After I died in the attack on the Twin Mountains Sect, I woke up in my tiny house inside the Su Clan with no desire to jump right back into the meat grinders that were my lives.

My last life was the first one that felt like a real, full lifetime. I had lived to a similar age in the past, but those lives were like shadow plays where every day blended into the next. This past life had been a more complete experience.

I had joined the Twin Mountains Sect, had felt the joy of ascending to Peak Grandmaster, and had experienced the eventual destruction of the sect due to the actions of only a few of its members. I had learned more about the world I found myself in and had a clearer notion of what I needed to do to advance further. I had even made a couple of friends along the way.

Now, I was back in the emaciated body of a poor orphan that the Su Clan would inevitably murder. My nice, healthy beard had vanished, and my long black hair was once again filled with the detritus of a beggar living on the streets. My elegant, light blue silk robes of an inner sect disciple of the Twin Mountains had been replaced with the ragged, undyed hemp robes of a street urchin.

I needed to take some time to breathe and assess everything that had happened. Not only had I gained a lot of knowledge from that life, but I had also earned a million credits. I needed time to work out how I wanted to move forward from here.

Unfortunately, I only had a few hours until someone from the Su Clan came to take me to be tested, and I needed to prepare before that happened. How did I want to play this? Everything the clan did after the testing was based on my affinities. I had a mid eight-star fire affinity, low eight-star affinities in the other four basic elements, and a fortune in credits to play with.

I just wanted to be left alone for a short while to figure things out on my own, and a good way to get the time I wanted was by appearing to have no affinities at all. I could do what I had done in the past and pay for the system to hide them for me, but now that I had a better understanding of how the affinity testing orb worked, there was another option available to me.

“System, permanently raise all my basic affinities to mid eight-star.”

Permanent mid eight-star Water, Earth, Wood, and Metal Affinities. Purchase confirmed. Cost 10,000 credits. 990,290 credits remaining.

With those four now matching my mid eight-star fire affinity, the affinity testing orb should no longer work. With five matching affinities, everything would cancel out, and I would appear to be nothing more than a worthless piece of trash. If things played out as normal, I would be thrown right back in here for a week of uninterrupted solitude.

I didn’t have long before I would be summoned to have my affinities tested, so I didn’t bother diving too deeply into my research. Instead, I spent the few hours I had on organizing my thoughts and making a plan for what I would work on over the next week. There were a few ideas I wanted to try out, now that I once again had a clean slate to work from, and I needed to decide which ones were worth pursuing.

I stepped in front of the elder who always tested my affinities, and he gave me a pleasant smile.

“What is your name?”

“Su Fang.”

“Place your hand on the orb and channel your qi into it.”

When I channeled my qi into the orb, only a flicker of chaotic lines appeared. I pushed and gritted my teeth to show that I was trying my hardest, but nothing more happened.

“Zero elemental affinity.”

The elder’s voice was entirely neutral, showing neither praise nor censure.

“What can you tell us about the blessing you have received?”

“I don’t know. My body feels a little stronger, but that’s all.”

The old man gave me a look, and I could feel energy from him lightly probe my body. After that, he nodded to the scribe who was sitting at the side of the room.

“He will be given the Earth Heart Mantra and returned to his original quarters.”

Upon returning to my house, I sat down and got to work.

I had obtained a myriad of cultivation techniques in my last life, and I wanted to see what I could do with them. Of these, the ones that I considered the most important were the two dual-element techniques.

I had studied the wood-fire cultivation technique quite a bit over the years, and it gave me several insights into how cultivation techniques affected one’s body. Put simply, a single-element Rank 1 technique floods all the muscles in a part of the body with qi of that element. This dual-element technique sections off muscle groups, flooding some with fire qi and some with wood qi.

There were two main things I wanted to investigate. First, this technique was only Mid-Profound, and that seemed to be because it used low-quality qi filters. Could I extract the filters from a Peak-Yellow technique and implant them into this one to make it a Peak-Profound technique? Second, this dual-element technique divided the muscles into two groups. Could I divide them into five groups to create a five-element cultivation technique?

