Chapter 231: The Two Towers
Benton was pleased with the kids’ progress in obtaining the materials he needed for the qi sources, but of the six he wanted to make, he was only somewhat close with Fire. Once he traded five Orange Vigor Spirit Wood kernels for five Fire stones from the Poison Claw Sect elder, he’d have the mineral requirement taken care of, and he already owned a Fire-aspected core from the rank ten Cyclops he’d killed at the end of the beast tide. Combined with the metals his disciples brought back, all he needed was an appropriate plant material to create qi source for Fire.
Still, he had no idea where to find that plant material, and really, the qi sources were more of a long-term project, anyway. He’d keep his eye out for any materials—attending that auction in six weeks sounded like a no-brainer—but for the moment, his priority was to shore up the sect’s defenses.
Which was exactly what he was doing.
While the twins and Kang Lin were away, he’d been a busy, busy little sect leader. Every single stick and large stone in the piles near him had been inscribed with either channels or both channels and formations, and he’d dug two large holes and compacted the dirt underneath as densely as his strength and skills would allow. When he hadn’t been working on either of those activities, he’d made spirit coins. A lot of spirit coins.
Even with how fast he could inscribe with his superhuman reflexes and techniques at Mastery, there were just so, so many sticks and so, so many stones.
Heh. He’d should be able to break lots of bones.
Anyway, the only way he could finish those tasks and create the thousands of greater spirit coins his towers would need was to use time dilation.
The kids had been gone a little over two days. To him, close to twenty had passed. He’d even had to enclose the tree trunks with his Time Manipulation to finish off their curing after he’d completed his prep work.
Of course, a lot of that work hadn’t been the grind of repetitively inscribing the same channels on sticks or the same set of arrays on stone. No, quite a bit of it had been planning and executing his masterwork—the two tree trunks.
They were the core of his entire plan. He was going to armor them, of course, but he expected attacks from Nascent Soul cultivators. Withstanding that kind of force required multiple layers of defense.
The first layer was the natural toughness of a several-foot-thick trunk of Orange Vigor Spirit Wood enhanced by an alchemical process developed by Master Alchemists for just that purpose. Benton, with his peak Golden Core strength combined with his Gold Body Cultivation, could break the log, but it wouldn’t have been easy, especially since it maintained its latent flexibility.
On top of that brute toughness, Benton meticulously added arrays for defense. Since the trunks were to be encased tightly in stone, he couldn’t add a qi shield, but he could add separate arrays for increasing strength, toughness, and structural integrity as well as one that dispersed any attack that hit the wood to impact a wide area instead of a narrow point.