Chapter 185: Life 70, Age 16, Martial Disciple 1

Words : 1743 Updated : Oct 15th, 2025

After appearing in an alley in South Gate City, I headed directly for the area of town with the Blue Wind Pavilion. When I found an inn that looked nice but not too fancy, I went inside and booked a room. Before anything else, I needed to get cleaned up and make myself presentable. After all, it wouldn’t do to enter the Pavilion in the ratty robes of a Su Clan orphan. Once inside my room, I sat down to decide on a proper wardrobe for this life. I had a general idea of everything I wanted to accomplish, but I still had a lot of research to do before I would even know if my plan was viable. It would be nice to match my robe with my future peak, but with so many unknowns, it was best not to worry so much about that. Should I just purchase the fanciest robe possible? Something that screamed Sovereign clan scion? Maybe. It would be interesting to see what the System would design for such a situation. As I was thinking through different possibilities, I felt a pang deep within my soul. A small part of me vehemently rejected my idea of planning out a new wardrobe like this. I had only purchased a new robe from the System twice. Both times were at the start of a new adventure. This wasn’t supposed to be a new adventure. I was only supposed to be completing my unfinished tasks. I wasn’t supposed to be starting anything new. My face turned grave, and I nodded silently in acknowledgment of this promise. Instead of purchasing something new, I changed into the formation specialist robe of my last life. They might not be a perfect match for where I was headed, but they looked fancy enough to not stick out too much. Dressed to impress, I headed out of the inn. When I entered the Blue Wind Pavilion, I was greeted by an all too familiar face. It was far, far younger than the one I had spent so much time with, but it was undeniably the same person. She looked exactly like the version of LiTing I remembered most. It was the face of the disguise I had given her. I may have stared at Meng LuYao a bit too intently. She blushed and looked like she wanted to run away, but she was well-trained enough not to do so. “Hello, sir. Welcome to the Blue Wind Pavilion. How may I help you today?” This snapped me out of my trance, and I gave her a polite smile. “Yes, sorry. I’m looking to purchase a manor on the outskirts of the city. Is this something the Pavilion can assist me with?” “Of course, sir. We can help you arrange any purchase you wish within the city or abroad.” She handed me off to a middle-aged man who quickly noted down details of what I was looking for. This was pretty straightforward. I wanted it to have at least a dozen rooms and be in an area with the densest qi possible. Because of the latter half of this request, I had to provide a down payment of several dozen spirit stones, but I handed them over without complaint. I even offered to pay double the asking price for any place suiting my needs if I could purchase it immediately. Money was no object. Simple as that, through the power of cold hard cash, I easily acquired a fitting home where my friends and I could prepare for the road ahead. Just before I left the Pavilion, I took out Yan’s note and handed it to an attendant. “I want this letter delivered to Zhuge Yan. He’s staying with Ning ChenKun in the Ning Clan’s South Gate City manor.” Task complete, I headed back to my inn room. The next day, I arrived at the Pavilion slightly before noon and accepted the deed to my new manor. Then, I went to a conference room to await my friend. Only a few minutes later, the door opened, and Yan walked inside. He gave me a suspicious look but quietly sat down opposite me. He didn’t speak. He was forcing me to be the one to initiate contact. “I have something you need to take a look at.” I pulled out his memory orb and rolled the jade ball across the table to him. He reached out to grab it, and the moment it was in his hand, I activated my Memory Implantation ability. While my idea seemed rather straightforward, I had already noticed a few quirks that could be a problem. I had time to work on this technique, but it wasn’t unlimited, and I couldn’t allow myself to get bogged down. So, before I began my work, I made a purchase to speed things along. “System, boost my comprehension of cultivation techniques to a total of 100 billion credits.” Purchase confirmed. Cost 99 billion credits. 