By late morning, Mengyao and Changgui had been whisked away by their respective masters for the practical matters of settling into sect life.
There was orientation to get through first. They needed to familiarize themselves with the sect grounds, learn where everything was located, and understand the structure of the daily schedule. On top of that, they each had a daunting amount of personal belongings to sort through and organize properly.
Neither of them had received their sect robes yet. For now, they were still wearing the clothes they had arrived in, which made their status as newcomers immediately obvious to anyone who saw them.
For the next several days, their routine would be simple: qi-sensing practice every morning, followed by lectures on basic cultivation theory and sect rules. The rest of their time would be free for personal study or exploration.
None of which involved Alexei.
He'd already sat through those lectures months ago. And as for the written language lessons both disciples would need? He'd memorized about a third of the character book Qingxue had given him. Most of the characters were similar enough to Earth's writing systems that he could puzzle them out. The only ones requiring serious study were the cultivation-specific terms with absurdly complex stroke counts.
With his morning suddenly free, he'd spent it doing what any sensible Minecraft player would do: expanding his infrastructure.
---
The underground farming area beneath his house had grown considerably.
He'd carved out a 7×12-meter plot specifically for spirit plant cultivation. It was large enough to be covered by just two spirit stone torches, which would keep the ambient spiritual energy dense and pure.
Half the plot was already planted with various seeds Yan had given him.
She'd been worried, apparently, that he might eat the wrong spirit fruit and poison himself. So she'd only provided fruits similar to the Brightglow variety, ones that didn't directly boost cultivation but had other beneficial effects.
"Beneficial" being relative, since Alexei couldn't refine spiritual energy anyway. But they tasted good, which was benefit enough.
The selection was impressive. More than a dozen varieties in total, including three new Earth-tier fruits:
Emerald Cloud Fruit - Purified spiritual energy quality. Useless to him personally, but probably valuable for cultivators.
Yellow Dragon Fruit - Strengthened the body and accelerated injury recovery. This one he could benefit from, assuming the passive effects worked even without qi refinement.
Everlasting Peach - Beautification effects. Smoother skin, healthier hair, that sort of thing. Completely pointless for a sixteen-year-old guy who didn't care about skincare, but it tasted amazing. The only downside was yield, each force-ripened tree only produced three fruits.
The lower-grade Mystic and Yellow-tier fruits weren't bad either. Despite their ranks, they tasted just as good as the Earth-tier ones, each with distinct flavors and textures.
Worth planting, obviously.
Now he just needed more space. And more trees. Which brought him to the afternoon's project.
---
Alexei stood in his courtyard, axe in hand, staring at the trees surrounding the sect grounds.
He needed saplings, lots of them.
The wood supply he'd brought back from the Silkspore Basin was completely gone, used up making tools, furniture, chests, and various other necessities. His current inventory had maybe half a dozen planks left. Not nearly enough for long-term sustainability.
The solution was obvious: plant a proper tree farm.
The problem was equally obvious: he had procrastinated on this for months.
In his defense, it was a habit from playing Minecraft. As long as his plank supply wasn't at zero, he'd ignore trees completely. Even if one was growing right outside his door.
The logic made sense in a deeply irrational way.
Chopping down trees took time, and it cluttered his inventory with saplings, sticks, and apples that all had to be dealt with. Eating apples directly was inefficient. They were better saved for golden apples. But keeping them took up valuable inventory space. Throwing them away felt wasteful. And crafting golden apples was tedious.
Sticks were even worse. You needed a few for tools, but most of the time they simply piled up until you threw them away. That meant opening your inventory, which in turn meant dealing with saplings. You either planted them or tossed them out, and neither option was especially satisfying.
It was all tedious.
Because of that, his approach to harvesting trees had always been simple. He either did not chop at all, or he chopped in massive batches and dealt with the mess afterward. There was no middle ground.
This time, however, he needed trees for a different reason. A much better reason.
Beehives.
In Minecraft, newly grown trees had a small chance of spawning with a beehive attached. Each hive could house anywhere from one to three bees.
