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Of course, JiaQi could have just sent a group of mercenaries to sweep them away easily enough, but that would have been a self-defeating strategy. We needed to wait a bit before the harvest was ripe.

So, after ensuring everything with the assault was going smoothly, I returned to my regular business of alchemy, formations, and getting the city back on a path to prosperity.

I just hoped the invaders didn’t try attacking my herb farm or the city’s outlying villages. That would make things… messy. It would provide a bit of fertilizer for our growing crops, but no one wanted to have to clean up a bunch of dead bodies.

Not too long after this attack started, the Grandmaster I had sent to collect essence returned.

He had been gone for several months by this point, and I was beginning to think something had gone wrong, but I needn’t have worried. He had just taken his time getting to JiaQi’s hometown, and once there, he had left the gathering formation active for over a month. Then, he collected it and came back. No one troubled him along the way.

Fortunately for him, he hadn’t tried to uncover the secrets of what I was up to. I had hidden the beryllium oxide bar within a layer of stone, and if anyone tried to break the plate open and look inside, several Rank 5 Explosive Pills were ready to give them a bit of a surprise.

Once I deactivated this trap and removed the bar, I looked at it closely in energy vision.

I would have said the results were disappointing, but I didn’t have anything to compare them against. The bar appeared to be relatively empty, and the amount of essence within it seemed quite limited, but without knowing how much each person would need, I didn’t know how long this supply would last.

So, after talking with Meng LuYao and drafting a handful of volunteers from the city’s populace, I set up the essence extraction formation and created a bubble of purified metal essence. When someone walked inside, the essence would immediately seep into their bodies and boost their affinities.

The first volunteer to attempt this process was a 17-year-old boy. He had no affinities, but he did have a blessing to improve his spearmanship.

Since I didn’t know how effective this essence would be, I regulated the energy within the bubble to a small fraction of what had been gathered.

When the boy stepped inside, essence poured into his body like rain soaking into barren earth.

The child’s skin split apart, and vicious cuts appeared all over his body. He screamed in agony.

Reacting instantly, I raced forward, ripped him out of the essence bubble, and shoved a Healing Pill into his mouth.

I stared at him, panicked. What went wrong? That shouldn’t have happened.

As I examined his healing wounds, I tried to get him talking. “Are you okay?”

“Ye… Yes.”

I tried to comfort him, but once he was assured of his survival, he only wanted to know one thing, the same thing that all of the mortal onlookers wanted to know.

“Did it work? Can I cultivate?”

I couldn’t help but let out a relieved chuckle. “Let’s check.”

Side by side, we walked to where Meng LuYao had set up an affinity testing orb. The boy pushed the limited energy within his body into the orb, and everyone waited for the results.

For a moment, nothing happened, but once that energy level inside the orb crossed an unknown threshold, the image of a small dull red metal ingot appeared. A moment later, it brightened. After brightening twice more, the ingot dulled and became slightly yellower. When this happened the boy’s face fell. After that, the image of the ingot only brightened a single time.

The boy, having seen the brightly glowing red ingot become dull and lifeless, looked to be on the verge of tears. “Did… Did something go wrong?”

I patted him on the back. “Congratulations. A mid eight-star metal affinity.”

After that, I toned down the formation and only gave people enough essence to reach peak nine-star. Meng LuYao could work out a system where they could earn more, but for the time being, I wanted to spread the essence around as much as possible.

With my citizens’ affinities improving, I figured it was time to work on my own.

I looked out at the cultivators who were assaulting the city’s formations. Their numbers had grown slightly, but not to the point where I was worried. It wasn’t time to deal with them yet, and they wouldn’t be able to cause any problems during the next week, so I confidently left the city and headed to the Lightning Peak.

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When I got there, I headed straight to the Trial. While I hadn’t earned any contribution points from missions recently, points from ruling a city worked just as well, so I was able to enter without issue.

Like my previous visit, I relied solely on my seed of the Profound-Rank Slicing Winds Fire to handle all the Trial’s obstacles. This wasn’t nearly as effective as it had been when I was a Grandmaster, but with lightning’s weakness to wind, it was good enough. I barreled through the Trial and quickly racked up enough points to reach a mid four-star affinity.

As I was leaving, a voice echoed throughout the entire Trial.

“Do you know how precious lightning essence is? It is far more difficult to collect than the baser elements, and you are just wasting it. You don’t even use it. Are you just trying to anger me?”

I cocked my head to the side. “Yes.”

Then, I left.

When I arrived back in NanLu City, I was surprised to find that the number of attackers had grown substantially in the brief time I was away. There were now multiple groups dressed in the regalia of multiple cities. Wondering what was happening, I made my way to the city lord’s manor.

Everyone was already seated around the conference table when I arrived, so I joined in on the meeting in progress, and Yan explained the situation.

