The Undying Immortal System

Once the alchemy competition was over, I didn't hang around to watch the fallout. I immediately led everyone into a building, set up a quick formation, gave everyone a sleeping pill, stuffed them into my storage space, and silently departed for Mount Jiang. WuJing still owed Rulan 50 spirit stones, but I would pay her out of my stockpile. He could make it up to me later. It was far more important that we vanish before anyone started asking the wrong questions.

The only person at the competition who had seemed to grasp the importance of RuLan's pill was WuJing, but the Third Prince would have been able to gather enough information from WuJing's reaction to know that he needed to report what he had seen as soon as possible. Once this news reached the right ears, the Wastes would be flooded with enemy cultivators wishing to discover our secrets.

RuLan's performance might have won the alchemy competition for us, but it made the further existence of our clan in the Wastes entirely untenable. We were now working under a deadline.

Once we were back on the mountain, I woke everyone up and handed out rewards to each of our competitors, including Hong. While he hadn't technically won, he had done the clan proud, and I wasn't one to skimp out on rewards.

After that, I visited Bao and handed him the Earth Dragon's Tongue Fruit. While a Rank 3 pill for temporarily boosting a person's earth affinity seemed somewhat pointless to me, the fruit's effects were unique, and I wanted to see if we could find a more valuable use for it.

Next, I held a meeting with the leadership council. During it, I did my best to maintain the facade that everything was normal, but Mo, at least, sensed that something had changed. He didn't say anything about it, but he kept a close eye on me and was measuring each of my movements.

Of course, it might not have been my behavior that had made him suspicious. He was at the competition with us, and he had been able to see WuJing's reaction as easily as anyone else. He had to suspect that the importance of RuLan's pill had exceeded his expectations.

Once the meeting was over, I disappeared and left everyone to their own devices.

Before everything blew up, I needed my storage space to be as habitable as possible. While it was mostly ready, there was still one major project left to complete, the illusory sky formation.

Over the years, with the help of my clan's illusionists, I had developed a grand formation that would do what I needed it to do. The central node of this formation would be attached to the exact center of the ceiling of my storage space, and ancillary nodes would be installed into the ceiling at regular intervals. Then, as the space expanded, I would just need to attach new nodes to the newly grown ceiling.

This formation wasn't exactly perfect. The colors in the space would be slightly unnatural, and the sky would definitely look artificial, but it was good enough for now. I could work on perfecting it later.

However, two issues had held me back from making this design a reality.

First, while I was confident that this formation would work, we had only been able to do small-scale tests on it. This grand formation was well beyond the abilities of the specialists in my clan, and without access to earth qi, I couldn't carve stones with the precision that this formation required.

Not having access to the right qi was a problem, but I could easily solve that by swapping out my cultivation technique. The real stumbling block was the second problem. I had needed to find some way to attach these formation nodes to the ceiling of my storage space.

This had held me up for a long time, but I had recently figured out a solution.

When I had purchased mastery of my spatial spirit fire seed, I gained a significant amount of knowledge on how to direct the shape of my growing storage space. I had used this knowledge to transform the space from a sphere into a cylinder, and I was actively using it to expand only the edges of this cylinder so that the area inside would grow into a wide, flat disk.

Recently, I had spent time practicing with both the spirit fire and the fire seed to gain more control over them. This led me to understand that my thinking of how to use these flames to shape my storage space had been too simplistic. A Profound-Rank fire might not be powerful enough to do anything too crazy, like expand the space into a fourth dimension, but I could still do more than make simple geometric forms.

After discovering this, I began to practice using the flames of the fire seed to grow small extensions onto my storage space. Originally, I was only doing this around the edges, where the expanding disc would eventually cover over any mistakes I made, but after the alchemy competition, I knew that it was time to push forward. So, after entering secluded meditation, I began my work.

Within my soul, I extended a small tendril of flame from the fire seed and directed it toward the center of my storage space's ceiling. Then, I used this flame to create a small tube. Once this tube reached a meter in length, I flared the flames to create a large bubble.

When I was done, I was left with a pocket of space two meters in diameter that was connected to the rest of the storage space by a ten-centimeter diameter tube. The tube would let energy flow into and out of the bubble, but anything larger than the tube, such as a formation node, would be trapped inside.

Once this first bubble was complete, I created several more, spaced out at 100-meter intervals. When I was done, the ceiling of my storage space looked like it was covered in a series of tumorous growths. It was ugly, but it would do what I needed it to do.

By placing formation nodes into these bubbles, I would be able to create an illusory sky grand formation that covered my entire storage space. All I had left to do was to make the actual formation.

To make the formation, I first needed to change my cultivation technique and gain access to earth qi, but doing this would drop me back down to Martial Disciple 1, and I would suddenly become the weakest person in the entire clan.

