The Undying Immortal System

While living in the Verdant Fields Sect, time seemed to pass me by far more quickly than usual. I spent each morning tending to my field of flowers and each afternoon teaching Bao and SuYin to cultivate using the methods I had learned in the Yellow Orchid Academy.

I did occasionally have them practice fighting against each other using basic combat techniques, but our primary focus was on helping each other learn to grow better, more potent herbs. This mostly involved teaching ourselves through experimentation and the books in my mental library, but after harvesting our first crop, we also purchased a few simple herbalism lessons from low-level members of the sect.

My disciples seemed to enjoy the time spent in these lessons, but I left the first one feeling more than a little underwhelmed. I couldn’t be too hard on the kid who was trying to teach us, but as a Disciple from a bottom-feeder sect in the Wastes, he was missing a lot of basic information. I found that the limited collection of books in my mental library was a far better guide than the teachers available to me as a simple farmer.

However, while I focused my efforts on my books and my experiments, SuYin and Bao continued taking these lessons and shared what they learned from them.

As for my experiments, knowing that blue peonies contained wood-based medicinal energy, I set up several different sections in my field to try different formations to see how various combinations of energies affected the growth of plants. These experiments proved that the herbs needed some type of energy other than just qi to grow properly, but I didn’t have any filter designs specific to medicinal energy, demonic energy, or any more exotic energy forms, so the conclusions I could reach were limited.

It was easy to grow a peony that was considered to have an efficacy of 100%. More or less, I just needed to place a seed in the ground and wait for it to blossom. However, my goal was to go beyond this. Where any normal farmer could grow a peony with 100% efficacy, an herbalist was supposed to be able to push it to 120, 130, or even 140%. I didn’t know what the theoretical limits of an herb's boosted efficacy were, but the best peony I had ever seen had an efficacy of 137%.

Of course, none of the lessons we received from the Verdant Fields Sect addressed this topic. They were more concerned with consistently achieving 100% efficacy instead of pushing beyond it.

Should I have gone to find a real teacher who could have told me how to do this? Probably. Should I have just bought the information from the System and had it shoved into my head directly? Maybe. But that wasn’t the point. I was enjoying spending some downtime farming and experimenting. It had been a long time since I had allowed myself to just relax and become absorbed in learning a new craft without worrying about schemes and deadlines.

I was learning herbalism far slower than I otherwise could have, but I was doing so with a unique approach. Other than just having fun, I was hoping that whatever I learned by studying in this way would complement what I would eventually learn from more knowledgeable sources.