As they approached the city just before sunrise, Randy walked over to the side of the cart where the sixteen year old girl laid, sleeping in the lap of another woman. The boy was doing the same on the other side of the cart. “I just want to say that I’m sorry I couldn’t have gotten there a day earlier to rescue you. I didn’t know about your situation, but if I did I would have stopped them before they could do that to you.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a man did so.” said the woman that was acting as a pillow. “At least, not for the four of us. And that doesn’t include clients who won’t accept your boundaries or refuse to pay. It’s basically a job requirement to be in our line of work. In her case, though…” she paused and looked at the girl. “In our line of work you learn to make sure that no matter what happens with a client or clients, you don’t end up with child. She may be a level one cultivator like us and we coached her the best we could once we were kidnapped, but it was her first time needing it. I can only pray to the gods that she didn’t end up carrying a bandit’s child.”
Randy wasn’t sure how to handle it. On Earth that wasn’t a concern. What had occurred last night happened much more rarely, and the infertility meditation was taught to every teenager in their sexual education class, so this situation just wasn’t one that occurred. There may be techniques which could let her know for certain if she was or wasn’t expecting, but Randy didn’t know any. Maybe Dr. Clement did. He would have to ask.
They arrived back at High River just as the sun was rising. The moon was quite dim that day, so the guards heard them coming long before they saw them, as the axle of the cart was in serious need of some grease. Still, Mike was in the fourth level. Even if it weighed ten times as much and he had to drag it he could probably still have pulled it here.
One of the guards came over. “This is an unusual situation.” he said. “Care to explain?”
Mike nodded. “We just wiped out the Red Vrooshkin Bandit Sect. These people were their prisoners, so now those seventeen back there are ours.”
The guard called another one over and went to inspect the people on the cart and those tied behind it. He asked the women on the cart a few questions, then a minute later the guard nodded. “Well, the men are certainly wearing the emblem of the bandits, and the women confirm that they were kidnapped. Do you have any other evidence?”
“Four of the women and the sixteen year old were with a merchant group that is staying in town here. I can have the merchant come to meet you, to verify those women and his daughter.”
“Tell us where he is staying and we will send someone to retrieve him. If you were hired by him to rescue them, then you must know where he is.”
“Actually, the master of the caravan I’m working for was the one to arrange everything. I can ask him.”
“You believe we should let you into the city because you claim that two men were able to take down a bandit camp by themselves?” the guard said with obvious annoyance and incredulity.
Mike sighed in exasperation. “He is level three. I am level four. Only one of them was a threat, and I used a relic weapon to kill him.” Mike responded.
“I don’t recognize you. The image of every rank four cultivator in the city is posted on the wall of the guard house.”
“I lied about my level when I first got here, and said I was level two. Didn’t want the extra attention.”
“You do know that lying to gain entry to the city is a crime, don’t you? Are you sure you want to keep pretending to be level four?”
“How can I prove it to you? Do you want me to rip my core out?”
The guard laughed. “How about we start with you trying to suppress me. That way I’ll know how big of a lie you were telling.”
Mike sighed. “Fine.” The guard was level three, right? Why else would he act like he was better than Mike, who he thought to be a level two? He focused on his metal root and the guard, and let a bit of his qi out.
The guard instantly collapsed. One second he was just standing there smiling smugly at Mike, and the next his eyes rolled back and he fell to the floor. One of the other guards noticed and cried out in alarm and three other guards drew their weapons, assuming the man had been attacked. “Woah.” said Mike. “Hold on. He told me to suppress him to prove I was a level four cultivator. I didn’t attack him.” He sat down the tongue of the cart and held up his hands, but that just seemed to make the guards even more nervous.
A few tense seconds later a man burst out of the office at the side of the gate. “So, who’s out here trying to fight the city guards?” he said. From the qi pressure coming off of him Mike could tell that he was near the end of Foundation. Even Randy was being slightly suppressed by his aura, and he was much further away.