With the soul techniques that I had copied from the Nine Rivers Sect, I would still be able to fight against nearly any Grandmaster on the continent without much effort, but I was the only person who knew that. While I had placed copies of all the soul techniques I knew in the Soul Cultivation Library, no one had spent much time studying them. I didn't offer any rewards for mastering them, so there wasn't much point in doing so. Therefore, no one in the clan really understood the dangers of soul combat. Because of this, as far as anyone in the clan would know, the moment I abolished my cultivation base, I would be a chicken waiting to be plucked.

After visiting the elders and taking care of a few minor matters around the mountain, I visited Bao in his garden on the roof of the Soul Cultivation Library.

"Bao, I need to talk to you about something important." My voice was only slightly louder than it needed to be. "I am about to enter seclusion to change my cultivation technique. This will mean abolishing my foundation and dropping back down to Martial Disciple 1. I will need you to manage things while I'm in my weakened state. I can't let anyone know about it."

Bao widened his eyes in concern. "Master, do you need me to protect you? I can stand guard while you cultivate."

I shook my head. "No, stay here. Work with the council to keep everything running smoothly in my absence. If someone sees you standing guard over me, they will know something is wrong."

Bao started to turn his head to the right. "But—"

I quickly placed a hand on his shoulder and forced him to return his attention to me.

"I know." I tried my best to convey a deeper meaning with a mere look, but I could only rely on him figuring things out on his own. "After I enter seclusion, help the council where you can, but allow them to run the clan as they see fit. Don't interfere if you don't have to."

Bao tried to look to his right again, but I used a thread of qi to keep him from turning his head.

Eventually, he nodded. With that, I returned to my house and entered seclusion. I had to hope that Bao had understood my meaning.

The moment I left, the spy that TaiZu had placed to monitor Bao's activities dashed away to inform his master.

With a wealth of cultivation techniques to choose from, selecting the right one to use was a bit challenging. I needed a technique for cultivating earth qi, but what other considerations were important?

It would be nice to have access to metal qi to practice refining, but if I wanted to keep track of everything happening in the clan, I needed to retain access to wood qi, and I didn't have any three-element techniques for wood, earth, and metal. Such a combination would have been rather strange.

Earth and wood were what I really needed access to, but while I did have earth-wood dual-element techniques, because this was a destructive combination, these techniques were considered suboptimal as there was no effective way to combine the two types of qi synergistically.

Eventually, I decided on a Peak-Earth wood-fire-earth three-element technique. I had never cultivated a true three-element technique before, so mastering it would take slightly longer than I was comfortable with, but as long as things didn't get too crazy, I should be able to reach Peak Grandmaster before things fell apart completely.

Satisfied with my choice, I activated a defensive formation around my cultivation room and got to work.

First, I did my best to expel all the qi in my body. While I couldn't completely drain myself, I needed to get rid of as much qi as I could so that I didn't lose control of it later.

Then, I disconnected my dantian from my meridians and carefully picked apart its weave. Each time I removed a thread of qi, I allowed it to dissipate completely before moving on to the next.

Once my dantian was dismantled, I began dismantling my meridians.

Finally, I took a Rank 3 Energy Expulsion Pill to wipe away any vestiges of compressed qi that remained in my body.

This process took me an entire four days, and at the end of it, I was a basic mortal once again. As a 49-year-old, if I didn't quickly begin working to restore my cultivation base, my physical body would begin to age rapidly, and my energy body would begin to calcify.

As no one had appeared to make an issue of my lacking cultivation base, I proceeded to go ahead and practice my new technique.

The technique I had chosen, the Writ of Wood-Burned Earth, was different from the Rank 1 cultivation techniques I had practiced in the past. It treated the body as a single unit, and a single qi vortex was used to draw in energy from every point in the body at once. To do this, a cultivator needed to create a large vortex in their chest and slowly expand it each acupoint they opened.

To start, I created the core of the vortex in the center of my chest, right behind my sternum, and set up earth qi filters on over three dozen acupoints that were scattered around my torso. From there, it was a simple enough matter to use pills and formations to break through to Martial Disciple 2.

However, I couldn't allow myself to stop. At the moment, I was cultivating pure earth qi, and if I allowed the situation to continue, earth qi would begin invading other parts of my body.

So next, I extended the vortex to my upper right arm where I set up a series of filters for fire qi. This drew in fire qi from the environment and infused it into my muscles. Then, the expanded vortex pulled the energy into my torso where it surrounded the earth qi and stopped it from escaping into my limbs.

Of course, this would only result in fire qi invading my limbs instead, but that was fine.

At this point, I rested for a couple of days and allowed my qi to settle. Without an enlightenment helping me, I needed to be careful and ensure that all my energy was flowing through my body like it was supposed to.

Once I was satisfied, I expanded the vortex to my lower right arm where I set up several filters for wood qi.

