The late teens and young adults quickly explained to Randy about the different parts of the Vrooshkin. First, as a first tier spirit beast, it would have a first tier core. Cores were kind of like spirit stones, but they grew over the lifetime of the beast and were made of the same material as claws, hair and quills. Randy thought it was called keratin. For some reason they weren’t sure of, some animals on this world could make a core, and it would act like a fake dantian, naturally draining the qi in their bodies. The qi would eventually balance with their body, the same way meridians and dantians will balance the qi. This makes them stronger the same way that cultivation does for people, and when the creature reaches tier two, the core will take the place of the main dantian, absorbing liquid qi into itself, with the other two or more dantian points in a monster growing normally at first, then slowly hardening into secondary cores. At fourth level these cores will become proper cores, but will still have a web of the other material running through them.
Though it was rare, sometimes animals would get sick then become spirit beasts. Sometimes this happens with people, which makes them Demons. Once a core grows in their brain it makes them mentally unstable or even insane, and they have to be executed so that they aren’t a threat to others. For this reason, if a person transforms into a demon and they are level two or above, they have one week to get their affairs in order before they must either commit suicide or be executed. If they are level zero, a non-cultivator, or level one, they can be sterilized so that they don’t produce demon children and aren’t allowed to cultivate for the rest of their life, and are under watch in case they advance to level two.
There are also cultivators who see this as an ideal, as their body will automatically cultivate on its own, and seek to follow this path. They use techniques meant to mimic such a development, though so far they only have one way of truly transforming, injecting or otherwise consuming the blood of an actual demon or monster. If it was one that was converted from an animal or person, there is a chance that they will undergo the transformation as well.
When Randy mentioned Blood Red Scorpion and asked if he was a demon, the others told him that he followed the demonic path, but Blood hadn’t yet managed to transform. If he had, he would have been far harder to defeat, as he was in the fifth realm and therefore would have had three cores, with the two secondaries being almost as strong as the primary he already had. He had, however, found a child that had transformed and kidnapped it. He was going to use it as a renewable source of blood to try and transform himself, but the elders of the Eastern Gate Sect found him first and they fought. He managed to kill two elders and badly wound a third before fleeing without the child.
After asking the locals when this happened Randy calculated that these events happened just before the first portal formed on Earth. It seemed that he had fled to Earth because he was being pursued by the elders of the sect, though whether he found a natural portal or made his own Randy didn’t know.
They had continued to dissect the creatures as the told him all of this. As for the other useful parts of the animal, the meat of a Vrooshkin didn’t taste very good and was fairly tough, but the hides and quills, as well as bones, were all useful in crafting. Some of their organs can also be used in pills, though the people here didn’t know which ones, as none of them were alchemists. For all of this information Randy gave them two of the dead animals which he killed.
So that he didn’t interfere in their hunt, once they were finished harvesting Randy followed them in the air, carrying a vrooshkin with him and promising to only get involved in their battles if they got into too dangerous of a situation. While he would save their life in such a situation, he was aware that a loophole to that promise existed. So that they didn’t do reckless things just to push themselves and force him to act, they had agreed that if he had to get involved in a battle he got to keep all of the loot from the battle.
They slowly made their way down the road until they got to the village. Once there they asked to be allowed in and the guards opened the gates for them. Randy simply flew over the wall and landed on the other side. The disciples entered and Randy escorted them towards the Inn so that they could barter. Randy was carrying a dead Vrooshkin over his shoulder, which frightened the locals at first until they realized that it was dead and not unconscious, and that even the weaker cultivators which followed him could take one down in a fight if they had to. Much of the confusion was caused by the fact that it had no visible wounds, as Randy had killed it by crushing its throat.
He laid the beast down in front of the inn and went inside. There were five cultivator customers there already, so when he saw Randy, Mike motioned for him to come over. “What took you so long? You’ve been gone an hour and a half.”
“Escorting a group here. Learned some useful information from them too. Is Dr. Clement available? They were hunting some local creature, so I figured I would give the body of one to the doctor.”
“Over there talking to the team medic from the other team.” He pointed to where a beautiful woman that looked to be in her early thirties was having a conversation with the doctor about the different ways in which the two groups made pills. Most of the ones from Earth were made in factories, so that they could be mass produced for low cost, but the doctor had made enough by hand, the process for developing the formulas the factories used, that he could have the conversation, even if he looked more like an amateur than an actual alchemist. “He explained to her that he focuses on looking for new ingredients and formulas, and is only an apprentice alchemist, and she is teaching him the basics. It might just be an excuse so that she can offer her backup cauldron in trade and have it accepted, though.”
“She doesn’t look like she has a big pot on her.” Randy said, confused.
“Magic bag. You remember Green Butterfly putting her sword in one?”