“The Lord of Yellow Bluff City decided to attack the herb farm. Your formations shredded his forces, and that got everyone else to take us more seriously. None of the Lords have appeared in person yet, but they have all ramped up the forces they’re sending against us, and it looks like they sent specialists to assist in taking down your formations.”

I nodded in understanding. “If they’re this aggressive, how are they working together?”

“Pack tactics. None of them feel like they can suppress the others, so they’re working together to prevent anyone else in the area from rising up.”

I snorted. If being a city lord was a game to impress the clans, I doubted this strategy would work very well. At least, it wouldn’t if I were the one deciding who to raise to Sovereign. For all I knew, this could be exactly the attitude the clans were after.

I turned to JiaQi. “Are you ready?”

A wide grin spread across her face. “Been waiting for weeks.”

“Just remember, the sect rules say you can’t attack them directly. You’re only allowed to attack other Lords. You can only command our troops and get them into position.”

She smirked and left without comment.

During my last life, the Master of the Lightning Peak had taught me an invaluable lesson. If one were to flood an area with qi, it would be incredibly difficult to detect more subtle energy signatures.

So, if, for example, a group of Grandmasters constantly bombarded an area with qi for several days on end, once they destroyed the formations they were attacking, it would be extremely difficult to notice energy signatures from other formations buried in the ground around them.

I had built the defensive formations around the city in three layers. The attackers were now on the third and final layer of these defenses, and they were standing in the area that had sat between the second and third layers.

The moment JiaQi charged out of the city with her small band of mercenaries, formations underneath each of the invaders sprang to life. These were not offensive formations. They were shielding formations. These shields separated the horde of over a thousand attackers into small pockets of four or five people each.

JiaQi’s people went through each of these pockets one by one and attached Rank 3 Restraining Talismans to each person.

In less than an hour, everyone who had been attacking the city had been turned into a captive.

The Lords of these cultivators never showed themselves. They were too cautious and relied on sending underlings to do their dirty work. If the city had looked like it was going to fall, these Lords might have been willing to charge into the fray, but given the results, they stayed well back.

That didn’t bother me. The ransom I exacted from my captives made everything worthwhile, and when combined with the karmic energy generated from injecting purified essence into my populace, I was on track to rise to Martial King faster than ever before.

I didn’t think the local Lords would willingly just let this defeat stand, but before they could mount another assault, Tie Yang was able to complete my wall. To finish things off, I infused the wall with ziethanite dust and activated a grand formation powerful enough to straddle the gap between Ranks 4 and 5. After that, there wasn’t anything a lowly Lord could do to us.

In the following years, my friends and I still continued helping the city improve through injections of essence, pills, and new construction, but our efforts were no longer necessary. All we had to do was wait as the contribution points piled up.

While the city was generating an unnatural number of points, and we all had Rank 4 pills and formations to help us cultivate, there were limits to how quickly a person could advance their cultivation level safely. I still needed to pause between each advancement to let my cultivation base settle, and I filled most of this free time with my most important unfinished task. I needed to learn to carve a Qi Gathering Formation into my soul.

The skill I had purchased from the System, the Garden of a Hundred Flowers, was supposed to allow me to visualize my soul in a way that would make inscribing it with formations possible, but mastering that technique had proved to be incredibly difficult.

This was because the technique required me to weave a single strand of qi through each of my opened acupoints. With a normal cultivation technique, one that only used 9 acupoints, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but my technique used a full 361 acupoints. The enlightenment I had gained when creating it had helped me better understand what I was supposed to do, but the System had cut that knowledge short, and I didn’t learn everything I needed to know.

That being the case, and to save as much time as possible, I purchased a little help.

“System, give me a 100 billion credit boost to my comprehension of soul techniques.”

Purchase confirmed. 340,443,100,650 credits remaining.

This didn’t give me an instant understanding of everything I needed to do to use the technique successfully, but once the comprehension bonus was in place, studying the intricacies of the technique became far faster and easier.

Four years after first arriving in NanLu City, my friends and I had all reached Martial King 1.

During this time, we saw neither hide nor hair of Lord Hao. The commotion I had caused early on must have scared him away. That made me a little sad, but it was fine. Lord Hao was just an annoyance from the past. If I had a way to easily annoy him in the future, I might do so, but he was no longer of any importance.

I did, however, take time to refresh the bounty I had laid on the PangBo Merchant Alliance. Using my new knowledge, I created hundreds of Rank 3 and 4 Soul Cleansing Talismans and handed them over to the bounty hunter’s guild. Like Lord Hao, the PangBo Alliance was of no real importance, but I wanted to give their captives what chance I could to be free.

With that, everything I needed to do in Profound City was complete, and we were ready to continue our ascent to the Summit of Dragon Peak.