And bees changed everything when it came to farming.
When bees finished collecting pollen and returned to their hive, they'd pollinate crops along their flight path. Each pollination advanced a plant to its next growth stage, basically the same effect as bone meal, but automatic.
A single bee could pollinate up to ten crops per pollen-collection cycle, with only a short cooldown between pollinations.
For someone planning to scale up spirit plant production to hundreds or thousands of plants? Bees were mandatory.
Bone meal worked fine for small gardens. But there was no way he could manually apply bone meal to a massive farm. It'd take hours. Days, even.
Bees solved that problem entirely.
Plus, he'd get wood, apples, and beehives all from the same activity. Three birds, one stone.
---
The process of obtaining saplings went smoother than expected.
Alexei targeted a few of the unknown tree species growing near his courtyard, nothing important-looking, just generic forest trees that wouldn't be missed.
After breaking enough leaf blocks, a sapling finally dropped.
[Windwood Sapling]
He examined it closely. Aside from lacking roots, it looked like a normal sapling. The leaves were slightly different in color, more blue-green, but otherwise unremarkable.
Back in his courtyard, he tested whether he could assimilate it.
The system accepted it, but the cost was steep: two experience levels. Same as water blocks.
He placed the sapling in his hotbar and walked to the center of the courtyard, where a patch of bare dirt sat between the paving stones.
Crouching down, he placed both hands on the ground and focused.
The sparse, patchy grass beneath his palms began to grow. Thin shoots thickened into lush blades, spreading outward in a perfect square until he was touching a 1×1-meter block of dense, healthy lawn.
He stood, brushed the dirt off his hands, and planted the sapling in the center of the grass block.
Then came the bone meal.
He pulled five portions from his inventory and applied them in quick succession, watching the sapling carefully for signs of growth.
For the first minute, nothing happened.
The sapling remained small and unremarkable. The trunk stayed thin. The leaves looked normal.
He frowned. "Come on. Don't tell me it doesn't work on assimilated saplings."
But after about four minutes, the growth accelerated.
The trunk thickened rapidly, its diameter expanding until it reached roughly a meter across. Its height surged upward as well, climbing to eight or nine meters in a matter of seconds.
And then something weird happened.
The edges of the grass block appeared to function as invisible barriers. Wherever the trunk pressed against those boundaries, its growth stopped entirely. On the other sides, it continued to expand at full speed. The result was a tree with a distinctly unnatural shape. It bulged outward in some directions while remaining flat and abruptly truncated in others.
Even the canopy of leaves was affected. As they spread outward, they hit the same invisible cube-shaped container and compressed inward, forced into geometric shapes.
By the five-minute mark, growth stopped entirely.
What stood before him was a fully formed Minecraft tree.
"There we go," he muttered, grinning. "Now it looks right."
Up close, he could see subtle differences from game trees. The trunk and branches were made of blocks, sure, but thin twigs were still visible between the leaf clusters. Not quite as abstract as pure Minecraft, but close enough.
He punched a leaf block that had a visible branch attached.
The leaf broke. And a stick dropped with it.
He tried again with a different leaf. Same result.
Then he tested an edge leaf, one with only thin twigs, no major branches.
No stick drop.
"Interesting."
So the rule was: leaf blocks with thick branches dropped sticks 100% of the time. Edge leaves with only thin twigs didn't drop anything.
That was way better than Minecraft's standard 2% stick drop rate from leaves.
He pulled out his stone axe and went to work, clearing the trunk and canopy. Wood blocks and leaves filled his inventory steadily.
By the time he was down to the last three leaf blocks, he still hadn't gotten a sapling drop.
His hands were actually sweating slightly as he broke the next block.
Come on. Don't screw me over. I need at least one sapling or I'll have to start chopping down the big shade tree in the courtyard.
And that tree was one of the few providing decent shade around his house. Losing it would suck.
CRACK.
The second-to-last leaf broke.
[Windwood Sapling ×1]
"Thank god," he exhaled.
He broke the final leaf block just to be thorough. Nothing dropped.
