After lunch the Ambassador stayed with the other men and I went with alchemist to do some shopping. His name was Qu Zhu, and he had been staying in this city for the last month, since they had last used the teleportation array, and had traveled around the entire outer city, so he knew where all of the shops were.

  We went to the closest alchemist shop and went inside. The shopkeeper recognized him and greeted him, then asked about me. After introductions, he asked what I wanted to buy. “I was hoping to find some level 2 healing pills, especially blood ones, as well as level two body and mind tempering pills.”

  The shopkeeper sighed. “Well, I have a few level two body tempering pills, but they’ll cost more that the outside. Only level one mind tempering. With you being at the end of level two, you are probably not getting much benefit from the level ones. I do, however, have some blood recovery pills, both level one and two.”

  I nodded. “Hard to get the supplies you need?” As this was an alchemist shop, I knew he should be able to make at least the basic pills.

  “Pretty much all of them. The siege has prevented all of my normal import channels from working.” he responded, then pointed to the shelf full of cabinets and jars. “When I set up here seven months ago I brought sixty different types of level one and two ingredients with me. I am completely out of twenty three of them. I only get small amounts of most of them whenever the base goes to kill the besieging army, because many of the enemy troops have medicinal herbs on them which the military doesn’t know what to do with. Of course, they keep the pills, only bringing them by so I can identify them, so I can’t even use them to replenish my stock. Most of the sales here are to soldiers in the inner base. If I make any level two body tempering or healing pills, they come by and buy them so that they get more out of their cultivation.”

  He walked over to a chair and sat down, seeming a bit winded from the rant. “The only things we can get reliably are from this other realm the United soldiers are from, I think it’s called Earth. I’ve had to make alternative versions of all of the formulas using their ingredients just to pay my bills.”

  “That’s good then.” I said. “you found an alternative source of material, even if it isn’t what you are used to.”

  ”In some cases, sure,” he responded. “I’ve been able to do what the restaurants do and use their ingredients. But the problem is that they don’t have alternatives for a lot of the ingredients I need. From what their own alchemists have told me they are going through an Awakening.”

  “An Awakening?” I asked. I had heard that term somewhere, I just wasn’t sure where.

  “Yeah.” said Qu Zhu. “From what I heard, they only discovered qi around twenty five years ago, and it was extremely thin. Now they are at about one tenth of our level, but their techniques only cover the basics.”

  “So that’s why their techniques seemed so limited.” I said. “I came here because I heard that you could learn a large number of basic techniques for free and spent most of the last month learning them. But aside from the flight ones, they didn’t seem to have anything new, just more efficient forms of the things I already knew.” It worked well enough as an excuse for why I didn’t know much of this information already.

  “Exactly. When you first gain something, you learn to do the basics first. In fact, I’m surprised they already have people at level five, though I hear the entire country that built this base barely qualifies as a medium sect, with only two fifth level cultivators, and there are only a few other countries with them as well, most countries only having fourth level.”

  “It’s because of their qi gathering formations.” the alchemist said. “One of my formation master friends told me about it. The barrier around the outer city and the inner city are both massive formations. Of course, that’s nothing new. Most sects and cities have protection arrays in case they are attacked, but what makes this one special is that they have devices that can gather and store massive amounts of qi to fully power the barrier almost indefinitely instead of just temporarily or at lower levels when not needed. They call it a ‘core generator’, and somehow it creates an artificial core to store the qi, though I hear the inner city uses the cores from five or six level four enemies that attacked the base as the initial source of qi.”

  Qu Zhu whistled. “With that much qi, they can probably afford to give their soldiers all of the qi they need to constantly cultivate.”

  “Oh, it does more than that.” The alchemist went behind the counter and pulled out a plastic bracelet. “They sell these things in a few stores they built out here, so we can buy their goods. These bracelets can gather as much qi as a qi breathing exercise, but do so constantly so that the wearer doesn’t even need to know the exercise. Combine that with their techniques which let even people without spirit roots cultivate almost normally, and every one of their people is a cultivator. Can you imagine how strong that would make a country?”

  “You mean all of the people with spirit roots, even petty ones, cultivate, right? I heard that around half of them have roots.”

  “All of the ones with roots do, of course, but also all of the ones that don’t have roots. It’s so wide spread that there isn’t even a difference between the two strength wise. I heard that’s why the sects are attacking. They are afraid of our society becoming like that.”

  “I don’t know if that’s really something you need to worry about, though.” countered Qu. “The outer city here has over eighty percent of people being cultivators, even though only 20% of us have roots, and the only problems I’ve seen are that most of the women can’t duel cultivate, as you can’t do that without a root.”

  “Well, you can, it’s just a lot more complicated, and requires and actual technique. Though you originally came here to ask about medicine, right?”

  “Yeah,” I responded. “You mentioned that most of your ingredients are coming from Earth and how that means that you had to rewrite most of your formulas.”

