Chapter 70:

  Earth, Las Angeles, California, USA

  Two Asian men at the peak of Core, wearing black clothes and masks which hid everything except their eyes simultaneously brought in two other men, throwing them on the concrete floor of the old warehouse. These two men, one a Hispanic man wearing all green and the other an African American man wearing all red, were almost perfectly matched at the middle of the Core realm, and were both bound with gold colored silk ropes which glistened, and had matching black blindfolds. A third Asian man, this one much older but still appearing to be in his late sixties, stepped forward and motioned with his hand. The two blindfolds were removed by the two kidnappers, and the men could once again use qi to extend their senses.

  “Julio Cardova, Master of Los Muertos.” said the older man, looking at the Hispanic man. He then turned to look at the African American man. “And Tyrell Campbell, Master of The Brothers of Blood.” The two men seemed surprised that he knew who they were. Their two street gangs, qi embracing branches of two previous gangs, had been fighting over south LA for over a decade, and had even managed to fight off the police several times thanks to their strict training policies. Both groups lived by the motto ‘Work Hard, Train Hard, then Play Hard’, and seemed to trade drug dens, casinos, black markets, and brothels on a weakly basis.

  “And who the fuck are you, asshole?” said the Hispanic man, obviously upset at being abducted and brought here.”

  A middle Nascent Soul aura flew out of the man, causing the two kidnapped men to fall to the ground, unable to challenge him on the strength of their qi. Neither had been practicing with their spirit roots, preferring to use brute force of qi enhanced attacks or formation ammunition to fight rather than fancy techniques, and thus had little ability to resist a heavenly Water root a full realm stronger than them.

  Fifteen seconds later the older man removed his pressure from the two and dusted the shoulders of his robes. This building they were in may be large, but it was in serious need of a maid. Maybe he would capture a few locals later and make them do so. Most people in this new realm seemed to have the ability to use simple techniques, even the rootless ones, so surely they could manage the Cleaning technique. Water and rags would work if they had to use that, but it never got things as clean as he wanted.

  The two men started to get to their knees and Tyrell spoke up. “So, I assume you wanted to hire the two of us for a job, something that’s big enough that it will take both of our crews to pull it off?” If the man had wanted them dead, he would have had those two kidnappers end them, not bring them here.

  The older man nodded. “Good, you have some brains.” he said, and waved his hand. A stream of blue qi flew into both of their foreheads, causing both of them to get migraines as a large amount of information was sent into their minds. Once this step was finished, two books flew out of the older man’s ring and landed directly in front of the two, one in front of each.

  As their vision started to clear, they looked at the books. At first Julio wanted to say something about not being able to understand the language on the cover, but just as he was about to do so his vision seemed to adjust, much like a video that finally buffered, and he could tell what the words on the cover said. “Control of the Dead?” he asked, somewhat confused by the title.

  “The Waters of Life?” Tyrell asked almost simultaneously.

  The man nodded. “I gave you the Layered Reading technique at a Master level as well as the Black Dragon Mountain Dialect at a master level and the Jade Memory Transfer technique at Master level, so you should be able to read more than that.” He motioned and the two kidnappers untied the two men. With the ropes removed, qi flowed back into their bodies, allowing them to use their powers once again, but rather than fight a battle they knew they couldn’t win or try and run from people that were likely faster than them they both reached forward to pick up their books. Both could now tell that just the cover could be read in at least ten different ways, and likely contained more ways that they couldn’t use yet. After a few seconds the older man continued. “I have given both of you a Master ranked level four cultivation manual. Control of the Dead grants you power over dead things, and the power of death itself. The Waters of Life Grants you control over Blood, which if the substance that supports life. Control the blood and you control life itself.”

  “That’s a big prize.” said Tyrell. He estimated that this book was worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. “Which means you must want something worth at least that much out of us.”

  The old man nodded. “I want the two of you to help me understand the two techniques and merge them.” he said.

  “How are we supposed to do that?” asked Julio. He was still a bit full of himself in Tyrell’s opinion, which might backfire. If there’s one thing Tyrell learned in prison it was that you don’t challenge a man that’s strong enough to kill you with little effort. It wasn’t that he wasn’t just as prideful as Julio, it was that he knew how to play along until he had a plan to beat the enemy.

