The Undying Immortal System

Upon leaving my house, GuiAi went to talk with the others about taking a trip down the mountain, and it quickly became clear to me that while a cost of 25 points a day was enough to deter long vacations, it wouldn’t stop anyone from taking a day off. Everyone was ready for a break, and they were more than willing to pay a couple dozen points to get one.

I had told GuiAi that I was willing to take them anywhere they wanted to go, and while this was true, leaving the Wastes would add a large cost due to the travel time involved. Also, after seeing how excited everyone became at the prospect of taking a day off, I realized that these trips might become a common occurrence in the future, so it would be best if we were strategic with our travel destinations.

Since I wanted the Su Clan to believe that our base of operations was located in Rosehill, we needed to make a show of visiting the town on a regular basis. With this in mind, I informed everyone of a slight change to the price of excursions.

If they wanted to visit Rosehill, I would only charge them 20 points per person per day. If they wanted to go anywhere else, I would charge them 30 points. As Rosehill was a semi-famous tourist destination with plenty of leisure activities to indulge in, no one complained about these new prices.

The very next day, I gave all five of the Disciples sleeping pills, shoved them into my storage space, and rode west to the Rosehill Hot Springs.

As it turned out, it wasn’t just my Disciples who were excited about this outing. After nearly a month trapped within the limited space atop Mount Jiang’s plateau, my horse was more than ready for a good run across an open landscape.

We made good time and arrived in Rosehill only eight hours later. Once there, I snuck into the city, entered the small palace complex that previously belonged to the Su Clan, and placed everyone’s unconscious bodies into separate sleeping quarters.

I spent that night scoping out the town and didn’t wake everyone up until the next morning.

A few dangerous-looking Grandmasters were lurking around the place, so I gave everyone a formation-inscribed amulet to keep them safe. Then, I handed everyone a few gold coins and disappeared, allowing them to roam the town freely without needing to worry about me constantly looking over their shoulders.

Of course, while I ‘disappeared,’ I didn’t go far. I stayed close enough to monitor everything they did. This was both to keep them safe and to keep an eye out for any questionable behavior.

Shortly after I left, they split up into three groups. GuiMing and GuiAi went off to explore the town together, Mo left to explore on his own, and ShouLi took Liang by the arm and gave him a guided tour. I did my best to stay close enough to Mo and the siblings to help them out if anything went wrong, but most of my focus was on ShouLi. If anyone was going to take this opportunity to betray us, I expected it to be her.

ShouLi acted nervous the entire day. She was constantly glancing at shadows, and her eyes would occasionally linger on random passersby for a bit too long, but she never did anything overly suspicious. If anything, her behavior seemed to indicate that she was worried about the Su Clan targeting her, not that she was working with them.

At the end of the day, I returned them all to my storage space and took them all back to Mount Jiang.

After this outing, everything returned to normal. The Disciples spent their time cultivating, and I focused on improving my skills as a refiner. While I wanted to learn more about herbalism, it had dropped down on my priority list. With the memory orb training system having proven to be a success, it was clear that I would need a considerable number of orbs in the future, and I didn’t want to have to rely on Jin for them all the time. I needed to learn to make them myself, so that was where I put my focus.

The Disciples remained diligent and hardworking for an entire month. Then, they asked me to take them back to Rosehill. This time, however, Mo didn’t join us.

After setting everyone free to roam the city and watching them each go their separate ways, I once again turned my focus to ShouLi. As she was now walking around on her own, I thought that she might take this opportunity to contact the Su Clan, so I wanted to keep a close eye on her.

I barely noticed it when Liang took a crumpled-up piece of paper out of his robe and tossed it into an alley.

As soon as the coast was clear, I appeared in the alley, picked up the note, and read it.

It contained a lot of basic information about our base, including details on the affinity testing orb, the formation for testing qi purity, and the Qi Gathering Formations. It also mentioned that I was teaching them techniques through the use of white stones, but it didn’t provide many details about the process.

Importantly, this note didn’t contain any information on where our base was located, and it didn’t mention anything about me helping them increase their affinities.