  “Right.” the old man responded. “We were talking about why they didn’t have most of the ingredients and got side tracked. Like I was saying, the only tier two ingredient I’ve bought that works as a direct replacement to the ones we have here is their ginseng. Of course, it’s just the common yellow variety, not any of the better green, red, or purple ones, but it is good for middle quality level two body tempering and qi recovery pills.”

  “Yeah, I forgot to ask about those.” I said. “Do you have any tier two qi recovery pills? All I have are tier ones.”

  “A few, but it’s hard to get one of the ingredients.” He gave me a look like I should know what he meant.

  “Demon cores.” said Qu, and the Alchemist nodded. “You need cores equal to the rank of the pill to make one, as the source of the qi in the pill as well as the things that hold the qi, and without people going out to fight beasts we can only get them off of the bodies of dead enemies.”

  “Why can’t you just use stones to supplement the qi?” I asked. Stones were widely available and a regenerating store of qi.

  “You can to some degree, but it results in a lower quality product. I’ve made a few using null ingredients and filling the pills with qi from stones, but the best I can get when making them is low grade, while I can easily make Average and sometimes High grade pills with cores.”

  “Null ingredients?” I asked.

  “Ingredients that don’t have medicinal effects but can store qi, or combinations of ingredients where the ingredients neutralize the effects of the others. They let you put a lot more qi into a pill to increase its quality, but in this case they make the pill possible, as nothing else in it stores enough qi to even reach Petty quality. Hopefully my order can be filled, though, and I can fix all of these issue by next month.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Apparently, the military was allowing people to send out orders through the teleporter this time, and the people on the other side could fill orders in order to earn the rewards that the customer offered. While the people here didn’t know who the contact on the other side was, and therefore didn’t know how their orders would be filled, I suspected that the Eastern Gate Sect would add all of the orders to their mission board as things that the disciples could sell to the mission hall in exchange for rewards, though I wasn’t certain if they would reward them with part of the stones the merchant offered or if they would just be rewarded in something the sect had, perhaps even some sort of internal currency.

  It took another thirty minutes for me to finish shopping. I wasn’t able to buy any of the qi recovery pills, but I did get some level one blood recovery pills and three level two body tempering pills, selling him ten of my level one body tempering pills in the process. While the military troops couldn’t make much use of the level ones, many of the locals used them on the days they had off from work in order to get in better shape, as most of the work the locals did on the base was manual labor. There weren’t many trees left inside the barrier, so the logging industry had mostly died down, but there was a lot of new construction happening.

  Once we were finished we browsed the shelves of a few other stores, seeing if there were any useful techniques, formations, or items. While I saw a few techniques, formations, and knowledge books that would be useful once I returned to Earth, most of the items here were things you could buy an equivalent or better form of on Earth, so I didn’t get any.

  We returned to the Inn and, after checking on the Ambassador, who was doing some studying in the room, and setting up the seal plate there to provide him with a bit more security, I went to the training field behind the inn. There were over a dozen mercenaries there practicing, as there wasn’t much else for them to do in the city, with the base security protecting everyone, so I joined the group that were sparring. As there were several other people signed up to take on the winner in front of me, I went over to the training dummies to practice while I waited. Wanting to get the most out of the training, though, I took one of the level two body tempering pills.

  As soon as I took it I knew that something was different, as my muscles started to ache slightly, like I could feel the last several days worth of work. I hadn’t actually fought for the last several days, though, so I assumed that it was just a bit of stress caused by the pill. Not wanting to damage the dummy, I swung at it with a series of fists strikes. My muscles quickly got sore, as if I’d done the move over a dozen times, and the skin on my knuckles burned as if I had been punching it for the last hour. I switched in several kicks, some of them enhanced by my fire qi, and got a similar effect in my legs, abs, and back. I took a level one muscle and skin pill and felt a slight cooling sensation fighting the effect, but knew that it would bee far too slow to keep up with the damage I was doing to myself.

  After another ten minutes I sat down to meditate on one of the internal healing techniques I knew, all of the muscles, tendons, and skin in my body feeling like it was on fire, then took a tendon and another muscle pill and began. Thirty minutes later, with my meditation enhancing the effects of the pill, I was feeling almost fully recovered when the person overseeing the sparring field called my false name.

  I got up and walked over. Over the last few minutes I could feel the effects of the body tempering pill start to weaken, but it was still working at more than half of its previous level. ‘Maybe the spar will help condition my organs and blood vessels’ I thought as I stepped into the field.

  My opponent was a large man, over two meters tall, who was at the peak of level two by the standards of this world, but would be considered initial level three by Earth standards, making him slightly stronger than me and, as he was on the body path, giving him a supply of liquid qi in his veins. He also had massive muscles that were larger than Marcos’s. The referee, an Early level three fighter and the strongest one on the field at the moment, signaled the start of the match, and the large man ran at me.