  “Simple.” the old man said. “You continue your little sect war. Teach your people this technique. Make copies of it on Jade so that your subordinates can have a copy. Keep fighting until one of you wins. And as a grand prize for whichever of you two masters both methods first, I will give them the Level Five breakthrough technique I developed from my mastery of the two, the Blood Corpse Reincarnation Art, allowing you to reach Nascent Soul.”

  ---

  Ilarya, High River

  Once Ji Cha made copies of the technique for me I gave one to the family, whose surname was Ping, which thanked me profusely. Such a technique was only worth two stones, but they acted like it was a precious gift. They returned to the techniques shelf, telling me that they would think about joining the White Tiger sect the next time the sect was in town. As the Father was used to hunting spirit beasts anyway, joining would just mean that he hunted them for the sect and captured some of them rather than finishing them off and selling their bodies in town. The son could have a stable environment to learn in, and the mom wouldn’t be mistreated for being a mortal.

  I also secretly told the father telepathically that the sect had a copy of every occupational book here, so if he joined he could just get the technique for free or sect contribution. He decided to buy his son a copy of a high grade water type breakthrough technique instead, teaching him his own advancement technique. Such a breakthrough would allow him to advance faster, more smoothly, and with fewer bottlenecks. They could still decide later if they wanted to join the White Tiger sect. The son could easily support himself when he grew up with just the basic cultivator techniques like qi blasts, barriers, and enhancements, so even if they didn’t join he wouldn’t be bad off without an occupational technique. If the dad managed to save up the stones again and his son decided that he wanted to take up a trade, he could purchase the book later.

  Once they left I put the five thousand stones for the book on the table. “You know,” I said, “I also have three cultivation techniques for alchemists, which I bought from Mo Lin. I would have come by here to buy them, but you don’t seem to have any.”

  Ji Cha shook his head. “I would love to start carrying cultivation manuals for Alchemy, but unfortunately the family elders forbid it. They seem to think that I would be training the family’s competition. I tried explaining that the other alchemists and bookstores were selling the techniques, and we were just losing money, but they didn’t want to hear it.”

  I nodded. “Too bad. Can you at least make copies of the jades for me? Preferably High grade, as that’s what they all are?”

  He nodded. “Sure, I can do that. Many people have me make copies. Copies cost as much as a level one technique, with a twenty paper book minimum for paper books, as I have to set up the printing press, so High grade copies are ten stones each. Switching from paper to jade or jade to paper costs the full price of the technique, and I can’t guarantee that the quality won’t drop a level. You’ll only be charged for the lower quality if that happens, though.”

  I explained to him that I didn’t have the jades on me, and would have to bring them by later. I considered having him translate Chasing Tribulation onto jade slip, so that it was easier to use, but I wasn’t sure if he could get all of the details, so I decided against it. “So, have you read over the swarm control and contract techniques yet?” I asked.

  He nodded. “They were really easy to learn, but might take a while to master. I practiced on the flies over the trash box behind the shop. They obeyed fairly consistently as long as I kept the order simple.”

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  I nodded. “Good, then here.” I brought ten of each kind of caterpillar out of my bag, and thirty caterpillars were on the table. “I’m not sure how to split the contract, so I’ll remove it from these thirty, and you can form a contract with them then.” He nodded and I released those thirty from the contract. He then did the hand signs associated with the contract and pointed at them and all thirty glowed slightly.

  A few seconds after the golden aura went away he looked at me. “So, how is this supposed to help me?” he asked.

  I explained how they had three different roots at level one and gained two more at level two. “And because one of its abilities is an iron sense, that means it has to have a metal root. If you can borrow the Iron Sense from a few butterflies, then that means that you borrowed its metal root and can then use that to break through using the pure metal technique you already have.”

  He nodded, seeming to understand my idea. “That sounds a bit complicated, but I can give it a try. So, how long until I see results?”

  I shrugged. “Well, the caterpillars only have a three month lifespan, and the butterflies only have a six month lifespan, so they should break through within a few months, assuming you give them adequate food. So far I only know that they love Crescent Leaf Mint and will eat spirit cabbage, but don’t know what else to feed them.”

