Chapter 51: Life 58, Age 60, Martial Grandmaster 5
Over the years, I slowly improved.
My alchemy skills saw the greatest improvements. While I couldn’t guarantee High-Purity every time, I no longer risked pills collapsing, and my products were always good enough in quality that Jiao deemed them ‘profitable.’
Part of the reason I wasn’t able to make higher-quality pills was simply the ingredients. Jiao openly admitted that I was given all the dregs that no one else wanted to work with. The best or easiest ones were given to other disciples. I was happy with this arrangement, though. I didn’t need easy profit-making opportunities. I needed challenging practice.
As for my cultivation, that had become more challenging. My ascension to Martial Grandmaster 2 had been extremely smooth, so I had hoped that was a good sign for the future, but each additional compression became more difficult.
The maximum amount of qi I could hold before I began compressions was partly to blame. When filled, my dantian showed signs of buckling quite early. From what I was told, this was mainly due to errors in my weaves, especially at the seams. Small errors created weak points that made the structure more prone to breaking than it should have been, which meant I could store less qi before a compression. Having less qi meant I needed to force it into a smaller ball before the qi reached the proper density to transform and allow my advancement to click into place, and trying to compress at such a low volume was more difficult.
After each compression, I needed to do small repairs to my dantian where it had become damaged from the pressure. Under normal circumstances, these repairs weren’t a problem, but during the next advancement, when my dantian was under the most pressure, they became more weak points that would cause more damage. All of this meant that I was becoming less optimistic about my chances of ascending to Martial Grandmaster Peak this life.
That was fine, though. Peak Grandmaster was a goal, but it wasn’t essential. My current progress was already enough that if I died, I would be in a far, far better position my next time around. So, I shifted my main focus to other areas.
“Disciple Su,” said Jiao as she entered my workshop, “how have you been recently?”
“Elder Jiao,” I said with a slight bow, “very well, thank you.”