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I thought back to the last moment I could remember. I had been improving my affinities, and there was a sudden pain in my soul…

Doing a quick examination of my soul, I didn’t notice anything different. It was healed slightly more than the last time I had looked at it closely, but that was the only difference I could find.

Then, I noticed my storage space.

There was a lot of empty space inside. Too much. From what I could tell, its radius had increased by nearly 10%. That might not sound like much, but it meant the volume had increased by 33%. The space inside had increased by well over 100,000 cubic centimeters, and it was still growing at a noticeable pace.

Putting everything together, I realized that gaining a spatial affinity had interacted with the spatial fire seed and my storage space in a strange way that had knocked me unconscious. The result of this wasn’t that bad. After all, I got a free expansion to my storage space, but if I enhanced my space affinity in the future, it might cause more severe problems.

To try and play it safe, I asked the System for guidance on the topic, but as expected, every request came back with prices far outside of my budget.

There wasn’t much I could do about this. I couldn’t exactly tell anyone about the situation, and bringing it up as a hypothetical in front of anyone knowledgeable on the topic would throw up way too many red flags. Hell, I didn’t even know who I could possibly ask other than Du XiongMing, and I doubted I would be able to gain an audience with him anytime soon.

I would just have to play it safe. If and when I decided to raise my space affinity, I could look at transferring the fire seed out of my soul to prevent such a situation from happening again. But I wanted to be at least Lord, preferably King, before I started playing around with fire seeds.

Breathing in and out, I refocused my mind. I needed to get to work.

While it felt like I had been unconscious for only a moment, it could’ve been hours or days. I could have gone to ask somebody what day it was to find out, but the answer wasn\'t important. No matter how long I was out, it was too long.

I had only been given one month to make 80 Perfect Rank 4 Qi Gathering Pills. I didn’t have time to lie around.

I looked into my dantian and saw the karmic energy that was waiting for me. I reached out with my mind and started to shape it.

I had hoped that gaining a karmic affinity would make this task simple. All it seemed to have accomplished was reducing the difficulty back to where it was when I used standard Lord-level energy.

That did put creating a core within the realm of possibility though, so following the manual I had used as the Water Groom to the best of my recollection, I began assembling it.

I didn’t make any changes or embellishments. I simply made a replica of what I’ve done in the past. The only difference was that I limited the amount of energy I invested in it based on Lord Ning’s instructions.

Once it was complete, I needed to begin filling it with qi.

To accomplish this as quickly as possible, I would ideally use Rank 4 Qi Gathering Pills, the same pill I was attempting to ascend to be able to create. I had inquired about purchasing some through the Blue Wind Pavilion, but they were not readily available. I would have to contract a Pill Lord to create them, and that would require a long lead time.

The other way I could cultivate more quickly was to use a Rank 4 Qi Gathering Formation. I had looked into having a formation specialist construct one in my apartment, but the response I got back indicated that it would be impossible.

Formation specialists in the city were not in the habit of building Qi Gathering Formations for others. They seemed to have an unwritten agreement between themselves to do no such thing. If I had stronger connections, it might’ve been possible, but it wasn’t something that simple spirit stones could buy.

The reason for this was simple. They had formed a cabal focused on forcing people to rent cultivation rooms. Instead of purchasing permanent formations for 10 or even 100 spirit stones, cultivators were forced to rent a room at a cost of two spirit stones per day.

This was annoying, but it was something I could work with. I asked around about the date and found out that I only had 24 days remaining before the pills were due. I hurried to the closest cultivation pavilion and paid 48 spirit stones to book a room for the rest of the month.

Once seated in the middle of the room’s formation, I reached into my storage space and pulled out a Rank 3 Qi Gathering Pill. Its help would be extremely limited considering that I was working on ascending to Lord and that I was already in a Rank 4 formation, but I would take any assistance I could get to make the process faster.

