MPCW Ch. 81
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10m
It had been over two months since Alexei began his alchemy education under Danqing, and the old man seemed to have forgotten that teaching was supposed to be part of the arrangement.
He didn't mind. Whenever Danqing remembered to teach him something, the lesson usually ended with the old master standing there in silence.
Yan and Ying continued their studies. They listened to instructions, practiced properly, made ordinary mistakes, and improved at a normal pace. In short, they behaved like normal alchemists.
The same couldn't be said for Alexei, who remained Danqing's most consistent source of quiet torment.
What interested Alexei more was what Danqing had brought back from his travels through the outer regions.
Over the years, the old man had wandered from place to place, refining pills for people whenever the mood struck him. Most of those people had paid him with spirit plant seeds, which sounded simple enough until Alexei saw how much he had collected.
There were two spatial rings, each with over a hundred cubic meters of storage, filled with more than thirty varieties of peak Heaven-tier spirit plant seeds. Alongside them were three living Immortal-tier plants, five dead ones that were already beyond saving, and 1.3 million mid-grade spirit stones.
According to Danqing, this was only what remained after he had converted most of his wealth. He had once accumulated far more, including enough high-grade spirit stones and spirit marrow to fill a chest. The problem was that the Eastern Territories had weaker spiritual energy, and high-grade spirit stones would degrade too quickly during transport.
Because of that, before returning, he had exchanged most of his wealth for spirit plants.
The total cost had been 1.7 million supreme-grade spirit stones, plus another 12 million high-grade spirit stones.
That many spirit stones would have been enough to synthesize six pieces of immortal marrow.
There was nothing he could do about it now, so he put the matter aside and converted the 1.3 million mid-grade spirit stones into five supreme-grade spirit stone lamps.
The 200 cubic meters of plant material would take much longer to sort through, but the first pass already turned up a large number of high-grade spirit plants and fruits with harvestable seeds. That alone was enough to keep the situation from being a complete loss.
The only disappointing part was the talent-enhancing plants. Because his spiritual roots were unusual, single-attribute enhancement plants had no effect on him. Danqing had brought back quite a few of them, but after checking everything, only two varieties were useful to him.
One was the Nine-Domain Refined Fruit, a mid Heaven-tier plant. The other was the Hundred-Clarity Fruit, a low Earth-tier variety. It wasn't as valuable as the first, but it still helped. After using both, Alexei's talent bonus rose to 18%, pushing his overall aptitude into mid Mystic-grade.
At that level, improving talent was much harder than it had been in the lower grades. The increase didn't look especially large, but even a small gain at Mystic-grade carried far more weight. In practice, his cultivation speed had risen by more than half.
Since both plants produced seeds, he planted them in the orchard section of his planting zone. With that, the Aureate Summit Sect gained two new types of talent-enhancing fruit. If the three single-attribute fruits Danqing had brought back were included as well, the number rose to five. He couldn't use those three himself, but they would be useful for the rest of the sect.
Qingxue had entered seclusion 17 days ago, and Yan believed the talent boost she received this time could trigger some kind of spiritual body awakening.
He kept the information in mind, then turned his attention to the next matter.
---
The soul sand Alexei had stockpiled two months ago was already gone, even though it had filled half a chest and produced a little over three hundred Nether Stars before running dry. Getting more in bulk meant traveling nearly 300 kilometers to the Soul Sand Valley, and no matter how he looked at it, that was far too much trouble for crafting materials.
So instead of making the trip, he had spent most of the past week building a piglin bartering farm.
But most of the tricks that made the classic design efficient didn't work in this world. Chests and brewing stands couldn't clip items through blocks, ice paths weren't reliable enough for bulk transport, and pistons could push a chest against a piglin and pin it to a wall, but they couldn't push the chest through the piglin.
The same problem applied to the items the piglins threw out. They behaved like real objects, so they landed wherever they were thrown instead of phasing through blocks or sliding neatly into place because the game engine allowed it.
Alexei had adjusted the design around those limits, removing the parts that depended on collision-box tricks and keeping only what this world's rules would support. The result was simpler than what he would have built in a normal playthrough, but it was stable, repeatable, and most importantly, it worked.
After checking the layout one last time, he pulled the lever and watched the bartering sequence activate.
Every 0.2 seconds, a hopper pulled a gold ingot from the storage chest and fed it into the dispenser above the bartering chamber. The dispenser fired the ingot toward the piglin, and as the piglin caught it, the sticky piston mounted above its head extended, pushing a gold block into its line of sight.
