The sect master's hasty retreat left an awkward silence in the courtyard. Qingxue stood there, arms crossed, staring at the spot where Zhengxing had disappeared with all the dignity of a man fleeing creditors.
Yan sighed. "You're not actually planning to hunt down those legendary items, are you?"
She'd noticed the calculating look on Qingxue's face, that particular expression that meant she was seriously considering something incredibly stupid and dangerous.
"Those kinds of treasures..." she continued, shaking her head. "Even the great families and major powers in the Eastern Territories can't compete for them. How could they ever fall to a sect like ours?"
Alexei, who'd been quietly processing everything, finally spoke up. "What about seeds?"
Both women turned to look at him.
"Seeds?" Qingxue echoed.
"Yeah. If we can't get the fruits, could we buy seeds instead? They'd have to be cheaper than the finished product, right?"
Yan's expression suggested she was trying very hard not to laugh. "Spirit plants don't work that way. You can't just stick a seed in the ground and expect results."
"Why not?"
"Because every spiritual plant has absurdly specific growth requirements. Soil composition, ambient spiritual energy density, temperature ranges, even the angle of sunlight in some cases. Most of them need conditions that can't be replicated outside their natural habitats."
Zhi, who'd been silent until now, adjusted his glasses. "Only a tiny fraction of spiritual plants can be successfully transplanted to cultivation gardens. That's why cultivators risk their lives in monster-infested forests searching for wild herbs."
"Though even in the Eastern Territories' forests, you won't find many high-grade medicines," Yan added. "Earth tier at best, and even those are rare. The risk-to-reward ratio is terrible."
She paused, then smiled slightly. "That said... I do have a seed that could improve spiritual root quality."
Alexei's attention sharpened immediately. Even Qingxue leaned forward slightly.
Yan reached up and unfastened a pendant from around her neck. It was a glass-like ornament on a colorful cord that had been tucked beneath her collar. She held it up to the light.
"This is a high-grade Profound tier Brightglow Fruit seed."
Alexei examined it skeptically. It looked like colored glass. The kind of cheap trinket you'd find at a street market back on Earth.
"A few years ago, when I was selling pills in the city, the shop owner threw this in as a bonus," Yan explained. "Brightglow Fruit trees take seventy years to flower and another seventy to bear fruit. Once mature, they produce nearly a hundred fruits per cycle."
"So why not plant it?" Alexei asked. "Seems like a steady supply if you're willing to wait."
Yan smiled like she'd been expecting that question. "Because Brightglow Fruit trees have extreme requirements for soil spiritual energy. In the entire cultivation world, only a handful of places meet the conditions. And those places already have other plants competing for space. The seeds that do get planted are only the highest quality specimens, carefully selected from the best fruit sources." She held the pendant out toward Alexei. "Most Brightglow Fruit seeds in the Eastern Territories come from imports, the Obsidian Domain or the Frostpeak Domain. Quality varies wildly. This one's decent. There's still life force in it. But I don't have anywhere that could support its growth."
She pressed the pendant into his hand. The glass was still warm from her body heat.
"Since you seem interested, it's yours. If you somehow manage to grow it one day, save me a few fruits as payment."
She was clearly joking. With their sect's spiritual energy levels, even growing Profound tier plants was a struggle, let alone Earth tier ones.
[Brightglow Fruit Seed ×1]
The moment Alexei's fingers closed around the seed, he felt a familiar pulling sensation in his chest. His mind started racing immediately, but he kept his expression neutral. Just nodded politely and pocketed the seed.
Yan, satisfied that her gesture had been appreciated, turned to Qingxue. "I should get back. That pill furnace won't monitor itself, and I'd rather not explain to Zhengxing why I destroyed another one."
Zhi was already halfway to summoning his sword. "I have formation diagrams to review. Let me know if anything else unusual happens."
They both left with considerably more dignity than the sect master had managed, though Yan did give Alexei one last measuring look before departing, like she was trying to figure out exactly what made him so interesting to Qingxue.
Once they were gone, the courtyard fell quiet again.