It took me two days to gather the energy needed to break through. When I did, I sent a combination of qi, spirit stone energy, and karmic energy to destroy the chain barring me from Martial Lord 1. The moment the karmic energy touched it, it vaporized like it had never been there.

I felt the world shift as the laws of Heaven and Earth loosened their grip on my body.

As a Lord 1, the first thing I did was to make a Perfect Rank 4 Qi Gathering Pill as efficiently as I could. Previously, I hadn’t been able to make such a pill until higher stages, but with my experience, a full suite of peak six-star affinities, and the Profound-Rank Earthflame spirit fire, I was able to pull it off.

Unfortunately, it took me 12 hours to make a single pill.

If I was only making this one pill, I could have reduced this time to somewhere between six and eight hours by burning through my qi at a faster rate. That, however, would have left my dantian empty, and it would have taken a significant amount of time to replenish it. To complete the entire eighty-pill order in as little time as possible, I needed to match the rate I burned through qi with my regeneration rate.

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I only knew of two options that could speed up the process.

The first was to use the Profound-Rank spatial fire seed. As I had learned, it was much less energy intensive, and much quicker, to use a fire seed instead of a spirit fire when concocting pills. However, I knew I wouldn’t be able to control it anywhere near well enough for high-level alchemy. Aside from that, I had an instinctive fear of the seed being detected by others, so I wanted to keep it as hidden as possible.

My only other option, then, was to advance. As a Lord 2, my qi would be slightly more powerful and would regenerate at a slightly faster rate. Also, my will-lock would improve, giving it more control and strength.

I used the pill I had made and cultivated as quickly as I could for the next 12 hours. With the combination of the Qi Gathering Formation and Pill, my cultivation base increased at a rapid pace, but trying to break through to Lord 2 in only a matter of days would be impossible. I could do it in a month, but not in only a couple of days.

This experiment had given me a new idea, though.

The limitations on my speed were the strength of my will and the rate at which I could recover qi. I couldn’t do anything about the first, and being in the gathering formation already helped with the second. However, the formation only increased the amount of ambient energy available. The pill increased the speed at which that ambient energy entered my body.

I made another gathering pill as quickly as I could and consumed it. With its effects boosting me, I was able to concoct a pill in only six hours while still matching my burn rate to my regeneration rate. This was good news, but the effect of a single pill only lasted for 12 hours.

If I went with this strategy, a third of the pills I made would be used up in the concoction process. The Ning Clan might be willing to consider the lost third as the cost of doing business and only require me to hand over 80% of the remaining pills, but I very much doubted it.

This setback didn’t make me despair. I still found a potential avenue to meet my deadline. I had 20 days. If I could make a pill every six hours I would be able to make 80 pills. That meant no sleep, but I could manage that through other pills. I just needed something that would help me gather qi more quickly.

Without a better idea in mind, I opened Emperor Li’s book in my mental library and began searching through it for recipes.

After advancing to Lord once more, I found that some of the passages that had once been inscrutable had revealed themselves to me. After a few hours of careful searching, I found what I needed, a Rank 4 Qi Replenishing Pill.

The gathering pill was useful for advancing one’s cultivation, but the replenishing pill was useful for daily activities. Its effects lasted for an entire 48 hours, meaning I would save money by not having to take as many of them, but its power was significantly worse. It was most effective at low energy levels, but even then, the boost it provided was only about half what a gathering pill could do. Using one would help, but it wouldn’t allow me to meet my deadline.

The Emperor\'s book, though, contained a special recipe for a variant of the replenishing pill. Its effects were only good for 36 hours, but as long as my body contained less than 10% of its maximum qi capacity, the effects of this pill would be increased to be roughly 50% stronger than a gathering pill.

This was of course good news. I just had to be able to get the ingredients for said pill.

At the Pavilion, I found out the price for each set would be eight spirit stones. This made me wince, but I still handed over a large number of the pills that I had made in my previous life for several sets of herbs.

