Chapter 99: Life 61, Age 37, Martial Lord 3
During my reign as city lord, I had set three main objectives for myself. The first was to reach Martial Lord Peak so that I would have access to as many credits as possible in the event of my death. The second was to master the skills of a Pill Lord to the best of my ability. The third was to find novel means of boosting a domain’s karmic energy production in ways the Brilliant Sun Empire would see as valuable.
All of these goals required intense study and concentration, and they resulted in me spending countless hours locked away in a cultivation chamber or a workshop.
Reaching Martial Lord 4 was not too difficult. I had excess karmic energy after ascending to Lord 3, and gaining enough for Lord 4 only took a few short months. My bottleneck was once again my qi levels. I couldn’t cultivate qi fast enough to keep up with my karmic energy gains.
It took me three more months of long hours cultivating to scrape together enough qi to advance. I ascended to Martial Lord 4, but I knew these delays due to lacking qi would only grow longer. I needed a solution. I needed Rank 4 Qi Gathering Pills.
My alchemy skills were starting to grow quickly, at a far faster pace than I originally anticipated. Early in the process of learning Rank 4 alchemy, I had difficulty maintaining will-locks, and they would often cause problems with my control of qi and spirit fire. After creating a foundation with the Soil Enrichment Pills, though, things started to flow more easily.
The book Emperor Li left me was a big part of this rapid progress. I didn’t have to worry about large difficulty spikes when learning a new recipe because he laid everything out in an extremely methodical fashion. This not only allowed me to advance quickly, but it also meant I wasn’t wasting precious herbs by trying to make pills far beyond my abilities.
The more my alchemy progressed, though, the more lopsided the deal with the Situ Clan felt.
The arrangement I had reached with the Situ Clan was that they would provide me with an ample supply of the herbs that I needed to raise my skills, and in return, I would give them 80% of the pills I made with those herbs.
Early on, this arrangement seemed beneficial to both of us. I was wasting a significant number of herbs in the learning process, so to me, having the Situ Clan absorb the upfront cost of herbs was worth the excessive compensation in pills they received.