After considering the situation, I crumpled the note back up and returned it to the alley. Giving the Su Clan a bit of information about how I was training everyone wasn’t an entirely bad idea. If they knew a bit more about what I could do, they might be more eager to work with me. If they knew that I could easily raise a person’s affinities, they might go a bit too crazy, but there was little harm in them knowing that I could accurately test for affinities or that I had access to Qi Gathering Formations.

I would need to be careful about the clan planting more spies into my ranks in the future, but again, having enemy agents amongst my Disciples wasn’t entirely bad. Having someone trying to turn my recruits against me would be a good test to see who would remain loyal to me and whose real loyalty was to the Su Clan.

While I didn’t know much about the process of generating the karmic energy needed to ascend to Sovereign, I was working under the assumption that the clan needed to see me as their Patriarch. The fact that nominal city lords could generate Lord-level karma without actually managing a city likely meant that there was some amount of leeway with this, but if people in my clan were truly loyal to the Su Clan’s patriarch, then I doubted I would be able to draw energy from them.

That said, while I didn’t mind the Su Clan learning any of the information contained in this note, I was worried about Liang giving it to them. I would need to keep a closer eye on him in the future.

This pattern of work and relaxation continued for several more months, and our trips to Rosehill became somewhat routine, but eventually, GuiAi and GuiMing requested a trip to Dragon Gate City. They wanted to spend some time with their parents and tell them about everything they had been up to recently.

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This visit led to their parents asking if they could join us on the mountain. They also mentioned several other small families that might be interested in moving there as well. ℞ᴀℕ𝘖ᛒĚś

These additional workers were not members of the Su Clan, and I wouldn’t have any kind of bloodline connection to them, so I was hesitant to bring them along with us. However, they were skilled in a variety of mortal crafts like tailoring and pottery making that would be useful as our settlement continued to expand.

My ultimate goal was to create a true, thriving city inside of my storage space. That would require a large number of skilled laborers, and if I limited myself to only recruiting members of the Su Clan, I might have a hard time finding knowledgeable people who wanted to join me. In any event, expanding the gene pool of my city would only be beneficial, and nothing said that the children of these people couldn’t marry into the Su Clan in the future.

In total, four small families joined us, and I settled them all on the south side of the plateau. At first, they were a bit dismayed to find that they would be living on a desolate mountaintop, but watching the Disciples quickly construct a series of brand-new stone houses and workshops for them calmed them down.

While this expansion to our small community would no doubt be beneficial in the future, it did highlight a problem for the present. How were people supposed to be compensated for their labor?

Typically, bakers and weavers would make goods and sell those goods for copper or silver, but on the mountain, copper and silver were worthless. On our trips to Rosehill, I had been providing everyone with a bit of gold to have fun with, but none of the Disciples considered these coins valuable. Base metals weren’t important to them. What they cared about were contribution points.

So, after spending some time understanding how the formations I had purchased for the Affinity Hall interfaced with the sect-protecting formation to charge and award contribution points, I created a simplified version of these formations that could function as a point-of-sale system. These formations allowed everyone to sell their goods and receive contribution points in exchange.

Of course, since one contribution point equaled one minute on an Essence Gathering Formation, no one was crazy enough to pay an entire point for something like a loaf of bread. This forced me to implement a fractionalized point system so that people could pay as little as a hundredth of a point for simple goods.

My hope was that by allowing mortal laborers to spend these points in the Affinity Hall, I could increase the production of karmic energy from my clan and city in the future.

As time passed, the Disciples began to make significant advancements. As their affinities grew and they got more practice, they reached the point where they could regularly advance from Marital Disciple 1 to Peak Disciple in only a matter of weeks with even Mid- and High-Yellow techniques.

Their qi purity when advancing so rapidly wasn’t exactly impressive, and only ShouLi had gotten anywhere close to the pristine foundation I demanded of them, but they were all showing marked improvements in their cultivation skills.

However, they were developing a worrying tendency of rushing their cultivation a bit too much in order to earn contribution points from rapid advancement. So, I made a slight change to the rules. Previously, I had said that they could only earn points from a given technique a single time. If they advanced to Martial Disciple 2 with a weak foundation, they might only get 30 points for doing so, and the remainder of the points available for this advancement would be forever lost to them.