Qingxue was watching him with that soft expression she got sometimes, the one that suggested she was thinking about things she wasn't saying.
"You don't need to worry about talent," she said gently. "In the future, I'll find pills and spirit fruits to improve your spiritual root aptitude."
Alexei barely heard her. His mind was too busy calculating.
Bone meal.
In Minecraft, bone meal instantly advanced a plant by one growth stage. It worked on saplings, wheat, berries, melons... everything. And the effect wasn't tied to how long each growth stage normally took. A sapling that would take hours to grow and a wheat plant that would take minutes both advanced one stage per application.
Which meant...
If he could MC-ify that Brightglow Fruit seed with experience points, and if bone meal worked on cultivation plants the same way it worked on regular Minecraft plants... He could potentially mass-produce spiritual fruits that normally took one hundred and forty years to mature.
His face must have done something, because Qingxue was giving him a concerned look.
"Alexei? Are you alright?"
"Yeah," he answered absentmindedly.
If Brightglow Fruit seeds were common enough to be given away as throwaways despite being Earth tier, what about other high-level spiritual plants? Were there more "worthless" seeds of valuable plants floating around markets, dismissed because no one had the conditions to grow them?
If he could get his hands on a variety of those seeds...
But he kept that thought to himself. No need to get anyone's hopes up before he'd tested whether the theory worked.
Qingxue was still watching.
"The seed won't help you. Even if you could plant it, Brightglow Fruit takes over a century to produce. A normal person's lifespan wouldn't..."
She trailed off, clearly not wanting to finish that sentence.
Alexei realized she thought he was upset.
"I know," he said, which was technically true. He did know the normal limitations. He just also knew those limitations didn't apply to him. "I just think it's a cool seed. And who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky."
She didn't look convinced, but she let it drop.
"There's something else I wanted to discuss," Qingxue said, changing the subject. "About your cultivation."
"I thought we established I can't cultivate?"
"Spiritual roots are important for traditional cultivation," she said carefully. "But we can start with body tempering first."
"Body tempering?"
"The foundation stage of cultivation. It's less about spiritual energy and more about physical refinement. With spirit stones and the right pills, becoming a Body Tempering cultivator isn't difficult. And it would give you a foundation for potential future cultivation."
She was looking at him hopefully.
Alexei considered the offer.
On one hand, he didn't particularly care about cultivation. He had Minecraft mechanics, which were arguably more versatile and way less likely to get him killed in sect politics.
On the other hand... body tempering sounded like it would make him physically stronger, faster, and more durable. Which would be useful for survival in a world full of monsters and cultivators who treated normal people like disposable resources.
"Wait," Alexei said, a thought occurring to him. "If you're teaching me cultivation, does that mean I have to start calling you Master or something?"
He'd gotten used to just calling her Qingxue. The whole formal master-disciple thing sounded exhausting.
Qingxue's lips curved into a small smile. "You can keep calling me Qingxue. Between us, there's no need for formalities."
"Good. Because that would've been weird." He settled back against the courtyard wall, watching the evening light fade. "So when do we start?"
"Tomorrow morning. But there's preparation work first." She reached into her storage pouch and pulled out a worn booklet, setting it on the stone table between them. "Before body tempering, you need to learn qi circulation. This is the foundation manual."
Alexei picked up the booklet. It was old, but surprisingly well-preserved. The cover had six word written in elegant calligraphy that he could barely parse.
[Body Tempering Art: Qi Nourishing Chapter.]
He flipped it open to the first page, which appeared to be some kind of introduction or preface. The text was written in a formal, archaic style that made his head hurt just looking at it.
[The essence of heaven and earth gathers within the meridians. Through focused intent, qi sinks to the dantian. In the cycle of breathing, spiritual energy mingles. As qi and blood circulate, the body's foundation strengthens...]
It continued like that for several more lines, dense with metaphor and poetic language that probably meant something very specific to cultivators but looked like mystical nonsense to him.
"This is..." He searched for a way to phrase it. "Very classical."
"It's the standard Body Tempering manual," Qingxue said. "Every sect uses some variation of it. Ours is one of the simpler versions."