While I believed a five-element Rank 1 technique should be possible, I was extremely doubtful that I could make a five-element Rank 2 technique. Rank 2 dual-element techniques created separate meridians for each element, so a five-element technique would likely need five separate sets of meridians, one for each element, and designing something like that felt far beyond my current skill set. Still, the fact that I wasn’t ready to begin designing this kind of Rank 2 technique didn’t need to stop me from attempting to create a Rank 1 version.

However, first, I wanted to check on the pricing of a few things.

“System, how much to change this Rank 1 Mid-Profound technique into a Peak-Profound technique?”

Cost 11,000 credits.

That was ten times more than upgrading a Mid-Yellow technique to Peak-Yellow.

“System, how much to change this Rank 2 Mid-Profound technique into a Peak-Profound one?”

Cost 1,100,000 credits.

Those two prices gave me the answer to my next question, but I wanted to ask it anyway. I took out the copy of the Rank 3 dual-element technique from my storage space.

“System, how much to change this Rank 3 Mid-Profound technique into a Peak-Profound one?”

Cost 110 million credits.

While I was somewhat confident that I could alter the Rank 1 technique to make it Peak-Profound on my own, and while I believed that I might be able to do the same for the Rank 2 version, I had no confidence at all in upgrading the Rank 3 technique. I had several lifetimes of experience to draw upon when working with Rank 1 and 2 techniques, but I had only advanced to Rank 3 a single time.

Upgrading the Rank 1 technique wouldn’t do too much good unless I could upgrade all of them, but I wouldn’t lose anything by trying. I wasn’t willing to spend credits on this, however. Unless I could upgrade all three Ranks of the technique, any upgrades I did would likely end up more detrimental than helpful.

By the end of the week, my experiments had hit a brick wall, and my cultivation base was a complete mess.

I had quickly reached Martial Disciple 2 by practicing the basic wood-fire dual-element cultivation technique on my upper right arm. This was mainly to get a general feel for how the technique should work and try to see how I could go about changing it. Then, on my upper left arm, I switched to the fire-earth dual-element technique to see how that one differed.

Cultivating two different techniques that used two different combinations of elements caused havoc with the energy in my body, and using even the slightest bit of qi caused me to suffer internal injuries.

Part of the problem seemed to be that these techniques used two very different principles when filtering qi. The fire-earth technique was only Low-Profound, not Mid-Profound like the wood-fire technique, and that may have been the reason for these differences, but I couldn’t help but feel that the two techniques were built from two completely different perspectives on how a dual-element technique should function.

Since cultivating two different techniques in different parts of my body was only causing problems, I decided to ignore the fire-earth technique and focus only on the high-Ranked wood-fire technique.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

To avoid the chaotic energies roiling inside my chest, I began cultivating in my lower right leg, as far away from them as I could get.

The wood-fire technique used a single filter to create two separate streams of wood and fire qi, then directed these streams into different muscle groups. After reviewing the Peak-Yellow techniques I had for these two elements, I began working to modify this filter and improve it.

My first attempt ended poorly. The filter collapsed, and this caused my muscles to be flooded with impurities. I then switched to my lower left leg and tried again, but the results were no different.

As the end of the week approached, I sighed and decided to give up. I would need far more experience with dual-element cultivation to make this work, and there were other things I wanted to get done in the meantime. I would just have to spend a few years using this dual-element technique normally and try again later.

These difficulties also meant that my dream of creating a five-element cultivation technique wouldn’t be coming true any time soon. Upgrading the dual-element technique could be considered a long-term goal, but creating a five-element technique would need to be completely shelved until I had more information to work with.

At this point, my cultivation base was in tatters, and the Su Clan had likely already marked me for death. I had no desire to be a punching bag for an angry combat instructor, so I popped a poison pill into my mouth and skipped the inevitable torture session.

You have died. Calculating…

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

Total Credits: 990,300

The System’s assessment of Martial Disciple 1 was a little surprising, since I should have technically been a Martial Disciple 3. I had completed cultivating both of my upper arms, after all. It had to have been the unresolved clash between wood and earth qi that caused me to have this reduced evaluation. In any case, I didn’t want to spend too much time stuck on my problems with cultivation, so I put the topic aside to think about later.