Looking down at the grass block he'd planted the tree on, he noticed it had transformed into a dirt block, still usable for planting, but no longer the vibrant green MC grass.
Probably because the tree roots changed the soil composition or something. Doesn't matter. Still works.
---
Several hundred kilometers away...
The grey-robed man stood perfectly still in a small clearing, his gaze fixed on the ground beneath his feet. This was the place. He had confirmed it three times using tracking talismans and residual qi signatures.
His grandson had died here.
The evidence was scattered across the forest floor.
Yuanzhao felt his spiritual energy surge beyond his control. Grey flames burst across his robes, spreading outward in waves of cold fire that left frost creeping along the bark of nearby trees.
His eyes were no longer merely bloodshot. Blood vessels had ruptured outright under the pressure of his fury, staining the whites of his eyes a deep, violent crimson.
For two months, he had been searching.
That time had been spent chasing dead ends, bribing information brokers, and interrogating witnesses who knew nothing. With each passing day, the dread had grown as the trail went cold and the Soul-Fixing Pearl remained silent. That pearl was the only artifact capable of tracking the half-demon girl Heng had been hunting.
It had never failed.
It was silent because it was still resting on his corpse.
And without that pearl, finding one specific cultivator in the Eastern Territories was nearly impossible. Tens of thousands of square kilometers, millions of people, countless places to hide.
He'd known that this outcome was possible.
He'd prepared himself for it.
Or so he'd thought.
It turned out, you couldn't really prepare for finding your only grandchild scattered across a forest floor like discarded trash.
"Who did this?"
The six Ghost Sect disciples standing at a respectful distance flinched at the sound.
They were outer sect members, little more than expendable muscle with slightly better training than ordinary bandits. Two months earlier, the sect had sent them into this region with orders to search for any trace of the Ming family's missing young master.
At the time, finding him had seemed like a stroke of luck.
Now, they regretted ever being born.
Yuanzhao turned his gaze toward them. Three of the six dropped to their knees on instinct. One of them lost control of his bladder.
The deacon leading the group was a Foundation Establishment cultivator named Wei something. Yuanzhao had not bothered to remember the rest. The man looked on the verge of vomiting, his face drained of all color by sheer terror.
Yuanzhao pointed at Wei, grey mist coiling around his finger. "You are familiar with this area. Tell me everything you know. Who killed my grandson?"
Wei's legs gave out beneath him. He managed to catch himself before fully collapsing, but only barely.
His thoughts spiraled out of control.
Shit shit shit shit...
He didn't know. How could he possibly know? They had stumbled upon the remains by pure chance during a routine sweep of the forest. There had been no witnesses and no clues left behind by the killer.
There were only bones, blood, and the growing certainty that whoever had done this was someone you never wanted to attract the attention of.
And he could not say any of that to a Nascent Soul cultivator consumed by grief and rage.
He needed an answer, even if he had to make one up.
His thoughts spun desperately through everything he knew about the local area.
The closest sect was Aureate Summit Sect, a complete joke by any reasonable standard. It was an unranked organization with only three disciples until recently. They were so poor that they likely could not afford spirit stones even if someone offered them at a discount.
The idea that they could kill a Spirit Condensation peak cultivator from the Ming family was absurd on its face.
Beyond them lay Iron Peak Sect and Five Completes Sect. Both were just as worthless, presiding over tenth-rank territories where no one of importance ever bothered to go.
Farther out were Flying Flower Sect and Iron Claw Gate, but those were several days of travel away. It was unlikely they had any involvement.
His mind continued its panicked spiral, rejecting each possibility as quickly as it formed, until one desperate thought finally surfaced.
There was a rumor. It was just a rumor, probably complete nonsense.
People said that the founding master of Aureate Summit Sect had come from outside the Eastern Territories. They said he had once been monstrously powerful, and that when he died, he had left behind Heaven-tier treasures and secret techniques.
Wei had never believed it. Why would anyone that powerful build a sect in this spiritual-energy-starved wasteland? It made no sense. But desperate times called for desperate measures. And better to send a Nascent Soul cultivator after a useless sect than admit "I have no idea and please don't kill me."
