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Gathering enough qi to advance so quickly was difficult. Earning enough contribution points to buy sufficient karmic energy with my limited Rank 6 skills was completely impossible. So, I abandoned cultivating properly and began advancing without it.

After that, I made a deal with Emperor Shen that allowed me to cultivate in his cave on the Earth Peak in exchange for an unspecified future favor. With an endless stream of pure earth qi supporting me, I was able to rapidly advance. My cultivation base wasn’t pretty, but that no longer mattered.

Once I completed my final breakthrough, I exited the cave to see Shen waiting for me. He walked up and clapped me on the back.

“You should be glad old man Li isn’t here. You’re the only disciple he’s ever been allowed to accept. If he saw you destroy your foundation like that, he would be pissed!”

His words gave me flashbacks to something that happened a few lifetimes ago, and I could only smile weakly in response.

“Why are you rushing like this anyway? What’s the point? Why even cultivate if you’re just going to just die in a few more years anyway? Does it affect the next cycle?”

I shook my head. “No, it has nothing to do with the way the cycles work. It’s a… personal decision.”

I wasn’t willing to tell him about the System or its need for credits, and I didn’t know how to explain my 100-year plan or my need to hold myself to it. It barely even made sense to me.

Before I came to the sect, I had told myself that I was doing so in order to prepare to repay my debts in the Wastes. I was here to learn what I needed to learn so that I could achieve that goal, and I had locked myself into a 100-year schedule.

I had committed myself to that. I needed to repay the debts I owed in the Wastes, and at this point, I was confident I had the tools needed to do so. Some things, like my storage space, weren’t ready yet, but I had all the information I needed to take the final steps. I no longer needed to stay in the sect. I should return to the Wastes and start working to fulfill my mission there.

I just… I didn’t want to leave everyone yet. I wanted to stay here a little longer.

After so much time cultivating my soul, I had gained an understanding of what was happening. Two parts of my soul were in conflict.

The newer parts, the parts that had grown since I had learned to cultivate it properly, were attached to the friends I had spent the last several decades with. The thought of leaving them now and possibly spending centuries separated from them was abhorrent to this part of my soul.

The older parts, the parts from my first lives in this world when I grew my soul without understanding what I was doing, the parts now walled in and protected by my soul cultivation technique, those parts of my soul were screaming about the need to repay my debts.

I was able to identify the impulses driving me, but I didn’t have a way to change them. All I could do was to try and follow a course of action that would satisfy both halves of myself.

Attempting to keep to the letter of my promise would satisfy one part of my soul. Breaking the spirit of it to spend one last life with my friends would satisfy the other part.

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel I could explain that to Shen or anyone else properly, so they just saw my actions as either mysterious or blind recklessness.

With Shen and Jin taking care of the memory orbs and my cultivation base having risen far quicker than it had any right to, I had a bit of extra free time on my hands. I decided to spend it on learning more about soul formations. That was the most important issue left for me to tackle.

The Heaven City Scripture Pavilion had a small selection of soul skills related to attack and defense, and I purchased them all as soon as I had the contribution points needed to do so. The sect had marked them as anywhere from Rank 1 to Rank 6, but that categorization seemed false. Even though my library couldn’t store Rank 6 techniques, it had no problem storing the sect’s ’Rank 6’ soul techniques. Even my ‘touch reading’ ability worked on them.

After studying them, it didn’t take me long to understand why these techniques wouldn’t have been made available lower down the mountain. They were incredibly dangerous. Soul-against-soul combat was one thing, but some of these techniques would allow a cultivator to use their soul to defend against regular qi attacks. If they misjudged the strength of their soul and the defense failed, their soul could be completely annihilated.

If one\'s soul was overpowering, these techniques would provide a way to utilize that strength, but even then, sending one’s soul into direct combat was a risky proposition. It wasn’t something that I would be willing to do unless I had no other choice.

More important than these combat techniques, though, was mastering the soul visualization technique I had purchased from the System, the Garden of a Hundred Flowers. While its premise was simple, its execution was far more difficult.