The piglin reacted as if someone was trying to destroy its gold. It dropped out of bartering mode and turned hostile, but before it could do anything, the dispenser fired another ingot. The piglin caught the second ingot, calmed down, and returned to bartering mode while the piston retracted and pulled the gold block back into place.
With that single cycle, two trades were completed. As long as the storage chest still had gold ingots, the farm could repeat the process continuously, reaching five trades per second.
The items produced by the trades, including crying obsidian, regular obsidian, soul sand, nether quartz, and ender pearls, were carried away through a hopper-and-dispenser chain and sent through the Nether portal back to his survival base. Once they arrived, the all-item sorting machine distributed them into their respective storage chests.
The gold supply was automated as well. The ingots consumed by the bartering farm came through the same portal system, drawn directly from the output of the zombified piglin farm above.
Based on the zombified piglin farm's daily gold output, the numbers worked out to roughly 1000 soul sand and crying obsidian per day, 300 ender pearls and obsidian, and 700 nether quartz.
It wasn't an elegant setup, but it worked, and that was usually enough for him.
He watched the machine run through several cycles to make sure nothing jammed. Once he was certain the bartering system was stable, his thoughts moved to the next problem he had been putting off.
The ender dragon was only part of it. What he really wanted was bedrock.
In the game, bedrock was the one block that no tool could mine. Its negative hardness meant it ignored normal durability calculations altogether. To obtain it, he would have to refresh the exit portal with end crystals, then use block-update mechanics to break pieces loose.
The trouble was getting the first piece.
The usual method required a four-wide dark oak tree to grow in exactly the right position and trigger an update at the right time. In the game, that was possible because bone meal made trees grow instantly. Here, trees still took several minutes to grow, which made the timing nearly impossible.
He went over the process in his head, trying to see if there was another way around it, but nothing useful came to mind.
For now, forcing the issue wouldn't change anything. He pulled the lever again, watched the bartering farm complete another clean cycle, then made a mental note to deal with the ender dragon when he had a better plan and headed back through the portal.
---
Zhengxing had a certain expression that appeared whenever his patience as sect master was pushed further than expected. He was wearing that expression as he looked at the fourth group in two months to arrive at Aureate Summit Sect selling information about an ancient battlefield realm.
The first group had come excited, the second had come enthusiastic, and the third had come with urgency. This older man, however, had come prepared to sell. He held a golden sword across both palms.
"The spiritual energy density inside the realm is three times higher than in the outside world. This sword is proof of what can be found there. It was compressed over 1,300 times by an ancient cultivator. Weapons like this can be obtained inside the realm without much difficulty, and the ground is covered in gold. For only 1,000 low-grade spirit stones, I can tell you how to get inside."
Zhengxing opened his mouth to respond, but the man continued before he could speak.
"If weapons and gold don't interest you, the realm also contains spirit stone lamps that release three times the usual ambient spiritual energy. They are inexhaustible. For the price of a little information, you could obtain a cultivation ground of that quality. Under normal circumstances, something like that would cost no less than ten million low-grade spirit stones."
He finished speaking and watched Zhengxing's face, waiting for the reaction he expected.
Zhengxing sat quietly for a few seconds before saying, "A manager from another sect came here with the same information about a week ago. They offered it for 300 stones."
The man's expression shifted. Still, he recovered quickly. Zhengxing gave him some credit for that.
"Then how about the sword? For 100 low-grade spirit stones, you can have an immortal artifact authenticated by Senior Qianxin."
"I know what it is."
Zhengxing was not lying. The purple light running along the blade's edge was distinctive, and he had recognized it as soon as the man entered the room.
He reached into his spatial ring and placed an identical sword on the table between them.
The man stared at it.
"I bought this five days ago for thirty stones."
That was also true. The seller from five days ago had brought along a boy, maybe ten, who had clung to Zhengxing's sleeve with both hands and looked up at him as if the sale concerned his entire future. Zhengxing had bought the sword mostly so the child would let go.
The man's gaze moved between the two swords before finally settling on the empty space between them.
Zhengxing waited to see what he would try next.
---
The upper council of the Verdantree Alliance had received many strange reports over the years. Managing dozens of cultivator factions in a city like Verdantree meant dealing with all kinds of unusual incidents, so most of them had long since grown used to hearing absurd news.
But the report delivered today still made the atmosphere in the room turn heavy.