He swallowed, steadying himself before he spoke,"There are rumors. About the sect nearest to here, Aureate Summit. Their founding master supposedly came from a major region beyond the Eastern Territories. It is said he possessed extraordinary strength and left behind powerful legacy items when he passed away."
He was embellishing heavily now, adding details that made the story more plausible.
"It's possible... if your grandson pursued the half-demon this far, she could have fled to her sect for protection. And if they possessed weapons or formations left by their founder..."
He trailed off, letting Yuanzhao's imagination fill in the blanks.
It was complete fiction. But it was plausible fiction. And that was all he needed.
Yuanzhao's expression darkened further, if such a thing were possible. His spiritual energy fluctuated violently, creating pressure waves that bent nearby grass flat.
"Good," he said quietly. The word was more terrifying than if he had shouted it. "Good. Good."
So this was where it had been hiding all along. The half-demon had fled to her sect. His grandson had chased after her, and some unknown cultivator, armed with inherited weapons or ancient techniques, had ambushed the boy.
They had killed him.
They had left his corpse to decay.
The half-demon herself could not have done it. The wounds she suffered in the Silkspore Basin would take years to heal. In her current state, she was incapable of such a thing.
But the identity of the killer did not matter.
The entire sect would answer for it.
A unranked sect was nothing to him. He could erase it with ease.
As for the half-demon, that pure and untouched soul had to be secured before she witnessed the slaughter of her sect. Emotional corruption would only diminish her worth as a cultivation resource.
His face twisted into something inhuman, blotched red and black by coagulated fury.
A vast surge of grey mist burst from his body and lifted him into the air as he shot toward the sky.
He did not bother with refined flight techniques or delicate qi control. He relied solely on raw, violent force to propel himself upward.
The six Ghost Sect members watched until he vanished from sight, and only then did their legs give out. They slumped to the ground, the pressure he left behind still crushing their chests.
"Should we follow him?" one of them asked between ragged breaths.
Wei spun around and drove his foot into the speaker's ribs. The disciple cried out and tumbled across the ground.
"You want to follow a Nascent Soul cultivator? Are you completely insane?"
His own breathing was uneven as adrenaline and lingering terror surged through his body. Even with Yuanzhao gone, the memory of that overwhelming presence clung to the air.
"We're only Qi Refinement and Foundation Establishment," he continued harshly. "We would die before we could even keep up with him. Stay away from me!"
He kicked the disciple again for good measure, then forced himself to regain control and turned to the others.
"Stop wasting time. Clean up the remains and collect everything. Do not leave any evidence behind."
Grateful for clear orders, the disciples hurried to obey. The grisly scene demanded strong stomachs, but the familiar rhythm of work steadied their nerves.
As they sorted through scattered bones and shredded clothing, they began to uncover intact medicine bottles. Ceramic and jade containers lay hidden among the debris, somehow preserved despite the violence that had torn the area apart.
The labels had been ruined by water and could no longer be read. Even so, everyone recognized their origin. These bottles had belonged to Heng, and anything he carried was bound to be valuable.
The disciples slipped the bottles into their robes in silence. Each of them tried to keep a neutral expression, even as they noticed their companions doing exactly the same thing.
They continued their search. Wei's orders demanded thoroughness, but greed provided its own motivation. Every corner of the clearing was examined in the hope of uncovering something valuable.
When Wei finally called a halt, their efforts had produced less than a kilogram of bone fragments. The collection was pitifully small, nowhere near enough to form a complete skeleton.
Whatever had killed Heng had left almost nothing behind. Either the killer had been terrifyingly efficient, or the wildlife in the area had finished the work afterward.
Most likely, it was a combination of both.
They abandoned the clearing. No one spoke as they retraced their steps through the forest. Each of them wondered whether they had just condemned an entire sect to destruction based on incomplete evidence.
In the end, none of them cared enough to turn back and question their conclusion.
Survival came first. Conscience could wait. At least, that was what they told themselves.