“I’m not attacking anyone. I explained to your guard that I was a level four cultivator that took out a bandit group with my friend and….” Mike didn’t realize that he was still projecting his Earth qi and focused on the guard captain. Immediately he felt a large clash between his qi and the guard captain’s Wood qi, and the Captain seemed to immediately tense up.
They stared at each other for a few seconds before the Captain smiled. “Definitely fourth level. Otherwise there’s no way someone with only an average Earth root could suppress me like that.” Mike released the pressure, and the Captain withdrew as well. “I take it you haven’t trained much?” He asked.
“Where I’m from we only use neutral qi, or, as far as I know we did, as no technique required a specific spiritual root. Some people were just better with certain techniques than others. I didn’t know what Spiritual Roots were until a few days ago.”
The Captain nodded. “Definitely not an Orthodox cultivator, then. But you are telling the truth. I’ll have to talk to my guard about treating you that way. No idea why that level one rookie is so full of himself.” He motioned and two other guards came over to carry the man to a bed. He then looked over the prisoners. “So, these guys are the surviving bandits?”
Mike nodded. “Yeah. They lost the will to fight after watching the other members of their group die bloody.”
The Captain nodded. “Lots of fighters are like that. Saw it in plenty of battles.” He motioned to the office. “Well, come on. I’ll settle the matter of the sell of the bandits, then we’ll figure out what we need to do with the others.”
---
Dave sat on his meditation cushion in the middle of his room. It had been more than six months since meeting Maria, and since that time he had watched her advance all of the way to the middle of Gathering with Kevin’s help. It was about time that he advanced as well. He had finally reached Peak Gathering a week ago and had spent all of his time since then going over his meridians, checking for any flaws in the way he had advanced.
He had spent over a thousand dollars on his advancement technique, so it shouldn’t have any of the flaws that Kevin or Maria’s had, like overlooking specific areas or ways the meridians could be improved. He just wanted to be completely sure before using his $500 realm advancement technique to grow a dantian. He had over twice the qi that Kevin had when he advanced using that free technique, and had only bothered converting his blood vessels, therefore having three times as much as he would have had with Kevin’s technique, so he was certain that he had more than enough qi for the advancement.
Did he have the control, though? He went through the $300 set of qi training exercises one more time, and managed to execute them flawlessly and effortlessly. His control was as good as it could get. He surveyed the area inside of himself where the dantian would grow, the center of his chest. This was a serious decision and would affect the rest of his life as a cultivator. Each location for the dantian had advantages and disadvantages, and David Lively, fifth son of the CEO of Lively Pharmaceuticals, the second largest alchemical company in the country, had to be sure of this decision.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
He carefully cleared his mind. He would need maximum concentration for this. He had taken an iron supplement and drank a protein shake before entering his room, and had eaten a large steak for lunch, so the usual nutritional problem shouldn’t occur.
Strictly speaking, all of this worry wasn’t necessary. Every step of cultivation could be reversed, and almost all flaws in cultivation fixed by simply using a better technique to repair the earlier flaws. Any flaws, however, would slow his progress and limit his performance, and if there was one thing his father taught him it was that in the real world second place may as well be last. That’s why his father worked so hard to grow the company, so that it could be the largest alchemical company and not just the second largest. All of his other brothers were already in the mid or even peak of Condensation, and his oldest brother, Thomas, was already preparing for his advancement to Foundation. Dave needed to succeed here just to keep them from seeing him as trash when Thomas got more than a full realm ahead of him. And with the better techniques he had found, he could likely advance more quickly than all of his siblings, and even beat Thomas to Core.
Settling his resolve, he reached into himself and grabbed a tiny sliver of qi, just enough to notice, and moved it along his meridians in the path the technique described, a path which millions of dollars of research suggested was the optimal path for qi to adapt to the body of the cultivator, even if it required twice the effort of the next best technique for 5% greater compatibility. Still, that 5% would add up in the long run.
