The Undying Immortal System

There was a lot to fix in NanLu City, but before anything else, I had to enhance the city’s defenses. If I tried to improve my citizens’ quality of life first, hungry Lords from the surrounding lands would swoop down and destroy all my hard work.

My first impulse was to find a way to construct viable fortifications out of the area’s abundant sandstone deposits. However, after a week of experimentation, I was forced to accept that it just wasn’t going to work. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get sandstone to contain the energy of even a Rank 1 formation.

Overall, the composition of the minerals in sandstone was not too different from granite, but the way these minerals were structured and bonded together created significant differences in the effectiveness of the final composite stones. No matter how carefully a formation was constructed, sandstone crumbled to pieces when injected with any meaningful amount of qi. It was simply ill-suited as a construction material.

The remnants of crumbling sandstone made me think about how I had been constructing jades for memory orbs in my previous life. I could grind the stone down into a fine powder and then use the base minerals to build a perfect wall one layer at a time. A monocrystalline quartz or feldspar wall could potentially handle high levels of high-Rank energy, and it would provide an excellent base for a full defensive formation around the city.

However, constructing something like that would require me to reach at least Martial King first, and even then, it would be the work of decades. NanLu City wasn’t huge, at least not in terms of cities on the Nine Rivers Continent, but it still held more than 100,000 people and covered an area of nearly 100 square miles. That meant I needed to construct over 40 kilometers of wall. It would need far more stone than I could possibly build up through such a slow, methodical process.

Still, the concept was interesting, and it might be useful when I had the time and reason to make such a dream a reality. I made a note of the idea in my journal and then set it aside for the distant future.

After considering a few more options, I had to concede that there was no way I would be able to make a meaningful wall with the materials I had on hand. Once I accepted this conclusion, I had to start thinking in new directions.

Did I need a wall? When combined with formations, a wall was a valuable part of a layered defense, but unless it was made of special materials, it was nothing but a hindrance. At most, the current wall only served to control the flow of citizens in and out of the city. It did nothing to stop cultivators from attacking or sneaking in. In that case, why not just get rid of it?

If I relied only on energy shields from formations, my defenses might be weaker than normal, but I also might be able to strike a better balance between defense and economic growth.