---
Dusk was settling over Aureate Summit Sect when Qingxue finally allowed herself a moment to relax.
She sat at the stone table in her courtyard, a small book open in her hands.
"This is ridiculous," she muttered, flipping to the next chapter anyway. "Master-disciple relationships don't work like this. They just... they don't."
The book was called Peerless Master, one of several romance novels she'd picked up in Verdantree City. It was trash. The story was the kind of melodramatic cultivation romance where every interaction carried unspoken tension and every misunderstanding spiraled into chapters of pointless angst.
She'd read it three times already.
There was something oddly compelling about watching fictional cultivators stumble through romance with all the grace of drunk oxen. It made her own life seem less complicated by comparison.
She glanced toward where Alexei was working near the edge of the courtyard, making sure he wasn't paying attention to her choice of reading material.
He wasn't. He was too absorbed in whatever ridiculous project he'd started this time.
She went back to reading.
---
Meanwhile, Alexei was having the most productive afternoon he'd had in weeks.
After hours of work, and consuming nearly all bone meal he'd accumulated, he'd successfully grown enough oak trees to harvest seven apples and three full stacks of oak wood.
He'd also managed to get exactly one beehive to spawn, which came with two bees already inside it. Perfect number, really. One bee couldn't breed. Three bees would overcrowd a single hive.
The bees themselves were not what he'd expected.
They were huge. When they landed, each one stood nearly as tall as his waist, round and fuzzy like a normal bee inflated dozens of times over and covered in soft fur.
They looked ridiculous. But they were adorable, even, in a way that made no sense for insects that could theoretically sting him to death.
He had prepared the hive area carefully. He assimilated the surrounding grass blocks with experience points, then crafted lanterns mounted on fence posts to maintain a high light level and prevent hostile creatures from spawning nearby. After that, he used bone meal to grow flowers throughout the area so the bees would have plenty to pollinate.
While he worked, one of the bees drifted over to investigate. Qingxue stopped reading long enough to reach out and pat it. The creature did not resist. It simply hovered there, while she ran her hand across its soft, fuzzy surface.
New world, new ecosystem. The bees were curious about everything, which made sense since they'd literally just spawned into existence.
He was in the middle of planting another pair of saplings when Qingxue's posture shifted, going from relaxed to alert in the span of a heartbeat. Her book snapped shut and disappeared into her storage ring as her eyes fixed on the horizon.
Alexei looked up at her and smiled. "Did you just say 'fuck'?"
"No," she replied evenly. "You misheard."
He raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure about that? Anyway, what's wrong?"
"Someone's coming." Her sword materialized in her hand. "It is a Ghost Sect cultivator at the Nascent Soul stage, and he is angry."
She rose to her feet. "Stay here. This won't take long."
Before Alexei could respond, she shot into the sky, moving fast enough to leave a small crater where she'd been standing.
---
Qingxue intercepted the old man about a thousand meters from the sect's outer perimeter.
His eyes were bloodshot to the point of appearing diseased, and his entire presence radiated naked killing intent. She did not recognize him personally, but she did not need to. The grey mist surrounding him and the distinct signature of soul-draining techniques identified him clearly as a member of the Ghost Sect. That alone was sufficient.
"State your business," she called out.
The old man didn't slow down.
So much for diplomacy.
Qingxue narrowed her eyes and examined him more closely. His cultivation registered as peak Nascent Soul, but the impression was superficial. His qi was withered, and his spiritual energy flickered unsteadily, like a candle struggling against the wind. Age and decline had already taken their toll.
In terms of true combat strength, he was likely no stronger than mid-Nascent Soul. Perhaps weaker.
More importantly, he was clearly misjudging her. That misconception worked entirely in her favor.
She let her sword's power build, frost spreading across the blade. The air around her grew cold enough that her breath misted.
The old man closed the distance rapidly.
One hundred meters.
Fifty.
Fourty.
At thirty meters, his right sleeve exploded outward in a burst of grey mist. His withered arm emerged, and in his palm sat a bronze bell about thirty centimeters tall. More grey mist poured from his body into the artifact, and Qingxue felt the space around them twist as the bell activated.