Randy thought, then remembered that he had barely noticed when he got a look at those hips. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, apparently they don’t hold any extra space, just stabilizing the qi in items placed inside, but combined with a shrinking technique they can hold more than one of our vehicles. The technique uses a lot of qi to shrink something or keep it shrunk, but once inside the bag, the item stops trying to expand. Greg negotiated for one of the bags and the shrinking technique from their leader. Had to give him a Levitation bracelet and a Condensation level barrier bracelet for both, but now we have a really nice item to take back with us.”
A few minute later Dr. Clement agreed to exchange two bottles of pills, a detoxification pill and a Breakthrough pill, for the cauldron and two books, one on alchemical techniques and one on alchemical formulas. The first pill just neutralized most toxins, venom, and poisons. The second made your qi thicken temporarily, letting you store slightly more and helping you compress it to make breakthroughs into Gathering or Condensing easier. The fact that it could only compress your chi into liquid chi at best limited its usefulness to those two situations, but for those in the first two levels it was quite useful.
The first were only $10 for a bottle of 30, and the second $20 for a bottle of fifteen. Both were over the counter drugs on Earth, with the first most often being used to sober up or treat a hangover. Here, however, they appeared to be hard to find.
Once he was finished Randy got one of the disciples he had brought here to show the doctor the corpse of the Vrooshkin. He then had them describe everything to the doctor about cores, demons, and the useful materials that can be harvested, as Randy wasn’t sure he remembered the details.
One of the rules they had to agree to in order to come here was that they wouldn’t provide Cultivation techniques, attack techniques, attack relics, or weapons to the locals, so they had to deny any requests for such things, but by the time the three days were up they had been asked about pretty much every type of technique out there. Even with the supposed low quality of their techniques, most of the books had been sold. They also only had a few relics left, and had run out of medicine this morning, when an independent cultivator had heard of them and come to buy out all of the medicine they had.
Apparently this cultivator was a Buddhist monk who traveled in order to treat the sick and injured among the mortals, and was also at the Core Formation realm. He was happy to trade many technique books, including ones on crafting talismans and relics, and several Buddhist techniques.
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While the technique books were full of references to scriptures, even including the scriptures, it quickly became apparent that in order to use these techniques one must believe in what they did, as well as many religious concepts. For that reason they were more like Talismans than the scientifically backed formations and formation relics like Earth mostly used.
That night they decided that they would continue to High River. Once there they would lie about their cultivation level so that they didn’t cause too much alarm and sell off any goods they had left. They would then arrange to bring metals back to the city the next time they came, and spend what money they had on techniques and useful materials to bring back, should they have better materials. One issue Earth had with designing items was that their qi conductive and chi storage materials were too expensive and of too low performance. If this group could exchange Iron or Copper for these materials, they would be able to make a profit in both directions.
The next morning they loaded what was left of their goods into their vehicles, left the Innkeeper ten spirit stones, and left for High River. Normally they would have given him something of value to him, but as he wasn’t a cultivator none of the techniques or relics would mean anything to him. While technically he could learn to use some of the techniques or any of the relics, as they didn’t require qi from the user, with most people believing that only cultivators could use relics or techniques, he would only have held onto them to trade them with the nearby cultivators. So instead they gave him spirit stones, which could be used to pay the cultivators for their services.
Around noon they arrived at the city. There was a line of around a dozen carriages and wagons, and they sat there as it advanced. After ten minutes or so they got to the front of the line and told the guards that they were traveling cultivator merchants at the first and second realms.
“I hope your wares are real.” he said. “A week ago someone tried to sell fakes to some of the local cultivators and they were flown above the clouds and dropped into the local forest where they became Vrooshkin food.” Greg wasn’t sure if that was true, or just a story they tell to scare newcomers, but it did let him know that they don’t take kindly to scammers trying to rip off cultivators.
Once inside there were two techniques that they prioritized above all others, and would either secure a copy of or verify that they couldn’t get a copy of before looking for other techniques. The first was the manufacturing technique for magic bags and, if possible, storage rings. From what some of the cultivators they traded with said, the rings were far more size efficient, and could use the shrinking technique on its own, but they require vast amounts of qi to use. Few people under 5th stage could provide them the energy they required, and all of those that could were at the top of 4th stage, with most having practiced special Core Expansion techniques to maximize their qi reserves. For this reason the design was split into the magic bags, which stabilize and store items, and the shrinking technique, which makes items small enough to go in the bag, allowing people in the late first stage to use them, though they lacked the energy to shrink the items as much as possible.
The second was the technique for storing and recalling information from Jade. Not only would it let them more easily fit in with the locals and carry the library of available techniques without carrying a literal library, just a jade slip for each technique, if they could figure out how to interface it with a computer it could lead to massive technological advancements. Even if it had inferior data density compared to a modern storage device like a microSD or other solid state device, Greg could think of two other possibilities. First, it could be implemented into the device control chips that all devices used to let you give them mental commands, thus allowing it to take more complex commands like techniques and formations could, such as whitelists and blacklists on barriers. Second, as it interfaced with the mind, it could be used to make far superior VR simulation devices. Greg had already lined up possible buyers for the technique from the Data storage, Control Chip and VR markets even before they came here, and would earn millions if he could return with the technique before their rivals got it.
