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Chapter 240 – Preparing for War
🕑 Added 2025-04-13 01:26:08 +0000 UTCThe arrival of the Jade Chameleon Sect Nascent Souls might be days away, but Benton had to prepare as if it would come first thing the next morning, meaning he only had the rest of the evening and the whole of the night to get ready. Which was exactly what he planned to do. First and most importantly came his upgrades.
Since he’d found out about the expected imminent attack from Kang Ya-Ting, Benton’s mind had gone into overdrive, thinking about what he could do to power up.
He already made use the most powerful qi elements he could think of—Gravity, Time, Space, and Void—to create techniques. But it occurred to him that an increase in raw power wasn’t what he needed.
Well, such an increase would be nice, but he was at his wit’s end regarding how to make improvements in that regard. His opponents were going to be faster, tougher, and hit with far greater strength than he could muster no matter what.
No, he needed tricks, utility, and ways to leverage his advantages.
The first advantage that came to mind was his perk that hid his cultivation. Not only did it do its job well with no one being able to figure out his realm, but, so far, it had completely concealed him from all cultivators’ spiritual senses. Even the vaunted Nascent Souls he was about to fight shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between him and a mere mortal.
In the confrontation against Teng Chun way back when they’d been returning from Sixth Flawless Flowing City, the only way Benton penetrated the illusion had been with his spiritual sense. Fighting Teng Chun’s father, Benton had an even tougher time seeing through illusions, requiring the use of a technique.
But that concealment had come at a cost for Teng Jian. He would have had to spend both concentration and qi to keep his presence hidden in addition to what it cost to create illusions to fool other senses.
Benton required no such expenditures to accomplish the same thing. He was undetectable to other cultivators with no effort on his part. An illusion technique to make him invisible would allow him to hide at a lower cost than other cultivators could.
That advantage was small, but efficiencies like that added up during the course of a battle.
Playing on the same theme, replicating the technique that Teng Jian and his flunkies had used to create illusionary clones would be a nice touch. Not only was it a practical tactic that would frustrate opponents’ targeting, but Benton loved the idea of using the Jade Chameleon Sect’s own techniques against them. Only since his technique was System supplied, it would be much more powerful, more efficient, and harder to see through.
Tricky. Which was exactly what he was going for.
The vision of a thousand Chao Su’s facing the two Nascent Souls made him happy. It also spurred another thought. What if he could change places with any of the clones? That ability would be very helpful in the coming battle.
Utility. Perfect.
What else?
Kang Ya-Ting and Yuan Yaozu had shared what intelligence they had to the two enemy cultivators, Ye Zhengsheng and Yan Mingxia. Neither were illusion qi users. In fact, both used primary elements, the former Fire and the latter Water. Benton already planned to use exclusively Earth and Wind elements against them respectively.
To that end, he purchased Earth Shot, a technique that sent basically bullets made of pure Earth qi at a target, and Wind Slash, which did the same thing with what he imagined to be spinning circular saw blades made of Wind qi. Both had the ability to also be charged with Void qi as a finisher once his opponent’s shield weakened.
Finally, he purchased a Concept for Force qi and created a technique that utilized Force, Speed, and Momentum to add all those elements to any projectile, whether it be pure qi, mundane, or a mixture of the two.
When he looked at his total Sect Points remaining after the expenditure, he almost laughed. The Concept and six techniques cost sixty-four points. Even with spending that many, he still had over two thousand remaining.
Sweet!
Anyway, he’d probably think of more uses for the points during the fight, but for the moment, his imagination was tapped. It worked out then that a popup distracted him a few moments later.
As soon as Benton dismissed that notification, another one appeared.
Nice. Too bad he couldn’t create a cultivation method for Ganzou and capture those points, too, but that was just being greedy.
Benton frowned. Jin LiJuan was probably getting ready to take the pills to expand her qi pool, meaning she’d be spending the next half day in intense pain. If there was one thing that Benton hated about the cultivation world—
Actually, there were many things he disliked about the cultivation world. The primary thing he hated about it was how cheap life was. No one seemed to think twice about killing a rival for any reason whatsoever. He hoped he could start turning that viewpoint around. Maybe in a millennium, the Rising Tide Sect could be known as cultivators who valued life.
Of course to have any chance at reaching such a goal, the members would have to be so powerful that no one dared call them weak. Benton was okay with that.
The second thing he hated was the thing he had first started thinking about, the fact that gains in one’s cultivation potential always seemed to be accompanied by lots of pain. He was beginning to feel guilty every time he inducted a member into the sect and every time he gave anyone pills to expand their qi pool.
Benton tried to tell himself it was kind of like cancer treatments. Chemo sucked beyond the telling of it, but it was often a patient’s only shot at beating the disease. The medicine hurt, but it was necessary.
His mind wouldn’t quite accept the analogy, though. Advancing spiritual roots and increasing qi pool size were both beneficial to cultivators, but they weren’t lifesaving.
He sighed. Then again, it could be. Who was to say that one of his sect members wouldn’t one day be involved in a battle to the death and having that extra edge would be what saved them.
Anyway, it was truly night by that point, and time was wasting. He needed to determine what to do next. What would be most beneficial?
The answer came to him almost out of nowhere—sleep. He no longer needed a full eight hours ever, but it had been several weeks since he’d taken more than a few minutes as a power nap. Cultivators didn’t completely eliminate the requirement for sleep until receiving their reformed bodies at the Nascent Soul realm, even if those requirements were seriously reduced. Weeks of work and going without would cause a degradation of thought processes and optimum body efficiency. Just a couple of hours would refresh him completely and leave him one hundred percent ready for the battle to come.
