I followed her to the main dining room where the Ambassador and higher members of the family were already dining. I went to the table for the Lesser family members and Upper servants and sat down.
“Hey, Kev.” said Ji Xo, sitting down beside me.
“Oh, hey, Xo.” I said. Apparently we were using each other’s given names now. “I take it you have been doing a bit of Alchemy?” He smelled like several types of herbs mixed with a pungent smoke.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been making pills all morning, so I kind of smell. Can’t really help it, though. The family is always short handed, as skilled alchemists are hard to find. Every one the family produces constantly needs to turn out pills so that our family pill house can keep up with demand. If I slack off and cause a shortage, our competitors might get a foot in the market, which the family can’t accept.”
I nodded. Typical corporate logic. Blame the overworked employee for your failure. “Have you tried to bring in talent from outside the family?”
He shrugged. “Not many rogue cultivators have any skill with alchemy, usually just a bit of herbal knowledge at best. And it’s near impossible to pull people from another family or sect.”
“What about commoners?” I asked, a bit confused.
He shrugged again. “They might be able to handle the herb fields, though not as well as a cultivator could. You have to be a cultivator to make pills, though, and the vast majority of cultivators don’t have a high enough success rate at doing that to still earn the family a profit after the pill failures. And that’s not factoring in the cost of training them. Even if we got lucky and found someone with a spirit root that wasn’t already cultivating, the chances of them being a quality alchemist are around three percent at best.”
I nodded. There was probably a solution to this that I was overlooking, but it seemed that the family was doing the best it could at recruitment. Maybe once the war was over and Rootless cultivators started being common they might find enough talent to fill the role, but, as rootless cultivators tended to require more cultivation resources than those with spiritual roots, that likely wasn’t the solution unless rootless had more innate alchemy talent.
“So, how about you?” Xo asked, bringing me out of my thoughts. “You do anything interesting since last night?”
“Spent last night cultivating, then this morning I ate at a small restaurant just outside the manor, then went to a bookstore and bought some books from you uncle. Or maybe cousin? I didn’t really ask him how he was related to anyone here.”
“Ji Cha?” he asked, and I nodded. “Great uncle. Mother’s uncle. I’ve been in his shop a few times, but his techniques aren’t usually as good as the ones the family has, and when he does get such a technique the family instantly gets a copy of it to put in our library.”
“How about knowledge skills?”
He nodded. “As half owners, they can get a copy of any book or jade they want by just requesting it, so anything that seems useful is automatically copied and given to us.”
“Does that mean you already have a copy of the Taking Pulse technique and an alchemist cultivation technique?”
“Master Taking Pulse, and Heavenly Sacred Herbs Alchemist Path. The Ancestor is a level five alchemist cultivator, so when he founded the family he gave us copies of all of his books, as well as his personal diary. Only those of us that reach level five can read the diary, but I have studied the techniques and followed all of the cultivation techniques up to level two. Hopefully I can reach level three with the cultivation technique and integrate a medicine spirit.”
“Medicine spirit?” I asked, confused. “I’ve heard of Fire spirits, and assumed that the other elements had them, but not a medicine spirit.”
“Oh, I can explain that.” he said. One of the servants brought over some soup, so we paused the conversation for a minute while the food was placed on the table, then continued after he left. “A spirit is a gathering of qi that can act on its own. A medicine spirit is one that has medicinal properties, and can therefore enhance or lessen those properties in pills and people. There are natural spirits, of course, but they are quite rare and difficult to domesticate, so most people make them artificially by gathering together qi of a specific type and imbuing it with a will.”
“There has to be a downside to doing it that way.” I said, “or no one would bother with the natural ones.”
He put a spoon of soup in his mouth and swallowed. “Oh, there are several. For one, artificial spirits can’t be transferred. There mind is tied to the creator’s mind, their qi is the creator’s qi, so when the master dies, they die as well. Second, it is very difficult to make a spirit of a different type than you have a root for. There are special pills to give you the right type of qi, and if one has spirit items that are suitably strong one can channel the qi from the items to create a weak spirit. Of course, the items usually have to be made of at least level three materials and have natural qi affinities of the type you want, so the items needed are too expensive for most.” He ate another spoonful of soup. “I tried to make a spirit one time, to help with my alchemy. Alchemist with fire spirits have a massive advantage over those without, as the fire spirit can control the furnace heat while they control the mixing of the ingredients. This usually results in higher quality pills that were less of a mental drain on the alchemist, thus letting them make more successful batches per day.”