640,049,168,410 credits remaining. Taking a deep breath, I reached into my storage space and pulled out two of the books Jin had given me, the Rank 1 technique for cultivating metal essence and the Rank 1 technique for cultivating lightning essence. If this was going to be my last life in the sect, at least for now, I wanted to take full advantage of it, and the best way to do that would be by draining it of as much essence as possible. Jin had already promised me access to the metal essence as part of our earlier deal, and I would repay my debt to the Master of the Lightning Peak by absorbing every drop of lightning essence I could. Shen hadn’t seemed too happy about me cultivating earth essence since I needed ten times as much as a normal disciple. How would the Lightning Master feel about me absorbing something ten times as precious? I would just need to rely on Shen, Jin, and the sect rules to prevent him from doing anything too reckless in response. However, before I could make that dream a reality, I first needed to create my new cultivation technique. In theory, my idea was simple. I wanted to use the Writ of True Earth as a base. At this point, I was most comfortable fighting with earth qi, and I didn’t want to spend time learning combat techniques that used other qi types. However, I would strip out all the earth essence filters from the technique and then add filters for lightning and metal essence. Making the process easier, all three techniques used the same set of 361 acupoints. While the exact filter types used at each point varied, they had roughly the same distribution of filter types. About a quarter of them were pure essence nodes, and about two-fifths were pure qi nodes. The rest were mixed nodes. However, which acupoints were qi and which were essence varied by technique. My first pass at making the combined technique was crude and direct. I laid out each node on a large sheet of paper and marked the ones that were used for qi gathering in the Writ of True Earth, either pure or mixed. After that, I marked the nodes that were used for essence gathering in the metal technique, and then I marked the essence gathering nodes of the lightning technique. Once that was done, I worked on creating new filter designs. I had the pure qi filters and the qi-plus-essence filters from the technique manuals, but I needed an essence-plus-essence filter and a qi-plus-two-essence filter. I also had to modify the qi-plus-essence filters to work with earth qi instead of lightning or metal qi. One complicating factor that I wasn’t yet sure how to address was that each technique contained two different designs for the qi-plus-essence filters. I didn’t even know what purpose these differences served. I could only push forward and hope that the reason for this became clear during testing. Using the designs from the existing manuals as a guide, it didn’t take me long to create a few prototype filters. I didn’t expect these first iterations to function properly, but I just needed them to be safe enough for a trial run. When I was confident they wouldn’t kill me, I was ready to begin experimenting with using them in an actual cultivation technique. However, that was when I felt a ping from the manor’s defensive formation. Someone had used a key to enter the manor. I exited seclusion to see who had entered and was happy to find that JiaQi and LiTing had arrived together. LiTing just gave me a complicated smile, but JiaQi ran forward and hugged me. “Thank you.” My return hug was only slightly awkward, but she didn’t care. “Where’s LuLu?” She snickered at that. “I didn’t think bringing a Rank 6 demon beast near the city would be a good idea. Besides, she’s been trapped in the sect for far too long. I told her to go out and explore the world for a few years. She needs to have some fun for a while, and at her level, there aren’t many things around that can hurt her.” I looked at LiTing who had just been staring at me strangely. “Anything wrong?” “I...” She breathed deeply. “The memories you gave me feel... strange. I... The girl from those memories... she... I don’t understand why she felt certain things.” I gave her my best comforting smile. “Those impulses were partly from your qi cultivation technique, but most of it was from your soul cultivation.” I looked back and forth between the two girls. “This was something I had to grapple with at first too. When you start a new life with your old memories, some of your actions won’t make much sense. This... world... imposes changes to our thoughts, but that gets undone at the start of a new life.” I struggled trying to explain things. “I would suggest you think of it like this. You have the memories of what happened, but in a way, that person wasn’t you. The memories are from a different possible you. Don’t try to recreate anything from that life. Just use what you learn from them to create something new.” LiTing bowed her head. “Thank you, Tea— Thank you, Fang.”

Chapter 185: Life 70, Age 16, Martial Disciple 1

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