The Undying Immortal System

After leaving Bao to get settled in, I went outside to begin work on a new building. Bao was going to need to do a lot of work on soul cultivation, and for that to happen, I first needed to build a Soul Cultivation Library for him.

The plateau was nearly stuffed with buildings by this point. GuiMing and his team were already hard at work building down into the mountain, but they were only Martial Masters, and the mountain was made of Rank 3 blueschist stone. It would still be months before the first habitable areas would be opened up, and even then, I wasn’t sure how many people these limited areas would be able to house.

Luckily, there was still a bit of open space on the northwest corner of the plateau, between my home and the workshops.

To conserve as much space as possible, I built a long, narrow, four-story structure that wrapped around the edge of the plateau. Each floor consisted of only a single, large room, and each of these rooms was packed with bookcases. I wanted to add reading rooms to each floor where people could study in private, but with space at a premium, I decided to hold off. Bao would be the only one using this place for the next few years, so setting up a simple desk and reading area on each floor was sufficient for the moment.

Each floor of this library was dedicated to one of this world’s four primary philosophies: Universalism, Traditionalism, Legalism, and Daoism. While this library wasn’t nearly large enough to hold all of the books I had pilfered from the Yellow Orchid Academy and the Nine Rivers Sect over the years, it was able to hold a good number of them, and with the scribe ability I had recently purchased, I was able to quickly fill up the library’s shelves.

After a bit of internal debate, I also decided to include the various philosophical texts I had purchased from the System. If a knowledgeable outsider knew about these books, they might become suspicious or greedy, but I didn’t think that would be too likely. This would not only require a member of my clan to talk about the books they had read in incredible detail, but it would also require a listener who knew and cared enough about the topic to even notice that anything was amiss. Even then, protected by the shield of the Wastes and my ability to reincarnate, there was little risk in spreading this knowledge around.

Instead of being worried, I was just interested to see what might happen if focusing on these books led to my clan having subtly different outlooks than the rest of this world. With an expanded perspective on what was possible, they might be able to open entirely new avenues of advancement.

Once everything was set up, I manipulated the sect-protecting formation to block anyone from accessing the library other than Bao or myself. I wasn’t yet ready for any of the younger members of my clan to begin actively cultivating their souls.

At the Yellow Orchid Academy, students weren’t allowed to begin soul cultivation until after they turned 25. This was to allow them to develop their own sense of self before submerging themselves into the morass of different drives and impulses that could come from soul cultivation. While I didn’t know if 25 was the proper age for this or not, I understood the value of prudence here. If something went wrong during qi cultivation, it was easy to fix with an Energy Expulsion Pill. Fixing a problem caused by improper soul cultivation wasn’t so simple.

After my work on the Soul Cultivation Library was complete, I spent some time visiting various places around the plateau and checking to see if anything needed my direct intervention.

There were a few batches of formations stones and refined weapons in the workshop that needed my appraisal, and there were a few buildings that needed minor repairs, but overall, things were running smoothly. The only real problem I found was that all the high-level herbs I had seeded around the island to draw in treasure hunters had already been found and taken away, but that was easily fixed.

I took out another dozen Rank 3 herbs, spread them around the island, and then turned my focus to more personal pursuits.

After giving him a couple of days to relax and adjust to life on Mount Jiang, I visited Bao to talk about what we should do with his garden. It had suffered significant damage in my storage space, and as he had not been tending it, the damage had only continued to mount.

Initially, he wanted to go up and take a look at it to see what he could do to save it, but after a long discussion, I convinced him that this wasn’t a good idea. The plants were in bad shape, and I was worried about how seeing them like that would affect him. If he had insisted on trying to save the garden anyway, I would have taken a step back and done my best to support him, but thankfully, he backed down first.

Instead, Bao agreed to spend a few months working on his soul cultivation and practicing the Path through the Silent Night. Then, he would spend some time practicing a few soul techniques. After some basic soul defenses were in place, hopefully, he wouldn’t be nearly as susceptible to the influences of random plants and herbs.

This meant that it would be a long time before Bao was able to take care of his garden again, and by that time, most of the plants would have likely died off. While I or one of my clan’s herbalists could attempt to save them, we didn’t have Bao’s skill, knowledge, or blessing. If we tried to save them, we would likely only do more harm than good.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

That being the case, after Bao left to spend time in the Soul Cultivation Library, I went to the garden and harvested everything that I could. In hindsight, I should have done this from the start instead of trying to take the entire garden with me, but even if I had, I can’t say how much of a difference it would have made. The blue peonies had broken apart into nothingness the moment they were harvested, after all. It would have been impossible to store something like that long term.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

After collecting everything that was still viable from the garden, I noticed an unusual pattern in what herbs had survived.

The lack of any blue peonies wasn’t a surprise, but I felt that it was a little strange that there weren’t any astragalus roots or schisandra berries either. None of the ingredients needed for the Rank 1 Superior Qi Gathering Pill had survived being transported from the sect. After a bit of checking, I realized that none of the herbs needed to make a Rank 2 Meridian Builder Pill or a Rank 3 Qi Gathering Pill had survived either. It was possible that Bao just hadn’t planted any of these herbs, but that seemed incredibly unlikely.

