As I knew more about what the different elements could be included in than the natives of that world, I went on a bit of a tangent for the first week. After figuring out a method for using spiritual roots to synthesize chemicals which contained the corresponding element, I created technique fragments to synthesize or break down hundreds of different chemicals. Each of these, minus the few that made dangerous or illegal things, were placed on the website, and they earned me thousands of dollars in the first week alone, as there was nothing else like them on the market even if they were mostly useless. My Fire root, for example, let me synthesize sugar, gasoline, or diesel, but none of them were economically viable due to how low the cost of those things were and how much qi it used to make them. As those molecules also included carbon, I was also able to make a Wood version of them, as well as a Water version for sugar. I also incorporated them into some of the other techniques from the other world to make interesting if mostly worthless techniques of various orthodox and unorthodox paths, like a Water technique that created wind by moving the oxygen in the air.
I turned in one of those techniques to my teacher as my final project, and they thought that a flame technique that synthesized natural gas to maximize the heat was creative, giving me a B on the project because it wasn’t really useful in the real world. Liza’s formation version of the technique was much more useful, as it used one of the extra tiles encased in cement to store around 100 stones of qi, then use that to generate natural gas for several hours from the stored qi, and could therefore be used to refill a home’s gas stores if they still used natural gas, and a variation which made gasoline could be used to make fuel for older vehicles that still used it.
She and Dave refined the design into something that might be commercially viable, and Randy got them in touch with Greg, who arranged for them to meet the agent who found people willing to buy the techniques he brought back from the other world, including the original deal for the jade data storage. A month later they had sold the natural gas, gasoline, and a new diesel device design to a company that makes modifications for classic cars and both would be getting royalties for the devices from now on.
Over the month since we built the cultivation room Liza and I had used it every day to optimize our cultivation. The cultivation of the other world was similar to ours, but was far more structured and complex. I read over all seven Gathering breakthrough techniques that were available for Fire and the Three that were available for Metal, the lower number being because of the rarity of metal in the other world and therefore there being fewer practitioners. There were several similarities between the different techniques. The first was that they focused a specific element on either the brain or heart. This was what was described in the Early Cultivator’s guide, but I had assumed that they would have figured out a better way to do it by now, the book being thousands of years old.
As these were Petty grade techniques for cultivators that were just starting out, they were fairly simplified. The energy sometimes went through specific veins around the heart or nerves at the base of the skull, but for the most part they didn’t go far. The Average Water technique that Liza had found, a “pay what you want” option she paid ten dollars for, had more detail, though, sending the qi through certain major veins further into the body which were supposed to be tied into Water through some metaphysical means.
This gave me an idea, and I took one of the more complex free breakthrough techniques from Earth and incorporated what I had learned of Fire Root techniques. Scientists had discovered that certain parts of the body had qi that would work better at breakthroughs and when advancing, whatever was being grown to advance your cultivation using the energy slightly more efficiently and sometimes creating higher quality upgrades. In the case of meridians, there were 107 of these points. This lead to techniques that bounced qi between these points dozens or hundreds of times in complex patterns to optimize it as best as possible. Before one has meridians, however, qi moves like molasses through the body, and was difficult to manipulate. This is why most techniques focused more on getting as much qi as possible into the area to grow low quality meridians by brute force. After a person was in Gathering they could go back and fix the quality issue with a technique which specialized in improving quality, called an Optimization technique.
I knew that I couldn’t get enough energy from all of the optimal locations to the heart before its quality had decreased to the same as the other qi in the area, so I took a different approach. Based on Maria’s breakthrough, if one got a blood vessel or, presumably, a nerve close enough to meridian quality they would start sustaining themselves off of the energy inside of them and letting qi move much more easily. So over the next week I started drawing the qi slowly down the blood vessels from each special area in order of how close they were to the heart, mimicking the speed at which it would travel in a person that hadn’t broken through. As they went down the path they slowly optimized the blood vessels. Adding elemental qi to it made it optimize the blood vessels faster, and seemed to improve it in a unique way, though I wasn’t sure exactly which way, so I optimized the pathways from each of those points to my heart. This was similar to the breakthrough technique Maria used, only it did one pathway at a time instead of one region’s meridians. Once I was finished from each point I finished off the meridians by optimizing the blood vessel meridians that weren’t used when connecting the 107 points, as not all were on a direct line. I then switched to Metal, as I had used my better quality Fire the first time, and repeated the process, unsure how much improvement I would get from metal’s unique improvement effect.
