As we left the valley we went past a large pillar, a tower over thirty meters in diameter. I could feel qi flowing into it. This close to the pillar, the qi density was greater than modern day Earth. “That is why the valley lacks qi.” said Ji Bo, pointing towards the pillar. “The valley is surrounded by pillars like that, which drain away all of its qi.”
“But shouldn’t more just flow in from above it?” I asked, and Ji Bo shrugged.
“Maybe, but let me ask you something, do you remember feeling cold in the valley?”
I thought for a few seconds. “Only when fighting a spirit. The weather was actually really nice in there.” I said.
Ji Bo nodded. “It’s always nice. I doubt the valley has seen snow since the towers were built. Works in the summer too. No matter how hot it is outside the valley, it never gets hot enough to even need a fan. Many researchers think that the valley is being kept at a comfortable temperature by those pillars for a reason, but no one knows why.”
“Why not just enter the towers and get an answer? There should be notes inside of them.”
Ji Bo shook his head. “The towers are protected by a barrier. No one can break into them, and if you try the barrier counterattacks. And before you say we should just go around the barrier, several level fives have tried. The towers can destabilize any portals nearby, so you can’t even portal inside. So, whoever built them doesn’t want us to have the answers.”
“Or, they just don’t want to risk us messing up the formation.” I countered, and Ji Bo shrugged.
“Maybe. It’s the biggest mystery of the Black Dragon Mountain range.”
We traveled until sunset and reached a village. The qi levels had returned to normal about an hour after we had passed the towers, so I had spent most of the trip restoring the qi of all of my items. Once we were in the village I brought Xiao out of the beast pouch and let him go hunt. I knew I owed him for coming out and helping me in mortal valley, but wasn’t sure what to give him to pay him back, so for now all I could do was let him search for a spirit beast to snack on by himself. He came back half an hour later looking happy, and I decided to actually sleep that night. Refilling all of the items, plus the stress from training my mind had exhausted me and I needed a break. So, after another session training Jiang, I went to my tent and she went to hers.
She had managed to reach Late Gathering levels of pressure. I guessed that she had almost caught up to the mental training her two days of suicide sprinting Alchemy had given her, but knew that she likely had some serious flaws in her foundation. If she wanted to reach level two before the trip was over, she would need to bring all of her mental abilities up to par, but unfortunately there wasn’t an easy mental training you could do to train everything fairly equally, the way you could work out or do martial arts to train the body. Once we were in Crystal Summit, I might have to look into making a cultivation seed talisman for her that had a generic mental seed. With a level two seed on a level three talisman paper, I should be able to make a rechargeable one that could take her to at least late level two in her mental stats, letting her reach that point more quickly.
Such advancement was actually too fast, and was constantly pushing her to the limit. There was a reason you couldn’t get people from level one to level two faster than two months. The human body could only advance so quickly without developing serious flaws. I was hoping that with recovery pills I could shave a good bit of time off of that, but wasn’t sure if it was possible even while using them. The improvements in her pressure had mostly been due to her pushing herself to her limits during duel cultivation training. It was like a body builder who focused on benching as much as they could, and would leave their abilities extremely unbalanced. For that reason, though, I would only give her the option to advance at most, not encourage her to take it. Such a choice was too dangerous to know if it would be the right one, so she would have to decide on her own.
The next day around noon we reached the city. After paying the toll, Ji Bo sold all of the prisoners to the gate guards and we entered the city. The guards commented on how it was strange that I had used the beast taming spell on them. Apparently, the beast version only restricted the movements of a servant, not the thoughts. When using contract magic to restrict an intelligent being, however, including intelligent beasts, one needed to partially restrict the thoughts as well. Without doing so, the person would be able to slowly work out the flaws in the contract and eventually break it. This was likely what the ghost had been able to do, being able to expedite the process because it wasn’t under the contract at all, and only its host was, thus creating a much larger flaw for it to exploit. The guards wouldn’t sell me the version for use on humans, as they didn’t want it to be a commonly known technique, but let me know that there were locations in town where you could purchase it, as bounty hunters often learned it for dealing with prisoners.
