After we finished dealing with Manager Liu, Master Zhong disappeared, so neither SuYin nor I had any more problems with him or Gao, and my time in Dragon Gate City became much more relaxed.

With threats to my life eliminated, I had the ability to freely explore the city and surrounding areas, but after a few small excursions, I no longer had the desire. There were no forgotten ruins or mystical forests to explore, just endless fields of low-level herbs. While there were a few options for entertainment and relaxation, I allowed my cultivation technique’s mental effect to keep me focused on my advancement.

I remained dedicated to the timeline I had laid out. Every other year, I advanced two steps while bringing Mei and SuYin up along with me. With Mei, this was simple. I could easily help her form her meridians to the same standard as my own, so we advanced in sync. Shortly after I reached Peak Master, she did as well.

Helping SuYin was a bit more difficult. She wasn’t able to give me control of her qi like Mei could, especially when it was within her body, so I had to guide her to be able to advance on her own. Because of this, her final meridians were always slightly off, and after each advancement, she needed time for her qi to settle. However, with the improved technique that I had given her, that still only took a few months.

I was forced to rush her to cultivate faster so that she could catch up with the schedule I had set. It may have been unfair to the girl, but I needed her to reach Grandmaster before the year I turned 29. The notes I had received from Bao during my time in the Twin Mountains Sect indicated there would be an important festival that year, and I wanted us to be ready for it. While this quicker pace may have hurt her foundation, it was still leagues ahead of any other Martial Master that I had seen.

After we had all reached Peak Master, the only thing left to do was to find each of us a suitable Rank 3 cultivation technique.

I had started my search for Rank 3 techniques the moment I hit Martial Master, but I hadn’t been able to find anything that felt ‘right.’ I was beginning to understand that different cultivation techniques created different ‘flavors’ of qi. The fire qi that I was cultivating in this life felt ever so slightly different than it had in previous lives. So, instead of just worrying about a technique’s mental effects, I also had to find techniques with matching ‘flavors.’

The only Rank 3 technique that I had brought back with me was my Mid-Profound dual-element technique. I had nothing for Mei or SuYin. So, I had searched the Pavilion library for a technique that they could use. Unfortunately, while I didn’t yet truly understand what I was looking for in terms of ‘flavor,’ nothing in the library felt like a suitable complement to the techniques that I had already given them.

I put in requests for manuals that I thought might work, as well as requests for a few other Rank 3 techniques that I wanted, but getting my hands on high-quality Rank 3 techniques wasn’t so easy. The books I wanted needed to be requisitioned from the main branch, and building up enough contribution to make that happen would take time.

Secretary Jiang and Manager Cai, however, had no such limitations.

After dealing with Manager Liu, Jiang had given me my rewards. I was upset with the two of them, but the reward they gave me… it calmed me down quite a bit. It at least showed that, when they used me, they were both willing and able to provide proper compensation.

The bag he gave me contained only five techniques, but they were the epitome of delivering coal in winter. First, there were the Rank 3 manuals for the techniques that I had given the girls. Not simply techniques that were suitable, but the ones designed to work best with the techniques they already had. These felt like they were nearly reward enough, since they were exactly what I needed, but the other three techniques in the bag were beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of receiving.

The three manuals formed a full set of Warrior Tier cultivation techniques that would allow someone to advance from Disciple 1 to Peak Grandmaster. They were single-element techniques for cultivating earth qi. If I wanted to become a formation master in the future, I would need to cultivate earth qi, so I had been looking for quality techniques in preparation. What made these particular techniques special, though, was that they were a complete set of Warrior Tier Peak-Earth cultivation techniques. Even if it was for a qi type I didn’t currently use, the research value of seeing what would make a technique ‘Peak-Earth’ was immense.

Reading through the Rank 1 technique, I found that it was not too dissimilar to the Profound techniques that I had used previously. The primary difference was that where a Profound technique utilized dozens of acupoints, the Earth one used hundreds, a total of 361 to be exact.

I wasn’t sure, but what seemed to make the technique Earth-Rank was a method for dealing with the interference that I had experienced when trying to cultivate through multiple acupoints at once. I couldn’t use this until I started over again, but it gave me hope for further developing my techniques.

Staring at these five manuals, I was both excited and worried. Did Cai really have enough pull to get me a full set of Peak-Earth cultivation techniques? Was helping her take down Liu really worth such a large favor? More to the point, how did she even know the specific techniques that Mei and SuYin were using? And, if Cai could do all of this, why was she only a Grandmaster stuck in the Wastes?

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No. It was obvious. These techniques hadn’t come from Cai. They had to have come from someone higher up the food chain. Was it Cai’s backer, or was it someone who had taken notice of the karmic energy I was providing?

Manager Cai had said she wouldn’t report me to the Pavilion, and based on our conversation, I tended to believe that was true. Still, no one who had reached a high level in this cutthroat world would be an idiot. When she sent Perfect Rank 3 pills and asked for cultivation techniques in return, especially right after, if Cai was right, there had been a suspicious surge in the Pavilion’s karma. It would have been obvious what was going on. Maybe no one would come find me directly, but I was on someone’s radar.