Just from that step I could tell that my meridians were vastly improved and allowed qi to flow far more easily while being better able to resist outside influence. I then did the same thing with the Nervous System meridians. They had a different order of optimization points for the qi to come from, but eventually all of the 107 points had their pathway optimized, then the minor paths were optimized as well.
I wrote down the five different variations of the technique, one for each of the five elements, giving them five different Elementally appropriate names, like the 107 Lakes Technique or the 107 Stars Technique. I made sure to put them into a PDF, and posted it on the site as “The 107 Points Elemental Breakthrough Technique”, rated at the Gathering level. This quickly became one of my most popular techniques. After a week some people even left reviews that they had used it to break through, verifying that I hadn’t made any serious mistakes.
Next was the body optimization step. Normally one wouldn’t do this with techniques from Earth. As long as the body had enough qi, it would automatically optimize itself as much as it needed to in order to advance towards the next realm using any excess qi that was collected. In the other world, however, the advancement techniques had the cultivator optimize each body part separately in the Gathering realm. This made sense if one thought about it. Optimizing the body part yourself was far more qi efficient than letting your body optimize itself. While this didn’t matter on Earth, where people could gather as much qi as they wanted using cheap devices, and therefore only qi gathering techniques which drew it in faster than such devices were commercially viable, in the other world they mostly relied on consuming qi rich foods and qi breathing techniques to gather qi, which was far slower. They only learned the more advanced techniques once they were in the third level, as it wasn’t needed before then, and was considered expensive and high quality. This resulted in efficiency being incredibly important.
With the relative qi abundance of Earth thanks to gathering devices, one ran into a different problem in this step, pushing the growth too hard. The meridians could only improve so quickly, which gave you a maximum cultivation speed with Earth techniques, and likewise the various body parts had a maximum upgrade speed as well. No matter how much energy you had at your disposal, no one had found a way to get someone from peak cleansing, where a normal bracelet wearing adult was, to initial Condensation, the military standard, in less than two months, and to do it in less than six months usually required special diet and exercise routines. That is part of why I took five years to do it, though my insistence on only using the bracelet from when I was a child meant that I wasn’t getting the maximum amount of qi I could.
The Body Cultivation route had nine different things that needed to be upgraded. While different groups or techniques told you to do them in different orders, they all had you optimize the Bone, Marrow, Blood, Tendons, Muscles, Skin, Digestive Organs, Functioning Organs, and Sense Organs. After all were optimized to your liking, you could optimize the whole body, which would make sure that you didn’t overlook any minor areas and that everything would work together properly. This lead to there being ten ‘minor realms’ in the Body Cultivation path.
The Mind Cultivation route also had nine different areas one need to work on. They weren’t as well defined as the others, however, as they didn’t correspond to a specific body part. They were Memory, Wisdom, Willpower, Creativity, Touch, Taste/Smell, Sight, Hearing, and Reflex. It also had a final optimization step which tied the entire nervous system together, leading to all mental and other nervous functions being optimized. This meant that there were also ten ‘minor realms’ in the Mind Cultivation Path.
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I decided to do the Body route first. Each of those body parts were close to different optimization points, and the larger ones like bones and skin were closer to different ones at different places on the body part, so I couldn’t just use them to optimize the energy. Instead I started practicing sending them through different pathways. At first I tried to find the shortest route so that I would use the least qi, but with functional meridians the energy didn’t decrease by a significant amount so that wasn’t needed. Next I sent qi into the organs from each point one at a time and rated the quality of the improvement on a scale of one to ten. I tried sending qi just through the ten best, then the ten worst, then into the organ. Interestingly, the ten worst did almost as good as the ten best, as combined they fixed more of their flaws.
