Chapter 281: Life 75, Age 61, Martial King Peak
Each year, the nervousness in my soul grew, but as time passed, it became little more than a constant droning in the back of my mind. Something was going to happen, but I didn’t know when, and there was nothing I could do about it, so I did my best to put the warning from my karmic energy affinity aside while I continued with my work.
Still, I couldn’t ignore this feeling entirely. I needed to be prepared, and that meant I had to make a few choices I otherwise wouldn’t have.
The first was the choice to ascend to Martial Emperor earlier than I had planned. I had wanted to spend a few decades as a Peak King to practice my professions without the natural advantages that came with being an Emperor, but with an invisible sword dangling over my head, I felt that it was better to push into Rank 6 as soon as possible.
With all the contribution points I had amassed from completing alchemy missions for the Fire Peak over the years, purchasing the karmic energy I needed was simple enough. So, after a quick visit to Dragon Peak, I entered seclusion and prepared for my advancement.
As the Rank 6 cultivation technique I had acquired from Emperor Shen in a past life was rather simple, I expected this advancement to be straightforward, but with all the changes I had made to the design of my core, it was far trickier than I had imagined.
When I had advanced to Lord, I had set aside the tried and tested cultivation techniques and instead created something new, a core with a lace-like lattice structure.
The creation of this core had been guided by my understanding of refining and my sense of how the karmic energy ‘wanted’ to be structured. When I had advanced to King, I infused this core with King-level karma and then built upon it, creating a secondary lattice surrounding the first.
As I was preparing for the ascent to Emperor, I was expecting that I would need to do something similar, but when I looked at my core and tried to work out how to best utilize the Emperor-level energy that I had just bought, I was at somewhat of a loss.
Unlike Lord- and King-level energy, Emperor-level energy seemed beyond my ken. This might have been because I only had a five-star affinity for karmic energy, or it might have been because my understanding of refining was too limited. Either way, the result was the same. I would have to find a path forward without fully understanding what I was doing.