Chapter 343 – Lives 82 & 83

With my Karmic Energy Storage Formations in place, I could now rapidly increase my strength without needing to rely on outside forces. This gave me a lot more freedom with how to move forward.

So, what did I need to research next? The answer was obvious: Rank 7 body cultivation. How to research it, though, wasn’t exactly straightforward.

Back when ShouLi was studying body cultivation, she had developed new techniques by mimicking demon beasts of the appropriate Rank. Unfortunately, since this continent didn’t have any Rank 7 beasts, she hadn’t been able to study them.

Therefore, if I wanted to find a path to Rank 7, I needed to create a Rank 7 demon beast. And to do that, assuming that Rank 7 demon beasts were like Sovereign-level cultivators, I needed to help a demon beast create a clan of her own.

While I had a perfect candidate for the position of Sovereign of Beasts, I didn’t like the idea of helping her create a clan without having a way for her to keep her memories between loops. So, first, I needed to improve my skills with refining and learn to create memory orbs for demon beasts.

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Upon awakening in the Su Clan’s training compound, I immediately teleported back to the small town west of the Wastes, where I could spend a couple of years in peace.

Cost 3,252 credits. 128,352,792,834,478 credits remaining.

Then, I began experimenting with wu and body cultivation.

These experiments were incredibly reckless. I would pull in random bits of wu and infuse it into different parts of my body just to see what would happen. The result was malformed bones, burnt skin, and atrophied muscles. I learned a hundred wrong ways to use wu, but this didn’t tell me too much about the right way to use it.

I did learn one thing that was important, though. It was something that should have been obvious from what I had seen with Liang and the others, but it wasn’t something that my mind had latched onto.

The damage caused by cultivating wu incorrectly was permanent. It changed the physical structure of a person’s body, and no amount of Energy Expulsion Pills or Healing Pills would fix it. However, if the damaged body parts were cut away, then new, healthy tissues could be grown to replace them.

I wanted to see if I could actively incorporate this knowledge into a body cultivation technique, but that would have to wait. My two years were up, and it was time to release the Su Clan.

Before I left, I just needed to make a small purchase to prepare for the life ahead of me.

“System, as soon as the next loop begins, give LiTing a ‘temporary’ low three-star metal affinity. Then, immediately shift my permanent reset point forward so that it includes this change.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 20.3 trillion credits. 108,029,592,834,478 credits remaining.

With that done, I pulled out a pill and returned to the start once more.

You have died. Calculating…

You died as a Martial Disciple 1 – 10 credits awarded.

Total Credits: 108,029,592,834,488

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Before releasing anyone from my inner world, I portaled over to LuLu and told her about my plans. While the deer couldn’t speak, she seemed to know what people said to her, so I took her chuffed response as an acceptance of my proposal. Then, I returned to the Wastes.

Cost 15,040 credits. 108,029,592,819,448 credits remaining.

Upon my return, I let people out of my storage space, and they conquered the continent as normal. By now, this had all become rather routine, so I barely even paid attention to it. I was more focused on raising my cultivation base to Peak Sovereign with a dual-element earth and metal technique.

One thing that slightly bothered me, though, was that when I was visited by Emissary Yun, instead of telling me that the Saint felt I was doing an ‘exceptional’ job, she said that it was only ‘acceptable.’ This didn’t change anything—I still became the continent’s official Emissary—but it was a bit worrying. There had to be a problem with this generation of the Su Clan’s leadership.

Still, I didn’t want to step in and forcibly change things unless I had to—especially since I didn’t know what metric the Saint was using to grade us. If things continued to deteriorate in the next loop, then I would have to make some hard decisions, but for now, things were still good enough that I could keep my focus on my personal projects.

My primary goal for this life was to develop a memory orb capable of storing the memories of demon beasts. Memory orbs were the product of a combined effort from both refiners and formation specialists. So, since I already had a strong grounding in Rank 7 formations, I planned to walk the path of a refiner in this life and made a series of purchases to complement this path.

Enhanced comprehension of refining: 14.9 trillion credits.

A permanent mid three-star metal affinity: 35 trillion credits.

Low Five-star affinity for karmic energy for this generation’s Sutong: 116 billion credits.

Cost 50 trillion credits. 58,013,592,819,448 credits remaining.

Then, I went to visit LiTing and Emperor Jin and asked for a bit of assistance.

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After I told Jin what I wanted to do, she let out a light chuckle. “Child, unless you’ve been hiding a superb talent in refining from us, the odds of you successfully figuring out how to redesign those orbs are nil. Just focus on the formations, let LiTing and me handle the real work.”

I didn’t entirely agree with this assessment, but Jin didn’t know that I had increased my talent for refining by several orders of magnitude. Of course, even if she did know, her opinion might not have changed. Both she and LiTing had blessings that gave focused boosts to their abilities as a refiner, and they were too powerful for me to copy with credits.

Still, her suggestion wasn’t without merit.

There were two things stopping demon beasts from using memory orbs: the core of an orb couldn’t record the memories properly, and demon beasts didn’t have any qi to activate an orb’s formations. While Jin and LiTing tackled the first problem, Shen and I tackled the second.

In the past, I had controlled environmental qi to pull the memories from an orb and send them into another person. Changing the ‘read’ formation to do this automatically wasn’t a problem. The problem was changing the ‘write’ formation. The standard formation extracted memories through a complex interplay between a person’s qi, energy body, and mind. Replicating this with environmental qi wasn’t going to happen.

So, we needed LuLu to be able to store qi. On the Central Continent, there were supposed to be spirit beasts that could access qi naturally, but none existed on the Nine Rivers Continent, and we weren’t sure how they did it. Therefore, we could only force the issue.