  I stepped to the side, the standard dodging skill in my martial arts manual’s movement technique, and he went by. I kicked at his stomach as he passed, but my leg felt like I was kicking a tree and I was spun around, losing my balance and falling to the ground. He stopped a few steps later, then turned at me with a vicious smile.

  I managed to get up and roll out of the way, but he simply turned around and came running at me again. His impression of a charging bull, what may have actually been the inspiration for this move for all I knew, continued for over a dozen times, and I was hit several times. I could feel the damaged areas burning as my skin and blood vessels were feeling the weakened effects of the tempering pill, and knew that I would have to find a way to injure him quickly if I wanted to win. At this rate he would wear me down before I got in a good blow.

  ‘What about a choke hold?’ I thought. If I could use one on him it might be able to knock him out. So the next time he ran at me I dodged to the side and, as he passed, spun around behind him and jumped up, wrapping my arm around his next.

  I realized that was a very bad decision when, instead of trying to pull me off, he ran backwards at the nearest wall. I slammed into it, a solid object on one side and a half ton man on the other, and felt several ribs crack. He jumped forward, then back into the wall two more times before reaching over his shoulder, grabbing me by the hair, and lifting me over his head, only to swing me at the ground. I coughed out a good bit of blood, certain that one of my broken ribs had punctured a lung, and started to black out. Just before losing consciousness I saw him lift an elbow and prepare to jump at me when the referee jumped between us and stopped him.

  When I woke up I saw the alchemist standing over me. I had left my box of pills on a nearby bench in case I needed to get to them quickly, so he had probably force fed me some of them. “Good, you woke up. Wasn’t sure if you would before tomorrow morning.” It was dark outside, so at least four hours had passed since I lost consciousness. “I’m going to assume you don’t have a lot of experience sparring, as you didn’t know that you aren’t supposed to take body tempering pills before hand, as they make your injuries far worse. Also, you tried to choke him, which was a terrible move.”

  “Just sparred my Dao companion and cousin. And the choke hold has worked on people before.” I responded. Most of the pain had gone away, but I was still almost too tired to speak.

  “Well, unless they are mad at you those two are going to hold back, so maybe you’ve just never fought someone that seriously. I’m also assuming the hold worked on mortals, not cultivators. Cultivators need less air than mortals, and can usually hold more in their lungs, so they have a while to get you off of them if you try to choke them.” I nodded. That was a pretty good explanation of my situation. “Anyway, I used two bone, two organ, and one blood pill from your medicine kit to treat you.” He handed the kit back to me and, instead of grabbing it I used the shrinking technique to put it into my bag.

  The referee noticed that I was finally awake and came over to talk. “Good, you woke up. Good thing I stopped him, though, or I’m not sure you would have. None of the alchemists have any level two organ pills in stock, and if he had landed on you you would have needed one to survive.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, then. Do I owe either of you anything for helping me?”

  They shook their heads. “Not really.” said Qu. “I was going to be here anyway to practice.”

  “And stopping people from finishing there opponents is part of the job of referee.” responded the ref. “So I was just doing my job.”

  I nodded again. “In that case, can I take you out to eat to thank you? I don’t like feeling like I owe someone.”

  Qu shrugged. “I would normally agree, but you still need to recover. If you know an internal healing technique, you should use it, but even if you don’t you should cycle your qi to make sure the damaged areas have enough qi to heal properly.”

  I nodded and pulled out two spirit stones. “In that case, here’s a stone for each of you. Go have some liquor on me.” I handed one to each of them.

  The ref stuck it in his pocket and nodded. “Well, I’m not into alcohol that much, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to go find a woman to spend it on.”

  “This city has brothels?” I asked, and the two of them laughed.

  “You must still be concussed if you don’t’ remember that.” said Qu. “We walked by two of them while walking around the city earlier. About half the time soldiers come out here it’s to visit them.” He described the two buildings to me.

  “Oh, I was wondering why they were so fancy. Didn’t see any women outside, so I wasn’t sure.”

  “That’s because the town head doesn’t want them advertising during the day, in case children see them. But they’re open all day, every day.”

  I nodded again and, after Qu helped me up, I went back to my room. The Ambassador was already using the meditation area so I sat down outside of it and started using my healing technique. A minute later he opened his eyes and stood up. “I didn’t realize you were injured. Please, use the meditation circle to heal yourself. I was about to got to bed anyway.”

  “How did you know?” I asked standing up and moving over.

  “Divine sense technique.” he responded. I knew that there was a way to concentrate a stream of qi and extend your senses along it, even avoiding the natural resistance a cultivator would have to having another person’s qi inside of you, as it was self contained, I just hadn’t learned it as it used more qi than I currently had. “I’ll teach you once you reach level three.”

  With that the Ambassador went to the bed and lied down. I sat down and started drawing in the qi from the formation, sending it through my veins while willing it to nourish all of the cells in the area, even the ones along the mostly healed cracks in my bones. A soothing sensation filled me, and all of the pain went away, luring me into a deeper meditation than I had done for several months.