“What went wrong?” I asked. “Surely your family can afford Fire type artifacts which they can loan you.”
Xo nodded, before picking up his bowl to drink the last of the soup. “The do.” he said, setting the bowl down. “But not enough to let me borrow it for long. I had it for a month, and during that time I tried seven times to create a fire spirit, failing each time. I was forced to return them to the family so someone else could use them. Six months later I saw a natural level two fire spirit at the auction house, but lacked the money to bid on it. It ended up selling for over one hundred thousand stones.”
I choked slightly on my soup at hearing such a number. A level five Master quality technique would only cost around five hundred thousand, and that was that was something a family legacy could be built around. How was this spirit worth anywhere near that much? “That seems like a bit much.” I said, finishing my soup.
“I thought so too, but the one that bought it obviously didn’t. Perhaps they already had the resources to increase its level?”
The servant came over and took both of our bowls, then placed two plates of spirit rice and two bowls of some type of grilled meat in front of us. I looked at the bowl suspiciously, but picked up my chopsticks anyway and started eating.
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“Something wrong with your food?” he asked. “The chef can alter it somewhat if you can’t eat one of the ingredients.” While food allergies were rare in cultivators, they could sometimes occur as a result of injury or poison, especially when such things drew away most of the person’s qi.
“No, it’s fine, I just realized that this was the third meal I’ve eaten since arriving here, including two here, and all of them included spirit rice. I thought it was too expensive to eat it every meal due to the need for qi gathering arrays in the fields, and that plants which used less qi, like spirit wheat, spirit barley, or even non spirit rice were far cheaper, and thus the go-to staple food.” During the five days we were at the sect the staple was spirit wheat noodles and flat bread made of spirit wheat, as it could grow in the ambient levels of qi.
Xo nodded. “In most places that is correct. Most types of spirit rice require too much qi to grow to their full potential, so they must be grown inside gathering arrays that are normally used to grow spirit herbs. This city has two advantages which, together, make spirit rice about half the cost of mortal rice.” He put a piece of the meat in his mouth while gathering his thoughts.
I also ate a piece of meat, noticing that it tasted like a spicier and much tougher version of a type of meat I had eaten a few times on Earth. “Goat meat?”
“What? Oh yeah.” he said grabbing another piece. “We slaughtered four old spirit goats a few months ago so that their sons could take over as breeders. I personally prefer spirit chickens or even boar meat, but we have a good bit of this in storage after drying it, so it makes a good source of meat for the diet.” I nodded. “Now where was I? Oh, yes. The spirit rice. First, all of the water in the town is spirit water. The lake that feeds the stream that goes through the town has enough spirit algae in it that the water in the stream is a low level one grade spirit water. Even better, though, are the wells. They range from mid level one to being like the one behind the house here, middle spirit two. The family actually bought this land to build a house on because of that well, as it’s extremely useful when making any pill that requires water or spirit water to make.”
I nodded. “Is that because the city was built on a dragon vein, so all of the water that touches the vein or goes through it absorbs qi from the vein?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Surprised you figured that out so quickly.”
“The sign in my room told me about the vein, as it’s the source of the qi in the injection formation.” He nodded. “So, what’s the other reason the city doesn’t need gathering arrays for its rice farms?”
“Oh, that would be the fact that if you use good enough spirit fertilizer on the rice, you can give it enough qi through its roots for it to reach full yield. We have large numbers of spirit animals in this city which, even when fed mortal plants with excrete spirit manure, as well as a massive alchemical industry thanks to my family’s presence. Most spirit plants have only one or two parts that are useful in alchemy, so after gathering those parts the rest can be composted. We have many servants that just collect the good parts and compost the useless ones every day. Then we can add the scrapings and dregs from the alchemy cauldrons, which still has a good bit of qi in it. It makes about twice the amount of spirit compost we need to grow those medicinal herbs, so the rest goes to the rice fields, where, combined with the water, it gives the plants enough qi to grow properly.