He flipped another page, hoping for diagrams or illustrations. Maybe some helpful charts showing where meridians were supposed to be. Instead, he found more dense text. Page after page of words, packed so tightly together they seemed to blur into an incomprehensible wall of ink.
[The body is the foundation of life, the source of all things. To temper it is to use heaven and earth's essence to nourish life's roots. Begin by absorbing sun and moon radiance; inhale the rising sun's qi, gather twilight's lingering energy, merge it into flesh, purify bloodlines...]
He kept flipping. More text, archaic phrasing. More metaphors about essence and circulation and transformation.
By the time he reached the end, one thing was clear: there were exactly zero illustrations in this entire booklet. Just page after page of small, dense words written in that formal cultivation style that probably hadn't changed in a thousand years.
He closed the book and looked at Qingxue.
"How much of this do I need to memorize?"
"All of it," she said, like this was completely reasonable. "This is the Qi Nourishing Chapter, the first and simplest volume. It's only fifteen thousand words. Once you've mastered it, I'll give you the Skin Refining Chapter."
"What the fuck..."
Alexei's brain stuttered to a halt.
"You're joking."
"Why would I be joking?"
"Fifteen thousand words?" He gestured at the booklet "Do you have any idea how long that would take to memorize?"
Back in school, memorizing a hundred-word poem had been torture. This was one hundred and fifty times that length... for one chapter.
"How many chapters are there total?" he asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.
She pulled out six more booklets from her storage pouch and set them on the table in a neat row.
Skin Refining Chapter, Tendon Refining Chapter, Bone Forging Chapter, Five Viscera Chapter, Six Bowels Chapter, Meridian Opening Chapter.
"Seven volumes total," she said. "130,000 words combined."
Alexei stared at the pile of booklets.
"You can take it one step at a time," Qingxue added, apparently mistaking his horrified silence for contemplation. "There's no rush. I spent two full years in the Body Tempering stage myself."
A tiny spark of hope flickered. "How long did it take you to memorize all of these?"
"My master said my memorization skills were rather poor. It took me more than half a month to barely get through all seven volumes."
"...half a month?"
"Yes. I was quite embarrassed about it at the time."
Alexei felt something inside him break.
It took her half a month to memorize 130,000 words, and she thought that was slow.
"That's it. I'm out. Whoever wants to cultivate can have it. I'll just stick to farming and call it a day."
Qingxue blinked, clearly not expecting that reaction. "Alexei—"
"You memorized 130,000 in half a month and you think that's bad? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?" He ran a hand through his hair. "I'm not a genius. There's no way I'm memorizing a small library's worth of cultivation theory."
"It's not as difficult as it sounds—"
"It sounds exactly as difficult as it is. Which is extremely." He pointed at the booklets. "Look at this! Have you read this? 'Absorb sun and moon radiance'? 'Gather twilight's lingering energy'? What does that even mean? How am I supposed to memorize something when I don't understand half the words?"
Qingxue was quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed.
"You're right. I forget sometimes how different our educational backgrounds are." She picked up the Qi Nourishing Chapter. "The formal language is traditional for cultivation manuals, but you don't need to memorize it word-for-word. You just need to understand the principles. Though it helps to memorize key passages for meditation and circulation patterns." She opened the book to a middle section. "The core concepts are fairly straightforward once you learn to parse the archaic phrasing."
That was slightly less terrifying. Only slightly.
"So I don't need to recite the entire thing from memory?"
"Not unless you want to pass the traditional sect examinations, which you won't, since you're not formally a sect disciple." She smiled. "I'll teach you the practical applications. You can reference the manual as needed."
"Why didn't you lead with that?"
"I thought you knew. Most people who pursue cultivation are already familiar with how manuals work."
She gave him an amused look. "Get some rest. Qi sensing can be mentally taxing the first few times, and you'll want to be alert."
After she left, Alexei sat in the courtyard and pulled out the Qi Nourishing Chapter again. He read through the first few pages more carefully this time, trying to parse meaning from the flowery language.