She'd seen similar techniques before. They were devastatingly effective against injured cultivators or anyone with unstable spiritual foundations. Unfortunately for him, she was neither injured nor unstable.
The bell rang.
Clang, clang, clang...
Qingxue blinked.
The old man blinked.
Nothing happened.
The soul-suppression effect, which should've locked her in place and left her helpless, just didn't work. The bell might as well have been a normal piece of bronze for all the effect it had.
She almost felt bad for him.
Then she remembered he'd come here to kill her and everyone in her sect, and the sympathy evaporated.
She moved her sword.
A vast blade of frost and cutting force formed instantly before the old man's face, manifesting faster than his mind could react. His eyes widened in shock. Grey mist erupted around him as he made a desperate attempt to defend himself.
It was too late.
The strike cut through him from crown to groin in a perfectly straight line.
For a brief moment, he remained suspended in midair, his body still technically whole. Qingxue's frost had sealed the wound the instant it formed, freezing the two halves together into a single shape.
Then gravity remembered it existed.
His body split apart, and the two halves began to fall toward the cloud sea below.
Qingxue watched him drop for a few seconds, making sure his spiritual signature had disappeared, before flying down to intercept the corpse before it could vanish into the clouds.
She removed his storage pouch first. It was a grey bag marked with dark, sinister patterns that practically advertised its owner's nature. She took the bronze bell as well, unwilling to leave behind anything that might prove useful.
Once that was done, she spent a few more seconds finishing the job. What remained of the body dissolved into a fine mist of blood and gore, scattering across the clouds below and staining them red. There was no reason to leave a corpse behind. This was directly outside her sect's front gate, and a pile of bones at the base of the mountain would be terrible feng shui, or whatever the local equivalent was.
With that handled, she descended to the courtyard and landed lightly beside Alexei. One of the bees rested on his shoulder, its wings folded and still.
"You okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine. He wasn't that strong, just loud."
"And dead now, I'm guessing?"
"Yes."
"Good." He nodded, seemingly satisfied with that answer. "So, uh. Mind if I ask what that was about?"
"He was a Ghost Sect cultivator. Most likely connected to the one I killed before." She walked over to the stone table and tossed the storage pouch into the air.
The pouch burst apart before it hit the ground. Its contents spilled out all at once, materializing in midair before crashing down into a massive heap more than three meters tall.
Alexei's attention immediately diverted to the loot pile.
"Holy shit..."
Most of the heap consisted of spirit stones. Mixed among them were several unfamiliar objects, along with cultivation manuals, jade slips, and a handful of medicine bottles.
He noticed there were far fewer bottles than the last Ghost Sect cultivator had carried. Apparently that kidney-deficient idiot had been hoarding medicine like a paranoid doomsday prepper.
This was much more reasonable. This looked like what a normal cultivator would carry.
A black handle caught his eye, sticking out from the pile of spirit stones. He reached over and pulled it free.
[Soul-Suppressing Bell:
Soul Suppression III
Spiritual Energy Circuit II]
The bell itself was bronze with a greyish patina, covered in intricate engravings of three-eyed ram heads. The overall shape was oddly organic, almost like a trumpet flower in full bloom.
"Magic treasure?" he turned it over in his hands, examining the craftsmanship.
The enchantment list was interesting. Soul Suppression was self-explanatory, some kind of soul-targeting effect, presumably the thing that had spectacularly failed to work on Qingxue.
But Spiritual Energy Circuit was familiar. He'd seen that enchantment before, on his own Mystic-Etched Rose-Gold Sword. This one was ranked higher, though. Tier II instead of Tier I.
"The difference between magic treasures and magical artifacts," Qingxue said, settling back into her seat, "is that treasures have their own abilities built in. You just channel spiritual power and they activate. Artifacts just enhance what the cultivator can already do."
"So this is the 'press button, receive soul damage' category?"
"Uh... Yes?"
Alexei gave the bell a shake.
Clang, clang, clang.
It sounded exactly like a normal bell.