On the other hand, not a single herb needed for a Rank 1, 2, or 3 Healing Pills was missing.

Some of them did look a bit strange, though. For example, the speckled ganoderma, a wood-based herb used in the Rank 1 Healing Pill, was typically a black mushroom with small white spots. At first, I thought that this herb was missing. However, upon using energy vision to examine a few of the herbs I hadn’t recognized, I found a jet-black herb with a medicinal energy structure that matched the speckled ganoderma almost exactly. Unlike some of the others, its energy was broken and disjointed, but it was still clearly recognizable. What had thrown me off was that instead of having white spots, this ganoderma was pockmarked with small craters across its entire surface.

While some of them were in worse shape than others, I had been able to collect a wide variety of herbs used to make various healing pills, and none of them broke apart upon being harvested. In contrast, not a single herb used to concoct a cultivation-related pill had survived the journey from the sect intact. Why?

I had my speculations, but I wasn’t ready to form any hard conclusions just yet. Instead, I took my gathered bounty and headed to an alchemy workshop.

Once inside, I gathered the herbs needed for a Rank 1 Healing Pill and started work.

The first thing I did was try to melt the physical shell of the herbs, but as expected, this didn’t do anything. Likewise, there were no toxins to take care of, so I moved on to combining the herbs’ energies.

This step was a bit trickier than usual. Typically, with most herbs, the structure of the medicinal energy would be broken up into small shards, and all one would need to do was mush the various energies together. The energy shards in the different herbs would then naturally separate and combine together to form a greater whole.

With Bao’s herbs, this didn’t work so well. The medicinal energy in them formed something akin to a monocrystalline structure. Even damaged and broken apart as they were, the medicinal energy was still lumped together in large chunks instead of the normal small shards. This kept the energies from merging together properly.

If I wanted to rely on Bao’s herbs in the future, I would need to learn how to use them properly, but for the moment, I decided to just brute force matter. I slammed the energies together, shattering apart their large energy structures, and forced them to combine. Once the energy of all three herbs merged into a united whole, I forced the energy to condense into a pill. Then, I examined it with my analysis ability.

Perfect Rank 1 Healing Pill (damaged), 137% Medicinal Efficacy. Value: 0 contribution points

This was the first time I had seen the ‘damaged’ notification. This might have been caused by my rough handling of the medicinal energies, but I doubted it. That should have only lowered the pill’s efficacy. Instead, I felt that the damage had to have been the result of what had happened in my storage space. The herbs remained mostly intact, but that didn’t mean certain parts of them hadn’t been destroyed.

A more important question was what did ‘damaged’ mean? Would it still work as intended, or would it have some kind of deleterious effect? Without human trials, it would be hard to say. Unfortunately, I wasn’t willing to let anyone else try this pill, and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to die myself, so the question would need to go unanswered for now.

However, the process of concocting this pill, everything from the herbs not having a physical structure to burn away to the notification that the pill was damaged, had given me enough information to reach a tentative conclusion for why certain herbs had been able to survive in my storage space while others had not.

Why did pills need to be stored in jade bottles? Why did high-quality herbs need to be stored in jade boxes? Why did spirit stones tend to lose their energy when left in my storage space?

As I had learned long ago, if the energy in an item was denser than the energy in the surrounding environment, then that item would slowly lose energy over time. However, this energy loss was significantly reduced if the item had a strong physical structure. Pills were basically just condensed balls of energy, so they would rapidly lose their energy if left outside of a jade bottle. Refined weapons, on the other hand, could be left out in the open for years without any loss of energy at all.

So, what did that tell me?

I tried to burn away the physical shell of the speckled ganoderma, but there was no physical shell to burn away. The entire thing was pure medicinal energy. The only conclusion that I could draw from this was that the physical shell of the ganoderma had been entirely incorporated into its energy structure.

It all came back to what I had learned at the Verdant Forest Sect. Demonic energy. Wu. The elder in the sect had said that wu was ‘substance.’ The physical shell of an herb was, thus, solidified wu.

What was medicinal energy? The sect’s elder had said that it was structured qi, but I no longer believed that to be true. It was a mixture of qi and wu, and that mixture was different in different herbs. In the blue peonies, an herb used for cultivation, the medicinal energy was almost pure qi, so it had very little structure to it and broke apart easily. In the ganoderma, an herb used for healing, the balance was closer to pure wu.

Why was the medicinal energy in the pill I had made damaged? Because the ‘qi-centric’ medicinal energy in the herbs had dissipated. The ganoderma was pockmarked instead of speckled because those speckled parts of the herb had been destroyed in my storage space.

At this point, this was mostly just speculation, and there was still an open question about what it meant that various spirit fires could make pure medicinal energy, but nearly everything fit, and it was all leading me down a path to answering a far more important question that I had been wondering about for a while now. How can parts from demonic beasts be used in alchemy?