This technique was not a simple mental trick to let me think about my soul in more concrete terms. It gave me a way to interact with my soul in a nearly physical way while mentally projecting this interaction in the form of tending a garden.

To use the technique, I had to create a thin qi flow, pass it through an acupoint, send it into my soul, and then pull it out through another acupoint and back into my energy body. Then, I had to pass that same flow of qi into my soul through another acupoint and then pull it back out through yet another one. I had to knit together all my acupoints with a single flowing strand of qi.

Complicating things, I couldn’t go in and out of acupoints at random or the technique wouldn’t function properly. Making this even worse, the technique didn’t give specifics on what order to do the acupoints in since it would be different depending on the cultivation technique one was using. The manual only gave instructions on how I could figure out this order for myself.

Mastering this technique and finding the proper qi flow would take time, but I had completed the early steps of the process. I reached the point where I was able to visualize the inner core of my soul as a small walled-in garden. The flowers were a mess, and dozens of small white stones were scattered haphazardly around on the ground.

Seeing my soul in such a state of disarray, I had an instinctive desire to clean it up, but I held back. I needed to master this visualization technique before doing anything else, and even then, directly meddling with my soul seemed like it might be a bad idea.

Because of the difficulties involved in learning this technique, I hadn’t made any actual progress on learning to create a Qi Gathering Formation in my soul. That was fine. I didn’t need to rush it. I would improve first and only worry about carving my soul up once I was truly ready.

With less than a year to go before my deadline and not having been able to create the formation to automatically expand my storage space, I needed to manually expand it as much as possible to provide plenty of room for LuLu to hitch a ride with me. I also needed room for the ‘experiments’ that Yan had hinted at.

As a Martial Emperor, swapping out the seed of the Cold Mountain Fire for the seed of the Expanding Realms Fire went smoothly, and with the proper seed in place, I got to work.

Being a Peak Emperor with Rank 6 pills while sitting inside a Rank 6 formation massively increased the rate at which I was able to expand my storage space. Cultivating near the Summit of Dragon Peak helped even more.

While Dragon Peak didn’t have the level of earth qi that Shen’s cave had, I didn’t need pure earth qi for this. I just needed as much energy as possible, and Heaven City had the densest energy I had ever experienced. The waterfall of energy pouring down on the Summit made me wish I could cultivate there instead, but that wasn’t an option. Not yet at least.

My space was expanding rapidly, but it still wasn’t fast enough for my liking. I wanted it to be as large as possible, and I only had one more idea for how to make that happen. I needed to improve my space affinity.

Permanently enhancing that affinity was beyond my means, but I could spend some credits to boost it temporarily. In the past, such a huge outlay of credits for a somewhat meaningless boost would have made me blanch, but I was about to get a large windfall. It was better to use my current resources productively than allow them to sit around until they became meaningless.

After popping my spatial fire seed back into my storage space to be safe, I made my purchase.

“System, temporarily improve my space affinity to high seven-star.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 850 million credits. 49,200,000 credits remaining.

I felt the world around me distort slightly before it snapped back into place. Once I blinked away that sensation, I set about expanding my storage space.

Originally, I had only planned to spend a month on this task, but I had a bit of extra time on my hands, and I wanted to make good use of the boosted affinity. So, with nothing else pressing for my attention, I spent an entire three months expanding my storage space.

When I was done, it was a sphere with a radius of roughly 4.5 meters. While the radius had only slightly more than doubled, the volume of the space had increased by more than ten times, reaching nearly 400 cubic meters.

It was finally reaching a point where I could consider creating a small garden inside. There were still a lot of roadblocks preventing me from making that a reality, but space would soon no longer be one of them.

With my space expanded, I next had to spend time cleaning it out and restocking it.

I topped up the gold and spirit stones inside, but doing so didn’t take up hardly any room. I next added every pill and formation plate I might need from Ranks 1 to 5. With the help of Emperor Shen, I also added a few Rank 6 defensive formation plates, but I didn’t add any Rank 6 pills. I had no way of crafting ones that would be worth keeping.

