The Sect Leader System

Benton needed to know what shape the old sect buildings were in before he considered how much to pay for them, and Fatty Ren simply didn’t know, having not been out to the site in years. Thus, Benton insisted on seeing the Righteous Rain Sect grounds before even mentioning a possible price. He and Fatty Ren did agree in principle that Benton could take whatever he could carry out.

So, Benton jogged toward the sect grounds. Not ran, jogged, at a nice, slow twenty-five miles per hour or so because he wanted time to think.

It would be easy enough for him to rob the Town Lord blind. His ring had a total volume equal to about the size of the interior of a football stadium and one of the larger ones at that. Many buildings could be contained inside the volume of a stadium, but considering how spatial rings actually worked, even more would fit.

When Benton thought about a storage space, he tended to envision something like a box in the shape of a square cube, say, twenty-seven cubic feet in volume, meaning it was three-feet wide by three-feet tall by three-feet deep. Logically, if he wanted to fill that box with widgets that were cubes one cubit foot in volume, he’d be able to fit nine widgets placed into the shape of a square three units wide by three units long on the bottom of the cube. Two identical squares could then be added on top of that layer, equaling twenty-seven widgets. Simple.

If he wanted to put, say, a stick in that storage space, the longest that would fit would have a length of three times the square root of three feet. Anything longer wouldn’t fit.

In actuality, spatial rings didn’t work like that at all. There was no box. Any empty or void space placed inside did not take up any volume.

Assuming the same twenty-seven cubic foot space, you could still fit exactly twenty-seven solid one-foot cubes in the space, but if the cubes were empty, the number you could fit inside would be higher, the actual amount dependent on the volume of the material that made up the cube.

So, if the material making up each of the one-foot cubes only took up half a cubic foot, he could actually fit fifty-four of them in the storage space even though, from looking at the two widget cubes, they appeared to take up the same volume.

That method meant he could easily place an eight-foot spear in his hypothetical twenty-seven cubic foot storage space because the spear’s length literally didn’t matter, only its volume.

It was kind of trippy to think about, but it gave him a lot, lot more space than he would have otherwise had. If he dropped a house inside, the living space inside didn’t count against his total.

All that to say that he could fit a lot of buildings inside his spatial ring, even with all the other crap that was starting to accumulate in there. Even if the sect grounds were as big as the Flowing Tiger Sect was in Su’s memories, Benton could still take a significant portion of the buildings. Which would be great for the sect he was founding but less great for any kind of future business relationship with Fatty Ren.

How scrupulous to be with the deal wasn’t something Benton could decide without more facts. He needed to weigh the needs of the present versus the long term. And he needed to see how reasonable Fatty Ren would be.