It was still dense and confusing, but underneath all the poetic metaphor, there did seem to be technique being described. Something about breathing patterns and focusing intent and circulating energy through specific pathways in the body.
Whether he could do any of that remained to be seen.
But at least he wouldn't have to memorize it all verbatim. What still surprised him was that he could read it at all. It seemed the Minecraft powers had their perks.
---
Meanwhile, several hundred kilometers away...
In a hidden underground chamber beneath the Ghost Sect's main compound, several elderly men in expensive robes stood in panic. Before them were three reinforced cages.
Two zombies wearing torn blue-green shirts and dark pants shuffled in their confinements, occasionally throwing themselves at the bars. In the third cage, a skeleton clutched a bow. The floor of each cage was stained with blood. Beneath the stains, faint golden runes flickered, the only thing keeping these creatures contained.
Elder Feng's hands trembled as he clutched his sleeves. "This is madness."
"We should have destroyed them immediately," Elder Wu whispered. "The moment Elder Ming brought them back, we should have burned them to ash."
"Too late for that now." Elder Chen stared at the creatures. "We've already confirmed everything we feared."
Over the past several days, they'd conducted experiments. Terrible, necessary experiments that had cost them three dozen slaves. The results were worse than anyone had imagined.
These weren't ordinary corpse puppets. Corpse puppets required expensive materials, careful preparation, and had a high failure rate. You had to select quality corpses, preserve them properly, and channel massive amounts of spiritual energy into the transformation process.
These things? These things just made more of themselves.
A single bite from one of the shambling zombies, and a living person would transform. The victim would die, rise again within minutes, and join the mindless horde. And that was just the first generation.
The second-generation zombies, the ones created through infection, were somehow worse than the originals. Faster and more aggressive, they were devoid of reason, felt no pain, and never tired, attacking anything that moved with single-minded viciousness. They inherited the physical capabilities of their hosts. A cultivator's body, transformed into one of these things, retained its enhanced strength and durability. Just without the control or technique that made cultivators dangerous.
Worse still, they could create third-generation zombies. Then fourth. Then fifth... The infection didn't weaken or dilute as it spread. It simply multiplied.
"If even one of these things escaped into a mortal city..." Elder Wu didn't finish the sentence.
They'd all run the calculations. A single second-generation zombie created from a Foundation Establishment cultivator's corpse, released into a city of a million people...
Within a week, there'd be nothing left but walking corpses.
Within a month, the infection would spread to neighboring cities.
And within a year...
"We have to destroy them," Elder Feng said again, more firmly this time. "Whoever created these things was a madman. We can't let this exist in the world."
"But the research potential..." Elder Chen began.
"Is not worth the risk!" Elder Wu's voice rose slightly. "Do you not understand what we're dealing with? This isn't about cultivation advancement or sect power. This is about survival! If the Heavenly Dao senses what we're doing here—"
"The Heavenly Dao won't act unless we harm mortals directly," Elder Chen argued, though he didn't sound convinced.
"These things are harm to mortals! This is literally a plague that turns people into monsters!" Elder Feng gestured at the cages. "We're already walking a fine line just by keeping them contained. If one escapes, if the infection spreads into the mortal world, divine lightning will reduce this entire sect to a crater!"
That silenced the argument.
Everyone in the cultivation world knew the rules. Cultivators could fight amongst themselves all they wanted, wars between sects were common, if regrettable. But harm the mortal population? That was the line the Heavenly Dao would not tolerate.
It wasn't about morality or compassion. It was pure cosmic law. Mortals fell under the protection of human fate itself, and any cultivator or sect that threatened that faced consequences that made death look appealing.
The threat of Heavenly Tribulation wasn't just some abstract concept used to scare children. It had historical precedent... catastrophic, world-ending precedent.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Ten Thousand Demons Sect had nearly unified the entire continent. At their peak, they were unstoppable, commanding power that made modern sects look like children playing with wooden swords.
But power breeds arrogance.
