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Chapter 214 – Party Prep
🕑 Added 2025-03-13 16:09:00 +0000 UTCYang Xiu waited until her brother stepped heavily forward on his right foot. That was his biggest flaw in using his technique. He always, always triggered it after one certain movement with that foot.
She dodged right.
He transferred all his gathered Momentum into his strike, but it was too late. She’s already moved too far away. And with his Momentum depleted, he was too slow to avoid her reprisal.
In one smooth movement, she nocked an arrow, charged it with as much qi she could in the fraction of a second she could afford to spend, and loosed. It flew true, straight to the center of his chest, where it explosively impacted with the heavy force of sharpened ice.
Yang Ru staggered and let out a loud oof.
She prepared another arrow but knew she wouldn’t have to use it. He was done.
“Stop,” he yelled, holding out his hand. “You win.”
It was nice to be able to fight using all their strength. If they’d hadn’t been sparring inside one of the rooms in the new pavilion, that arrow might have killed him. With the arrays on, it only felt like it should have.
She grinned at the thought. “Good job, Brother. You almost had me.”
He really hadn’t, but the longer he thought he was on the verge of beating her, the longer it would take him to figure out he was tipping her off to the exact timing of his use of the technique.
Yang Ru winced, rubbing at his chest. “We should set the pain lower.”
Yeah, right. He hadn’t thought that way when he was the one pummeled her.
“We agreed to use the one hundred percent setting, remember?” She said. “We want to get used to being hit hard, so we can overcome pain in a real fight.”
“I changed my mind.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Too bad. So sad.”
“Brat.”
Yang Xiu just laughed at him. “Again.”
He sighed. “Fine.”
They each moved to an opposite corner of the training room, but just as she was about to trigger a rune to start their match, Master appeared.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.
“Tell you what, Master?” Yang Xiu said.
“That you had a birthday!”
“What is a birthday, Master?”
She had never seen him look so surprised.
“A birthday? The day you were born? The day you turn a year older?”
Oh. She and her brother were birthed in the early winter months, so around the time of year it currently was. Knowing when one turned fourteen was important to sects, so all the villagers kept rough track of their age. Not to the extent of knowing the exact day, though. She told him as much.
“You … You don’t celebrate birthdays? No cake? No presents?” Master looked disappointed.
“Sorry, Master.”
He stared very intently at her for a moment before shifting his gaze to Yang Ru. “Well, that lack ends today. We’re going to have a party. I’ll take care of everything. Just have everyone meet at the amphitheater right after dinner.”
She cupped her hands. “Of course, Master.”
He used his Quickstep to disappear, and she shook her head.
“I wonder what that was all about?” she said.
“Don’t know,” Yang Ru said. “Let’s fight.”
Yang Xiu grinned. “Ready? Three. Two. One…”
###
Benton was flabbergasted. He hadn’t even thought to check Su’s memories. Celebrating birthdays was a universal thing, wasn’t it?
Apparently not. Su definitely hadn’t been acquainted with the concept, and the twins were completely oblivious. They had no idea what he was talking about.
Well, no matter. Of all the kids in the sect, the twins, Li’er, and Zou Tian really felt like his own grandkids. Which meant they were Evelyn’s grandkids, too. And she would have been horribly, horribly disappointed in him if he let a birthday slip by for any of them without some kind of party.
He smiled, remembering all the events she’d put together. There was a memorable one where a bunch of pre-school girls were running around the house wearing tulle fairy dresses with storebought wings, carrying small nets attached to sticks and swinging them at paper cut in the shape of butterflies sent flying through the air by a means of a fan.
So cute!
Benton was no Evelyn, though, and there were no party stores nearby for supplies. He was, however, a superhuman cultivator with magic powers. There had to be something that he could do.
First, a cake.
That was easy enough. Flour. Eggs. Sugar. Butter. Something for flavoring. A pinch of salt. He could gather all those things. In fact, he had most of those things in his spatial ring.
Of course, getting the quantities of the ingredients right and figuring out temperature and cook time was going to be time consuming. And he was an important man doing important work. Honestly, there were other things that should take priority.