"It probably needs spiritual power to work," he said, setting it aside. "I'll figure it out later."
He turned his attention back to the pile.
---
Alexei and Qingxue spent the better part of an hour sorting through their latest haul.
They recovered several thousand low-grade spirit stones and close to a thousand mid-grade ones. There were also fifteen bottles of pills that held no immediate use for them, along with more than a hundred talismans. Most of the talismans were communication types, which appeared to serve the Ghost Sect the same way burner phones did in the mortal world.
In total, they found nine magic treasures.
Seven of them were identical: head-sized black coffins that looked like someone's idea of an edgy cultivation aesthetic.
[Black Spirit Coffin:
Suppression II
Spirit Sealing II
Spiritual Energy Circuit I]
"Prison boxes," Alexei said, turning one over in his hands. "These are for trapping people, right?"
"Enemies, specifically," Qingxue confirmed. "They suppress cultivation, seal spiritual energy, and keep the target contained. They are standard Ghost Sect tools for kidnapping and interrogation."
"How reassuring."
"They're villains. What exactly were you expecting?"
He had to admit, she had a point. Every piece of Ghost Sect equipment he'd seen so far had been designed to look as ominous as possible. Did evil cultivators have some kind of aesthetic requirement? A dress code that mandated everything be black, grey, or vaguely corpse-themed?
The eighth magic treasure was slightly different: a lamp that gave off deeply unsettling vibes even while dormant.
[Soul-Guiding Lamp:
Soul Suppression III
Soul Lock I
Spiritual Energy Circuit II]
"It is a soul container," Qingxue said before he could ask. "It is used to trap and store souls after extraction, usually for refinement into cultivation resources."
"So, horrifying. Got it."
They transferred everything into the storage chests inside Alexei's house. He had established a dedicated treasure vault on the ground floor, separate from the mob farm infrastructure beneath it.
The spirit stones received their usual treatment. He excavated them and began the conversion process. When it was finished, he had gained thirteen additional unassimilated MC-grade low-grade spirit stones. He still lacked the mid-grade stones he needed. The total haul had fallen just short of a thousand. At first glance, it sounded like a significant amount. In reality, it barely made a dent in the requirements of his long-term plans.
All the mining experience went toward assimilating more spirit stones and crafting spirit stone torches.
That was the real prize from this whole looting session: enough resources to start implementing his perpetual motion cultivation ground plan.
The theory was elegant.
Spirit plants converted ambient spiritual energy from the environment into purified spiritual energy. Under normal conditions, this process created a critical flaw. If too much purified energy accumulated, it would sink and displace the surrounding ambient energy, effectively suffocating the very plants that produced it.
Spirit stone torches solved that problem. They provided spiritual energy in a fixed radius. As long as spirit plants were within that radius, they wouldn't suffocate from their own production. Which meant the plants could endlessly convert energy and radiate it outward, completely unrestricted by the torch's limited range.
It was a perpetual motion machine. Or close enough that the distinction didn't matter.
Sure, a handful of high-grade spirit plants couldn't keep up with a normal cultivator's absorption rate during training. But that was a scaling issue, not a fundamental limitation.
One plant wasn't enough? Use ten. Ten wasn't enough? Use a hundred.
Combine spirit stone torches, bees for pollination, and mass-planted spirit herbs, and he could transform the entire interior of the mountain into a cultivation paradise.
As for using experience to assimilate the magic treasures themselves?
He'd tried. His Mystic-Etched Rose-Gold Sword was sitting at level twenty with zero response. Either magic treasures required exponentially more experience to assimilate, or there was some threshold he hadn't hit yet.
Either way, it was a project for later, when he had experience to spare.
---
That evening, Alexei followed his usual routine: clear the mob farm before bed, collect drops, repair tools, repeat.
His luck was mediocre this time. He had only managed to collect one iron ingot and four gold ingots.
On his way back to the house, he passed the Brightglow Fruit tree. He reached up and plucked one of the glowing fruits from a low branch, then bit into it as he walked.
By the time he reached his front door, the fruit was gone, and his hunger bar had recovered by half a unit.