"An ancient battlefield realm has appeared in the mountain range roughly fifteen kilometers outside the city," the head steward said. "According to our information, it has already been active for nearly three months."
The council members looked at one another, and the alliance head's expression darkened.
"The nearby sects have been entering it this entire time?"
"Yes," the head steward replied. "They appear to have been harvesting it from the beginning. So far, they have taken out thousands of tons of gold, along with a large number of weapons and artifacts."
One of the elder council members narrowed his eyes.
"And during all that time, no one reported it to us?"
"No."
No one spoke after that.
The Verdantree Alliance was the largest administrative power in the region, and its headquarters stood in Verdantree, not far from the mountain range where the realm had appeared. For the past two months, they had watched more and more cultivators enter the city, but they had assumed it was because of a small conflict or the discovery of a resource vein somewhere in the outer regions.
None of them had expected the truth to be this close.
The sects in the surrounding area had discovered an ancient realm, entered it for months, and taken away benefits while keeping the Verdantree Alliance in the dark.
The alliance head's fingers tightened around the armrest of his chair.
"How far into the realm have they explored?"
The steward looked uncomfortable.
"Less than thirty kilometers into the interior. Most of the activity has stayed near the entrance. The groups involved have spent their time collecting gold and equipment rather than pushing farther in."
Seeing that no one interrupted, he continued, "After the first groups realized how much they were losing to spirit stone operating costs, they began inviting other sects to share the burden. Those sects later discovered that the gold wasn't as profitable as expected, so they sold the location to others to recover their losses. The next sects did the same, and the process has continued for roughly six weeks. They were careful not to spread it too widely at once. Each group only approached a limited number of sects, so they wouldn't create more enemies than they could handle. That's why the information moved outward bit by bit instead of reaching everyone at the same time."
The explanation left the room quiet. Several elders looked toward the alliance head, while the rest seemed to be weighing whether speaking first would make them look foolish.
One elder drew in a slow breath. "So every sect near us knew about a major resource discovery right on our doorstep. They traded the information around, recovered their losses from one another, and somehow we were left until the end."
"That appears to be accurate."
A cough came from the far end of the table.
The alliance head remained silent. Everyone present could tell that his opinion of the surrounding sects, along with their own intelligence network, had just dropped several levels.
"We won't intervene directly. The situation outside has already developed too far. If we rush in now, we may only make things worse. Send a few stewards in civilian clothes to investigate the realm. I want facts, not rumors passed around by people trying to profit from this."
His eyes moved toward the map of the area near the entrance.
"Start drawing up plans for construction there as well. If that realm remains active, we need roads, lodging, storage, and guards in place before the crowds grow any larger."
The steward bowed and left to carry out the orders.
After he was gone, the council didn't immediately return to discussion. No one wanted to say it aloud, but the same thought was on all their minds. Something this significant had appeared almost on their doorstep, yet they had only learned of it after everyone else had already begun moving.
---
Alexei woke to someone pounding on his door.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, considering whether he could pretend not to hear it. The pounding continued, so he gave up, pushed himself out of bed, and pulled on a robe before opening the door.
Yan stood outside with two cups of tea.
"You sleep like you're dead," she said, handing him one of the cups. "Danqing is waiting in the pavilion. He is leaving somewhere this morning and apparently wants company."
Alexei accepted the tea and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "Why are you the one telling me this?"
"Qingxue is still in seclusion, and someone has to handle logistics." Yan spoke as if the answer should have been obvious. "Besides, I was awake already. The charm body gets harder to suppress if I sleep too long."
Alexei decided not to ask any more questions about it. Yan had already explained her Alluring Bloom Constitution once, and that explanation had lasted 69 minutes. He had no desire to hear it again this early in the morning.
From what he understood, her physique produced a passive aura that affected the people around her. Regular cultivation or physical activity helped keep it under control, while sleeping too long made that control unstable.
He drank half his tea, set the cup on the table near the door, and went to make himself presentable.
Ten minutes later, he and Yan crossed the courtyard toward the pavilion. Danqing was already seated there with his own cup of tea.
"I will be traveling today," he said without looking up. "I should be back before evening."
He reached to his waist and took out a green gourd about the size of two fists, with a few small tassels hanging from its neck. After turning it once in his hand, he flicked it with two fingers. The gourd swelled rapidly, growing to nearly five meters in length as it settled onto the pavilion floor and took up most of the space in front of them.
Alexei stared at the gourd, and before he could reach out to touch it, a soft force lifted him from the pavilion floor and set him on the widest part of its body. The movement was so smooth that he barely needed to adjust his balance.