But then he heard Evelyn’s voice in his head.
“What is more important than family?” she said.
Nothing. Nothing was more important than family. And he’d do well to remember that.
After gathering sufficient quantities of the ingredients he needed from the village, he thought about where to go next. The cafeteria was obviously an option as it had everything he needed for cooking, including ovens. But those facilities were also in use. The workers there cooked and served three meals a day for the close to three hundred people living on the sect grounds.
Benton really didn’t want to get in their way. He’d feel awful if meals got delayed because his sect members were too polite to tell him that he was interfering with their routine.
Better would probably be the Alchemy Pavilion. There were those big labs that each had ten heating plates. And no one was really using them. The pavilion had so few members that all of them tended to use the smaller rooms.
With a little work, he could craft rudimentary ovens out of Orange Vigor Spirit Wood, using the plates to provide heat. And ten of them should give him plenty of space to experiment.
He Quickstepped to one of the big labs and began work.
Benton wasn’t actually much of a cook as he simply was never patient enough. He tended to blast everything on high heat, preferring to spend less time waiting over making the food taste better by cooking it slower.
Baking was something that he somewhat enjoyed, though. For one thing, he had a bit of a sweet tooth. For another, he and Evelyn had taken a cake decorating class when they’d first married, and it had been fun. She had kept up with it longer than him and eventually become a much better decorator, but up until the day she died, he could still do a better shell border than her.
The Orange Vigor Spirit Wood, which he had plenty of stored in his ring, was a great crafting material. It was tougher and more resilient than normal wood, and it supported arrays just about as well as any Earth grade material.
By projecting a thin edge of Void qi from the blade of a knife and using Gravity to manipulate a tree trunk and the pieces he was cutting from it, Benton quickly made a variety of tools and dishes, including cake pans, spatulas, spoons, and mixing bowls. Having access to qi techniques was almost better than living near a Walmart.
Though he had enjoyed baking back on Earth, he’d always had recipes to follow. And cake mixes. Cake mixes were super freaking convenient. Trying to come up with his own recipes was an exercise in frustration and futility.
He was just about to pull the trigger on buying a technique to tell him what he needed to know when he realized that there were probably women in the village who knew a lot more about it than he did. Neither he nor Su remembered tasting any cakes that were exactly like the American version that he wanted, but various bakers produced a variety of breads and pastries. He was sure that, if he gathered some of the ladies together and told them what he wanted, they’d be able to give him advice.
Yeah. Worth a shot. Even though he had a ton of points, it was better not to spend them unless he had to.
It turned out that he was right. There were two ladies in the village that had forgotten more about baking than he had ever learned. With their guidance, he was able to put together a recipe that sounded right to him, and after a bit of testing and tweaking, it worked.
The icing was a bit easier to create as he remembered how to make it—combine a pound of butter, thirty-two ounces of powdered sugar, and one can of sweetened condensed milk, which he had to make from scratch also with the advice of the ladies.
He loved that icing, though. It was sweet and rich. The only issue was that its consistency tended to vary greatly with temperature. Heat from his hand when piping it would make it runny. Stick it in the refrigerator overnight, and it was like cutting through concrete.
If only he had a way to precisely control the temperature… Oh wait, he did. His area temperature control technique was apparently useful for more stuff than just killing people. Who knew?
He ended up making a ginormous cake, enough to feed the entire village. The thing ended up being twelve feet in diameter, way too big for an oven. Once he thought about using his temperature technique to help in decorating, it wasn’t much of a leap to figure out that he didn’t actually need an oven.
Of course, creating a cake that big so quickly and moving it around and decorating it would have been impossible if he were back on Earth. But on the cultivation planet, he possessed superhuman abilities, and that strength and agility and speed all came in really handy.
With the main piece taken care of, Benton had to figure out what else was needed. He really wasn’t Evelyn, and he was pressed for time. Coming up with a theme simply wouldn’t work. Besides, there were going to be a thousand people there. It wasn’t like he could come up with party favors for everyone.
