The rising sun cast long shadows across the road as I pushed the cart up the steepest part of the road. Cresting the hill, I hit a flat area which had been hewn out from the mountain before the city was built thousands of years ago. I covered the last few hundred meters to the line in front of the gate, then set down the tongue of the cart and caught my breath. The guard jumped out of the cart and handed me a muscle recovery pill, this time a petty grade, as we were about to enter a city where we would be safe, and I used a bit of the last few centimeters of qi in my soul sea to remove a canteen of water from my ration bag, drinking the last mouthful that it contained.

  The guard had taken a shift pulling the cart just after supper, pulling us almost as fast as I had for about two hours, and the caravan driver had taken a shift after that, pulling us at a jogging pace for about an hour. I had used the three hours to meditate and restore my qi, though I did take a few minutes to help the medicine fix the damage to my muscles. I’m pretty sure I got a good bit of conditioning from that, the equivalent of a good workout at least, but with no way to measure it I didn’t have exact numbers.

  I had used the level three qi cloud technique to recover my qi, sending out a bit of qi to guide the qi in the air to me. While I could have completely recovered in less than thirty minutes using my new Calling Tribulation technique which was like an upgraded form of the qi cloud technique, it was a rare technique that was too flashy to use in public. The only thing unusual about my version of the qi cloud technique, other than its greater efficiency, was that I was using a qi gathering technique a major realm above me. While this wasn’t unheard of, it was rare outside of the rich and powerful due to the cost. Still, it was a far better idea to use the slower method and not draw attention than to use the faster one and possibly scare our new friends.

  The group of villagers in front of us moved forward and I picked up the tongue and pulled the cart after them. I used the qi cloud technique again, channeling the energy into making the pill work faster, but I could tell that several other people in line were also gathering qi by the relative density in the area. One of them, a level one teenage boy with the villagers in front of us, even had full qi reserves, but was sending all of the qi he gathered into a technique to enhance his body. He was most likely a body cultivator who was practicing channeling, so that he could last longer in a fight. Still, with him only using the level two qi skin technique, absorbing any qi that touched his skin, he didn’t significantly slow my own efforts to recover.

  By the time we were at the front of the line I had completely recovered physically and recovered around one percent of my qi reserves. “Reason for visiting?” the guard said in a bored voice.

  The Ambassador jumped out of the cart and came forward. “I and this guard are here to discuss business with some of the businesses in town, as I’m a merchant ambassador. The other two were part of a caravan, but were attacked by bandits. We managed to save their lives, but most of the people in the caravan were killed and the rest were captured.” The caravan master also got out of the cart and came forward, relaying his story.

  The guard nodded. “In that case, it doesn’t look like you’ll have to pay the caravan fee for your carriage, but there’s still the charge of 10 taels per person to enter.” From what I had read, a tael was the standard mortal currency. Though the exact exchange rate fluctuated based on where you were, it was generally equal to somewhere between 1/100th and 1/150th of a spirit stone. While different metals were sometimes used for this purpose, as they were expensive enough to be worth a large fraction of a stone in something the size of a coin or smaller, the most common item to act as currency was uncut gemstones.

  The Ambassador pulled out a small quartz stone that had slightly less than half a stone of qi in it, not wanting to bother with counting the small amount of mortal currency we had. “Keep the rest.” he said, and the guard nodded, waving us through the gate.

  Once we were inside the city the caravan master gave us directions to a house in the older but still nice part of the city which had been built around 600 years ago. There he had me pull the cart up to a gate with a large ‘Ji Family’ sign board. Ji Wan left the cart and talked to the two door guards and they opened the gate for us to enter.

  Once inside the others got out and a servant came over to me. “Come on, slave. Follow me.” I followed them past several large buildings, from kitchens to workshops to servant housing and eventually reached the barn, where I parked the cart. “Must be terrible having to pull a cart like a common pack animal.” the servant said as I backed it into an open area. “What did you do to piss off your master?”

  “Master?” I asked, not understanding why he would use that word.

  “Great, he’s stupid. You’d think the cultivation would fix that.” the man muttered, then looked at me. “Your master. I assume he’s the level three man in the nice robes? What made him punish you by having you pull his cart?”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing what the man had said. “I’m not a slave. I’m a cultivator.”

  “Plenty of slaves are cultivators. Being a cultivator just means you probably broke a few laws to get in that situation instead of having to do it because you were poor.”

  “No,” I corrected. “An independent guard cultivator. I work for the third level man, but I was hired, not bought. I was just pulling the cart because our pack animals were killed by bandits and it’s a good way to condition the body.”