  He nodded then got up and picked up a copy of ‘A Guide to Insects’ from the Mortal section. He flipped through it, then showed me a page on Treasure Caterpillars. “Apparently, they seek out rare minerals after hatching. I can easily get gems by just grinding currency gems into powder. Silver and gold will be a problem, though. I’ll probably have to buy ores and crush them. Iron and Copper are much easier and cheaper to get, but that means that finding them will earn me less money.” I nodded. “As for the plants they eat, they are fans of the leaves of mint, ginger, bamboo, and ginseng. They will eat other leafy vegetables if they get hungry enough, but rarely other herbs. Ideally, they would eat a mix of those, but I’m not sure where to get ginseng or ginger leaves. Maybe the local farmers or my family can get them, as those and mint are pill ingredients, and you don’t need the leaves of ginseng or ginger in any pills as far as I know. Bamboo leaves can be bought in bulk as animal feed, and bamboo shoots can be purchased as food, so that won’t be an issue.”

  This was good knowledge. “Can I get a jade and paper copy of this book? Actually, two of each, as I can give this to the White Tigers so that they have the knowledge to catch and raise insects too.”

  He nodded then got me the books. “How much do I owe you for the insects?” he asked. “You said they cost you fifteen? So how does thirty sound?”

  “Fifteen is fine.” I said. “I’ll sell them at cost because I only thought about them because I wanted to help you. Now that I have, though, I might start looking into spirit bees or silkworms. Sure, these caterpillars will make level one cocoons, which can technically be used, but I would like to try and set up a spirit silk farm once I get home, and spirit honey would likely sell well as well.”

  “Well, if you find them, I wouldn’t mind getting some either. The honey is used to make pills, so the family raises many bees near the fields, and a new variety would be welcome. My wife is a tailor, and the price of silk from Crystal Summit has increased by over thirty percent this year. They are likely struggling to keep up with demand, so producing silk locally might be profitable. As for the money, you can have the books for free. Even my family profits slightly by selling me things, so I can’t let an independent cultivator not earn at least a little profit. Those four copies should come to about three stones.” He also gave me four copies each of a book on beekeeping, one on identifying local plants, and one on the production of fabric. The last might be covered in the tailor book I’d already bought, but I wasn’t sure. This brought my ‘profit’ to eleven stones, which he was happy to part with.

  Next I traveled to the smith that had improved my equipment a little over a week ago. It was only about ten minutes from the book store. While my sword had proven useful, I had struggled to do damage against the flood dragon, so I wanted to see if there was anything else he could do to improve it. I greeted the smith and he finished with his current realm of hammering before coming over to talk to me. “Is that steel?” I asked. The sound of him striking the sword sounded similar to the sounds of smiths from Earth.

  “Yes, it is. Someone came by a few days ago from the White Tiger guild. It seems they went to the sight of a battle with the people from the other realm. While most of the material was taken away by others, they found a few pieces of scrap and offered to sell them to me.” I wondered if this was something official the Mike had ordered, or if some of the disciples had found a ruined vehicle someone had salvaged and sold a few easy-to-remove pieces for a quick profit.

  “That’s good.” I said. “Maybe some of the metal cultivators in town will be able to practice properly now.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, confused.

  “Well, many of them can’t afford to buy metal weapons, as it is too expensive, so they can’t properly train their skills. If you made small weapons, maybe darts or arrowheads, or even throwing knives, they could have something to practice with. Imagine if a wood cultivator lived in the desert. They would have trouble finding wood to work with.”

  “What’s a desert?” the man asked, and I could tell that he honestly didn’t know about them.

  “Oh, it’s a place that gets very little rain, so plants don’t really grow outside of small ponds where water comes to the surface.”

  “There are places like that?” he asked.