Once the qi was perfectly adapted to him, he lead it through the meridians in his chest which would form the core of the dantian when they started to grow additional tissue around themselves. He saw the nerves that went through the area and would become part of it as well, but ignored them. While he wouldn’t start off with the optimal connection as he only had one proper set of meridians, he would start growing them as soon as he advanced so that the growth of his dantian was maximized.
As he moved the qi through the blood vessels in an endless cycle, some of it started to dissolve into the wall of the blood vessel. At those points Dave knew that the cells were starting to divide, to form a type of cell that the body would never have grown if not for the presence of substantial qi, what some called a Dantian Cell. He continued to cycle it until the spark of qi was almost completely dissolved, then grabbed another strand and started adapting it to himself. While, theoretically, he could continue this indefinitely, as he was using qi so slowly that he was outpacing his bracelet, eventually the mental effort that was needed for this method would cause his mental strength to give out in only a few hours.
After more than a dozen cycles of purifying qi and cycling it, he noticed that the meridians were starting to close off. They weren’t being blocked, however. They were filling the blood vessels with a more efficient conveyor of nutrients and qi, a dantian cell. Eventually, all of the blood cells which touched these cells suddenly lost whatever they were carrying, whether oxygen or nutrients. Only the waste products were left behind in the blood, and they were given a special protein marker so that the body’s filtration systems would rapidly absorb them.
Qi and nutrients began to build up within that nexus of meridians and soon the two separated. The nutrients were sent to the walls, where the cells greedily absorbed them and started to divide. The qi, however, stayed in the middle. As the water and nutrients were absorbed by the walls in a mad rush to grow, more and more qi was left behind, until the density and purity of the qi grew too high to remain a vapor, and the particles started sticking together, forming the first tiny bit of liquid chi that Dave’s body had ever formed.
For the next hour Dave remained in that state, repeating his circulation as if it were a mantra. Eventually, however, he felt his control start to slip, sending the qi down the wrong pathway and making it less adapted to him by a minuscule margin. He focused harder, using the last of the chi in his brain to force himself to concentrate, and sent the last stream of qi through the rest of the cycle, adapting it as much as possible. He then sent the stream into the dantian by cycling it as he had before and, as soon as it had absorbed the last of the qi, he pulled himself back to reality.
When he opened his eyes he saw Maria standing there, looking at him. “I thought you said you wanted to go out to eat at 20:00.” she said.
“I do. What time is it?” Dave asked.
“20:37” she answered, looking at her phone.
“Right.” he said, rubbing his eyes before standing up. “Where do you want to go?” he asked. “Anywhere is fine, just no alcohol. I just broke through and I read somewhere that alcohol can damage a dantian before it’s about 20% developed.” Sure, that study had looked at people whose dantian had been formed with inferior techniques and therefore didn’t have the ability to filter toxins as well as his did, but he wasn’t going to take any chances and wouldn’t be drinking again until he was at least in the early phase of Condensation.
---
Mike left the office along with the Captain. They had brought in sixteen level one bandits and one level two. This had got them five stones per level one and twenty stones per level two, or 100 stones in total. “You know, it was strange.” said the Captain. “All of the bandits had Water, Earth, or Wood roots, or some combination of those. No fire or metal. I wonder if the leader was recruiting people of a certain root?” Several people left the city gate and they stopped to let them pass.
“Well, the leader must have had a Fire root, as he was surrounded by fire when I saw him.” said Mike. “I wonder if the bandits recruited or merged with a demonic sect?”
“Possible.” said the Captain. “Many demonic and rogue cultivation techniques use one or more roots of a specific type. If this one was, for example, the Blood path, they would need people with Water or Wood roots to use the blood techniques, as blood is a combination of those two, ideally both. Can’t be that path, as it doesn’t explain the Earth, but I’m sure they’ll explain it eventually.”