I didn’t get a cut from the sale of the prisoners that were captured before the valley, as I had taken everything from the bandit leader, and the ones we captured while leaving were all non-cultivators, so even the few that had spirit roots were only sold for mortal currency. Once we reached the Ji family estate everyone left the wagons and Ji Wan took the Ambassador to meet the family head, a level five man named Ji Quei. He was the original founder of the family, and was over five hundred years old. Ji Wan was also his great great grandson through his first wife.
In the main family everyone was a cultivator. In order to marry into or be adopted into the main branch of the family one had to have spirit roots, even if they were only a concubine. Anyone that doesn’t have spiritual roots is sent to one of the branch families in the various nearby cities, to be adopted and raised by them. The family would then train anyone in the family with spirit roots, preferably in the family technique but sometimes in other techniques. Within the branch families, however, there was no such regulation, with mortals being able to remain part of the family, be adopted in, and marry into it. The head of the branch in High River, Ji Bo’s grandfather, for example, was the son of one of the patriarch’s sons which was born without a root. He had been sent to the branch family in High River around a century ago, and his oldest son had won the position of Young Master of the branch thirty years later.
After receiving a room from the family and arranging a meeting for tomorrow morning with the family head, the Ambassador informed me that he would be trying to break through to level four tonight. “In that case, is there anything I can do to help, sir?” I asked.
“Purple cloud tea.” said Ji Bo, who had stayed behind to discuss the return trip with the Ambassador. I gave him a puzzled look. “I used it when breaking through to the third level, and it made things much easier. It should help make things easier for the Ambassador too, so he can compress his core a bit more. Of course, it will need to be at least level three tea. The lower grade leaves won’t have much of an effect.” He told me where there was a tea shop in town, and I agreed to go buy some.
I was about to leave when Jiang came up to me. “Doing some shopping?” she asked.
“I’m going to get the Ambassador some Purple Cloud tea. Since you are such an expert at preparing it, though, would you mind brewing a pot for him it once I’m back?”
She nodded. “Sure, I don’t mind. I was actually going to go buy some tea myself. The other women told me about two types of tea that help during childbirth, Jade Leaf and Crimson Marrow. I was hoping to buy some.”
“Well, the birth is getting close,” I said, “so it makes sense to start preparing.”
She nodded. “Eight actually started the Quickening last night, so I’ll probably give birth a few days after returning to High River. So I want to do what I can to prepare now.” I agreed to go with her, and we walked to the tea shop. While we walked she explained that Jade Leaf was a pain killer which mostly limited the maximum level pain could reach, but did little about minor pains. Crimson Marrow, on the other hand, improved a person’s ability to exercise fine control over their body, and was often used by martial artists to learn new moves. It was often used by women who were about to give birth to make pushing easier.
We walked down the main street and looked at the stalls. There were people selling a wide variety of foods and goods, but the first thing I noticed was that most things here were spirit goods. They were usually made of the bone, hair, leather, and other body parts of spirit beasts or level one or two spirit wood. Even the mortals, which only made up around half the people of the city instead of the ninety percent of High River, primarily used spirit goods. While it was unusual that the city seemed to concentrate cultivators, the fact that spirit beast materials were so common that even the mortals could use them meant that I shouldn’t have any problems finding hides to produce more talismans.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
After purchasing some Rainbow Fruits, the cultivated version of Rainbow Enlightenment tree fruits, we turned down a side street. These fruits worked similarly to a low quality mind cultivation seed, and slightly improved the refinement of various parts of the mind, having the most benefit for the parts which were the least developed. At only ten taels each, Jiang also bought ten of them, as she wanted to work on her own mental weaknesses. I purchased twenty of them, hoping to use them to improve my mind to the limit before using the rare Rainbow Enlightenment Tree fruit.