Just in case anything went wrong, I stored Rank 6 armor and weapons for me and all my classmates. LiTing had made a metallic blue robe for JiaQi and a metallic black one for Yan. While the refining work on them was superior to the ones YuLong and I had, I didn’t have time to embroider formations into them, so they were a bit weaker overall. For YuLong, LiTing, and myself, I just stored the robes we had used during the trip to Heaven City.

What really surprised me was when everyone, including Shen, Jin, and Cai XiaoYu, presented me with a Profound-Rank fire seed. Even Jin ZiHan had bought one in Earth City and had it delivered to me.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The sect limited the purchase of fire seeds to one per person, and officially, the seeds remained the property of the sect. If someone departed for the Central Continent or retired from the sect to join a Sovereign clan, they would have to return any seeds they had purchased. So, giving these seeds to me like this violated the sect’s rules, but soon, that wouldn’t be any concern of ours.

After purchasing a final seed myself, I had a complete array of single-element Profound-Rank fire seeds for each of the five basic elements, all four secondary elements, and space. I was spoiled for choice on which one to place in my soul for use in my next life.

I considered using Emperor Li’s Earth-Rank seed but desisted. It wasn’t something that I could allow anyone to know about, and I wanted a seed that I would be able to use freely.

After considering my potential plans, I stored them all away except for the wind-based seed. That was the one I placed in my soul.

Finally, I sorted through the odds and ends that were lying around my storage space and cleaned out everything I no longer needed.

At some point, I had stored a large number of items for formation and alchemy practice inside, so I cleared them out, only leaving behind the box filled with various bags of rare or important herb seeds I’d obtained over the years. Kept in a jade box, those seeds hadn’t yet sprouted, and I could only hope they were still viable.

During this cleaning process, I came across something strange. While I had stored several blank stones for formations in the space, I didn’t expect to find a large chunk of granite. Granite was only used in Rank 1 formations, so it wasn’t something I would have usually kept around. Stranger was that the stone was a perfectly spherical ball the size of my head, not the normal flat square of a formation plate. It also had an unusually regular distribution of mica, feldspar, and quartz within it.

I had no idea where the stone had come from, and I didn’t need it, so I wanted to throw it away, but the mystery of how it had appeared in my storage space made me hesitate. I wasn’t sure if I should just throw away a mystery stone… After a thorough check in energy vision, I couldn’t detect even a trace of energy within it. It was a perfectly normal piece of granite with only its shape and regular composition making it at all unusual.

There wasn’t much reason to keep the stone, but I had more than enough extra space, and it appeared in my storage space somehow. I could at least hang onto it until I figured out where it came from.

With everything taken care of and my deadline right around the corner, Jin paid me a visit to deliver several boxes marked with everyone’s names.

“The ones for Shen, myself, and little ZiHan are already filled. For the others, you’ll need to take care of it yourself.”

I bowed slightly in thanks.

“How do they work?”

She picked one up and showed it to me.

“Have them insert their qi here. This will draw out their memories. Normally, you would want to focus on what’s important and only store critical information, but they’re all still young enough that these orbs should be able to hold everything. Just remember that this will only work once. After that, the orb will solidify, and the memories will be locked in place. There’s no changing them after that. If you want to add something, you’ll need to start again with an entirely new orb.”

She pointed to a different spot. “When they want to extract the memories, they need to insert their qi here. This will draw the memories out of the orb and store them in their soul. Soul memories aren’t as good as those in your head, but they’re better than nothing. They’ll be able to remember everything they did and why they did it.”

She placed the orb in the box, closed the lid, and looked at me seriously. “These orbs do have an important… quirk. You cannot store memories extracted from a memory orb into a new orb. Normally, this isn’t usually considered a problem, but for us, it’s something we need to keep in mind. If I want to retain three lives worth of memories, you’ll have to carry around three different orbs for me. When we have time, we can look at researching a way to fix this, but that’s for the future. For now, remember to keep all of the orbs safe, not just the ones from the most recent cycle.”

She hesitated a bit before continuing. “When you go back, your friends are only going to be children. All the work they’ve done to improve their souls will have vanished. After you give them their memories, they’ll remember what they did, and they’ll remember why they did it, but that reasoning might not make any sense to them without the same soul growth they’ve experienced in this life.”