They walked up to the people in the wagon. “Well, we need to find out where you people need to go.” the Captain said to them. “Mike says that five of you were part of a caravan, and the caravan master is in town, so he’s going to go find the man so he can vouch for you, then you can go with him. And the boy is the grandson of a rich merchant here. He reported the ransom demand and the kidnapping already, so I sent someone to get his grandfather or a servant to pick him up. The other four of you, though, will need to talk with me so I can figure out what to do.” The women stood up to climb out of the cart and Mike left to go find Li Fan. This left Randy with the cart, even though they would probably get rid of it.
With nothing else to do, he climbed in the wagon and pulled a random book out of his bag. It was some kind of Earth technique. “Flying Sand Defense” Randy read, looking at the front cover. Well, he might as well start translating it. By the time Mike got back with the merchant and Greg, Randy had made PDFs of the “Flying Iron Bloodletting Technique” a metal technique which left minor cuts across the target’s body, doing its best to recreate the infamous ‘death by a thousand cuts’, the “Ice Entombment Technique” a water root technique which surrounded the target in ice, and half of the “Immolating Rain” technique, a fire root technique which rained fire over a large area to try and ignite everything flammable.
The man saw his daughter sitting there and ran over to her. She stood up and jumped into his arms and immediately started crying. The other four women stood up and, after a minute or two of the teenager crying, the girl’s tears slowed down enough for the merchant to speak. “Thank you for rescuing my daughter.” he said, and bowed. He then pulled a jade slip from out of his magic bag, touched it and another one to his head, then handed Greg the second piece of jade. “This contains all of the techniques for creating artifacts that I brought with me. It isn’t everything that my company offers, but those are the ones I thought about setting up factories for in this land. If you start manufacturing any of those, I will be happy to discuss purchasing them from you for resale.”
Greg realized that the man had just given up a massive amount of profit in order to get his daughter back, and bowed as well. “It was a pleasure doing business with you. Hopefully the next time we meet it won’t be under such bad circumstances.” With that they left, leaving the cart for the merchant to keep, if he wanted it.
“So.” Randy said in English once they entered the city. “What do we do with the hundred stones we got from the slave trade and all of the stuff we looted?”
Greg gave Randy a confused look and Mike spoke up. “We turned in seventeen of the bandits for the reward and they were indentured to a mine, technically making them criminal slaves.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Technically that was participating in the slave trade.” Greg thought for a bit. “Make sure I get a copy of all of the books, in case you picked up anything that is worth selling, so we can figure out distribution a sales, but as far as I’m concerned you can keep everything. You two are the ones that got it, after all. I already have my finder’s fee.”
“Yeah,” said Randy, “I picked four of those books at random to translate while waiting, and three were elemental attacks, while the fourth was an elemental defense. I doubt there was much of worth there, but I’m sure the people on Earth will think they are neat. Not sure about the relics, though. I’ll have to work that out with Mike.”
Mike nodded, then changed the topic. “Since the mines were mentioned,” said Mike, “there is one thing I think we need to tell you. The bandit camp was starting one. Spirit stone mine.”
“Really?” Greg asked. “Might be worth surveying the place once we get back. Though we’d have to hire people if we want to claim it.”
“Aren’t you a geologist?” Randy asked. “I figured you would want to study the local rock structure.”
“Oh, sure, but I would have to leave you guys here or we would all have to drive out there. I didn’t figure you would want that. Plus, nothing says I’m not interested. I’ve just already been looking into the mountain we are on here. And I lined up a tour of the local Jade mine on the grounds that I was thinking of investing. Who knows, maybe it can be a source of income for whenever we come back, and I’ll actually invest my cut.”
“Well, Mike and I can clean the bandit lair up a bit if you want. Lots of bodies and we didn’t loot that much, so maybe the anthropologists will find something interesting there after we clean it up.”
