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Chapter 199 – Spirit, Body, Soul, and Mind
🕑 Added 2025-02-19 00:00:50 +0000 UTCA/N 2/18/25: This is Monday's post. Now, assuming that I get Wednesday's post up sometime tomorrow, I should be able to get back on track for posting on time starting Friday. Thanks for bearing with me.
The moment of silence was the end of Ye Zan’s memorial service, but with the entire sect present, Benton needed to take a few moments to conduct business. Which wasn’t exactly an ideal scenario, definitely something he wouldn’t have even considered back on Earth.
That understanding made the transition from the ceremony to other matters more than a little awkward. How was he supposed to begin, “Since I have you here…”?
Ugh.
“The creation of the Hall of Heroes was the last step in making the sect main grounds move-in ready,” Benton said finally.
That segue wasn’t exactly a good one, but at least it somewhat tied what he’d been talking about to what he wanted to bring up in a halfway coherent manner.
“Obviously, the area is by no means finished,” Benton continued. “A huge priority is to get a wall built around the entire central sect grounds.”
The lack of beasts made danger of that sort of attack minimal, but the threat from rival cultivators loomed large. A permanent structure such as the wall made from a qi rich material such as the Orange Vigor Spirit Wood made it the perfect conduit for formations. Benton was desperate to get that finished and tie multiple defenses into a grand array that would hold off, at least for a time, even a Nascent Soul cultivator.
“The minimum crucial installations are complete, however.” Benton said. “All the pavilions have a building dedicated to that specific purpose, and there is enough residential capacity for over three hundred people. My expectation for you is that most sect members move into one of the residences starting within the next several days. Mayor Mo Jian may choose to remain in the village at his discretion, and Lord Fatty Ren, the leader of the new Rising Tide Sect branch in Vermilion Incomparable Rain Town, will continue to remain in residence there along with his recruits. Otherwise, unless you receive direct dispensation from me, you are expected to relocate.
“Council members should find housing today and explore their pavilion tomorrow. The arrays in the buildings are complex. You will need guidance to understand all the functionality. Please schedule time with me tomorrow so I can provide that guidance.
“Regarding housing, the largest apartment building is reserved for Mistress Zhong, the kids currently living in her orphanage, and any other resident she sees fit to allow to live there. All other housing will be assigned upon request based on a priority list. The order of that list goes by membership in the council, highest cultivation realm, longest time in the sect, and highest age. Thus, if two sect members who are not part of the council and who were inducted at the same time and are in the same minor realm want the same dwelling, the oldest one will be given priority. If the two happen to be twins, figure it out.
“The morning of the day after tomorrow, the housing not assigned to council members will become available for assignment. Tour the residential neighborhood and create a list of dwellings that interest you ranked in order of preference. Before noon, you need to submit that list to sect administration.
“My two assistants, Sun Hua and Xu Gang, can be found on the second floor of the Administration Pavilion. They will handle assigning housing based on the priority list and the submitted requests,” Benton eyed each of the two young ladies. “I apologize for not consulting with you first. I’ll provide you a list of dwellings and a list of sect members sorted numerically in the order I mentioned. I trust the two of you will be able to handle the rest?”
Truthfully, he’d horribly underutilized the two assistants the mayor had long ago assigned to him. Basically, beyond introducing himself and telling them to cultivate, he hadn’t given them much to do at all. Now that everyone was moving onto the main sect grounds, he expected their role to become much more important.
Sun Hua immediately cupped her hands, seemingly happy to be addressed. Xu Gang only followed along after noting what Sun Hua had done.
“Finally,” Benton said, “I just want to say that I’ve been very pleased by everyone’s diligence and progress so far. Great job everyone. There are, however, two resources that are currently being underutilized—Soul Cultivation and Mind Cultivation.”
Most people in the crowd stared at him blankly.
“Every sect has access to Spiritual Cultivation. Most practice Body Cultivation to some degree. Almost no one cultivates the mind, though, and even less have access to Soul Cultivation methods. These two types of cultivation give the Rising Tide Sect an advantage that no one else can match, and we’re not utilizing them enough.
“While neither provides the pure physical benefits and power as Spiritual and Body Cultivation, both provide plenty of advantages. Cultivating the soul can make your life more satisfying, increase your ability to use qi, and protect you from demonic cultivators. Mind cultivation can give you access to mental attacks and let you split your thoughts, which is very beneficial to crafters. Scriptures will be available in the Contribution Points Shop. I highly suggest that everyone choose at least one or the other and begin working it into their schedules. Note that, for beginning cultivators, time spent on Soul and Mind Cultivation does not count against your ten-hour maximum per day.”