“I understand. Thank you.”

After Jin left, I went to visit each of my friends.

After taking LiTing’s memories, she gave me a deep bow.

“Thank you, Teacher. I’ll do my best to learn more in the future so that I can be of greater assistance.”

This statement worried me slightly, but I accepted her bow and returned it.

After YuLong gave me his memories, he set his jaw and looked me in the eye.

“I know you plan to bring us all back in the next cycle and rush through the Academy. I… I’m not going to join you. I want to spend time with my family. Can you give me my memories before I go to the Academy? That way, I can live a life without being dragged into this mess and find ways to help my brothers and sisters. If it’s possible, just come grab my memories at the end of it all.”

I thought through the feasibility of doing this and eventually nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do. There are potential complications, but I’ll do my best.”

He placed a hand on my shoulder and looked me deep in the eye.

“Thank you.”

JiaQi’s memory transfer went smoothly, and when it was done, I was faced with the dangerous task of trying to take LuLu back in time with me.

To prepare, I had filled large rubber bladders with air, transferred them into my storage space, and then opened them. I could only hope that this would give LuLu something to breathe while she was trapped inside, but I couldn’t be certain.

I looked at the deer.

“Let’s start with a short test. I’ll put you inside for ten seconds and then bring you right out, okay?”

After the deer lowered her head in acknowledgment, I placed a hand on her body and willed her to enter my storage space.

Looking inside, I saw her appear. She was initially startled, but she quickly calmed down. After ten seconds, I pulled her out.

LuLu scratched at the ground, and JiaQi translated for her.

“She says it’s uncomfortable, but she can withstand it if it doesn’t last too long.”

“Alright, I’ll do my best to not make you stay in there any longer than necessary.”

I looked from JiaQi and back to LuLu a couple of times, making a decision.

“There’s another problem we need to discuss… It’s…” I took a deep breath to muster my resolve and consider my words. “It’s about… ‘time.’ I can take LuLu back, and she can spend your next life with you, but…”

“Time will still pass. She will grow old. I know.” JiaQi smiled at me. “I’m not worried about that. I just want to give her a happy, long, natural life.”

I shook my head. “Yes, but… no. There are more complications. I don’t know how long I will be around in the next cycle, and I don’t know what will happen after that. Bringing LuLu back with me every time will be difficult, and I don’t know that either of you would be happy with that.”

How much should I say?

I looked at LuLu. “If everything works the way I think it will, I can lock you into the timeline. I should be able to take you back to the beginning and lock you in with the rest of us. Every time the cycle restarts, you will return as you are now. You can learn and grow through countless cycles just like the rest of us. But there’s a problem with this… I won’t always be able to give JiaQi her memories back. In those cycles, you will need to figure out what you want to do on your own. You can explore the world by yourself, or you can try to follow JiaQi even though she won’t remember you.”

I gave the deer a steady look. “Is this what you want?”

LuLu didn’t even consider the question before dipping her head. I wasn’t great at reading her emotions, but she seemed overjoyed.

With that settled, I gathered the memories from a crying JiaQi and departed.

When I visited Yan, three other people were in his room. I had expected Cai XiaoYu, but I didn’t expect the two people who were tied up and lying on the floor unconscious.

I raised an eyebrow at this.

“Two men who were trying to have their way with a woman who wasn’t interested in their advances. You weren’t sure what would happen if you took someone back with you, right? Well, when these two decided that raping a young lady was a good idea, they volunteered to help you find out.”

He kicked the man on the left. “This one is only twenty years old, a low-level Disciple.”

He kicked the other man. “This is his master. He’s over a hundred.”

Yan looked at me, and the disgust that had been in his eyes faded slightly.

“This will tell you if you can take people back with you, and it’ll tell you if there are any differences between people born before or after the date you return to.”

I looked at the men on the ground. I didn’t like the idea of human experiments, but I didn’t have much pity for these two.

After taking Yan’s and Cai XiaoYu’s memories, I hauled the two pieces of trash away, but I didn’t place them in my storage space immediately since I didn’t want them wasting LuLu’s air.

With all my tasks completed, there was only one thing left to do. I needed to die.