He looked down at the green surface beneath his feet, then turned toward Danqing. The old man was already drifting toward the neck of the gourd.
As soon as he touched the artifact, its information appeared in his perception.
[Viridian Clarity Gourd:
Spiritual Energy Circuit V
Spiritual Energy Absorption IV
Spiritual Refinement IV
Pill Integration IV
Spirit Infusion IV
Spiritual Energy Storage III
Spatial Storage I]
He read through the attributes and looked up again.
"That's an immortal-tier artifact..."
"Yes," Danqing confirmed.
He sounded calm, but the satisfaction in his voice was hard to miss. After the past two months, being able to surprise Alexei for once seemed to improve his mood.
The gourd rose from the pavilion floor, passed over the roof, and turned north. Below them, the Aureate Summit complex began to shrink into neat blocks of color. The planting zones stood out as green rectangles among the pale stone, grey buildings, and brown mountain paths.
The morning air above the forest was colder than it had been in the courtyard. Alexei looked down as the trees slid past below them.
"How does this thing expand?"
Danqing glanced back at him. "The gourd was made through compression forging. The material was originally larger, then pressed into a smaller form during the forging process. When spiritual energy flows through the circuits, part of that compression is released, so the artifact grows."
"Then can it return to its original size?"
"That depends on the circuits. They decide how much compression can be released without damaging the artifact's structure. Yellow-tier artifacts can usually expand to around 20% of their original size. Profound-tier artifacts can reach 40%, Earth-tier sixty, and Heaven-tier eighty. Immortal-tier artifacts are the only ones that can fully return to their original dimensions."
Alexei listened while watching the forest pass beneath them. The principle wasn't hard to understand. Compression forging reduced the material into a smaller form, and the spiritual circuits decided how much of that reduced form could be undone.
In other words, if an Immortal-tier artifact was long enough to begin with, it could be shrunk down to a portable size and restored to its full length when needed. It didn't have to be a tool, a gourd, or a blade. It could be something far larger.
MC items, however, weren't normal artifacts. They didn't have a rank-based expansion limit, and their durability wasn't something the physics of this world could properly measure. As long as they were treated as MC items, they followed game mechanics rather than cultivation mechanics.
If he made a long, thin weapon from MC materials and applied the same expansion principle to it, he could create an extending staff that stretched as far as the material allowed. A hundred meters should be possible, and two hundred wasn't out of the question. In theory, the only real limit was how much material he fed into the item.
The weight wouldn't be a problem for him. As long as it was an MC item, he could wield it normally. His enemies, however, would still have to deal with the full force of a hundred-meter staff crashing into them.
The more he thought about it, the more practical the idea seemed. If he swung the staff from his end, the other end could strike a target far outside normal weapon range. By the time the enemy realized they were in danger, the blow would already have landed.
He turned the idea over in his head and looked for obvious flaws, but none of the problems he considered were enough to break the concept. Anything related to durability, reach, or structural stress could be covered by MC item mechanics.
Several of his weapons had the Spiritual Energy Circuit enchantment, including the trident, the netherite sword, and the netherite axe. Since then, he had found that he could channel almost any technique through them.
The difference was obvious the first time he tried Flame Fist.
Normally, the technique released a burst of fire and that was the end of it. When he used it through the netherite sword instead, flames raced along the blade before the attack shot forward. The spiritual energy cost stayed the same, but the attack hit far harder than usual. Combining it with Wind Step pushed it even further.
Naturally, he had assumed he had stumbled onto something interesting. He had gone straight to Qingxue and explained his discovery.
She listened, then stared at him for several seconds.
"That's how artifacts work."
The same principle was already built into countless cultivation artifacts. Sword flight worked because the circuits inside the artifact handled part of the burden, allowing the cultivator to spend less spiritual energy for the same result. Better circuits improved that efficiency even further.
Truly powerful artifacts went beyond simple efficiency. While immortal-tier artifacts could theoretically double the power supplied to them, their real value came from specialized enhancements. Some amplified particular spell types or elemental affinities, stacking additional effects on top of the base amplification and producing results far beyond what a cultivator could manage unaided.
When Qingxue had explained all of this, Alexei had been slightly disappointed. For a while, he'd thought he had stumbled onto something original.
That didn't make the knowledge useless. Understanding how the circuits worked and learning to use them were different things. Since then, he'd spent plenty of time experimenting with the circuit-engraved weapons.
Which was why the sword's behavior was bothering him now.