Given his experience in the past, making one of his desires so blatantly known should cause everyone to rush to comply. Which meant he had to follow through with his promise to have cultivation methods waiting for them in the Contribution Points Shop.
As soon as he dismissed them, he Quickstepped to his office in the Administration Pavilion, dropped into a lotus position, and pulled up his Cultivation Creation Menu.
He already made two Soul Cultivation methods—the one he’d already given to Peng Zhen that focused on defense against demonic cultivators and the one for the former Righteous Rain cultivators to help them heal. The first question was whether or not more methods were needed.
Benton mentally reviewed the purpose each of the four soul characteristics served. Inviolability made the soul resistant to outside influence, such as attacks by demonic cultivators and control by gu worms. Size made it easier for a person to lead a more fulfilling life. Strength helped both resist and heal damage as well as leading to special abilities. Finally, Tempering enhanced one’s qi pool and physical prowess.
He didn’t want to spend a lot of points creating a bunch of methods, but picking one or two more to give his members options was probably a good idea. He’d only invested fifty Sect Points so far. Two more methods would devote another fifty. One hundred sect members reaching the first minor realm would return that many quickly, and everything after that would be pure profit.
Yeah. He could definitely afford to invest a few more points to give his sect members more choices.
One of the methods was heavily weighted to Inviolability for defense and the other to Strength for healing. An option for the new methods was to make one that was heavily weighted for each of the other two characteristics. The one devoted to Size would make people happier, but he didn’t anticipate a lot of his sect members making that choice, considering how power mad the entire cultivation world was. The one focused on Tempering, on the other hand, would be a good choice for anyone set on a martial path.
That last one sounded like a perfect option for some of his sect members, so he created the Martial Soul method for Soul Cultivation, allocating fifteen points to Inviolability to protect against demonic cultivators, ten to Size since he wanted his sect members to be happy, ten to Strength since preventing and recovering from injuries were both important, and sixty-five to Tempering.
Instead of creating the second one to be focused on the remaining characteristic, Size, he decided a balanced option would be better, so he allocated twenty-five in each category and called it Balanced.
He quickly wrote up a detailed description of what each characteristic did and how the characteristics were distributed in each of the four cultivation methods. Luckily, Peng Zhen was a reliable fellow who could be counted on to describe the contents of the note in detail before letting any of the sect members make a selection.
Next, Benton needed to create one or more methods for Mind Cultivation.
Of the four types of cultivation, Mind was probably the weakest, especially in when at the beginning. Like Soul, it had five major realms—Higher, Inner, Myriad, Expert, and Grandmaster—and a practitioner reaching the peak of the first realm couldn’t process information much more quickly or in higher quantities than a mortal. The second level provided some benefits, such as weak mind attacks and the ability to achieve greater focus, but considering that the level of effort was equivalent to that needed to reach Foundation Establishment, it required a lot of work for a relatively small gain.
Myriad and above was where the cultivation type shined. A practitioner’s mind attacks became much more powerful, and one gained the ability to split one’s focus, a huge benefit for nearly anyone but something especially valued by alchemists and formation masters.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of reaching Myriad was about the same as the likelihood of reaching Golden Core—small. Which was one reason Benton hadn’t pushed for his sect members to learn that type of cultivation.
Even taking into account the level of effort required, however, reaching at least Inner could give his people a decent advantage. In a fight between two people of a similar realm, being able to distract one’s opponent with a presumably unblockable mind stun could become a decisive advantage, even if the distraction caused was quite brief.
The real advantage was that, with the extremely high-grade cultivation methods provided by the System, almost all his sect members would be able to advance to Inner.
When he’d started recruiting every person he could find into his sect regardless of talent level, Benton hadn’t had any plans other than, “Hey, I need sect member. These people can become sect members.”
A Foundation Establishment cultivator in the mid minor realms held value. With access to techniques that allowed them to externally manipulate qi, they could learn to create low-level but necessary pills and arrays and weapons, etc. They’d become the worker bees of his sect and, hopefully, experience a nice life featuring good health and a standard of living much higher than most mortals. Considering that most of them started as peasants, the fact that they’d be expected to live around a hundred and fifty years as a cultivator was much better than the average peasant’s expectation of death somewhere in the early fifties.
So it was a genuine win-win. They got a genuinely better and longer life. He got lots of Sect Points. Yay.