At the height of their dominance, the sect's Holy Son decided he could challenge the Heavenly Dao itself. He gathered materials plundered from hundreds of top-tier sects, mobilized every expert his sect possessed, and created something that should never have existed: the Myriad Souls Banner.
The creation process alone was horrific. The souls of countless righteous cultivators were captured and refined with heavenly fire into the banner's fabric. But that wasn't enough for the Holy Son's ambitions. To complete his masterwork, he used the banner to harvest dozens of mortal cities in a single day. Billions of people, gone in an instant, their life force consumed to fuel his ascension to what he believed would be supreme enlightenment.
The Heavenly Dao's response was a single tribulation lightning bolt descended from a clear sky.
The Myriad Souls Banner, despite being a quasi-immortal artifact of terrifying power, was reduced to dust. The Holy Son died without even time to scream. And the Ten Thousand Demons Sect was annihilated in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
But the tribulation didn't stop there.
The lightning strike left a crater nearly ten thousand kilometers across, carved into the heart of what had been the Eastern Territories' most fertile lands. The spiritual energy drain was so catastrophic that the entire region's cultivation environment collapsed. What had been a paradise for cultivators became the spiritually impoverished backwater it remained today.
The Eastern Territories never recovered.
In the aftermath, the Heavenly Dao granted mortal humans protection through karmic fortune, a safeguard that prevented cultivators from casually slaughtering the defenseless. It was both mercy and warning: harm mortals en masse, and face extinction.
The Ghost Sect's own Hundred Ghost Banner was merely a fragment of that original artifact, yet it still ranked as a quasi-immortal treasure.
The elders standing in the underground chamber understood this history intimately. They knew exactly what happened to those who crossed certain lines. Which made their current situation terrifying beyond words.
"Wait." Elder Feng spoke up, breaking the tense silence. "Is it possible... that whoever created these zombie corpse puppets is deliberately framing us?"
The other elders went still.
Elder Chen's hands were shaking so badly he had to clasp them together. "The concealment methods on these creatures are extraordinarily sophisticated. Even with our Spirit-Sensing Grand Formation, we can't detect any spiritual energy leaking from them."
"Meaning the creator didn't want anyone identifying their origin," Elder Wu added slowly.
"And the location where they appeared..." Elder Feng continued. "The Silkspore Basin is remote, surrounded by cliffs, completely isolated. These corpse puppets couldn't have reached it on their own. They move too slowly. Someone placed them there."
"Right where Elder Ming would find them," Elder Chen whispered.
The pieces were falling into place, and the picture they formed was nightmarish.
"The soul-attacking abilities were bait," Elder Wu said flatly. "Interesting enough to capture for research but not so powerful that he would destroy them outright. And the creatures themselves..."
He gestured at the cages where the zombies shuffled mindlessly.
"We tested them extensively. Their combat capabilities are quite weak. Any Body Tempering cultivator, even a robust normal person, could avoid or kill them if they understood how the creatures moved."
"It's an obvious trap," Elder Feng said, and he sounded like he wanted to be sick. "We're old men. We should've seen this immediately. But we were too focused on the research potential to question why these things fell into our laps."
"Someone's setting us up." Elder Chen collapsed onto a nearby stone bench. "Someone planted these abominations where we'd find them, knowing we'd bring them back for study, and now... Now every sect in the Eastern Territories probably knows we have them. Elder Ming said he felt watched from the moment he took the creatures from the basin."
The silence that followed was broken only by the shuffle of zombie feet against stone and the click of skeletal joints.
"If the coalition of sects learns we're researching infection-based corpse puppets..." Elder Feng didn't finish.
They all knew what came next: a purge. Every sect in the Eastern Territories would descend on the Ghost Sect, and even the normally neutral demonic beast clans would join in. Because nobody wanted to risk another Heavenly Tribulation.
"The Eastern Territories can't survive another tribulation like the one that destroyed the Ten Thousand Demons Sect," Elder Wu said quietly. "If the Heavenly Dao decides we're a threat to mortal populations..."
Divine lightning would erase them all. Not just the Ghost Sect's leadership, but every disciple, building, text, and artifact. Scorched from existence so thoroughly that future generations would find nothing but glass and ash.