I continued with each body part, making lists of which ones did the best with which location’s qi. Eventually I worked out a path for cycling qi through the 107 points which balanced the quality of the qi between ease and quality, accepting minor quality decreases for large savings on amount, effectively trying to optimize the cultivation speed. Once I was done I checked to see if the particular body part changed the effectiveness of the cycle. As it didn’t, I adjusted it to start near the organ in question for the smaller organs so that one could send qi through full cycles before using it. In case someone didn’t like the compromise path, I listed four more paths, with qi quantity and quality listed, and added them as alternative pathways in the last chapter.
I then tested it with the different elements, or, at least, the three I and Liza had access to. Once I was certain that the different elements had little effect on the quality, though some had minor improvements depending on the start location and exact order, I simply edited it to tell the user to use elemental qi, and finished the PDF document. I then put it on the website and it quickly jumped to number one on the list, ahead of the breakthrough technique by two positions and strangely only slightly ahead of a water/wood method for converting CO2 into oxygen and carbon.
I followed the technique for the body path for the next month, and eventually my various systems couldn’t be optimized any further using the new technique. Four months had passed since I had moved in with Randy and, other than helping with chores to pay him back, I spent all of my time either developing techniques, meditating, or spending time with Liza. Her days were pretty much the same, though she developed formations, occasionally meeting with Dave to optimize them. This was a slower process but she earned significantly more for each technique, so Liza had far more money than me saved up, even after giving Dave his cut.
We had continued to dual cultivate at least twice a week, but as both of us were at the peak of Condensing we couldn’t maximize our improvements from doing so, though we both could now store over 250 stones of qi now. We had both picked up two combat techniques, a hand to hand and a weapon technique. For a weapon technique I went for a French long sword technique developed by a HEMA instructor based on a Fire Sword technique from the other world, and Liza went for a duel dagger technique a Chinese group had brought through called Flowing Blades. For my martial arts I went for a fast paced technique which incorporated Fire into the moves, as Fire cultivation seemed to work well with fast paced techniques. She went with something that reminded me of a mixture of wrestling and capoeira with its emphasis on kicks and grapples. Somehow it was supposed to mimic a water snake, but I didn’t quite see it. Still, every day after we dual cultivated we entered the field together and sparred in order to incorporate the combat experience into our fighting, and then meditated together to incorporate it into our qi combat.
Randy had made two trips to the other world since the attack and told us that things were getting worse over there. There were rumors that the three sects to the West, the Eternal Flame Sect, the Chartreuse Peacock sect, and the Azure Cloud Sect, had joined together to wage war against the USA, and the base was now preparing for the attack. Adams had taken over the control of the base while Lindstrom recovered, having nearly been killed defending it.
Once he was in charge Adams built two barrier formations around the base, one which covered the main part in a late level 5 barrier and one which covered everything within a li of the center in a peak level 4 barrier, thus preventing any hostiles from entering. They were powered by the cores of the cultivators that attacked previously, though the barriers would be turned off when not under attack. The walls had been reinforced with qi enhanced concrete which could withstand a peak Foundation level attack, the cheapest and easiest way to replace the wall being to tear down the palisade wall one log at a time, stack them outside, then a few tree widths from where it had been build a form and fill it in with the concrete.
It only took them a month to do this, as they had brought in heavy equipment from Earth to help. Once the wall was finished the base started pouring the concrete throughout the inside anywhere they weren’t planning a building. The inside of all of the buildings meant for visitors had impregnated granite tiles laid down to impress the visitors, though it would also give everyone working there a reserve of qi they can tap into if they needed to.
