I spent several hours in meditation, attempting to repair all of the flaws I could find in my cultivation. Now, with the better senses of a level three body but without the automatic reinforcement of my bodily systems by qi which tended to hide them, I was able to manually enhance those senses to easily find thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of minor flaws. I was able to categorize the vast majority of them, however, over 99% by my estimation, and construct seeds which repaired any weakness within those categories. While I still had over a dozen flaws to fix, they were now minor discomforts at worse, feeling like having a bruise that wasn’t yet healed or a tiny ant bite. At that level I could mostly ignore any issues.
Resolving to fix those few issues manually before advancing back to level three, I instead turned to finishing Ryuu. I read over the Dancing Dragon Technique once more, checking every level I could to make sure that I didn’t miss anything, and once I had found answers to my few remaining questions about the method, I began to grant him independent thought. This was a complicated process in which I copied the energy pattern of my mind, though not the detail, creating a miniature energy mind. At its current complexity, it could probably only properly mimic an ant or perhaps spider, but as I developed it and the mind it contained neared its limits it would start to refine itself into a better form, using my mind as a guide. With the miniature mind stabilized, I first installed it into the head of the flame dragon manifestation, so that it could adapt to the new body and start drawing on the energy within it. It took almost an hour of manual work to make it mesh fully with the new body, but eventually it fully stabilized and I was ready for the next step.
Next, I imparted all I could of Ryuu onto that mind, every memory and personality trait it should have. Another two hours were spent fixing the areas where the energy mind rejected the personality mind, but with enough concentration, attention to detail, and mental effort, the two eventually fully merged. Only one process was left, then. I nudged Ryuu slightly with telepathy and he started to stir. After a few minutes of repeated attempts to wake it up, I felt it fully do so, and it took its first conscious thought.
The growth period was remarkably fast. It only took three hours of interaction with it to reach a point where we could communicate, though its raw intelligence was on par with a mortal dog, not a human. I knew that in time it might gain human intelligence, if I constructed the initial mind well enough. The book said that a perfectly constructed mind would easily mesh with the body and personality, and could eventually become as intelligent as the master, but with all of the effort I had needed to take to complete the process, I doubted Ryuu would ever be more intelligent than a mortal chimpanzee, if that. He was likely near his limit already. As I had given him the personality of a loyal guard dog, however, having that level of intelligence shouldn’t be a problem. With an actual mortal dog the issues would be obedience and understanding of my desires, but I had a better mental connection to him than to Xiao and made him highly obedient when creating him, so that level of intelligence shouldn’t cause any problems.
After ‘petting’ him, by sending positive thoughts through our link, I got up to go outside. The sun would soon rise, and I wanted to get in as much practice as I could before needing to go back to work. As I was at a lower cultivation level now, it would be more difficult for me to protect the Ambassador, so I would need the help of both Xiao and Ryuu if we came under attack.
I quickly checked on the essence stones on the counter and found that all of them were almost completely exhausted of their qi, with only the slightly stronger Water and Earth stones having more than a tiny vapor of qi. I used Taking Pulse on the weakest one, the metal stone, and found a tiny shaving of metallic energy left behind, barely reacting to my prodding. I did, however, feel the technique start to weaken, and found that the stone was absorbing the neutral qi around my sense, and that the technique was naturally converting more of its qi into neutral qi to compensate. I withdrew my technique and fed it a bit more neutral qi, and the tiny shard started to recover. Once I was certain that it was fully stabilized I did the same with the Fire spark and Wood seed. The drop of Water and pebble of Earth were already stable, so I spaced the stones out so that they could recover without risking another attack. As I had hoped, they had dual cultivated with their neighbors, and all of them seemed a bit stronger from the battle, their qi a bit purer than before. This would translate into a higher quality spiritual root for anything powered by the stone. It would take dozens of attempts to break through to Heavenly grade, but they would reach there eventually.
I left my room for the courtyard and started to do the moves from the book. I used them on a training dummy this time, though I used as little qi as possible so that I didn’t damage the targets. The point of this exercise wasn’t to test my limits, but to train Ryuu. While I only knew the first four moves, all four of them had a matching move that Ryuu was supposed to execute when I did mine, so that the target received greater injury or would be unable to block both of us. I gave him the order for each move as I advanced through the sets, and after a few times for each move he started to get used to the coordinated attacks. While his moves could use some work, and he was still barely middle level one in strength, he was starting to learn.
Once I was sure the two of us could use the four moves in combat, I decided to try the fifth. I was careful to limit the amount of qi my true meridians could put into the attack, so that I didn’t have a repeat of when I was first learning the fourth move, then executed the fifth. This one was like the fourth move, but required you to use a series of footwork techniques move completely around the target, slowly raising the blade as you did so. This would leave a massive spiral cut on them, causing massive blood loss. It was meant to mimic how a dragon would fly upwards while encircling a victim. When I executed it, however, several of my previously unused blood vessels and nerves started to burn. I estimated that I could do this three or four more times before seriously injuring myself. It took two of those times to get Ryuu to execute his move when I did so. As this was essentially a finishing attack, Ryuu was meant to fly into the air then dive straight at the target, then release all of his remaining energy into an explosion before returning to me to recharge.