If I was going to cultivate the Mid-Profound wood-fire technique, its low-quality qi filter meant that I was going to have problems with qi purity. This wasn’t ideal, but it could be managed through the use of Purifying Pills. The only problem was that, after taking too many of these pills, the toxins they contained would begin to build up in my body, and I would be in a worse state than if I had simply cultivated without them.

Fortunately, this problem was also manageable. As long as I only consumed Perfect pills, I didn’t have to worry about pill toxins.

I could already make Perfect Rank 1 pills, but to make Perfect Rank 2 pills, I needed to have peak eight-star affinities in all of the elements. To make Perfect Rank 3 pills, I would need peak seven-star affinities.

“System, what is the cost to permanently raise all my basic affinities to peak seven-star?”

Cost 862,500 credits.

That was a serious chunk of my profits from my last life, and I didn’t think it would be wise to spend everything I had in this one area. It would be much better to spread the wealth out a little more. Thankfully, I could still buy temporary affinities at 10% of the cost of permanent ones.

Over time, purchasing permanent affinities would be a better value, but I had already seen how effective temporarily raising my affinities could be. Higher affinities meant reaching higher levels of cultivation, and that meant receiving more credits when I died. The credits spent on temporary affinities might be ‘wasted,’ but the loss of these few credits could allow me to reap huge returns.

“System, after I raise my fire affinity to peak seven-star, what would be the additional cost to raise it to low six-star just for this life?”

Temporary Low 6-star Fire Affinities. Additional cost 100,000 credits.

“That doesn’t seem right. The cost of affinities only increases by ten times for each star level. Shouldn’t it be 10,000?”

Note: 9-,8-, and 7-star affinities are low affinities. The cost is multiplied by 10 with each additional star level. 6-,5-, and 4-star are mid affinities and have a cost multiplier of 100. 3-,2-, and 1-star are high affinities and have a cost multiplier of 1,000.

Upgrading my affinities was going to be a huge black hole. I could potentially use the spring in the Twin Mountains Sect to improve my fire affinity temporarily, but it was limited in how much it could help me. According to the sect’s elders, it couldn’t push an affinity past peak seven-star, and even then, I didn’t like the idea of sneaking into the sect after every restart just to boost an affinity. I needed a better solution.

I put a pin in this topic for the moment and moved on. While high affinities were vital to my success as a cultivator, there were other things I needed to spend credits on. I didn’t want to commit too many on my affinities until I had a better understanding of everything else I needed to purchase.

Thinking back to my goals from my previous life, the only thing I hadn’t accomplished was acquiring a spatial spirit fire seed. In fact, I hadn’t even heard mention of a fire seed other than the Cold Mountain Fire. Not only had I not heard about any such fire seed in the Twin Mountains Sect, but Bao’s spy network hadn’t been able to find any information about one either.

I could head out into the world and blindly search for the seed I needed, but I had no idea where to even begin looking. So, instead, I turned to the System.

“System, how much to purchase the cheapest spirit fire seed capable of helping me expand my storage space?”

Space-attributed spirit fire seed. Cost 5 trillion credits.

I wasn’t even close to being able to afford something like that, so I tried approaching the problem from a different direction.

“System, how much to learn the location of a spatial spirit fire I could acquire by myself. This information should include the time and circumstances under which I could get it?”

Cost 350,000 credits.

That was expensive, and it would eat into the funds I needed for raising my affinities, but getting that seed was my most important goal by far. My storage space was vital to my plans to create a sanctuary outside of the time loops and free from the interference of any ‘Daos.’ Every moment without that seed was a moment my storage space wasn’t growing.

Still, this was a major purchase, and I needed to think through everything else I needed before going through with it.

Was there anything else I needed immediately?

My plan was to use the wood-fire dual-element technique without upgrading it from Mid-Profound, but it would be a good idea to rework its mental effects before I did so. As I had seen countless times already, poor mental effects in a cultivation technique would only cause endless problems, and I had no desire to deal with that again.

When I had checked previously, I had found that altering a cultivation technique’s mental effect through the System was significantly cheaper when I already had a copy of a different technique with the effects I desired. This had been a bit of a problem in the past, but now, I had dozens of cultivation techniques that imposed any number of different mental effects.

I carefully flipped through my mental library and considered my options. What did I want in this life? I wanted to head outside the Wastes, and I knew who I would work with to do that. What would help me there?