They visited a relic vendor and a technique vendor and sold what they had left in stock after hyping their wares, then searched the technique vendor’s shop for the techniques they wanted. While they did have a copy of the Memory Transfer and Knowledge Transfer technique for use with jade, they had nothing on the production of any relics. Such information would be held by the Relic Crafters Guild, and they wouldn’t allow an outsider to learn a trade secret like that. Greg doubted that they were the only source for it, though. For one thing, both the French and Chinese invaders wore magic bags, and they were from thousands of kilometers from here at a minimum. That meant that some version of the bag was available over a large portion of the world, and therefore couldn’t be produced by only one supplier. He merely needed to find a public version of the item and learn the technique for making it.
The next morning they all met in the dining room of the Inn they stayed at. This place charged them money, but only one stone per month, allowing payment in stones instead of the gemstones they normally used as currency because they routinely dealt with cultivators. As they only intended to stay for a few days, Greg negotiated with the inn keeper and was allow to get eight rooms for four days each for a stone instead.
Randy noticed Dr. Lee and Dr. Shmidt arguing over something and slid closer so he could listen. The debate basically boiled down to the origin of Buddhism on this world. At first they had assumed that its development closely paralleled the religion’s development on Earth, much like the technology and culture paralleled its Earth equivalent in most areas. The two versions of the religion were just too similar for that to be likely, however. Lee argued that this proved that the religion migrated with them somehow, but Schmidt wasn’t convinced. Instead he posited that there was, in some way, actual beings known as Buddhas, which were in communication with both groups at least in the last hundred years. In short, there had to be alien influence which was keeping the two separate religions almost identical.
The version here was simply too similar to some branches back on Earth and they suspected that if they got scriptures from other Buddhist sects in this world they would have parallels on Earth as well. As Lee put it “If I didn’t know it came from here, I would suspect it was from Tibet.”
As the people there from Earth were more familiar with Christianity, Dr. Shmidt explained it this way. Christianity is only two thousand years old, yet there are Messianic Jews, Coptics, Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, Offshoots like the LDS, Mennonites, and the JWs, and offshoots of those groups as well. This religion, however, dates back even further, yet has almost no variation, and is closer than you would expect from two protestant branches on Earth. That could only be possible if there was some group preventing the divergence, like how the Vatican keeps Catholicism from diverging too much.
After breakfast they were allowed to wander around the city, but wouldn’t be given any money to purchase anything until Greg had secured the technique he wanted. So, while Randy wondered the streets for a few hours doing some window shopping, he couldn’t actually buy any of the things he saw and wanted, and even had to turn down a few women who made advances on him in the shadier parts of the city due to his inability to pay.
Eventually he found himself back in the inn. Mike sat in the Music room, this inn having a larger version of the one in the village, meditating while five small rocks orbited him. “Practicing your telekinesis?” asked Randy, sitting on one of the cushions that were often used like chairs here. It was a common technique that was basically the same as using Levitate on an object at a distance, and was pretty useful, even if carrying heavy objects required too much qi to be practical at low cultivation levels.
“No, actually.” he said, then showed Randy one of the local cultivation technique books. “I’m studying the concept of Spiritual Roots.”
Randy pulled out his phone and scanned the page, and after ten seconds the built in OCR had translated the page. It talked about how there were five spiritual roots, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, and Earth. One could tell if another person has any of them by Suppressing them with your qi pressure. Those with a root cannot be instantly suppressed by another cultivator, as they instinctively resist, but if the cultivator is in a much higher realm or has a stronger root of the overcoming element the resistance may be too short to see. Once you know that you have a root however, in order to see which you have you will need to perform a test. While there are more complex ways to test it, all one needs is a tiny bit of each element. You then merely need to place some of your qi into it and try to move it. If you have an affinity, the qi will stick to the item and moving your qi will move the item. The stronger this adhesion is, the stronger your spiritual root.
The ranks were, in order of strength and starting rareness, Petty, Low, Average, High, Master, and Heavenly. Randy put a wooden glass of water, a rock, a bullet, and a lit candle in front of himself, then tried to move each one in order. When he tried to slide the glass to him the glass didn’t move, but a jet of water jumped out and squirted in his face. That meant he had an Average Water Root. The bullet also rolled slightly, but he only maintained a grip for a split second, like a bandaid releasing when you jerked on it and only removing some hair. This meant he had a Petty Metal Root. None of the others responded.
After that he spent the rest of the day sitting with Mike and practicing with his energy. By the time Greg got there just before sunset he had a stream of water as thick as that from a faucet orbiting him and a single bullet floating above his hand, slowly rotating.