Living on Fasting Pills so I wouldn’t have to eat, Restoration Pills so I wouldn’t have to sleep, and Replenishing Pills so I wouldn’t run out of energy, I slaved away in the pill room for sixteen days. The additional boost from the Replenishing Pills was helpful, but I was still only able to average five pills per day.

Lord Ning hadn’t told me any specifics for which element the pills should target, so I decided to make sixteen for each of the basic elements. This might not have been what he wanted, but it met the brief I was given.

I spent my final days in the chamber converting the remaining herbs into earth-based pills for my own future use.

When an attendant knocked on the door to inform me that my allotted time had expired, I breathed out a sigh of relief. My time there had been way too stressful.

Thirty days after my visit to the Ning mansion, the same servant as before knocked on my door once more. I welcomed him inside to conduct our exchange.

I handed him a small storage bag I had purchased to make the transaction smoother.

“80 Perfect Rank 4 Qi Gathering Pills. As the element wasn’t specified, there are 16 of each.”

He took the bag and nodded in slight acknowledgment. After pausing strangely for several seconds, he tapped a small stone on his wrist.

I was bombarded by a flood of energy. My mind went blank at the onslaught. When I recovered, I found that I was sprawled on the floor.

“Please, allow me to assist you, Lord Su.”

The servant reached down and carefully helped me stand.

Blinking in confusion, I looked inside my dantian and saw a storm of karmic energy inside. There was nearly no room left for qi. I wanted to complain that this would cause problems with my daily activities, but I suddenly realized that with so much of my dantian blocked off, the Qi Replenishing Pills would always be operating at their highest efficiency.

I decided to accept this situation as a win.

“Thank you.” I gave the servant a slight bow.

“I was instructed to tell you that the energy you have been provided is sufficient to either advance from Martial Lord 1 to Martial Lord 9 or to advance from Martial Lord Peak to Martial King. The choice is yours. If you require more energy in the future, another deal can be arranged. If you decide to use this energy to advance to Martial King, you should use 50% on your core and 50% on your breakthrough.”

He reached into his storage bag and took out a small book.

“This contains the list of pills we would like you to concoct for us as per the ongoing portion of our arrangement. We, unfortunately, do not have a list of every ingredient needed. If you can provide us with such a list, we will procure them for you as our arrangement specifies.”

I flipped through the book and found that it was asking for dozens of different types of pills.

“This…” Had I really agreed to do so much? We hadn’t specified how many pills I would be making for them after the first batch. If this was what they were expecting…

“We understand that an alchemist’s time is valuable. We would request you choose one pill every other month. We will provide ten portions of herbs. At the end of the second month, I will arrive to take our portion and deliver herbs for the next pill you choose. Our only request is that you choose a different pill each time.”

I narrowed my eyes. These terms were incredibly suspicious. They were clearly still testing me. It worked in my favor, though.

I flipped open the book and quickly chose one of the simpler pills that I could concoct without spending too much time and energy on it. I needed to save as much of that for myself as I could.

The servant handed me a piece of paper, and I wrote out the necessary herbs.

“Very well, Lord Su. Do you require anything else before I depart?”

“N—” I was about to dismiss him, but I caught myself in time. There was indeed something I needed, but I was a little afraid to ask for it.

“I… need a Rank 5 cultivation technique.”

The servant smiled, reached into his bag, and pulled out a small black book.

“This was anticipated. I have been permitted to sell this manual to you.”

I wanted to rub my temples. I felt a headache coming on. “How much?”

“The price is simple. Every additional pill you were able to make with the ingredients previously provided.”

I couldn’t help it. A laugh bubbled up from deep inside of me. I reached into my storage bag to hide that I was taking several pill bottles out of my storage space.

I passed him the remaining 18 pills.

“Is that all of them?”

“Y—” I caught myself again. “No. I have already consumed two.”

The servant paused. “Very well. Those pills will be considered irrecoverable.”

He passed me the cultivation technique.

“Good day, Lord Su.”