The third time I tried it the pain flared up inside of me, but Ryuu performed his role and hit the top of the target, slightly burning it. What was left of him returned to my dantian and I took a break, constructing a seed made partially of the one the flood dragon had given me and partially of the standard method for reinforcing blood vessels and nerves to the flow of qi. When I was finished I drew in qi at a rate that would be considered fast but wouldn’t draw too much attention, as I was in the middle of the family’s estate, and channeled all of it into the new seed. Ryuu managed to fully refill its own qi and started refining its own body as I finished the last of the seed’s development. I told him I wanted to practice alone for now and did the fifth move four more times. This time my false meridians only felt a bit uncomfortable.
When Ryuu finished his cultivation fifteen minutes later I called him out and executed the fifth move on the target dummy one more time. This time he exploded with the force of a hand grenade and caught the wooden dummy on fire, though it didn’t damage the dummy directly, as it was made of level two wood. The attack didn’t harm me, as Ryuu’s qi was identical to my own, but if any mortal or level one cultivator had been nearby they might have been injured.
I put out the fire and petted Ryuu once more, as he had already returned, exhausted, to my dantian. I let him rest and cultivate, then watched the sun rise as I meditated on my own improvements in the dawn light. Many cultivation manuals referred to the sun as a source of yang qi or pure fire qi, and I did sense far more yang qi coming from it than yin qi. The qi was also strongly fire attributed, a Master quality root level, though that was because the sun was mostly hydrogen. Still, it helped me understand the local cultivation more, so it might be useful in the future.
After meditating I returned to my room where I quickly used the cleansing technique to bathe and changed into a clean set of robes. I woke up Jiang, who seemed to focus her mind a bit better and faster than previously when fighting the urge to return to sleep, and, after she also used the cleaning technique, we went to the Ambassador’s room and knocked.
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He told us to enter, and inside I saw that he was talking with a woman that appeared to be in her early fifties who was also in the early fourth level. Had he used her for a quick cultivation boost before breaking through last night or had he already left and found someone to train his new level with? I didn’t bother asking about his personal life, though, and bowed. “I need to go check on my experiments and do some shopping, but I should return by the middle of the morning to accompany you to the auction house.”
The ambassador nodded, but the woman spoke up. “I thought you said your servant was initial level three? Why is he late level two?”
I bowed to her. “Last night I lowered my cultivation to this level to fight off the parasite plague, as they cannot survive within the body of someone at the second level. If the Ambassador requires it or if he comes under attack, however, I can easily return to my previous level in a matter of minutes.” She nodded and the ambassador excused me.
After Jiang made them a pot of mint breakfast tea, we left for the market. What I really wanted to buy was a cultivation technique for Liza, but I knew I didn’t have anywhere near enough money for anything more than a level three. Instead I went to a grocery store and asked about rainbow fruits. This store had already been cleared by the city guard. They didn’t have any, but they knew of several places in town that sold them. There was a grocer in another part of the city that brought in large amounts of level one and two rainbow fruits from an orchard outside of town, most of which were sold to the major families for training mental cultivators, and he advised me to go there. I purchased several other types of spirit fruits and plants with various interesting effects, then thanked him and left. None of them seemed that useful to me, but Jiang was interested in trying to cook with them.
The other grocer did have the fruits in both level one and two versions, but didn’t have any level three fruits. There was a luxury food place in the richer part of town which often had level three and occasionally level four fruits, when someone found them near the beast planes, so after buying one hundred level one fruits, some for me and some for Jiang, I left for the next store. Most of the ones I bought for myself would go to spirit pets, as they wouldn’t have much effect on me, as my mind was already past their maximum ability to improve it.
The last grocer had some level three fruits, but no level fours in stock. All that they had were sold to the auction house where they would be squeezed into juice and sold to the level four and five cultivators there for ten or more stones per glass. Even the level three fruits cost me a stone each, but I bought twenty of them.
Now that we had bought the fruits we wanted we returned to the alchemist shop. I went to where my experiment had been set up and checked all of the dishes. Most of them showed little change either way, but one specific sample, number four, had killed several parasites and weakened the remaining two. This was Flame Li’s blood. Did that mean that Burnt Wolves had a natural resistance to them? He had been effected by them as well, so he obviously wasn’t immune, but if something was in his blood that killed them I needed to know what.