The Rank 3 cultivation technique I wanted to use would only make the effects of my Rank 1 and 2 techniques more intense, so as long as I was happy with the Rank 1 and 2 effects, I didn’t need to worry about Rank 3. That would make things a bit cheaper.

I would need to deal with a lot of different kinds of people in the future, so having an effect that helped with that would be nice, but I had no desire for something like friendliness again. It shifted my perceptions too much, and it also made me capitulate to the demands of others far too easily. This wasn’t horrible, since I usually came out ahead in the end, but that didn’t mean I liked it.

Instead of being friendly, I just wanted to be… personable. As long as my cultivation technique made me act friendly, it wouldn’t matter how I really felt. I would be free to say ‘no,’ but I wouldn’t do so in ways that started fights.

I also wanted to find novel solutions to problems, so something tending toward inventiveness? Unfortunately, I didn’t have any techniques with effects that could help me with that.

Thinking about the situation from a different direction, I would need to spend long stretches of time locked away alone in a room while working on improving my alchemy abilities. My Rank 1 skills were solid, but there was plenty of room for improvement in both my Rank 2 and 3 skills. To add to that, if I wanted any hope of advancing to Rank 4 or higher, I would need to spend countless hours in front of a pill furnace.

Most importantly, I needed the mental effects to only affect my behavior, not my perceptions or memories. That way, there wouldn’t be any lingering effects after I stopped using the technique.

“System, how much would it cost to change the mental effects of my Rank 1 and 2 fire-wood dual-element cultivation techniques so that they would improve my personability while also making me more dedicated and focused?”

Cost 101,000 credits.

Did I need anything else?

“System, how much to upgrade my mental library so it can hold Rank 3 and 4 techniques?”

Upgrade to Rank 3. Cost 90,000 credits.

Upgrade to Rank 4. Additional cost 900,000 credits.

“Alright, System, purchase the Rank 3 mental library.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 90,000 credits. 900,300 credits remaining.

“System, purchase the information I previously requested about the location of a spatial fire seed.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 350,000 credits. 550,300 credits remaining.

Formation Emperor Du XiongMing is currently in possession of a spatial spirit fire seed that meets the specified requirements. In 127 years, he will die in the Brilliant Sun Empire, located in the southern part of the continent. Upon his death, a war will erupt, with many sides fighting to claim his fire seed. If you are present in the capital of the Brilliant Sun Empire at the time of his death, and you have a connection with its ruling dynasty, it may be possible for you to claim this seed as your own upon his death.

Credits expended, transaction complete.

Formation Emperor. Alchemists were divided into Disciple Alchemists, Master Alchemists, and Grandmaster Alchemists for Ranks 1 through 3. Above that, a Rank 4 alchemist was called a Pill Lord, Rank 5 was Pill King, and Rank 6 was called Pill Emperor. Formation Emperor Du XiongMing was a Rank 6 formation specialist, and to get a spatial spirit fire seed, it sounded like I would need to rob his corpse.

To even have a prayer of pulling that off, I would need to be close to him when he died, which meant I needed to be his peer. To be the peer of a Formation Emperor, I would need to be at least a Pill King, possibly even a Pill Emperor.

Truthfully, this mission might be easier if I approached it as a formation specialist, but that would mean learning an entirely new set of skills all the way up to Rank 6, and that would take countless more lives to accomplish. It would mean starting from nothing again. Instead, it was better to approach this task as an alchemist and use my existing skills to advance as far as I could.

Reaching Martial Emperor or Pill Emperor wasn’t something I could expect to accomplish in a single lifetime, but I had as many lifetimes as necessary. While I worked on advancing to Pill Emperor, I would head in the direction of the Brilliant Sun Empire. Ideally, I would eventually reach a point where I could acquire the fire seed upon Du XiongMing’s death, but if not, I would just need to accumulate enough credits to buy it from the System directly.

My course forward was set.

I still needed to raise my affinities and fix my cultivation technique, but I didn’t want to rush that. Chen WuJing of the Blue Wind Pavilion had previously offered me a Profound-Rank cultivation technique, and I wanted to check that out before making any more purchases.

“System, teleport me to Dragon Gate City.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 30 credits. 550,270 credits remaining.