We passed an alchemist shop which claimed to be one of only two level four alchemist shops in the city. I hadn’t visited such a shop yet, only visiting Mo Lin’s level three shop, so I remembered where it was for later. High River didn’t have any level four alchemy shops, despite the Ji family being there. The only level four alchemist in the branch family, the Patriarch, produced pills for the high ranking cultivators in the city and sold them via private orders, the high ranking people needing to order in advance for ordinary pills and specially commission rare pills. Most of the level four cultivators in the branch family weren’t even level four alchemists, as it was too difficult for them to get level four materials to practice with, so while they might be able to produce level four pills given the materials, they couldn’t produce average quality level four pills with enough consistency to be certified as level four alchemists.
Beside the alchemist shop was the tea shop. It had several tables out front on the street and a few people were sitting at the tables, drinking tea from porcelain cups. The two of us went inside and stood in line behind three other individuals, two of which appeared to be a couple. When we got to the front of the line Jiang spoke up. “Do you have Jade Leaf and Crimson Marrow tea?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am, we have plenty of it.” she said. “How much would you like?”
“How much would a bag of each cost?” she asked, reaching for some gems.
“Just make it a gin of each, so she can have plenty for later.” I said. She looked at me confused. “Ding, One and Two can use them to train as well.” I explained. It was only a level one tea, so it shouldn’t cost much.
After verifying that it only cost one stone per gin, I asked about level three Purple Cloud tea. This was one hundred stones per gin. The woman turned around to bag the leaves. Jiang didn’t want me to pay for hers, but I told her not to worry about it and reached my mind into my storage bag for the stones. That’s when I realized that I was completely out of stones. I had given them all to the Ji family so that they could get spirit beasts for me before leaving High River, and hadn’t gotten any of the reward money from the sell of bandits yet, as Ji Bo needed to get paid by the family for the spirit plant materials the caravan had bought before he could pay me.
“Actually, I just realized that I spent all of my stones.” I said and the cashier sighed. She had probably heard that line several times before. “If you can hold it for me for a few minutes, I’ll go next door and sell something and be right back.”
She shrugged and put the bags of tea on the counter behind her. I wasn’t sure if she believed me or not, but I was telling the truth. I still had the blue-green ganoderma, and could sell it to raise the money.
We stepped out of line and went next door. The cashier was a red-haired girl that looked like she was seventeen or eighteen, but judging by the fact that she was late level two she was likely in her mid twenties. Five would probably end up like her in a decade, starting to age at half the rate when she was thirteen and not looking eighteen until she was twenty three. It would be even worse if she broke through to level two before then. “Welcome to the Burning Cauldron. What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I have something to sell.” I said. I stepped forward and pulled the mushroom out of my storage bag before dropping it on the counter.
The girl glanced at it and shook her head. “This is above my pay grade. Do you mind waiting for my boss? She’s in the back meditating at the moment, but for a level four ingredient I can go get her.” I nodded and she went into the back. About five minutes later she came back out, following a level four woman that looked to be in her late fifties. “This is the herb I don’t recognize, master.” she said and the older woman looked at it.
“Blue-green ganoderma.” she said. “It’s a mutation of the blue ganoderma you use to make regeneration pills. It is extremely poisonous, though.” The woman looked at me. “Can I ask where you found it?”
“I found the body of a demonic cultivator outside of High River and that was in his storage bag. I assume he got lucky and happened to find one in the wild.”
She shook her head. “Unlikely. It’s possible it didn’t mutate until it was already mature, but to reach this level in the wild it has to be at least one hundred years old. The area around High River is too well traveled for it to survive that long without being found. My guess is that either he happened to find it in a hidden realm, or someone in the area is growing them. There are several Wood type techniques that can accelerate the growth of spirit plants, but most of them can only be used to speed the growth up a few times over. If you try to push it beyond that, the plants tend to mutate. Most of the time that kills them, but some plants pick up special properties, like this. You can also buy Blue Ganoderma spores and cultures here in Crystal Summit, though I’m not sure about the market in High River, so it wouldn’t be hard for someone at a high enough level to forcibly growing them and accidentally produced a culture of blue-green instead.” She nodded. “I can buy it off of you, though. How does eight hundred sound?”