Now, though, he was considering how to improve that life as cultivators even more. Power equaled success in a cultivation world, and the plan forming in his mind had the potential to maximize the strength of every single member of his sect.
The fact that he would also be on the receiving end of a lot more points was something that didn’t really even factor into his decision making, but it was a nice bit of lagniappe.
Normally, rank made a lot of difference in battles between sect members. An A from one sect would beat a similarly realmed C rank from a rival sect nine times out of ten. In contrast, Benton expected his sect members to be able to compete versus similarly realmed cultivators from other sects based solely on the quality of his System-provide cultivation methods and techniques.
What happened when he added Body Cultivation to that equation, though? Maybe they couldn’t jump major realms, but the pure physicality of his sect members would allow them to punch upward several minor realms at least.
Add to that Soul Cultivation that advanced his sect members’ qi pools and physical might. And on top of that, add in an ability to launch a mind stun at a critical moment.
Benton liked the thought of that. No one in the same major realm would be able to beat one of his members in a fight. And there was no reason that the same shouldn’t apply to abilities in crafting.
Not only that, but some people had a talent for cultivation. For example, Wan Ai just took to Spiritual Cultivation like a fish to water, advancing much faster than her spiritual roots would normally suggest she would. By exposing sect members to the two additional cultivation types, it was possible that some of them would discover an unrealized talent and advance farther than projected.
He couldn’t help envisioning a sect where his members advanced realms much slower than other sects, but they advanced Spirit, Body, Soul, and Mind simultaneously. It was a vision of the future that he liked.
In fact, he liked it so much that he decided he needed to advance his own cultivation in those areas, and with a total of seven hundred seventy-two Sect Points, he was seventy-two points above the floor he’d decided on of seven hundred points.
“System, what’s the maximum level of mind cultivation that I can advance to presently?”
As Benton had expected, Myriad corresponded to Golden Core, the peak level he had currently qualified to reach. He quickly also confirmed that he was allowed to advance to the third level of Soul as well, the Fulfillment realm.
If his calculations were correct, it would take him eight points to reach the peak of Higher, eighteen to reach the peak of Inner, and thirty-six to get all the way to the peak of Myriad. That was a total of sixty-two points. And he’d need the same amount to reach the peak he could climb in Soul. Which was more than he had available to spend unless it was an emergency.
Benton had a choice to make. Should he max out one or advance both equally? And if he went with one over the other, which should he choose?
If he knew he was going to fighting demonic cultivators soon, Soul would be the best choice. But that threat wasn’t looming on the horizon. Being able to use mind stun and split his consciousness into multiple threads seemed like a better use of points, so he chose to advance his Mind Cultivation fully.
That selection left him with fifty-four Sect Points. Which was close to being enough to get him all the way to the peak he could go in Soul Cultivation but not quite. It was oh so tempting for him to just dip a bit into his nest egg, but he decided that, lacking a real need to do so, he’d only spend down to the seven hundred mark, meaning he advanced to seventh minor realm of Fulfillment.
As soon as he triggered the upgrades, he braced himself. And rightfully so. The huge increase of his Mind and the lesser one of his Soul was intense.
When he recovered, his greater processing speed made him remember that he’d completely forgotten to create methods for Mind Cultivation for his sect members.
Doh!
The proper thing to do was to dig deep into that area of cultivation just like he’d done with Soul Cultivation earlier and create a selection of methods for his sect members, floor be damned. Practically speaking, though, he was wiped emotionally from the memorial service and physically from the huge upgrades he’d just experienced. He just didn’t have it in him to give the matter the attention it deserved.
Instead, Benton went twenty-five Sect Points under his floor to create a basic Mind Cultivation method that balanced all the characteristics. He’d have Peng Zhen let the crafters know that more options would be coming in a few days.
Good enough.
He was confident that the steps he took today would lead to great things for his sect in the future. To reach that future, though, he needed time for his sect members to cultivate three different methods as far as they could, a process of many years even for the least talented of them.
To give them that time, Benton had to hold off all the threats facing the sect.
Not an easy task. Not an easy task at all.
Comments
Dusk
Now that I'm thinking about it, shouldn't Benton have gone "Fatty Ren's ability is quite useful, yoink" and more or less copied it? Hell he could take Ru's momentum ability and change it so any kinetic energy applied to him transforms into potential energy he absorbs
Pagemaster
Can it be? Benton remembered Mind and Soul cultivation! Hallelujah!
