The Undying Immortal System

The following lectures focused on various methods for altering the energy levels within a field and determining the correct balance for any given herb. The elder covered a few qi techniques that were useful for making small adjustments directly, but her primary focus was on how to make physical changes to a field to make large, long-term changes.

For wu, this mainly consisted of impregnating a field with energy from demonic beasts. The most common way to do this was by coating the field in a thin layer of beast manure, but a beast’s blood and viscera could also be used. Of course, even then, the energies in the manure had to have the proper balance of elements. If it all came from a wood-aligned beast, then wood wu would be too prevalent in the manure, and it would be difficult to grow high-quality herbs. So, an herbalist needed to source ‘energy’ from a variety of different beasts.

Balancing the qi levels of the field was far more straightforward and could be handled by common, everyday formations. The only somewhat difficult part of this was balancing the elements properly and maintaining them in the correct proportions. Most formation specialists wouldn’t have too much experience with this kind of work, so herbalists needed to seek out specialists who understood the complexities involved when purchasing formations.

In theory, this was all that was needed to grow the best herbs possible. Layer the ground with manure; use a formation to fill the environment with qi. However, there was one huge stumbling block: it was incredibly difficult to sense environmental energies with the precision necessary for making the minute adjustments that growing a ‘perfect’ herb would require.

The sect had techniques that could help an herbalist analyze the level of the various energies involved, but they were difficult to use well and were prone to misinterpretation. A better option was to use a specially designed formation plate capable of giving accurate, real-time information, but those were expensive and were sometimes of questionable quality.

To ensure our tools were of the highest quality, I wanted to craft our monitoring devices myself. However, after studying the problem, I found that while producing a formation capable of monitoring an area’s qi levels wasn’t too difficult, doing the same for wu levels was far more challenging. To make my own monitoring device, I would need to backwards engineer several inscriptions that were entirely new to me and then work on ways to improve them.

Since there were other projects that I had my eye on, developing enhanced monitoring equipment would need to wait for the future. For the time being, SuYin and I would need to rely on off-the-shelf devices instead.

After the series of introductory lectures was complete, SuYin turned her focus to the garden next to her house. This place wasn’t suitable for growing a lot of herbs at once, but it was perfect for performing small-scale experiments.

SuYin’s focus was on mastering the sect’s standard practices. While I considered joining her in this pursuit, my mind had already started wandering in new and unique directions. What I had learned of ‘wu’ filled in several of the gaps in my understanding of how pills and herbs worked, and part of me wanted to rush to see how the concept of ‘wu’ could be applied to alchemy. However, after stepping back and looking at the situation objectively, I decided to first investigate ways of helping SuYin with herbalism.

There was little I could do to directly assist her with growing herbs since her and Bao’s skills were already far above mine, but what she needed wasn’t the help of an herbalist. It was the help of a formation specialist. So, I focused my attention on designing formations capable of infusing the air and soil of her garden with precise quantities of the various energies necessary for growing high-quality herbs.

One of the formations that I had learned long ago, one that was a staple of any formation specialist's repertoire, was the standard Plant Growth Formation. When I first learned it, I had no real understanding of how it worked. I could watch the energy flows it created, but I didn’t have the theoretical framework to understand what it was actually doing to improve the growth of plants. Now, however, I had a pretty good idea.

The standard Plant Growth Formation didn’t use any energy filters, neither for qi nor for wu. Instead, it gathered all the energy from the surrounding environment and cycled it through a field in a complex pattern. It weaved the energy into and out of the ground several times before looping back and starting the cycle again.

As I had never seen or heard of a filter for ‘wu’ or demonic energy before, I had to assume that it did not exist, or at the very least, that it was so uncommon it might as well not exist. Therefore, the specialists who had designed the Plant Growth Formation had to find other ways of infusing the soil with wu. Thus, the purpose of this complex weave of energy was to deposit wu into the ground and qi into the air, bypassing the need for discrete filters.

I could appreciate the work of my predecessors, but this formation wasn’t nearly good enough. It amplified the amount of qi and wu available, but it did nothing to adjust their proportions. It could help plants grow faster, but it couldn’t help them grow better.

This formation needed to be completely redesigned, but making something better without wu filters would be challenging. As a rule, I didn’t like the idea of buying crafting knowledge from the System, but I felt compelled to do so in this case.