  “Yes, just not around here. Tens of thousands of li from here.” I honestly didn’t know how close the nearest desert was but the language did have a word for it, so I knew there had to be one close enough for them to need one. “I actually came by to ask if you could upgrade my sword. I got a lot of use out of it, but now that I’m at initial level three, I was hoping to get something a bit stronger. Could you possibly get it up to level four?” I only have around one and a half thousand stones left, as I spent almost three thousand six hundred on the Qin family if you count the two cultivation techniques, and another five thousand on the Dancing Dragon technique, but that should be enough to get the improvements.

  He shook his head. “Not level four, no. I’m only early level three myself. It takes too much effort to make a weapon at a higher level than yourself. I might be able to get it to late level three if you want, but it won’t be as efficient as the last time. Doing so will exhaust me mentally and likely deplete all of my qi, so I’ll have to charge you more for labor, around three hundred not including the qi cost, which, based on how much it took before, will likely be around a thousand or one thousand one hundred.” That meant that he expected to use at least one hundred thousand stones of qi.

  I nodded. “Well, I have the money to do that, but not much more. I have a large number of talismans and can make you some if you want them, but otherwise you’ll clean me out.”

  “I didn’t know you were a talismonger, but I don’t really need any. You can go sell some to the shops in town tomorrow morning and earn the money back if you have enough talismans. If you don’t have enough stones to pay I can even hold onto it for a little while until you get the stones.”

  “Unfortunately we are leaving town tomorrow morning. We’ll be leaving at eight, so I doubt I can even pick up my sword then.”

  He thought for a little while, then proposed a solution. “You have fire and metal roots just like me, right?” I nodded. “What book do you use to cultivate? I’ve kind of hit a bottleneck in my training with Refiner’s Fire, and was hoping to find another way to cultivate so that I can push through.”

  “Could be that your metal root is conflicting with the pure fire cultivation.” I said.

  “So you’ve heard of it?” he asked, surprised. “It isn’t that common of a technique.”

  “Well, I just bought it from an alchemist for my alchemist servant with a Fire and Wood root.” He nodded. “With her wood helping the process, it’s probably a better match than our metal, which will sap the strength of the fire and be hard to balance. I’ve actually run into an issue of not being able to properly train my metal because of that.” He nodded in understanding. “I do have a book which might help with that, though.” I motioned to my storage bag and pulled out “Human Slag”.

  Around fifteen minutes later he agreed to waive the labor fee as long as I allowed him to borrow the book for the next two weeks, while I was out of town. I would pick it up the next time we were in the city, but could pick up my sword in a few hours.

  After saying goodbye I went to the temple on the other side of town. This sect wasn’t a branch of Amitabha Buddhism like Prajna Temple, so I simply greeted them normally and asked to see monk Wanbo. He was in charge of overseeing the alchemy branch, as the sect primarily made cheap pills to distribute to the poor in the city, selling the better pills to the various alchemists in order to buy the ingredients to make more. As a result, they are willing to accept alchemists that aren’t quite good enough to get jobs in actual alchemist shops, and often train poorer level one cultivators in alchemy in exchange for making pills for them for a set period of time and pay of only one stone per month. This is still more than mortals make, but not enough to buy many further cultivation supplies.

  We went to his office and I told him about finding a hidden group of demonic cultivators that had died, as well as what they had on them. I showed him the contents of their bags as well, but when he asked to take the books with him so that they could be destroyed I had to turn him down. I explained that I wanted to find ways to counteract their techniques, and wanted to find ways to use them in ethical ways if possible. I showed him one of the pill recipes in ‘The Refinement of Humans’, a regeneration pill which required the blood of cultivators but nothing else that was immorally sourced. I explained that in my homeland we often collected blood from people for the purpose of transfusion after serious blood loss and to test many new medicines to make sure that it wouldn’t harm the people. So after I got home I might be able to just buy the blood from places where people were paid to donate it and produce high quality but cheap medicine.

  After thinking about it, he was willing to let me take the books with me as long as I swore not to use them to harm others, including sourcing materials from such harm. I swore and after I stored the contents of the demonic cultivator’s bags again he went to collect a group of monks. Five minutes later we left for the eastern city gate, then for the site of the demonic camp.

  And hour later they finished purifying the area. The demonic aura caused by their presence had already started to kill many of the local plants, and would probably start killing the trees within a month. They thanked me for my help and we returned to the city.