"We need to report this to the Sect Master," Elder Wu said finally. "Let him decide what to do with these things."
The others nodded.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away, a certain elder who'd inflated his merit reports was picking his nose and wondering why his ears were ringing.
Someone must be talking about him. Probably saying nice things. Definitely saying nice things.
---
Blissfully ignorant of interdimensional political crises and ancient cultivation sect drama, Alexei was dealing with his own very personal disaster: literacy class.
It had been a week since he'd arrived at the Aureate Summit Sect, and in that time, he'd managed to make decent progress on his construction projects. The courtyard now boasted a two-story wooden-and-stone building set against the mountainside, with a second-floor balcony overlooking the grounds.
The aesthetic was definitely more "Minecraft" than traditional cultivation architecture. Everything had a certain geometric quality to it, clean lines and right angles that looked slightly out of place next to the sect's curved roofs and organic designs. The windows weren't installed yet, so the whole thing was currently open to the elements, but that was a problem for future-Alexei to solve.
He'd also built a barn for Bessie and started a small farm plot. The interior of the mountain was still untouched; that project was on hold until he had better tools and more time.
Right now, he had neither. Because right now, he was being educated.
"Again," Qingxue said, her patience fraying. "The word is 'qi,' spiritual energy. Three strokes. How are you writing it with seven?"
Alexei stared at the paper in front of him, which was covered in what he generously thought of as "abstract calligraphy" and what everyone else identified as "incomprehensible scribbles."
"I don't know! The brush is too soft. It's like trying to write with a wet noodle."
"Every cultivator in history learned to write with brushes."
He was sitting at the stone table in the courtyard, a book about three fingers thick open in front of him. Foundation Literacy Primer: Essential Words proclaimed the cover in elegant script that Alexei could now, after a week of suffering, actually read. That was literally the only positive thing he could say about this experience.
Yan sat next to him, covering her mouth to hide her smile as she watched his struggles. She was technically his writing tutor. Qingxue had appointed herself the strict overseer whose job was to keep him focused and ensure he did the work instead of staring off into space and thinking about mob farms.
It was a division of labor that ensured maximum suffering for everyone involved.
"Look at this." Qingxue held up a paper covered in ink splotches. "This word is supposed to be 'water.' You've somehow turned it into... I don't even know what this is."
He sighed and picked up his brush again, dipping it in ink. "Alright. One more try."
The cultivation world's writing system was a nightmare. Each word had what felt like a thousand strokes, and the meaning changed completely if you made one line slightly longer than another or angled a curve wrong. Plus, there was no phonetic component, you just had to memorize that this complex squiggle meant "mountain" and that complex squiggle meant "river" and if you confused them, congratulations, you'd just told someone to climb a river.
And the primer he was working from had exactly zero illustrations to help. Just page after page of words with brief definitions that assumed you already understood the context.
"The problem," Yan said gently, "is that you're trying to approach this like you approach building. Construction is logical, if you place a block here, it stays here. Writing requires flow and muscle memory. You need to stop thinking so hard about each stroke."
"I'll stop thinking so hard once I know what I'm doing."
"That's not how it works."
"Then the system is flawed."
Qingxue rubbed her temples. Three hundred years of cultivation had given her patience that could outlast mountains eroding, but a single week of tutoring Alexei had pushed her closer to snapping than any tribulation or life-or-death battle ever had.
"How," she asked the sky, "is someone who can build a two-story house in three days unable to write one hundred words correctly?"
"Different skill sets. Building is spatial reasoning. Writing is... I don't know, torture?"
"It's basic literacy!"
Qingxue looked at his latest practice sheet, a page of words that ranged from "technically recognizable if you squinted" to "possibly an ink-related accident."
After a long moment, she turned to Yan.
"Do we have simpler books? I think the Foundation Primer is still too advanced."
---
---
Cultivation won. However, there were strong opinions about adding a magic mod, so I interpreted the description of Option 1 in my own way. Someone even pointed out that this possibility existed.