I took a sample of the parasite infected tea and left for the slum. Once there I was greeted by a bipedal being with an elongated head and sharp teeth which had a thick tail and was cover in scales despite its body looking similar to a human’s. “Old Gitan?” I asked, and he nodded.
“Mr. Li.” he said with a slight bow, and I noticed he didn’t carry a cane this time. “Good to see you again. It seems that your treatment helped me greatly. While I definitely won’t pass as a human looking like this, they are less likely to think that I am a threat now. I’ve been using the talisman every hour on the hour, and every time I use it there are fewer parasites for it to kill. I estimate within a day I will be free of the parasites.”
I nodded. “That’s good. Just be sure to only buy food from those places that have been certified safe.” He nodded his head, but I could tell that he doubted that he could do so from the sluggish nature of his response. “If you want I can go buy food for your people. I can spare a few stones to do so if you need to replace the contaminated food.”
He shook his head. “We’ve never asked for charity and won’t start doing so now. If you want, though, we can use you as a purchasing agent. We sometimes hire people from the human slum to do that. You would buy the food we requested from a list, as much as you could with the money we gave you, then bring it all back here where we would give you a percentage of it. Ten percent is normal, but since none of us would be welcome to join you, with the rumors spreading about the plague being started by spirit beasts who want to overthrow the city, I could pay twenty, and let you hire some humans to help with the extra.”
I nodded. “I need to return to my employer by mid morning, but if you can give me the names of some of the humans you have hired in the past, I can do that. I don’t really need the food, though, so the standard ten percent should be enough to pay my assistants. I actually came here because one of the tests proved successful.” I told him telepathically about how Flame Li’s blood had a strong effect on the parasites, so that no one else might overhear, and he called for the man. When Li arrived, looking like a human with a dog tail, ears on top of his head, sharp teeth, and a furry face with a flat nose, Gitan told him what I said, and we went to a private building to talk.
Inside I set up the barrier so that we couldn’t be overheard and asked if he knew what might cause him to be more resistant to the parasites. He thought for a few seconds before nodding. “Recently I’ve felt like my qi flows much better after absorbing the sunrise.”
“You absorb the strong Yang qi of the sunrise?” I asked, and he nodded.
“I found a cultivation technique on a group of hunters that attacked us a few weeks ago. I was acting as guide to a group of hunters that were visiting the Beast Planes, and another group attacked us. They saw that we had a better harvest and wanted to steal it. One of the ones that I killed had a level three cultivation guide called ‘The Sacred Sun Technique’ on him. While the humans that hired me did their best to avoid paying me what I was owned for guiding them, there is a strong tradition of letting people keep everything their attacker was carrying, so they had to let me keep his bag and everything it contained. Since then, I’ve been using the technique every morning, as for about a minute after the sun starts to rise it has a strong benefit to my cultivation. I assume it is because I am a fire cultivator.”
I nodded and pulled out the tea. I poured a small amount in a wooden bowl on a nearby table and focused on creating the purest Yang qi I could in my palm, to test the theory that the parasites were weak to yang qi. Li saw what I was doing and focused on gathering the left over yang he had gathered from the sunrise. When I was ready I sent the qi into the bowl and the parasites in it began to twitch violently. It seemed that yang qi was a poison to them. They splashed violently, some having grown to over two centimeters overnight, and started to die.
I poured another bowl and Li sent his own gathered qi into the bowl, and they had a similar, if not as strong reaction. Now that I knew that they were weak to yang qi, I thanked him for his help and left, taking the seal plate with me. I wanted to get a copy of the Sacred Sun technique, but I could get one later. I returned to the alchemy shop and demonstrated my findings to the others. The others verified that all of the things that had effected the parasites, including the strongly wood attributed mint, were all primarily yang attributed, and we set out to find better ways to produce or concentrate the needed qi.
I produced several talismans which concentrated the yang qi from the qi given to it then focused that qi onto the parasites it found. After the fifth one, though, I excused myself, telling them that I had promised to help the man that helped me find this cure, and set off for the human slums. After finding the crippled hunter and the drunk that Gitan had given me the names of as I left, we went to the first grocer I had found and purchased large amounts of food. Most of it wasn’t spirit food, but it was cheap. After storing everything in a few storage bags I had but wasn’t using, salvaged from the attackers in the hidden realm, we then returned to the spirit beast slums. While the other two men seemed uneasy, like they didn’t trust the people here despite having worked for them several times in the past, I handed Gitan the bags and received ten stones in return, to replace the ten I had spent on the food. He and the two men split the food, each of the two humans taking a spare bag full of food back with them, as well as a jar of monkey wine each thanks to the father I had met the day before, and I left for the mansion.
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The reptilian woman with a scorpion tail entered the cave and knelt before the large gorilla on the throne in front of her. “My lord.” she said. “The troops are ready for your orders.”
“Begin the attack.” he said, and she nodded. Today their plans would be fulfilled.