I had considered a few ways for how I might go about that this time, but looking up the mountain, I made my decision. I would attempt to reach the Summit of Dragon Peak.

There were four paths to the Summit. One was the Path of the Leader which I could not walk. One was the Path of the Master which would require two hundred years of service to be allowed to walk. Neither of these paths was an option.

I could walk the Path of the Crafter, but that was risky since I might complete it successfully. Sure, my Rank 6 skills were low enough that I shouldn’t have any honest way of completing the path successfully, but that didn’t mean the powers that be wouldn’t rig things to push me through anyway. If they wanted access to Emperor Li’s fire seed, they might go easy on me to get me out of the sect and into their clutches.

So instead, I chose to walk the Path of the True Chosen. There was, of course, still the risk that this path would be rigged in my favor, but it seemed less likely. Ning ChenKun had said this path was suicide. I wanted to find out why and see if I could use that information in the future.

After saying all my goodbyes, I left Heaven City and began climbing the mountain.

I kept my best armor in my storage space so that I wouldn’t lose it, but LiTing had made me an extra Rank 6 robe to use during this climb. This robe was focused on pure defense. Nothing save a top-of-the-line Rank 6 weapon would be able to do anything to me while I was wearing it.

I climbed the mountain with confidence, and only a few hundred meters into my trek I arrived at four portals to darkness.

Without hesitating, I stepped inside the one labeled ‘True Chosen.’

I appeared less than a kilometer away from the Summit’s temple. A straight, unobstructed path led directly to its front gate. The area around me was barren gray rock, but that was to be expected this high up on the mountain. Overall, the place looked serene and peaceful.

I was confused by the situation, but I didn’t give it much thought. I just started walking forward.

When I did, a large angry dog with vicious teeth appeared out of a fissure in the surrounding rocks and rushed at me. It didn’t look too powerful. It was only a Rank 1 or 2 demon beast.

Not wanting to kill the poor creature, but not willing to let it harass me, I reached for my qi to brush the beast aside.

My qi didn’t respond. Frantically, I tried everything I could think of. Spirit fire, fire seed, qi, will-locks, direct affinity manipulation of the environment. None of it worked.

After only a few seconds, the beast arrived in front of me. I tried to fight back, but my movements felt sluggish. My normally qi-empowered muscles didn’t respond like I expected.

When the low-level beast broke through my defenses and clamped its teeth down on my arm, my fancy refined robe seemed like little more than tissue paper. The dog’s teeth pierced through it with zero effort.

I was completely defenseless before the creature.

Not wanting to be toyed with by a mad animal, I reached for a poison pill in my storage space to end my life quickly.

Nothing happened. The pill didn’t appear, and the demon beast continued its assault.

I could only imagine the watchers in the Summit’s temple laughing at my situation.

When the beast attacked me once more, I twisted my body to turn a crippling blow into a deadly one.

The beast bit into my neck.

You have died. Calculating…

You died as a Martial Emperor Peak — 1 trillion credits awarded.

Total Credits: 1,000,049,200,000

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Affinities

Peak Four-Star – Earth

Mid Five-Star – Wood, Fire, Water, Metal

Peak Seven-Star – Wind, Lightning, Light, Dark, Karmic Energy

Peak Eight-Star – Space

Resistances

Mental Effects (Cultivation Techniques) – 25,000,000 credits

Mental Library

Capacity – Rank 5

Journal (with Mental Input) – Rank 3

Perfect Transcription – Rank 5

Touch Reading – Rank 4

Comprehension Boosts

Cultivation:

Cultivation Techniques – 1 billion credits

Qi Control – 100 million credits

Teaching – 100 million credits

Professions:

Alchemy – 1 billion credits

Formations – 1 billion credits

Herbalism – 20,000 credits

Martial – 1 billion credits

Social:

Reading Emotions (True) – 25,000,000 credits

Skills

Enhanced Soul Growth – 20,000 credits

Pill Appraisal – Rank 3 (Comprehensive)

Formation Appraisal – Rank 3 (Comprehensive, Detailed)

Technique Appraisal – Rank 3 (Earth)

Language (Western Han)