For a further reserve of energy, one of the buildings Adams insisted on building first was a ‘Bank’ warehouse. It would allow people, mostly traders, to store valuables, including the large amount of quartz that they had taken to bringing through the gate and leaving in the warehouses here so that it could fully charge, and therefore be used in trade with the local cultivators. While they were allowed to store it there free of charge, with the base providing security, the base was allowed to use the energy stored in the quartz as an emergency power source, provided that they fully recharge the stones within two weeks of the emergency ending. Most traders saw this as a good deal, and the warehouse quickly filled with quartz, resulting in others being planned.
One of the buildings Adams had built was a training room, but he had an extra one built and placed beside the Bank warehouse. He had it tiled it in impregnated granite too, then had the troops spend at least an hour in one of the training rooms every day cultivating or training. He wanted them to be at their best in case another attack happened. He also had a meditation building built in the outer base, though the techniques available there were all low quality, generally free, ones from Earth, as none of the people that would be using it had a spiritual root unless a sect decided to send someone or an independent cultivator decided to stop by. He had dropped all pretense of not wanting to train the locals. After that attack, they would need to strengthen the locals as much as possible if they wanted them to be worth having around during an attack, and the sects had already declared war on them, so training people more quickly wouldn’t make things worse.
This resulted in a small city of around two thousand people so far within the outer barrier. Adams was hiring locals to clear all of the spirit trees that they could from the area, so that another wall could be poured there. The wall would turn the base into a proper city-state under the USA’s jurisdiction, essentially creating a colony, so he wanted to develop the area as much as possible.
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By the time Randy was ready for the third trip he had reached Late Foundation. In a few months he might be ready to form a core, though he might need to optimize his base before that happened. He had used some of my cultivation techniques to do so, but hadn’t done so very diligently. Maybe when he got back I could optimize a path all of the way to the peak of Core for every element and he would be willing to use it.
I had gone back through my techniques, adding better explanations and explaining exactly why everything works, trying to mimic the style of the local cultivation books. I also added the alternative paths for the different elements to the development technique. I then translated them, had Randy use his new foreign language skills to double check the translation, then paid a publishing company to print one hundred copies of the combined books, one for each element and its derived paths. The English versions were posted on the website as ‘version 2.0’ and I got a few more paid downloads, but the real reason I did it was so that Randy could carry one hundred copies of all one hundred or more of my techniques of each element with him to the other world.
He technically wasn’t allowed to sell them cultivation techniques, so he turned down the books which contained the advancement and cultivation techniques for level one, but the five hundred books containing the rest of my techniques were loaded into a box and taken with him, so that he could sell them on my behalf and buy as many second or first rate techniques as possible. Boxes based on magic bags had hit the market a few weeks ago and I had bought one of them to send with him, while he had bought thirty of them. I wanted a fifth level advancement technique, but as the Earth version was classified and he therefore might not be allowed to bring it back with him, I asked him to double-check and get me at least one if possible.
Instead I asked him to buy advancement, progression, and enhancement techniques for each other level, at least one for each element, though if he can get ones for derived paths or even unorthodox paths I would take them, preferring the highest quality ones available. After all, if there wasn’t a serious moral issue with a technique there would be a market for it. Technically even a technique for instantly and effortlessly stopping a human heart would have a demand, but I wouldn’t be willing to sell it, just learn it to develop a defense against it.
If there was still money left over after that, I would take any technique he wanted to buy, as I was sure it would be worth posting at the very least. He agreed to do this for me, in exchange for a ten percent commission. It was strange that he wanted money from me when he hadn’t charged me rent since moving in, but maybe he wanted to buy something in that world and was planning on using my goods to raise the money.
I agreed and the next time he left he loaded my box as well, then told the caravan leader, Greg, that he had negotiated for a nine percent cut for the caravan and a one percent cut for himself as a handling fee. He showed Greg that they were fairly highly rated on the technique website and mentioned that his cousin was the one to make them and have the books printed, and Greg agreed to give selling them a try.