“System, I would like to purchase formation schematics for ‘wu filters.’ I want filters for each of the basic and secondary elements. How much would that cost?”

Calculating… Cost 1 shard.

I narrowed my eyes at this.

“How much for the schematics of just a wood wu filter?

Cost 1 shard.

This told me two key pieces of information. First, no one in this world possessed the knowledge I was seeking. Basic filter diagrams should not be considered ‘immortal knowledge,’ so the only reason they would cost a ‘shard’ would be because the knowledge didn’t exist in this world. Second, the fact that the System gave me a price in shards without asking for any credits first suggested that knowing this information wouldn’t do me any good.

Whether ’wu filters’ were immortal knowledge or not, whether anyone in the world knew about them or not, in either case, I arrived back in the same place. I had to design my new herb-growing formation without them.

After a day of research on the different formation schematics tucked away in my mental library, I was able to come up with two viable paths forward.

The first one was an incredibly complex formation consisting of countless subcomponents. My idea was to use my knowledge of fire qi filters and fire essence filters to create a more generic ‘fire energy filter.’ I could then use combinations of generic energy filters for each of the elements to adjust a field’s elemental energy to the correct proportions. After that, it would be a simple matter of using standard qi filters to raise the level of qi in the environment until the qi and wu reach a proper balance.

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However, aside from needing to design an entirely new form of energy filter, this design would also require a significant amount of work to ensure that the energy levels within a field remained constant even as the levels in the environment surrounding it shifted. I was somewhat confident that this could be done, but making this plan a reality would take years of research and development.

The other idea I came up with was much simpler. Instead of relying on standard formations and filters, I could use spirit fires. As I had learned previously, certain fires were capable of transforming energy from one state into another. A carefully designed array of spirit fires should be capable of regulating a field’s qi and wu without the need for novel filter designs. ř

While this seemed possible, there were several details that needed to be addressed. The most important of these, though, was the question of whether spirit fires retained the conversion properties of their fire seed. If the only way of creating this form of conversion array was by utilizing fire seeds, then it wasn’t something that I could just leave lying around.

As this second idea seemed like the best short-term solution, this was where I directed my research. Even though this formation was simple in concept, it would still take time to design properly.

Over the following months, while SuYin worked on mastering her herbalism skills, I dove headfirst into my study of formations.

As it turned out, yes, spirit fires retained the conversion properties of their seeds, but their efficiency left something to be desired. Where the seed of the Profound-Rank Blazing Inferno Fire converted any and all energy that passed through it into fire qi, its spirit fire was only able to convert about 70% of this energy, and the amount of energy that could be converted at any one time was much lower. This led to me needing to cycle the energy through the spirit fire several times to purify it as much as possible.

In fact, as I later found out, the ability to use spirit fires to produce specific types of qi and wu was not unknown in the sect. Aside from using the methods discussed in the opening lectures, herbalists would also employ a variety of spirit fires to adjust the energies of their field when necessary. Since each person could only hold a single fire in their body at any given time, and since randomly waving a spirit fire around a bunch of medicinal herbs was a terrible idea, the benefit of using this method instead of more traditional techniques was somewhat limited, but it did provide an additional way for regular herbalists to adjust their fields when necessary.

So, the primary advantage of my planned formation was not that it did anything a normal herbalist couldn’t already do. Instead, it was that it would allow an herbalist to set and maintain energy levels at precise proportions throughout an herb’s growing cycle without the need for direct intervention. Also, by making the formation adjustable and allowing the levels of the different energies to be easily changed, an herbalist would be able to quickly prime a field for new herbs after each harvest.

To do this, aside from needing to design several key formation components from scratch, I also had to get my hands on spirit fires capable of converting energy and matter into the necessary forms of qi and wu. Since I only needed fires, not seeds, this was a bit easier than it could have been, but it still took time.

The first place I went in search of fires was Green Leaf City. As the capital of a kingdom, and as the primary location where young men and women trained their skills in the hopes of earning a place in the Verdant Forest Sect, it had several stores that catered specifically to cultivators, including a shop that sold spirit fires. Unfortunately, the shop’s level was too low, and I was only able to pick up a few Yellow-Rank fires.

The second place I went to was South Gate City. As the gateway to the Nine Rivers Sect, the spirit fire store there was of a much higher quality than the one in Green Leaf City. They sold a wide range of Profound-Rank fires, and they had copies of almost any Yellow-Rank fire I could want.