“A little low.” I said. I knew that level three blue ganoderma can sell for at least three hundred, and this was a whole level higher. “How about a thousand?”
She shook her head. “No market for them. It’s only situationally useful, so I probably won’t use it for at least a year, until someone wants me to make some special breakthrough or advancement pills with it.”
I nodded and thought for a few seconds. I needed a few pills as well, so maybe that could get me a bit more. “What if I get at least half of the money in the form of pills? Could you do a thousand then?”
She shook her head. “Still a bit much, though I can pay nine hundred in that situation.”
I thought for a few more seconds, then nodded. “Ok, then. Can I see your list of level three pills you have on hand?” She nodded and had her apprentice hand me the list. The recovery pills were around twenty stones each for average quality.
“No qi recovery, gathering, or regeneration pills left, but the rest are still there.” the apprentice said, and her master left for the back of the store.
I nodded and ordered four each of the nine types of healing pills, plus ten level two Body Tempering pills at five each. The total came to seven hundred and seventy, so she gave me one hundred thirty in cash as well as all of the pills. I could use level two Mind Tempering pills as well, but because I still had the Rainbow Enlightenment fruit and had purchased Rainbow Fruit earlier, which had a similar effect, I would be using it to temper my mind instead.
I thanked her and was about to leave when Jiang spoke up. “I’m a level one alchemist, and was wondering if you can sell me the formula for Mother’s Milk pills?” she asked. I looked at her a bit confused, as I’d never heard of that pill. “Oh, they are like satiation pills for babies. If a mother isn’t producing enough milk or died in childbirth, you can crush one into a gin of any animal’s milk and it becomes good enough milk to raise a child to the point where it can eat solid food.” I nodded. So it was basically this world’s version of baby formula.
The assistant pulled out a piece of paper and quickly wrote the formula on it, then handed it to Jiang. Jiang pulled out her purse, and the assistant held up her hand. “Forget about paying. It’s a cheap formula. Since you are pregnant and an alchemist, I don’t mind giving it to you.” Jiang nodded and thanked her before putting the formula away. I thanked her as well. “No problem. Good luck on your new child. Do you happen to know if it has roots yet?”
“He started the quickening last night, so I know he has Earth roots. He must have gotten them from my husband, as I have Fire and Wood roots.”
The woman looked at me, but I shook my head. “We’re just friends.” I said, and the assistant nodded. “But Ding likely had an Earth cultivator ancestor, since Eight and Five both have them.”
Jiang agreed. “Both of his parents are mortals, like him, but I never met his grandparents, so that might be the case.”
“Or the man that raised him isn’t his birth father.” I said. It wasn’t uncommon for cultivators to have unofficial concubines, often even married ones. This was especially true when a cultivator was married to a mortal, as it allowed them the opportunity to dual cultivate. I assumed that the assistant thought Jiang was that for me, but didn’t really care.
Jiang nodded. “I’ll have to ask him once we get home.” We said goodbye and left. The master had already returned to the back of the store and started to meditate, and I could feel the qi in the area slowly move into the back of the store, revealing that she was gathering qi.
We returned next door to pay for the tea, and returned to the family, where Jiang fixed some for the Ambassador. He thanked her, then carried the pot of tea into his room, where he closed the door. Afterwards, I decided to wrap up one thing before starting my own cultivation. I had several spirit beasts from the journey here, most of them from the cave at the entrance to Mortal Valley, and still owed Jiang the beasts I had promised to buy her and her family. She had also grown attached to the Flood Dragon, so I would probably need to get her a replacement before she was willing to part with it, and Five would want another dog before giving up the puppy I had left to protect her.
“Would you like to go to the beast merchant with me?” I asked Jiang. “I did promise your kids pets, after all.”