He’d need to stick with the basics—balloons and gifts.
So balloons first. The cultivation world hadn’t come up with a substitute for latex, but paper lanterns were relatively common. But that was the problem. Everyone used paper lanterns for parties. He needed something better.
What was a balloon? A roughly spherical—more teardrop shaped really—piece of colored latex that floated. The key things were a teardrop/spherical shape, colored, and floating.
He had a Concept for Light qi at Mastery, so he could do just about anything he wanted with it, including creating any color on the spectrum that he could imagine. Something would need to hold the light, though, and with it being colored, that holder being clear would be best.
Glass?
Yeah, that would work. The village was too small to have a glass maker. Even Vermilion Incomparable Rain Town didn’t have one, so he’d have to go all the way to Sixth Flawless Flowing City. Which he didn’t want to do. There was no guarantee even an expert artisan could make what he wanted in the quantity he desired in the timeframe he needed.
On the other hand, four Sect Points for a technique giving him all the knowledge he needed to understand what materials and conditions he needed to make glass and another eight to use his qi in the manner required would let him make as many as he wanted quickly.
Benton really liked the idea of decorating the amphitheater with hundreds of glowing orbs of colored Light. Even Evelyn would have been impressed by that. Seeing no other way to get the glass made, he purchased the two techniques from the System.
Using his enhanced speed and System-bought abilities, he had two hundred balls floating over the party area. The use of Gravity on so many targets strained him a bit, but overall, he was well pleased with his efforts.
There was only one problem, though it was quite a big one. People were already on their way to the venue, and he hadn’t figured out what to give the twins for gifts yet.
Crap!
Comments
Keldra
It's sort of funny to go from so much reader drama over Benton spending points to help the smallest and weakest of the sect , to him spending points for birthday decorations..
Christabel Amanoh
This was fun and kind of chaotic, but it honestly sounded like way too much stuff to get done in a single day. I know we can hand wave away with cultivator magic, but I feel like I needed a clearer idea of the ticking clock and how quickly he handled each task.
tonright
There's something about numerals, weights, and measures specifically that activates a different part of your brain even if they're measurements you're perfectly familiar with. That's why you'll often see writers use human body measures that are uncommon in real life but perfectly comfortable in context. "He was at least two heads taller than anyone else in the room" or "Even after all this effort the other end of the wall was still a hundred steps away" for example. Even describing length of time in things like "took only a few heartbeats" instead of using "seconds". Just to avoid snapping people in to maths/conversion mode and/or breaking flow of the writing. Also avoids the issue of unfamiliar units. There's also that weird psychological thing where "two" feels more comfortable than "2" most of the time (Stat tables and lists and such in this kind of story excluded, obviously) because our brains don't like "2" being used like it is a word. Even without being taught to do so you know, innately as a native English speaker, that if you were writing a book about a picnic that "there were two grapes left", not that "there were 2 grapes left". Of course, like I mentioned in my first comment though Benton is American - very American, so it makes perfect sense for him to *think* this way. He even mentioned Walmart which will only really be familiar to people from a pretty small pool of countries but that makes sense as he is comparing it to what he knows. It's just that the measurements read weird when the rest of the story reads so smoothly it's jarring lol Also IDK if it'll help you with the centimetre thing but 200cm is 6 foot 5. When I see someone's height measured in feet my brain works out roughly how much of 6 foot 5 it is as a rough percentage and then apply that to 200 to be able to visualise it more easily, which might be useful, if slightly more clunky, in reverse.
Dusk
I have the same problem with metric in stories! Though KM and meters I can just ignore and process as miles and yards. But one story I'm reading gives everyone's height in CM and I'm just lost lmao
Jacob Spain
This is the most absurdly out of place sequence of events I’ve ever seen in a cultivation story, and I’m ABSOLUTELY here for it. 🤣
tonright
I know Benton the character is American but every time he starts measuring things in pounds and ounces and feet and stuff it so violently snaps me out of the headspace the rest of the story very skilfully creates lol