Shen and I designed a formation to directly inject qi into demon beasts. This process was nearly as destructive as my recent tests with body cultivation had been, so it wasn’t something that could be done lightly, but it did the job we needed it to do.

Then, we redesigned the memory orb’s ‘write’ formation to extract the injected qi on its own, without the user’s active participation. This required us to make the orb nearly twice as large as normal, but it did what we needed it to do, and that was all that mattered.

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LiTing and Jin had managed to come up with dozens of possible permutations for the internal structure of memory orbs, but without any way to test them, this hadn’t amounted to much. Once Shan and I had the formations ready, though, progress was swift.

After the situation was explained to them, a group of elderly demon beasts that were the companions of people from our Sovereign clans agreed to be our test subjects. None of them enjoyed this process, but they understood well enough what it might mean if we were successful, so they were willing to endure.

These experiments proved that demon beasts were not a monolith. Different species responded to different orb configurations differently. This made things a bit more complicated, but after the first demon beast was able to partially record its memories into an orb, LiTing was struck with an enlightenment, and things became much easier.

The year we were able to successfully create a working orb for LuLu, I was only 157 years old. While I could have reset and started work on my next project immediately, doing so would have been counterproductive. I needed to give LuLu as much time as possible to ‘grow her clan,’ so instead, I focused on increasing my mastery of refining.

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For the next 300 years, I worked on creating a ‘perfect’ refined item.

Mo had told me that the reason we couldn’t use refined weapons on the Path of the True Chosen was because the energy in such a weapon was in a slightly different plane from the physical object. I wanted to fix this. Body cultivation was helpful, but if I could create a refined weapon capable of being used under a suppression formation, I would be unstoppable.

However, creating such a weapon wasn’t easy. It required an incredibly precise manipulation of qi, and I could only tell if I was successful through the use of my analysis ability. Being a Sovereign had given me the strength to pierce other dimensions, but I didn’t have a good grasp on the nuances yet. My space affinity was helping, but I felt that I would need at least a three-star affinity before I had a good enough ‘dimensional sense’ to do this properly.

Still, after hundreds of years of effort, I had been able to make a ‘perfect’ Rank 3 dagger. It wasn’t much, but if nothing else, we could now pierce the outer ring of the formations under the Wastes without the need for body cultivators.

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During this time, the seven existing planes in my inner world reached the maximum size that I wanted for Rank 3, so it was time for me to create a few more.

I could technically choose to introduce any element next, but I only had Earth-Rank fire seeds for two of them: wind and dark. Luckily, these were also the elements adjacent to fire and earth on the Bagua.

So, which did I want to go with? My answer was immediate: dark.

I created four new planes. Taking wood as the center of a wheel, I created a new first-tier Plane of Dark clockwise from the Plane of Earth. On the second tier, I created the Plane of Dark Earth and the Plane of Dark Wood. Finally, on the third tier, I formed the Plane of Dark Woody Earth.

I considered connecting this Plane of Dark Woody Earth directly to Chang'an, but I decided better of it. Instead, I just created connections between it and its three subordinate Tier 2 planes.

Once this basic layout was complete, I shifted the Expanding Realms Fire and sent it to expand my four new planes.

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Upon reaching 437 years old, I sent a message to my clan, ordering them to return to Chang’an. With all the growth it had experienced in this life, Chang’an now had a radius of over 7.5 kilometers, and its bunkers were able to hold well over 100 million people.

Because of the limitations imposed on us by Grand Elder Zheng, this had already surpassed the limit of what the Nine Rivers Continent could sustain, and it was far more than the number of people who wanted to travel back in time with us. So, in the future, we could start looking to transition away from the bunker system.

Of course, nowadays, Chang’an wasn’t our only inhabited plane.

The Bao and Ye clans had also grown enough that they now fully occupied the Plane of Woody Earth. They hadn’t built any bunkers, and they hadn’t ventured out to the continent to do anything other than gather raw materials, so their populations weren’t huge. However, the people they did have were nearly all exceptionally gifted Grandmaster Herbalists and Grandmaster Formation Specialists.

The talent these two clans displayed was, honestly, a bit shocking. None of them had used memory orbs, and the only ones who were even blessed were the small few who had ventured onto the continent. They were all just naturally born with a talent in either herbalism or formations.

The only problem was, even though the population of this plane was large enough, it wasn’t generating any karmic energy, likely because the world didn’t have any Laws of Karma. The clans didn’t seem to mind this overly much, but it did mean that they couldn’t produce any Rulers without outside assistance.

I talked to Bao and SuYin about this, but neither of them saw it as a problem. Their families were safe and happy where they were, so what did it matter if they couldn’t ascend any further?

That said, there was still one other plane that had its share of inhabitants now, and they were a bit more ambitious.

Over this life, I had introduced a collection of herbivorous animals to the Plane of Wood. I was careful in my selection, choosing only those with natural affinities for the element, and by now, the plane was filled with a collection of squirrels, rabbits, porcupines, and other small critters. However, these were not the plane’s inhabitants. These were the inhabitants’ food.

After only 400 years of effort, LuLu had been able to produce a rather large clan of demon deer, and they were all now safely tucked away on my Plane of Wood. For various reasons, few of these deer had been able to advance past Rank 1, but that was something we planned to tackle in the near future. For now, we just needed a large population that paid respect to their ancestor, LuLu.

With everything arranged, I had no desire to stick around for a meeting with the Saint’s Envoy, so I swallowed a pill and moved on to the next timeline.

You have died. Calculating…

You died as a Martial Sovereign Peak – 100 trillion credits awarded.

You died at Peak Rank 6 of Body Cultivation – 1 trillion credits awarded.

Total Credits: 159,013,592,819,448

Rank 3 Small World – 728/1,000 km3 (Earth, Wood, Fire)