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Chapter 231 – The Two Towers
🕑 Added 2025-04-01 01:53:22 +0000 UTCBenton was pleased with the kids’ progress in obtaining the materials he needed for the qi sources, but of the six he wanted to make, he was only somewhat close with Fire. Once he traded five Orange Vigor Spirit Wood kernels for five fire stones from the Poison Claw Sect elder, he’d have the mineral requirement taken care of, and he already owned a Fire-aspected core from the rank ten Cyclops he’d killed at the end of the beast tide. Combined with the metals his disciples brought back, all he needed was an appropriate plant material to create qi source for Fire.
Still, he had no idea where to find that plant material, and really, the qi sources were more of a long-term project, anyway. He’d keep his eye out for any materials—attending that auction in six weeks sounded like a no-brainer—but for the moment, his priority was to shore up the sect’s defenses.
Which was exactly what he was doing.
While the twins and Kang Lin were away, he’d been a busy, busy little sect leader. Every single stick and large stone in the piles near him had been inscribed with either channels or both channels and formations, and he’d dug two large holes and compacted the dirt underneath as densely as his strength and skills would allow. When he hadn’t been working on either of those activities, he’d made spirit coins. A lot of spirit coins.
Even with how fast he could inscribe with his superhuman reflexes and techniques at Mastery, there were just so, so many sticks and so, so many stones.
Heh. He’d should be able to break lots of bones.
Anyway, the only way he could finish those tasks and create the thousands of greater spirit coins his towers would need was to use time dilation.
The kids had been gone a little over two days. To him, close to twenty had passed. He’d even had to enclose the tree trunks with his Time Manipulation to finish off their curing after he’d completed his prep work.
Of course, a lot of that work hadn’t been the grind of repetitively inscribing the same channels on sticks or the same set of arrays on stone. No, quite a bit of it had been planning and executing his masterwork—the two tree trunks.
They were the core of his entire plan. He was going to armor them, of course, but he expected attacks from Nascent Soul cultivators. Withstanding that kind of force required multiple layers of defense.
The first layer was the natural toughness of a several-foot-thick trunk of Orange Vigor Spirit Wood enhanced by an alchemical process developed by Master Alchemists for just that purpose. Benton, with his peak Golden Core strength combined with his Gold Body Cultivation, could break the log, but it wouldn’t have been easy, especially since it maintained its latent flexibility.
On top of that brute toughness, Benton meticulously added arrays for defense. Since the trunks were to be encased tightly in stone, he couldn’t add a qi shield, but he could add separate arrays for increasing strength, toughness, and structural integrity as well as one that dispersed any attack that hit the wood to impact a wide area instead of a narrow point.
The logs served two primary purposes. The first was simply to be a strong base foundation for each tower. The second was to transfer qi from the thousands of greater spirit coins that would be located in a secure spot in the ground to where it was needed to power the many formations attached to the trunk.
The key to providing that second use was redundancy. And more redundancy. And once he thought he had enough redundancy, he doubled it. If ten pathways were damaged, dozens more would carry the load. Each point where qi was transferred from the trunk to be delivered to another spot was fed by at least ten channels. And that was for the minor ones. The qi traveling to the main weapon had over a hundred paths it could take.
All that work was behind him, though. The next part was going to be a bit tricky.
Each stick had four qi channels, each running from the base to the tip and separated around the circumference by ninety degrees. Their purpose was simple. Qi traveled up to trunk and through the branch. Which in turn powered whatever array that touched the stick that needed the qi.
Stones were great for inscribing formations on. They were naturally strong against attacks and sturdy enough to handle large quantities of qi without any alchemical treatment needed. Benton had layered each with much the same formations as the main trunk—increased strength, toughness, and structural integrity.
There were two crucial differences, though. First, since some, most, or all of the stones, depending on the circumstances, would at some point be on the exterior of the tower, each stone got a qi shield that activated for any portion of it not touching another piece of rock.
The second added formation made him feel like a freaking genius. The entire purpose of the stones was to protect the main trunk, right? Well, what if, instead of a stone transmitting the energy of an attack to the stone below it and then the stone below that one and so on and so forth until reaching the core layers, the rock absorbed as much energy as it could?
Nice right? A lot of energy that would have gone to destroying the base would instead be wasted. It was an awesome defense.
The final array did just that. Any force of qi impacting the stone would be absorbed by the formation.
There was a minor tiny little flaw, though. If the force was more than the array could handle, the energy had to go somewhere. And he didn’t want it transmitted toward the core, right? So he made the array channel all that energy into exploding the rock outward from the tower.
Okay, so important safety notice—no sect members were allowed anywhere near the towers while under attack.
The end result, though, was thousands of rocks that basically functioned like circuit breakers. A Nascent Soul’s attack would destroy dozens at once, but that result was still far better than all that energy being used to damage the core.
The real problem was that he needed to get qi to each of the stones to power the defensive formations. Hence, the sticks.
So the next step in the process of constructing the tower was to sink one of the ninety-foot-tall logs vertically ten-feet deep into the bottom of one of the forty-foot holes he’d dug. That was enough to keep it standing while he worked on it, drilling small holes into the trunk, attaching a branch, and adhering the two together with a small, quick formation.
