pile. He didn’t want to risk imperfections caused by re-working the tal, and his practice materials wouldn’t go to waste, serving as a great training tool for the blacksmiths when they graduated to working more complex materials.
Benton’s next choice was the shape of the vessel. His first thought was to use part of the sect’s crest, but the boat was too indicative of Water. And he wanted each qi source to represent the elent visually. After a lot of thought, he decided on a Yin-Yang symbol. Which wasn’t great. But really, how the heck does one symbolize Shadow as an elent with a single color?
It was then that Benton hit a snag. How big should the housing be? Though he knew the dinsions of each of the three materials that would make up the mixture, weird things happened in alchemy. There was no guarantee that he wouldn’t end up getting rid of ninety percent of the mass of each piece when he extracted the essences. For that matter, it was just as likely that the total volu would end up far greater than the sum of the component parts. Which made no sense but that was just the way things worked with qi.
Alchemy didn’t feel constrained by the laws of physics. Benton wasn’t even sure that the craft even treated what were considered to be the fundantal rules of nature on Earth as suggestions. Instead, it just did what it wanted.
Basically, though, Benton was left with an unsolvable problem. With no way to determine the necessary final volu, he couldn’t forge the housing in advance.
Well, heck. That was probably why the step was listed fourth.
Benton let the fire in the forge die and cleaned up after himself before teleporting to his designated room in the Alchemy Pavilion. Step two it was!
Extracting the essences from the three materials actually went pretty well. He simply chunked each of them respectively into his new cauldron and added heat. The vessel was so well made that he barely even had to make any adjustnts to the qi to keep things even, and there was a formation that kept stray ambient qi from intruding into the bottom where the material was lting, eliminating a major source of contamination.
The process was fairly ti consuming as the procedure was a bit more complicated than, “Put it on high heat and stir occasionally.” Instead, he had to use very low heat, aning it took hours to lt each three materials.
Complicating matters was the fact that he had to store each of the essences in an inert container while keeping them heated so as to remain in a liquid state. Which ant he needed two more cauldrons.
Luckily, the pavilion mbers didn’t practice their craft continuously, devoting most of their day to cultivating, so he borrowed the necessary equipnt.
He still perford the actual lting in his own cauldron, though, because the superior craftsmanship eliminated a lot of the potential for introducing impurities into the resulting product. That ant he had to lt the materials consecutively instead of concurrently, though.
Finally, after hours and hours of tedious waiting and stirring and monitoring, all three of the materials had been lted, the essences pulled out, and the leftover sludge disposed of.
Benton was ready to proceed to step three—combining the three essences together and infusing the mixture with origin qi. That process was much less ti consuming than the second step, and eventually, he had a perfect fusion of three Shadow essences with, as far as he could tell, no impurities.
As he suspected, the addition of the origin qi had caused the blend to swell sowhat. There really had been no way for him to predict the final volu.
Since the instructions told him to forge the housing next, he assud that the mixture would remain stable with little oversight needed from him, but if that hypothesis were incorrect, the result would end up being an expensive setback. Thus, Benton stowed the mixture, cauldron and all, into his spatial storage, hoping the stasis effect would solve any potential degradation issues.
To further mitigate that possibility, he maxed out his Ti Aura while forging the housing, even going so far as to take off his ring and leave it outside the ti bubble.
There was actually nothing super complicated about the forging process. The need for a Master Blacksmith ca into play simply because working with qi inert cultivation materials was quite tricky. Benton had enough experience by that point, though, that creating the vessel was quite easy, and after a couple of hours of subjective ti, he was finished.
The final step was to inscribe a formation to activate the qi source, which wasn’t exactly a huge issue for a Formations Master. Unfortunately, though, he couldn’t just inscribe the array on the vessel prior to pouring in the liquid.
That would have been way too easy, apparently.
Instead, the formation had to exactly account for certain physical and taphysical properties of the liquid, which ant that he had to add the mixture to the housing and then perform the inscription.
Luckily, his Body Cultivation was so high that the heat from the molten tal didn’t bother him at all. The array was complex, however, and took many subjective hours to create. Finally, though, he finished.
Holding his breath and taphorically crossing his fingers, he channeled a bit of Shadow qi into the activation formation. The qi flowed smoothly through the channels, and the entire mixture and vessel glowed. Over the course of a few seconds, the liquid cooled into a smooth solid, and Benton sensed Shadow qi emanating from it.
Yes. He’d done it.
The first source was ready for use.
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