  “Look.” said one of the two teens that were taking care of a nearby goat-like creature that appeared to be nursing five kids. “We aren’t judging you. He might be a hired servant,” the young man pointed to the one that lead me here, “but the two of us are slaves too. Our dad got in a lot of gambling debt when we were children, and our whole family was sold to the Ji Clan to pay off his debt. We also aren’t cultivators, but that doesn’t really matter.”

  “Oh, I know you aren’t judging me.” I said. “Slavery’s pretty common around here. I’m not looking down on you either. I’m just not one of you. See.” I pulled my sword out of my second bag, where I stored my valuables. “Would they give a sword, much less an expensive metal one, to a slave?”

  The three of them looked surprised. “Well, there are plenty of warrior slaves, so maybe a weapon, but definitely not a metal one. In fact, I’ve never seen a piece of metal larger than a thumb nail, and what I have seen is from when the lady decides to wear her fine jewelry.” They came over and started looking at the sword, marveling at it, so I handed it to the nearest one.

  “You can look at it if you want, just don’t touch the blade. Metal swords don’t like it when you touch their blades.”

  “It has a sword spirit?” the servant asked in surprise, and I chuckled.

  “Not yet. It was only forged about eight years ago.” In many Asian cultures on Earth it was said that objects could develop a spirit if they were old enough, and there were several stories about swords that this had happened to. I knew that this world had similar tales, though I wasn’t sure if that was actually true. I doubted it was, but there were some strange phenomenon that had been proven to exist because of the existence of qi, so I couldn’t be sure. “It’s just an expression. Anything damp can make the blade rust, including finger prints.” They looked at me confused and I realized that with metal being as rare as it was, they probably didn’t know what rust was. “Rust is kind of like a rot that effects pure metals. I can make it not rust by cleaning the blade, but it takes at least an hour to do so properly.” The men nodded and, after looking over the sword and returning it to its sheath, handed it back to me.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “We apologize if we offended you, lord cultivator.” the servant said, and the two slaves echoed the sentiment.

  “You didn’t offend me, and I’m nobody’s lord, so just call me by my name, Kev. Li Kev.”

  The servant looked a bit surprised, looked at the two slaves with a puzzled look on his face, and bowed again. “Greetings Master Li.” the man said. “I am Wo Chang. These two are Qin One and Qin Two.” I gave the brothers a puzzled look. “Oh, That’s their actual names. I know some born slaves are named that way by their masters so that they can keep track of them more easily, but in this case their family was just following the tradition of numbering their children because they hoped to have too many to keep track of.”

  The older slave, maybe seventeen years old, spoke up. “So far mom has had seven children, and she’ll have brother Eight in a few months.”

  I looked over how they already knew the sex of the child without advanced medical equipment and focused on the ‘born slave’ thing. “Wait, are you saying that your siblings were actually born into slavery, and aren’t free?”

  “Yes. Of course they are. Both of our parents were slaves, so any children they have are born slaves. That’s how it works.” They looked confused.

  Wo Chang tried to clarify things. “You must be from one of those cities where children of slaves are born free, but are usually hired on as servants when they turn five. I heard that is a fairly common way of handling things, but here we still use the old fashioned method. They were sold as a family, so any children are included even if they are born after the sale. If both of their parents died, gods forbid, the others would go free, but One and Two would remain slaves, as they were already born when the contract was signed. The Ji clan are good masters, though, so they aren’t mistreated that often. At least no more than the hired folks, like me.”

  I nodded. This area would definitely need some social reforms once we got done with the war and could properly deal with the people here. “Ok, makes sense.” I said. “So, you said you three aren’t cultivators?”

  Chang nodded. “Yeah. None of us have spiritual roots, so we can’t even attempt it.”

  “Mom had a petty wood root, and sister Five has petty Earth and Wood, so they were trained to tend the spirit herbs, but we didn’t get that lucky.” said One.

  I nodded. “In that case, let me teach you something you can use, even at your level.” While I wasn’t allowed to teach Earth techniques to the people of this world, and doing so would risk blowing our cover, I knew several mortal level techniques from this world which commoners in large cities might learn. “How about I teach you to cycle your qi in a specific way to maximize the effects of medicinal pills?” This was a technique that all cultivators learned before breaking through to level one.

  “But we aren’t cultivators. How can we cycle our qi?” asked Wo Chang. The other two also looked confused.

  “Well, anyone can feel qi and learn to move it inside of themselves with a bit of training. The root just makes things a lot easier and lets you sense it and move it outside of yourself.” That wasn’t actually true, but it was written in several books on qi from this world which I had read, so it was a commonly held belief among commoners.