So that was what he did.
Upon waking, he did feel quite refreshed, and it was still the early in the night, giving him plenty of time to finish any preparations. His first thought was that, with two enemy Nascent Souls approaching, his Grand Defensive Formation wasn’t seeming quite so grand.
He didn’t have time to design or implement anything fancy, but he knew what two types of qi to expect. Shields to block a single type were super simple, something he could easily accomplish while using Time Manipulation.
Benton added a pair of formations, one to block Fire qi and one to block Earth qi, outside the wall, and another inside the wall.
There. Now each of the Jade Chameleons would have to penetrate two shields only one of them could hit and combine to take out the GDF.
And he was positive that, no matter how much of a distraction he provided, they would attempt to take out the shields. Otherwise, the tower railguns would pelt them mercilessly.
The problem was that, once those shields failed after taking three or four truly powerful hits each, there’d be nothing left to protect the sect grounds. Benton fixed that oversight by installing two more of each single-element-blocking array around the CBD, anchoring them to the ground. The solution wasn’t pretty or elegant. Nor would it survive the next thunderstorm. But the arrays would serve their purpose for a single battle that day. If the enemies didn’t show, he could always redo them the next night or even craft something more permanent.
With that task accomplished, there was no reason not to add a bit of extra protection for his towers, so he placed two pairs of arrays around each of those as well.
Each of the enemy cultivators would have to penetrate five separate shields in order to damage each of the towers, which were pretty darn resilient on their own. Just for them to break the shields would take fifteen to twenty shots at extreme power.
Benton’s thinking was that, while the enemy was trying to take out the towers, he’d have a huge advantage in that they couldn’t concentrate fire on him. If he could get one of the Nascent Souls trapped and killed prior to either tower’s faux main gun being destroyed, he’d be able to easily defeat the remaining Jade Chameleon.
In the event that things went wrong and his invisibility and illusions failed him, Benton would need a way to escape their sight long enough to heal himself—either via pill or technique—and to consume spirit coins to replenish his qi.
While the shields were up, he could simply teleport to behind them and safely do whatever it was that he needed to do to recuperate. Once they went down, however, he needed another option, and he decided the proper place for that option was deep underground.
While using Time Manipulation, Benton burrowed into the ground outside the sect in five locations, creating small rock-lined bunkers at the bottom of each. The bunkers were just large enough for him to fit comfortably inside.
He worried, though, about the open space being too precise in dimensions. One of his opponents was an Earth qi user who surely had a way to detect openings underground. There were already many natural voids and caves scattered about the area, so Benton reformed the rocks, doing his best to make the shapes appear irregular like they were naturally formed.
His final step was to inscribe arrays, one for structural re-enforcement and one to hide any qi within.
He closed the space behind him by fusing the rocks and filled in the tunnels he’d made to get there, using his technique to manipulate plants to make the ground look undisturbed. When he was finished, he felt pretty good about what he’d accomplished.
The arrays inside were unpowered, meaning that there was absolutely no qi signature inside to detect. Once Benton teleported into one of them, there would still be no way to detect him inside until he either used a technique or spirit coins to power the arrays or to replenish his qi pool.
Each bunker only had to hold up long enough for him to scarf down a handful of spirit coins and use his Healing technique. He hoped he’d done enough to conceal them and make them opaque enough to serve that purpose.
By the time he’d finished all his preparations, it was already morning, and as soon as dawn had even thought about approaching, he’d become diligent in scanning with his spiritual senses, using his Dual Mind to constantly be on the lookout. By the time it was fully light, all his sect members had evacuated to the amphitheater, including the ones who had gone to the village to shepherd the mortals.
Later than he’d thought would happen, Yuan Yaozu sauntered from his guest house to the Trials Pagoda. The man’s pace was truly glacial as he displayed absolutely no urgency in advancing to Nascent Soul.
Benton supposed that, once he had reached almost a thousand years old, it would be more difficult for him to find urgency in anything, either. On the other hand, he wished the cultivator would hurry. If the battle went really wrong, Benton hoped to be able to call upon a powerful ally as a contingency plan.
Surely Yuan Yaozu knew that, but he was still walking so slowly.
Ah. Benton figured it out. Yuan Yaozu was so confident that the Jade Chameleon cultivators would be defeated that he truly saw no need to hurry.
Ugh. Benton wished he hadn’t conveyed such confidence and power. Nothing he could do about it at that point, though.
Eventually, even a glacial pace brought one to one’s destination, and Benton received a notification.
Benton hesitated before sending a reply. Yes, he was flush with Sect Points. Yes, he needed a Nascent Soul ally. Yes, the expenditure was worth it.
But he hated having to pay the price. He knew the pagoda would become a point sink, and he was right.
Frustrated, he fired off a message to Yuan Yaozu that he better pass on the first try and mentally gave the Yes option a hard smash.
Benton sighed. Even more frustrating than the System’s attempt to pry his hard-earned points from him was the entire situation. All he’d wanted was to create a little sect and raise the fortunes of his sect members. He wanted to keep them safe. Instead, he found himself facing a battle with an unsure outcome.
An old quote came to mind, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Well, preparing for war was exactly what he’d done. He just hoped it would lead to peace eventually.
At least he felt he was as ready as he could be.
Comments
Ricky Kukowski
Benton added a pair of formations, one to block Fire qi and one to block Earth qi, outside the wall, and another inside the wall. fire and water
RedFaux
It might require active concentration
rwn
Couldn't Benton take naps in his time dilation technique?
tonright
thx but also next chapter pls/ty ❤