Still… how had they known what techniques to provide for Mei and SuYin? I didn’t know.

Also, why send me a complete set of cultivation techniques for an element that I couldn’t use? There was no way WuJing was the only person in the Pavilion who realized I took two girls who couldn’t cultivate and was about to turn them into Grandmasters within 10 years. Did they want me to do it again? If so, I might also stumble upon a high-quality set of metal qi techniques in the near future.

Drawing attention like this was something that I would need to be wary of in future iterations, but right now, it was what I needed. It had been my plan from the moment I put on these fancy robes and walked into the Pavilion. Be someone those in power would want to invest in.

Now, though, was not the time for worrying about company politics. It was time to advance.

Having only advanced to Grandmaster a single time, I lacked the knowledge and experience to improve my Rank 3 cultivation technique as much as I had the others, but I still needed to make a few changes to it.

The Peak-Yellow technique that I had previously used to create a dantian was questionable at best. When pushed to the limit, it was leaky and easily damaged. This was due in no small part to my mistakes in its construction, but I also felt that the construction method itself could be vastly improved.

This Mid-Profound technique created what was, essentially, a series of three dantians, each of similar construction to that Yellow-rank technique. The design was for a top dantian connected to wood meridians, a bottom dantian connected to fire meridians, and a middle dantian that was only connected to the other two. As I advanced, I would need to compress the qi in the top and bottom dantians simultaneously, always keeping my wood and fire qi in balance. This setup seemed nightmarish to create, and it didn’t match with the natural flow of qi in my body at all, but I didn’t have a better idea for how it should be done. I would follow this blueprint, experience it, live with it, and try to do better in my next life. At the same time, I needed to find more dual-element Rank 3 techniques for research.

Even with this manual as a guide, I needed to improve the technique to Peak-Profound for it to be suitable for use with my current techniques. I wasn’t sure if my plan was enough to qualify, but it should at least significantly improve the structural integrity of the dantians.

Instead of creating a sphere from four pieces and sewing them together, I patterned each of my new vessels off of the construction of a beach ball. I made two discs for the top and bottom and six slices to form the sides. Two of the slices had holes that would be connected to the meridians on the left side of my torso, and two had connections to the meridians on my right. Between them, there were two solid slices that would help hold everything together.

The three dantians were then connected together through holes in the top and bottom discs, forming what looked like a short, beaded chain that stretched from my solar plexus to below my navel.

This construction had vastly more parts than a normal dantian, and even with my higher affinities, it was a struggle to maintain everything all at once. Each dantian had eight parts that all had to be created and maintained before I could begin assembly. The saving grace was that sewing these pieces together was significantly simpler than normal. The beachball-esque construction method helped everything fit together much better than it had in the past, and after each dantian was completed, it no longer required my focus, so I was able to rest and then move on to the next without worry.

After several months of hard work, I broke through to Martial Grandmaster 1. While forming these new dantians had been a struggle, it had been worth it.

With only a little practice, I was able to cycle my energy into or out of the top dantian when working with wood qi and the bottom dantian when working with fire qi, but I wasn’t sure what the middle dantian was for. Qi didn’t want to flow into it. I tried to use it as a passthrough, letting my wood qi flow into my fire qi to strengthen it, but that didn’t work, and any of the limited qi that did enter it did not want to leave. Eventually, I gave up on working with the middle dantian, since I began to suspect that it was more related to my advancement to Martial Lord.

After my cultivation stabilized, I found that I only had ten months left before my deadline. At that point, SuYin had to be a Martial Grandmaster, and it would be best if she had been there for several months, possibly even having advanced a step or two in that time.

I didn’t want to start with her first, though. It was easier to help Mei, since she could give greater access to her qi. I would refine my teaching techniques on Mei, and only then would I proceed to guide SuYin.

They had both been studying their Rank 3 technique for years by this point, so when I told Mei that it was time to advance, she was more than ready. She used the same beachball construction that I had, and she did her best to advance without my direct intervention. This was practice for helping SuYin, so I would only take control of Mei’s qi if it was necessary. The process was slower than it could have been, but even though I didn’t control her qi, I was able to act as a stabilizing force for each piece as it was constructed, so Mei only needed to concentrate on the next step in the process.

The final product of our combined effort was far superior to my first dantian, and it was close to the quality that I had achieved this time around. Success in hand, I moved on to help SuYin.

While SuYin’s blessing lacked the guiding force of Mei’s, her perfect memory allowed her to place each thread of qi with exacting standards. She didn’t need my guidance at all. She knew exactly what to do. The only help she needed from me was the same stabilization I had provided Mei so that she could focus all her attention on constructing the pieces and sewing them together.

With only six months until my deadline, we had all advanced to Martial Grandmaster. While I wasn’t worried about myself or Mei, at this point, I provided SuYin with multiple Rank 3 Qi Gathering Pills over the following months. With one month to go, at age 29, she was a Martial Grandmaster 2. Her progress was far beyond anyone I had ever seen at her age in the Twin Mountains Sect.

She was ready to take advantage of the opportunity that Bao had told me about.