I changed this policy to encourage them to cultivate the same technique multiple times.

As an example, say that Liang advanced from Martial Disciple 2 to Marital Disciple 3 with a qi purity of 50% while using the Earth Heart Mantra. In the past, he would only be given 30 points, and he would never have a chance to receive points for advancing to Disciple 3 with that technique again.

The change I made was that if he decided to try cultivating the Earth Heart Mantra again and advanced from Disciple 2 to 3 with a qi purity of 60%, he would be able to earn the extra 6 points he had missed out on. Then, if he tried a third time and was able to cultivate it perfectly, he would get the remaining 24 points plus the 60 bonus points for having a pristine foundation.

This was to encourage them to acquire mastery of each technique instead of just rushing through as many as they could. Of course, since one needed at least a Peak-Yellow technique to achieve a pristine foundation, the impact of this change was somewhat limited, but everyone did begin practicing techniques multiple times after it was implemented.

Eventually, everyone was able to reach Peak Disciple with a Peak-Yellow technique. While no one had a solid enough foundation for me to consider letting them advance to Martial Master, I did add a bookcase containing 36 new scrolls with Profound-Rank techniques for every element.

Unfortunately, they struggled far more than I had hoped when trying to learn these techniques.

For most of them, I could attribute this to them simply not being very talented. Liang, for instance, had originally had a hard time learning even the most basic of cultivation techniques. ShouLi was different, though. I felt that she should have been able to learn a Low-Profound technique without too much difficulty, but after weeks of trying, she had only been able to advance to Martial Disciple 3.

This made me a bit worried that the process of learning to cultivate through memory orbs was doing long-term damage to their ability to learn normally. This was a cause for concern, but when most of the people I was recruiting lacked the ability to learn normally in the first place, it wasn’t something worth dwelling on. Still, it was definitely something I needed to keep an eye on.

Another change I made during this time was to my policy on Energy Expulsion Pills. Previously, I was handing them out for free whenever anyone reached Peak Disciple. I decided to instead start selling them for 10 contribution points apiece. This would allow the Disciples to reset their cultivation base at any time while also, hopefully, encouraging less rushing.

I would have liked to start everyone down the path of learning a profession so that they could make and trade pills amongst themselves without needing my involvement, but I didn’t feel they were ready for that yet. They needed to spend their time learning to cultivate better instead of trying to learn ancillary skills.

During this first year, while I spent most of my time mastering Rank 2 and 3 refining, I also spent time on my goal of turning my storage space into a viable ecosystem.

As I saw it, there were several things I had to accomplish before the space would be suitable for long-term habitation. It needed land, clean water, a day/night cycle, the ability to grow food, some type of sanitation system, and several other things.

Overall, my understanding of what it would take to create a habitable environment in a completely sealed-off space was extremely limited, and I doubted there were any schools in this world that specialized in teaching such things. So, I could only take things one step at a time and learn as I went.

I decided to first focus on something that was both important and something that I felt could easily be dealt with. I needed to find a way to ensure the space maintained a breathable atmosphere.

So far, I had done this by transferring copious amounts of air into and out of the space at regular intervals, but this was a huge hassle, and it wouldn’t work if I wanted to store a large population.

People consumed a lot of oxygen, and they produced a lot of carbon dioxide. Once the space was large enough and people got all their food from plants grown within the space, this might take care of itself, but it seemed like it would be best if I had a system in place to ensure the proper balance was maintained at all times.

What I needed was a formation. My idea was to design a formation that would pull CO2 from the air, break it down, and then release the oxygen back into the atmosphere while forming the carbon into a solid brick. Then, if oxygen levels got too high, it could just burn the carbon to create more CO2.

After several months of work, I was close to figuring out a Rank 2 formation that could make this happen, but this only created a new problem for me to solve. The formation I was designing would require a large amount of wind qi to function, and I would need to find an efficient way of supplying it. I had a few ideas for how to handle this, but each one came with its own set of additional complications to work through.

With solid progress on several fronts, my first year with my new clan came to a close, and it was soon time for me to return to the Su Clan’s training compound.

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