Chapter 110: Changes
The appearance of a rank five was a major change, but it was too soon to draw any conclusions about the impending beast tide from it. Benton decided to wait a few days and observe if more of the higher-level beasts appeared before calling a council meeting to discuss.
He did, however, make it a point to scan to the extent of his spiritual senses a minimum of four times per hour.
Additionally, he instituted procedural changes. The twins combat lessons were moved to the village as he deemed the trek to the sect grounds to be too dangerous. In fact, all activity outside the village walls were halted with the exception of the wood harvesting.
He also delayed the induction of the next set of villagers until after the council meeting as the status of the beast tide might have a big impact on their decisions.
Over the course of those three days, no one advanced their spiritual cultivation, but several of the guards reached Small Success with their techniques, getting him four points. The big gain came from Body Cultivation, where he got twenty-four points from martial pavilion members hitting Bronze minor realm five and six and another three from the twins and Zou Tian each reaching minor realm one.
The small windfall gave him six points for his personal use, and he reviewed his priority list just to make sure of his thinking. His first thought was to buy the technique to allow him to start producing spirit coins, but he wasn’t sure. The coins would be a very limited use to Qi Gathering cultivators, so the only members likely to get any benefit from them were the twins, assuming they advanced before the tide.
The coins’ use as currency was also not crucially needed. The body of one rank five from his storage ring would pay for a lot of bows and arrows, not to mention all the other meat and claws and cores in there.
Of course, the coins would be of some use to him as well, allowing him to effectively bank his qi for when he needed it. He definitely wanted the technique prior to the beast tide, but he wasn’t sure if it was an immediate necessity.
Nothing else on his list truly called out to him as being urgent, however. Time manipulation was the most powerful, but it would only shine against really fast opponents. So far, the beasts he faced weren’t all that impressive in that regard, and even if they were specced for speed, he had his gravity area effect to counter them.
Advancing his minor realm in Golden Core would give him access to more qi, but spirit coins would likely be the better investment for the short term. Body Cultivation was out until he learned more about what would happen at Nascent Soul, which was so far away that it made purchasing knowledge of the realm seem like a poor investment at the moment.
Healing was a strong choice, but he’d need to invest a lot of points to really make it shine. He just wasn’t sure he was ready to start sinking those points in yet. Meditation made no sense without the ability to spend his qi for making spirit coins, and a shield against area effect attacks was suboptimal against beasts.
In the end, he decided that getting the spirit coin technique was the right call. He invested all six points to buy it at Large Success and immediately used it to create ten ten-thousand qi water coins, chosen pretty much at random from one of the five major elements. It cost him one hundred seventy-five thousand qi to do it, which he’d regenerate in about seven hours. Not bad.