However, while these two cities were able to provide me with a range of fires for converting energy into qi, getting a fire for every element of wu was a bit more difficult. They were simply too rare.

This was where the Blue Wind Pavilion came into play. By putting in a request through the Pavilion, I could essentially put out a continent-wide bounty on the spirit fires I still needed. Of course, I could have simply gone this route from the very beginning, but visiting these other shops had allowed me to get a better sense of what fires were typically available on this continent and which ones I would need to be more careful about showing off in the future.

With the Pavilion’s assistance, I was able to collect a full suite of Yellow-Rank fires, but even they were unable to procure some of the rarer Profound-Rank ones. It didn’t help that, aside from qi and demonic energy, I was also trying to buy fires that produced medicinal energy. These medicinal fires were even rarer than the demonic ones.

Once I felt that I had hit a wall and that I wouldn’t be able to get anything else, I considered purchasing the remaining spirit fires from the System, but after a bit of thought, I decided to hold off. I already had a full array of Yellow-Rank fires, so it would be better to see if my idea was even feasible before spending precious credits on a dead end.

As I worked on creating my new formation, time flew by.

SuYin was able to master the sect’s standard method of growing herbs without much difficulty, and even though she still struggled with keeping the energy levels balanced throughout an herb’s entire lifecycle, her performance was enough to secure her spot in the inner sect.

Bao was still stuck in the outer sect, so I hadn’t heard too much from him during these months, but on the rare occasions when I saw him, it was clear that the sect’s knowledge was helping him finally understand the more esoteric information his blessing had been telling him. He still had a long way to go to memorize all the knowledge and master all the techniques that were expected of an inner sect disciple, but he was making solid progress.

As for myself, near the end of the year, I was able to complete a prototype formation for maintaining and adjusting the energy levels of an herb field. This protype could only affect an area the size of SuYin’s garden, and it could only provide enough energy to grow a crop of Rank 2 herbs, but it was a start. Once I better understood how it behaved and interacted with herbs, I would be able to refine it further.

This formation used the inscriptions from a standard Rank 3 Qi Gathering Formation to pull energy from the surrounding environment. Then, it split this energy in 27 different directions, one for each element of qi, wu, and medicinal energy. The qi the fires produced was directed into the air, and the wu was directed into the ground. Since I wasn’t certain what to do with the medicinal energy, or if it was even important, I made the formation adjustable so that it could be sent into the air or ground as desired.

The percentage of incoming energy that was sent to each spirit fire was fully configurable, so the operator could, for instance, set the fire qi flame to consume 50% of the energy input with only 2% going to each of the other flames. Unfortunately, this prototype wasn’t able to detect the real-time status of a field’s energy levels, so a skilled herbalist would still need to control the formation and constantly adjust its inputs if they wanted to maintain energy levels at specific levels.

Overall, the qi and medical energy sections of this formation weren’t too bad, but the wu part was a bit of a kludge. I couldn’t find any spirit fires capable of directly converting ambient energy into demonic energy. They could only convert matter into demonic energy. So, I had to first use something like the Cold Mountain Fire to convert energy into matter and then use another flame to convert that matter into demonic energy. With a fire seed converting 100% of the matter into demonic energy, this wouldn’t have been so bad, but with the low efficiency of the spirit fires, converting matter to demonic energy got messy rather quickly.

At first, I tried converting energy into a gas and then sending that gas to be converted into demonic energy, but this was a bit tricky. Not only was controlling a gas within a formation a bit difficult and energy-intensive, but its low density also affected the conversion process.

In the end, I settled on using the Flowing Metal Fire to convert energy into mercury. Then, I converted the mercury into demonic energy. This worked surprisingly well, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of large amounts of mercury being so near to a garden. If this formation proved to be successful, I would need to look for a fire capable of creating a less toxic liquid.

My prototype formation included a total of 36 spirit flames, 27 elemental flames and 9 copies of the Flowing Metal Fire. It was inscribed into a block of marble 5 meters long and 3 meters high. It was a massive beast of a thing, and I could only hope that it would prove to be worth all the effort that I had put into crafting it.

As the year came to a close, I handed off the formation to SuYin, taught her how to use it, and left the sect to return to the Wastes.