He held the netherite blade in front of him and sent spiritual energy through the engraved circuits. The weapon responded, but nothing happened to its size. He tried again, adjusting the flow the way Qingxue had suggested.
Still nothing.
"Why won't this one expand?"
Danqing turned away from the front of the gourd and looked back at him.
"It won't?"
He held out a hand, and Alexei passed him the sword.
The instant the sword entered Danqing's grip, his arm sank sharply. But he caught himself quickly. After adjusting his hold, he looked down at the sword, then at the gourd beneath his feet.
His expression slowly changed.
"How long has this sword been on your person?"
"Since I left this morning."
Danqing fell silent.
That explained it.
He had been flying for most of the morning with the sword nearby, and his spiritual energy consumption had been far higher than usual. He had assumed the weather was to blame, but that explanation no longer made much sense.
The sword must have weighed more than 20,000 kilograms.
On the continent, weapons known for their weight were almost always legendary artifacts. The Ninefold Forged Stormheart Maul, which ranked first among weapons in the Frostpeak Domain, weighed 9,000 kilograms. It was also a hammer, made specifically to take advantage of its weight.
It was already hard to imagine a sword weighing that much, yet this one was even heavier, and Alexei had been swinging it with one hand.
Danqing glanced at Alexei's cultivation realm and found it where it had been that morning when they left the sect: late-stage Qi Refining. According to Alexei himself, it had also been the same two weeks ago.
At that level, even a cultivator at their physical peak could only produce 300 kilograms of force. Wielding more than 20,000 kilograms should have required strength closer to the mid Nascent Soul realm.
He had no intention of saying any of that aloud. By now, he had long since learned that trying to measure Alexei by normal standards only led to a headache, so he simply sent a controlled stream of spiritual energy into the sword's circuits and guided it outward through the formation lines.
The weapon lurched in his grip as it expanded. The whole sword swelled in every direction at once, keeping its original proportions. Within four seconds, it had stretched past ten meters, but the hilt had also thickened to the width of a person's thigh, while the blade itself was nearly forty centimeters wide and more than five centimeters thick.
Alexei took the sword back with both hands and examined it. The weight hadn't changed, which was the only part of this that made sense. He turned the blade sideways, looked at its thickness, and frowned.
"This is a slab, not a sword. Can you change only the blade's length without changing the rest?"
The old man considered the request, then pointed at the blade. This time, his spiritual sense guided the energy along the blade rather than through the whole sword, forcing the change to follow its length while keeping the width and thickness under control.
The slab-like blade began to narrow as the material shifted forward. Its width and thickness shrank back toward a proper shape, while the blade itself stretched farther and farther behind them. After roughly ten seconds, Alexei was holding something that still counted as a sword, though only because it had a hilt and a blade.
The hilt remained the same size. The blade had become thin, narrow, and absurdly long, trailing behind them through the slipstream.
"I can't use it up here."
He was right. Swinging an eighty-meter blade while riding a flying gourd was a terrible idea, and neither of them needed to say why.
He tried to push it further, guiding more spiritual energy into the sword as he attempted to alter its shape and force the blade beyond the proportions Danqing had set. The energy reached the surface, but instead of sinking in, it scattered and left the sword unchanged.
"Your cultivation is too low. The first expansion only needs spiritual energy, but controlling the size afterward requires divine sense. At Qi Refining, you can activate the circuits, but you can't guide the changes with enough precision. That will have to wait until Foundation Establishment."
Alexei looked at the eighty-meter blade stretching behind them, his eyes narrowing as he followed Danqing's meaning.
"So once I reach Foundation Establishment, I'll be able to control the shape directly."
"In theory, yes."
"And the circuits will still support the full expansion?"
Danqing nodded. "They will."
That was enough for Alexei. He ran his thumb along the hilt and drew back his energy. The massive blade shrank behind them, returning to its normal size in his hand.
Danqing watched him closely, but didn't ask what the plan was.
Two months around Alexei had taught him that explanations rarely helped. Alexei always had a reason, and the reason usually made sense, which only made it worse.
The sword's weight, the gap between Alexei's realm and what he could do, the ten-pattern pills, the planting zone that had no business existing on such a scale... He had gone over all of it more than once, only to end up more tired each time.
So he stopped trying.
After that, the tension in his chest eased. Even his cultivation, which had been affected by weeks of confusion, returned to normal.
He called it acceptance, though it was probably closer to surrender.
Since it worked, he decided not to think too deeply about it.