  The Qin brothers nodded. “So, we aren’t completely useless when it comes to qi?” asked One. I nodded. “In that case, I would love to learn it.”

  “Good,” I said, then explained the procedure to them. It was fairly simple. The qi near one’s stomach simply needed to be moved near the pill. At that point the active ingredients in the medicine will bond with the qi, making it easier for your body to absorb it. At that point a person with false meridians could then guide it into their blood vessels or nerves, depending on which it effected and which ones they had converted to meridians, allowing it to immediately go into effect.

  On Earth it was known that qi could alter the electronegativity of atoms, speeding up or slowing down chemical reactions, even stopping, forcing or reversing them under different circumstances. It was this principle which I used to make the different chemical synthesis techniques which Liza turned into formations, then products. Here, however, they just knew that the effects of food, intoxicants, medicine, and poisons could be slowed or sped up by using qi, something which poison path cultivators and alchemists used to great effect.

  Pills normally contained enough qi to fully utilize the medicine within them, but level one pills contained little and petty and low grade pills, the best that they were likely to provide to lower servants and slaves, contained little to no such qi, making this technique necessary if one wanted to get the full effect. In fact, with level one pills, one needed at least an average quality pill to absorb all of the medicine without this technique, something I learned after I woke up from getting my blood vessels almost destroyed in that sparring session. Some of the pills had only a fraction of their active ingredients absorbed by me, but some had all of them absorbed, in one case even causing me to slightly absorb more of a previous pill. While I had used a variation of the technique I was now teaching to finish absorbing the medicine, with good enough quality pills I would have fully absorbed the effect even if I was unconscious, and the excess could have enhanced the effect.

  Once I was sure that all of them had learned the technique, I asked them what their biggest health concern was. Chang had hurt his shoulder after being thrown off of one of those goats he was trying to train for riding and cart pulling, so I gave him a Tendon pill. One had a sour stomach from eating something that wasn’t fresh. I didn’t have any anti-biotics, in case it was a bacteria from spoiled food, but improving his stomach would at least help with the symptoms, so I gave him an Internal organ pill. Two had hurt his arm while moving hay for the goats. At first I thought it might be a tendon issue like Chang, but it was just below the elbow. This likely meant that he had strained or pulled a muscle, so I gave him a muscle pill.

  All of the pills were petty grade, as I wanted them to see the full effect of the technique. I watched them as they used the technique, in case they ran into any issues. After thirty seconds, when they seemed to relax a bit, I spoke up. “If you think you are good enough with the technique, you can try moving the medicine to the walls of your stomach, so that it can be absorbed into the body and blood. This will let it reach the needed area faster in Chang and Two’s case, and will let the effect spread to other organs in One’s case.” Around two minutes later they started opening their eyes.

  “Hey, my shoulder doesn’t hurt any more.” said Chang, moving his arm to work the shoulder.

  “My arm too.” Two flexed his elbow to demonstrate.

  A few seconds later One opened his eyes. “My stomach feels a lot better, but not perfect. I do feel like I have more energy, though.”

  “Your pill wasn’t quite the right one for the illness, so I wasn’t sure. Ideally, you would take a weak antidote pill, as spoiled food contains some light poisons, and maybe an Immune Boost pill if it got bad, but this is enough to get rid of most of the symptoms. What I wanted all of you to learn is how the qi can be used to enhance the effect. Petty grade pills usually only weakly have that effect, so if your injuries or illness are actually fixed you had to have performed the technique fairly well. All that’s left now is practice. Any time you use medicine, even if it’s just an herbal pill and not a proper alchemy pill, you can use this. This also works with salves you rub on your skin, you just have to send the qi to where the salve was rubbed on and then draw the effect into your skin.”

  The thing that made this technique ideal was that it used very little qi. Higher level pills would require far more qi, but even a mortal in this world got enough qi from the spirit food they ate to refill it faster than they would likely use it. Normally they wouldn’t specifically grow spirit food for the slaves or other mortals, as spirit crops depleted the soil faster with little additional benefit to mortal consumers. The high densities of qi in this region, however, meant that the spirit varieties of most staple crops like beans, rice, wheat, and oats grew far faster than their mundane cousins and had higher yields, making them a better choice for bulk production. The soil depletion could then be mitigated through the use of fertilizers, especially those made from composted spirit plants or the feces of animals that ate spirit plants, as it added qi rich nutrients to the soil which plants could more easily absorb, benefiting the plants similarly to how the qi in pills benefited those that took them.