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Chapter 219 – Towers or Sources?
🕑 Added 2025-03-17 02:58:45 +0000 UTCThe twins’ birthday party turned out to be one of the best nights of Benton’s new life. He liked that the sect members and villagers seemed to appreciate the experience of the new dessert he served them even if the icing was a bit much for them. Watching Yang Xiu swoop around fearlessly on the glider and Yang Ru take a much more tentative approach amused the sect leader to no end. The main thing that warmed his heart, however, was seeing Jin LiJuan play with the other kids.
At first, she’d been just as reticent as he had expected. Her expression during her first attempts at play made her look more like she was approaching a battle than a game of tag.
Slowly, though, she loosened up. The fake smile she was keeping plastered on her face to appease him disappeared, and a genuine one replaced it. She clearly had better endurance and greater speed and agility than her playmates, so they all ganged up on her.
Benton expected the girl to react with anger. Instead, she laughed.
She laughed!
He watched with a grin as Jin LiJuan leaped over rows of seating and rushed about hither and yon tagging the mortal kids who were having just as much fun trying to evade her.
Still, he tried to keep from getting too excited by what he was seeing. Her family being slaughtered in front of her had affected her in ways from which she might normally never recover, and he definitely was no therapist to determine her actual mental state.
Playing with kids from the village, though, seemed like at least a small step forward. Her actions certainly gave him hope. Combined with the healing effect from the technique he had given her, she just might one day fully recover.
She continued playing with the group until the villagers, unused to late nights, departed, well before midnight. The party wound down pretty quickly after that point.
Jin LiJuan lived in the apartment building ran by Mistress Zhong that he thought of as the Outer Sect, and knowing that the girl would be eager to advance her cultivation, Benton monitored the building’s exit closely from his office.
Sure enough, Jin LiJuan walked out with the pup early the next morning and went directly to the Contribution Points Shop. Shortly after she entered, he got a notification that she’d reached Qi Gathering minor realm seven, giving him three additional Sect Points.
After reading the message, he let out a relieved sigh. He hadn’t really expected anything to go wrong, but the girl wasn’t exactly on a normal path. Expecting the unexpected was a good rule of thumb for anyone in such abnormal circumstances.
With that worry off his mind, he went ahead with his next set of plans for the day—inducting new members. The batch would be the first since he made the decision to reduce the time between recruitments from four weeks down to two and to increase the number from fifty to seventy-five.
The mayor already had the choices queued up, so all it took was a message dragon to have them sent over to the amphitheater. Benton’s entire day was spent babysitting to make sure no one had a bad reaction to the improvement of their spiritual roots.
Not that he thought such a thing was possible given the System’s track record. He did figure that it was a good move to have the sect leader present for each induction, however. For one thing, it probably did his reputation, and corresponding average loyalty, good to have the new members see him watching over them. Second, he just felt it was the right thing to do.
In the back of his mind, though, he knew he would not always be available to oversee the process, so he made a mental note to train the mayor in performing the induction, the guards in watching over the members while they spent twelve hours incapacitated, and the Healing Pavilion on monitoring everyone’s well-being.
By early evening, the new members’ spiritual roots had been improved, and they’d each taken the first step in becoming cultivators by taking in their first mote of qi, giving Benton seventy-five Sect Points.
He took a moment to review his gains of the last three days.
Besides Jin LiJuan’s three points and the seventy-five from the new members, Benton had gotten one hundred ninety-five from the inductees in Vermilion Incomparable Rain Town increasing their cultivation from the first minor realm to the second. Body Cultivation yielded him another twenty and techniques six—Peng Hanying, Guang Yin, and another harvester had passed their trials for half that number and the other half came from various members advancing. With members only working on Mind or Soul parttime, no points were earned from either of those sources.
Total, Benton gained two hundred ninety-nine Sect Points over three days, darn near a hundred a day. Not bad. Not bad at all.
He checked out an abbreviated version of his status screen.
Yikes. He officially had over one thousand Sect Points, and seeing such a large quantity made him want to start buying stuff. Before he went on any kind of spending spree, though, he needed to seriously think about what the future held and what might be helpful.
The best thing he could do to protect his sect was to become more personally powerful, but with his Spiritual, Body, Mind, and Soul Cultivation all maxed out, there wasn’t much he could do until he reached one thousand sect members. He had a plan in place to do just that, and unless an emergency arose, he’d stick to that plan.