Easy peasy. Except that he had a lot of sticks to attach. And each had to be precisely placed where he’d joined a nexus of at least ten channels on the main trunk. And he had to be careful to place the longer branches on the bottom. And then he had to do the entire thing all over again with the next log.
One good thing was that only the forty feet of the log that stuck out above the hole had branches attached, so really, he was doing less than half of each long. Still, just that task took him the entire rest of the day and into the night.
The next stage was less tedious but still fairly time consuming due to the amount of concentration required to manipulate so many techniques at once. It involved making the base as stable as he could possibly think of how to make it.
If one had ever pushed a stick into the dirt and pressed against the top, one knew that the stick would simply topple right over, pushing up through the dirt that buried it. The solution to that problem was to bury the stick really deep.
Easy enough except when one had to plan for defending against Nascent Soul cultivators. The amount of strength one of those could bring to bear was enormous. Simply unimaginable. No matter how deeply Benton buried the log, one of them could either just topple it or pull it out.
That vulnerability was unacceptable.
In a move that he fervently hoped was way overdesigning, he wanted to coat the portion of the log in the hole in a cone of molten lava, which, when cooled into igneous rock, would provide quite the ballast. Before he’d inscribed the formations on the trunk, he’d scored the entire bottom half with thousands of small indentations. The goal was for the lava to seep into those cuts and harden, essentially creating a bond between rock and wood.
The process of actually accomplishing that feat was not easy, however. First, he had to melt the pebbles of to form lava. Next, he used his Mastery of Telekinetic Push to move the lava where it needed to go to flow down over the wood.
Of course, therein arose an issue. Lava was hot. Really hot. Wood, even supernaturally strong spirit wood that was alchemically treated, burned. The two coming into contact with each other would normally be a Bad Thing.
Benton had to manually make sure the combination was not a bad thing. While still controlling the lava flow with telekinesis, he used Dual Focus and Extreme Area Temperature Manipulation to keep the lava flowing and the wood from burning. Which was not easy. Not easy at all.
Once the trunk was fully coated with a thick layer from the bottom up, the job grew much easier. The cooled igneous rock insulated the trunk from burning, so all he had to do was heap more and more lava onto the base until he got the huge hulking mass that he desired.
A final touch was to inscribe a formation around the circumference of the rock base that increased the Gravity pulling on it. Benton didn’t know how strong a Nascent Soul cultivator was in comparison to him, but even with his Body Cultivation, he couldn’t budge the log with its giant ballast.
Satisfied that he’d done all he could, he repeated the process for the second tower.
It was nearly noon the next day before he finished.
The third step, at least, was truly easy. He simply had to cover what remained of the hole with dirt and compact it. No problem. That was the work of less than an hour.
The fourth step was the most time consuming of them all—placing the stones. Each had to fit perfectly, from aligning with the stones around it in a structurally sound manner to contacting with at least one branch so that its defensive formations could draw the qi they needed. Even more time consuming was that it was impossible to simply line up the arrays of the individual rock with the channel on the stick. Instead, he had to inscribe a new channel on the stone from a linking point in the arrays to the qi source.
Finally, in lieu of using some form of weak mortar to hold the rocks together, he created a binding formation for each stone for each point where it contacted another one. There were a lot of points of contact. A lot.
Repeating that entire procedure thousands of times took hours and hours. More than a day and a half had passed by the time he finished. And he’d never been so glad to have been complete with a task in his life.
The only thing that got him through the tedium was looking forward to the next task. Benton Quickstepped to the Blacksmith Pavilion.
“Are they finished?” he said.
Xun Wu didn’t so much as flinch at the interruption. “Right over there, Sect Leader.”
After Quickstepping across the room, Benton examined two massive pieces of forged iron. Turrets. And they were both perfect. Exactly what he’d wanted. He’d forgive the blacksmith for not being entertaining since he did such excellent work.
Benton cupped his hands. “Gratitude.”
Not waiting for a reply, he Quickstepped back to the future gate area. The turrets were not quite finished as he still had to do his part, inscribing. They got the same defensive formations as the wood and the stones as well as a qi shield. Additionally, a set of three metal bars extruding from each of the cardinal directions got formations that made them capable of firing pure elemental qi of any of the five primary elements.
The fourth and final bar for each set rods was much longer and was hollow to boot. And he bet that those would take more time to inscribe than all the other work on the turrets put together.
Benton needed something that one might reasonably think would provide a danger to a Nascent Soul cultivator. But what? After all, their auras dampened the effectiveness of any qi attacks launched at them. Of any qi use at all anywhere near them. So how did one overcome that defense?
His great idea was to not use a qi attack. What if, instead, he could use a small amount of qi to launch something at immense speed? If the object were dense enough and struck with enough velocity, the force created might even be enough to make a Nascent Soul feel it.
Obviously, what Benton needed was a railgun.
One minor problem—he’d been a middle manager back on Earth. He had some peripheral knowledge of engineering involved in construction just from running a few projects involving building campuses for his corporation, but the company did nothing with military contracts. Other than knowing about the existence of railguns, he couldn’t tell you how to make one to save his life.
Had he discovered the fatal flaw in his plan?