Now, spirit rice grows in about one month, opposed to the four of mortal rich, and yields about twice as much edible rice. That means that, as long as we provide enough compost, we can get nine or ten harvests per year before it gets too cold, instead of two, at twice the yield, so we get nine to ten times the amount of rice with the same sized fields. This city actually produces so much spirit rice that we export twenty to thirty percent of the rice we produce, usually selling it to the caravans, either for their use or resale.”
While he was talking I had finished my meal, and he was almost done with his. “Sounds like it worked out well for the city.” I said.
“Yes, quite well.” Xo said, finishing the last of his meat. “Well, I’d better get back to the furnace.” he said, standing up. “How about we meet up tonight after sunset? There’s a nice bar in the merchant district I like to go to.” He gave me the name and address.
“Well, I have been wondering what the local spirit rice wine tasted like.” I responded. “I’ll meet you there.” One thing about being a cultivator is that you could hold your liquor.
“Good.” he said. “Well, then, I’m off. See you tonight.” With that he left and I got up as well. Maybe I would study another book or maybe I could cultivate some more? Given my habit of losing time when cultivating, I decided to go with the first one.
When I got to my room I noticed that someone had straightened it up. Five must have come in while I was out. I closed the door, not bothering to put the seal plate on it this time, as I didn’t need to block myself off from the world this time and searched through the jade slips I had just bought. I pulled out the two of them, Taking Pulse and the Layered Reading one.
First, I used the layered reading one, wanting to get everything I could out of later books. It mostly matched what I had already learned, though it had more methods of adding additional layers than I had learned, as well as descriptions of soul based techniques that I couldn’t understand, which gave me a slight headache when trying to read. As I had used the dictionary jade already, I was certain that it wasn’t just a language issue. There must be something about the concept that my brain couldn’t yet comprehend. I tried using a few different methods to read it, but got very little new information before the headache got so bad I could barely focus.
I withdrew from the jade and waited a few minutes for my headache to go away before continuing with a different section. This one was about special ways to encode layers on Jade, so I made sure to read it thoroughly. The data was structured in a way that reminded me of a textbook, with the earlier methods being needed to get the full lesson for the next method. It took me almost an hour in total to finish the jade slip, and when I was finished I knew that if I could incorporate this method into my own books I could radically improve the ability of others to understand the theory behind them. While it might not do much else for the basic level spells, as they were just simplified applications of scientific phenomenon, the cultivation techniques had enough depth to them that they could be greatly improved through this method.
Of course, the electronic means to upload and download data to jade wasn’t capable of making layered text yet, so I would have to either hire people to make copies of the slips manually, then ship them out, or modify the technology to let it layer texts properly. The only one I knew who might be able to help with the later was Gabriel, but I could probably teach most people the technique to manually copy the slips, with only the detail varying based on their skill.
Once I was certain that I had learned all that I could about how to better read layered text, I used the Taking Pulse technique. I was immediately glad that I had studied the other slip first, as I found two or three extra layers within the text which I wasn’t previously aware of with my cursory scan at the bookstore. This method bordered on Master grade, most likely because it had originally been copied from a master grade slip, but the one doing the copying had made several minor mistakes when doing so. Either Ji Cha actually possessed a slip that was barely Master quality and had made this from that slip, he had multiple High grade copies, and I was just lucky to get a good one, or he was good enough at making copies of jade slips that he had made close to no mistakes when making this copy.
The technique it described was a more complex version of what I had already imagined from the description. Depending on how the thread was wound, it could carry different senses and techniques, but all of them placed a thin layer of neutral qi on the outside of the strand so that it wouldn’t bother the patient. There were methods for different elements and six different senses, including the ability to sense qi. Furthermore, there were ways of mixing multiple threads together so that you could used most techniques through them at once.
This technique didn’t just seem to be useful for scanning people’s bodies, but also seemed to allow short range extension of the senses in ways that could transfer enormous detail. There was a companion technique mentioned called “Divine Sense”, but I didn’t remember seeing it on the shelf. Most likely Ji Cha had run out of hard copies and still had the jade copy in the back of the store. I would have to ask about it the next time I was in the store, as a detailed extension of your senses seemed extremely useful.
I removed my qi from the slip and put it away. Come to think of it, a better version of the jade transfer techniques would also be useful, as I might be able to improve the overall storage quality of data. For now, however, I would look over the slips I had already purchased in order to see if I had missed anything else.