Other than advancing, he couldn’t find any holes in his Ultimate Juggernaut Combat Build. He’d already bought every technique he could think of to Mastery. If anything else that seemed powerful occurred to him, he could instantly purchase it, but in the meantime, he was pretty happy.
His most immediate concern was an attack by Jade Chameleon Sect Nascent Soul cultivators. The wall wouldn’t be completed for another nine days, but with all the sect members from the village living on the main sect grounds, it might be a good idea to begin building the attacl towers. They would not be, overall, as good a defense as the formation he planned, but something was better than nothing. And the more towers he had, the more formidable they would be for defense.
Another immediate help would be if his low realmed sect members could help take on any Nascent Soul attackers, and as unlikely as that assistance sounded, there actually was a method to do so—battle formations. By having each of a squad of sect members learn the same formation technique, they could pool their qi and use the resulting power to attack higher realmed cultivators.
There were two problems with that method, however. One, the technique required external qi manipulation, so all his Qi Gathering sect members still couldn’t contribute. And unfortunately, the combined might of the few Foundation Establishment cultivators he had wouldn’t amount to much.
Two, the technique had to be learned to Small Success, Large Success, and finally Mastery by each sect member just like any other technique. That process was a long one.
Basically, battle formations would be a fantastic combat resource in the future when he had hundreds of sect members stuck in the middle of Foundation Establishment, but at the moment, it was a nonstarter.
The next avenue he was considering for improvement might be a good use of resources, though. Now that Benton had actual buildings for his sect, it was beginning to feel like a real organization, but things were progressing really slowly, especially cultivation. And on one hand, there wasn’t much he could do. He was already using pills to bypass two entire minor realms and using alchemy to speed things up even farther would hurt the members’ cultivation bases. There was one thing, however, that could definitely help—providing cultivation rooms to enhance the quantity and quality of qi available.
That method of speeding cultivation was more natural—for values of natural—and shouldn’t harm cultivation bases like alchemical means would. Of course, he’d have to monitor his sect members to make sure no harm was being done, but that task was quite easy for him.
A bigger concern was how to achieve the qi enhancement.
Increasing qi density in a room was a pretty trivial undertaking for a formation expert of his caliber. Any Golden Core cultivator with a deep understanding of the craft could create an array to double or even triple the qi density in a room. Easy peasy.
Of course, the resulting area would be of only a minor benefit to the cultivators using it. Basically, it would be an artificial version of the Wood. Anyone cultivating there would shave a small percentage, five to twenty percent, of the time required to reach the next minor realm.
That percentage was not insignificant by any means, but it also wasn’t a game changer. It also wasn’t anything that his sect members didn’t already have access too with the Wood.
A true cultivation room that included an actual qi source could not only half the time taken to reach the next minor realm but could also increase the Power and Foundation of the cultivator, assuming that the source element corresponded to the cultivator’s aspect.
So obtaining qi sources for his sect members’ use was a slam dunk, right? In a way, it was. The issue was that the things were a lot more complicated than an array fed by the correct spirit coin, and they were expensive. The cheapest available from the System cost a thousand Shop Points. Each. And that relatively low-cost one only cut cultivation time by twenty-five percent. Even if he wanted to buy that inferior version, he couldn’t as he had less than four hundred points available.
“System,” he said, “can I purchase a crafting technique that will allow me to make qi sources?”
Honestly, he’d been expecting a flat no in answer to that question. Prerequisites were something that he could deal with.
“System, please provide me with a list of the prerequisites.”
Yikes. That was a lot of things he needed. Luckily, he had over twelve hundred points available. That list contained twelve points worth of Qi Gathering level knowledge techniques, sixteen points worth of Foundation Establishment level techniques, and thirty-two points worth of Concepts.
Considering the wealth he was sitting on, an investment of sixty Sect Points to possibly create qi sources was totally worth it even if he had to spend even more on crafting techniques to create the bases.
Obviously, he’d have to balance time spent on qi sources with building the towers, but at least gaining the ability create something so beneficial to his sect members was worth a bit of effort at the moment.
Benton sat in a lotus position and readied himself. “System, please purchase all those techniques and Concepts to Mastery.”
Comments
RedFaux
Now THIS is the essence of cheaterering
