The Undying Immortal System

A day after we arrived, Ning ChenKun’s deathsworn and two of the students who had been traveling with him joined us in Earth City. The other two who had left Profound City with us had fallen on the Path of Soul. After adding in the one we lost on the Path of Mind, half of our students had failed in their attempt to ascend the mountain.

According to the survivors, this Path of Soul was far deadlier than the two I had walked previously. The way they told it, this path hadn’t been simply a matter of withstanding an ever-increasing amount of soul pressure. They had been assaulted by an endless series of soul attacks, and only the iron-hard will of the deathsworn was able to protect them. Without proper defensive soul techniques, the students had been helpless as they walked the path.

With the protections offered by my soul cultivation technique, I had lowered the priority of learning proper defensive techniques. After listening to their story, I bumped it back up to near the top of my to-do list.

LiTing and I set the three surviving students up with apartments in a small building near ChenKun’s headquarters, but I didn’t have any more time to spend nurturing them. Having arrived in Earth City, I could purchase additional King-level karmic energy, and that meant I needed to return my focus to advancing my cultivation base.

My time as the ‘Great Teacher’ had come to an end for this life. There was too much else I needed to do and too little time to do it.

I resumed the same six-month cycle I had used as a Martial Lord. Every six months, I ascended once, entered the Earth Peak Trial once, and spent the rest of my time earning points to pay for everything. As I was mainly focused on making a profit, my formation and alchemy skills didn’t improve overly much during this time, but my cultivation quickly advanced, and I reached the peak of the King realm. Through my efforts in the Trial, my earth affinity also broke through to peak four-star during this time.

All I needed was a Rank 6 cultivation technique and the karmic energy to use it. After that, I would be able to break through to Martial Emperor.

With Ning ChenKun’s backing, obtaining the necessary karmic energy was time-consuming, but it wasn’t difficult. I just had to earn a sufficient number of contribution points. Since ‘a sufficient number’ was nearly a thousand times as many points as I had needed for King-level energy, it would take time, but Yan and the others wouldn’t arrive in Earth City for several more years, so that was no real rush.

By selling sufficiently high-quality Rank 5 pills and formations, earning contribution points wasn’t a problem. However, during this time, my profession skills had stagnated. Because I was focused only on cultivation and combat skills, I resorted to making only the most consistently profitable items I could, so I hadn’t yet learned to craft the more difficult, higher-level Rank 5 items yet, and without them, I couldn’t make as many points as a Peak King should have been able to.