The Undying Immortal System

With a steady supply of herbs arranged, I returned to the life of a recluse. Technically, as city lord, I did have official duties to attend to, but from what I could tell, everything seemed to function well without my input. I was sure my ministers were more than happy with me leaving them alone and not doing anything that would create more work.

As a kingdom of cultivators, Rulers delegating away all of the ruling so they could seclude themselves for years was the norm, so my absence didn’t cause any major problems. At least, it didn’t cause any that I was aware of.

I spent my days slowly working through the book left to me by Emperor Li. The sequence of pills it outlined for training one’s alchemy ability was robust, with many options at every stage of advancement. This was important because the Situ clan had problems producing large numbers of any given herb. Without time to spin up large-scale production on a specific herb type, they could only provide haphazard assortments of herbs, so I had to constantly reference the book’s information to know what pills to work on with whatever herbs they had on hand.

The rate at which my alchemy skills increased during this time might not have impressed anyone, but I was making progress. After a few months of work, I was able to start breaking even with the cost of herbs, and after nine or ten months, I was beginning to make a small amount of profit. Since that profit was from Rank 4 pills, a fraction of it was even in spirit stones.

The agreement with the Situ Herb Lord was that I would help him raise his herbalism skills. In practice, that turned out to mean buying whatever excess herbs he had that were on the list I had given him at somewhat exorbitant prices. At first, the cost of herbs was simply deferred, but after I began making pills of sufficient quality, I would be paying him with the majority of the pills made from his herbs.

In the slow process of advancing my alchemy, there was one important event that pushed me forward more than anything else. Eleven months after entering seclusion, my store of karmic energy reached the point where I could break through to the next stage.

For the past year, while my focus was on alchemy, I still found time to add small amounts of qi to my core every day. It took me half a year to reach the point where my core was saturated and I was at the peak of Martial Lord 1. I could have tried to make a breakthrough at that point, but using pure qi was a last resort.

With enough karmic energy on hand, I enclosed myself in my cultivation room and began the process of breaking through. I braided my qi and karmic energy together in the pattern from my cultivation technique and forced it into my core.

The combined energies shot through my core and slammed into the wall that blocked me from ascending. I formed the energy into battering rams and slammed them against that wall one after another.