The Undying Immortal System

After leaving Bao to get settled in, I went outside to begin work on a new building. Bao was going to need to do a lot of work on soul cultivation, and for that to happen, I first needed to build a Soul Cultivation Library for him.

The plateau was nearly stuffed with buildings by this point. GuiMing and his team were already hard at work building down into the mountain, but they were only Martial Masters, and the mountain was made of Rank 3 blueschist stone. It would still be months before the first habitable areas would be opened up, and even then, I wasn’t sure how many people these limited areas would be able to house.

Luckily, there was still a bit of open space on the northwest corner of the plateau, between my home and the workshops.

To conserve as much space as possible, I built a long, narrow, four-story structure that wrapped around the edge of the plateau. Each floor consisted of only a single, large room, and each of these rooms was packed with bookcases. I wanted to add reading rooms to each floor where people could study in private, but with space at a premium, I decided to hold off. Bao would be the only one using this place for the next few years, so setting up a simple desk and reading area on each floor was sufficient for the moment.

Each floor of this library was dedicated to one of this world’s four primary philosophies: Universalism, Traditionalism, Legalism, and Daoism. While this library wasn’t nearly large enough to hold all of the books I had pilfered from the Yellow Orchid Academy and the Nine Rivers Sect over the years, it was able to hold a good number of them, and with the scribe ability I had recently purchased, I was able to quickly fill up the library’s shelves.

After a bit of internal debate, I also decided to include the various philosophical texts I had purchased from the System. If a knowledgeable outsider knew about these books, they might become suspicious or greedy, but I didn’t think that would be too likely. This would not only require a member of my clan to talk about the books they had read in incredible detail, but it would also require a listener who knew and cared enough about the topic to even notice that anything was amiss. Even then, protected by the shield of the Wastes and my ability to reincarnate, there was little risk in spreading this knowledge around.

Instead of being worried, I was just interested to see what might happen if focusing on these books led to my clan having subtly different outlooks than the rest of this world. With an expanded perspective on what was possible, they might be able to open entirely new avenues of advancement.

Once everything was set up, I manipulated the sect-protecting formation to block anyone from accessing the library other than Bao or myself. I wasn’t yet ready for any of the younger members of my clan to begin actively cultivating their souls.

At the Yellow Orchid Academy, students weren’t allowed to begin soul cultivation until after they turned 25. This was to allow them to develop their own sense of self before submerging themselves into the morass of different drives and impulses that could come from soul cultivation. While I didn’t know if 25 was the proper age for this or not, I understood the value of prudence here. If something went wrong during qi cultivation, it was easy to fix with an Energy Expulsion Pill. Fixing a problem caused by improper soul cultivation wasn’t so simple.