As soon as wood qi began entering my body, it reacted with the fire qi that was already there, and a wave of heat lanced through my forearm. Thankfully, as more wood qi built up, it overwhelmed the fire qi, and the fiery pain was replaced with a calm, cooling sensation.

This didn't last long, though. The vortex in my core began pulling wood qi from my lower arm and sending it to my upper arm. This caused the fiery lance of pain to return, but this time, the abundant wood qi from my lower arm mixed with the ample fire qi in my upper arm, and the pain was an order of magnitude stronger than before.

This pain seemed to last for hours, and I was worried that I had done something wrong, but eventually, the wood-infused fire qi finally reached the earth qi in my core. When it did, a feeling of solidity echoed from my torso, through my upper arm, and to the tips of my fingers.

For just an instant, I almost felt as if I had turned into a statue made of solid stone, but the sensation quickly passed, and I collapsed in a heap. The scroll for this technique had contained vague warnings that it wasn't for the faint of heart, but I had not expected it to be so damn painful to cultivate.

I had raised my cultivation base back up to Martial Disciple 4, but I had no desire to continue cultivating for the moment. I needed time to let my body adjust. I needed time to forget the pain.

In any case, at this point, it had been over a week since I had entered seclusion. I still hadn't heard anything from the clan, and I was starting to wonder if my plans had somehow gone awry. I needed to go out and check on things.

Before leaving my chamber, I looked through my storage space, took out a variety of random pills and crafting materials, and placed them all into a storage bag. Then, I placed my jade token into my storage space and swapped it out with a new one that I had only recently created.

After double-checking everything, I nodded in satisfaction, stood, and walked outside.

As I walked toward the door of my house, I noticed a formation that had been set up on its threshold. Someone had done their best to mask it, but they had overestimated their ability.

Smiling, I walked outside.

The moment I passed through the door, the formation activated and sent a pulse of qi down into the mountain. While I had cultivated a bit of wood qi in my right hand, it wasn't enough to fully access my root network, so I couldn't witness what occurred next, but it was easy to guess that a certain someone had been informed that I had exited seclusion.

Feigning ignorance, I calmly walked out from my house, which sat on an elevated outcropping, and headed down onto the main plateau below. As I did so, dozens of people swarmed toward my location.

When I caught sight of TaiZu, he looked apprehensive, but after studying me briefly, he set his jaw and approached with confidence.

As I passed by the location where I had placed the stele containing the rules for becoming a clan elder, a horde of cultivators encircled me. TaiZu and YuanFei had brought all their Grandmasters to greet me.

Most of the people surrounding me were from the groups that these two had brought to the mountain with them, but there were also a few of our outer elders mixed in with them.

Once everyone was in place, TaiZu stepped forward and bowed his head slightly in my direction. "Prince Fang, we wish to discuss the rules of the clan with you."

I raised an eyebrow. "Oh, is that so? What is the issue?" Stay tuned for updates on empire

TaiZu gestured toward the stele. "According to the rules, 'Anyone who wishes to be a leader must prove themselves worthy of such a position.' I question whether this holds true for the position of Patriarch. I question whether a Martial Disciple is worthy of the position of Patriarch. I question whether someone surnamed Fang is worthy of being the Patriarch of the Su Clan."

I rubbed my chin in thought. "What do you propose? Are you suggesting that you should be the Patriarch instead?"

TaiZu frowned at my nonchalant response. "No. I am the Grand Elder of the Su Clan. YuanFei was the designated heir of the former Patriarch. He must be allowed to assume his rightful position as leader of the clan. He has the highest cultivation base amongst the younger generation, and he has a blessing that will help him nurture the clan properly. He is the most worthy and capable person for the position of Patriarch."

I nodded at him. "I see. So, because you feel that YuanFei is more 'worthy' of being the clan's Patriarch, you have decided to rebel."

TaiZu's expression turned stony. "No. We are only setting things right. We will continue supporting you as your ally, as we always have. YuanFei is only assuming his proper place in the clan's hierarchy."

I looked at YuanFei. "Is that so?"

Contrary to TaiZu, YuanFei's face was a mask of barely concealed disdain.

He snorted at me. "That is correct. I am only taking what is mine by right. Hand over the token of the Patriarch."

"I see."

I reached down, unfasted the token from my waist, and presented it to him.

YuanFei snatched it from my hand and examined it closely. Upon seeing the symbol for 'Patriarch' inscribed into it, he smiled. Then, he gestured to one of his Grandmasters with a flick of his head.

This Grandmaster threw a new jade token directly at my chest. It impacted me hard, but not hard enough to shatter bones.

YuanFei proudly raised his chin and waved a dismissive hand at me.

"You may leave."

Then, he boldly strode toward my house.

Off to the side, TaiZu was nearly exploding with joy and righteous conviction.