He stepped inside, sealed the entrance behind him, and let himself collapse onto the bed.
Having his own place came with certain comforts. He could stretch out however he pleased without worrying about disturbing anyone else. There were no cramped shared quarters and no awkward late-night conversations. There was only him.
He was asleep in minutes.
---
The next morning started the same way every morning started: someone woke him up.
This time it was the sound of Changgui's voice drifting through his window, enthusiastically butchering some cultivation technique explanation that Quan was trying to teach him.
Alexei groaned, rolled out of bed, and got dressed.
By the time he made it outside, Mengyao and Changgui were both wearing Aureate Summit Sect robes, apparently Qingxue or Yan had distributed them at some point.
They looked ridiculous. The robes were clearly sized for adults, and both kids were swimming in fabric.
"Morning," he said, grabbing another Brightglow Fruit on his way past the tree.
"Alexei!" Changgui waved enthusiastically. "Are you going to sense qi with us today?"
"Already tried. I doesn't work for me." Alexei took a bite of the fruit. "You two have fun with that, though."
He left them to their cultivation lessons and headed for the mob farm.
---
The qi-sensing session was, predictably, a complete failure.
Alexei stood there with his eyes closed, trying to feel the ambient spiritual energy everyone kept insisting was everywhere. Felt nothing. Same as every other time he'd tried.
Changgui didn't have any better luck, though the kid seemed less bothered by it than Alexei had been initially.
"It's fine," Changgui said cheerfully. "We'll get it eventually, right?"
"Sure," Alexei lied. "Eventually."
He gave up and went back to what worked: mob grinding.
This session had barely been productive. He had managed to obtain only two iron ingots, the bare minimum required to craft an iron pickaxe. Still, it was enough, and that was all that mattered.
He spent the next twenty minutes at the crafting table and anvil, combining materials and applying enchantments. When he finished, he held an iron pickaxe with a faint purple light in his hands.
[Iron Pickaxe:
Efficiency IV
Fortune I
Smelting I
+5 Attack Damage]
Three enchantments, ten levels of experience total.
He still needed to add Mending and Unbreaking, which would cost another nine and ten levels respectively. Doable, with enough mob grinding. Maybe by the end of the day if he pushed it.
First, though: field testing.
He went back down into the mob farm area and started mining stone with his new tool.
The difference was dramatic. His old pickaxe had taken about fifteen seconds per block. The enchanted iron pickaxe cut that down to six seconds.
Fortune and Smelting were harder to test, he'd need to mine ore blocks.
He used up about half the pickaxe's durability, then stopped. Without Mending, he couldn't afford to wear the tool out completely.
With his testing done, he headed back outside to resume fishing.
On the way, he scooped up the fox kit that was sprawled on its back, fast asleep on the cushion in front of the Brightglow Fruit tree.
He had begun to notice a pattern. Whenever he fished while holding the fox, his catch rate seemed to improve. It could have been a coincidence, or perhaps the fox possessed some kind of passive luck-enhancing trait.
Either way, he decided to bring it with him.
---
Over by the stone table, Mengyao was trying very hard to pay attention to Yan's lecture on cultivation theory.
Her eyes kept drifting toward the massive fuzzy bees circling over the flower beds Alexei had planted. They were huge, easily the size of her torso, and they made no sense aerodynamically. How could something that round and heavy fly on such tiny wings?
"Mengyao," Yan said, gently tapping her on the head.
Mengyao jumped, her face flushing. "Sorry, Master. I was just... the bees are really interesting."
"They are," Yan agreed. "But you can observe them after the lesson."
Mengyao nodded and tried to pay attention.
It lasted about thirty seconds before her gaze drifted back toward the bees.
---
By noon, Alexei had ground out another eight levels of experience through a combination of fishing and periodic mob farm runs.
He was now only one level short of what he needed for Mending.
"Close enough," he muttered, heading back down into the mob farm for one more session.
He could have used the layered enchantment method by combining the books first and then applying them to the pickaxe to reduce the total cost. That approach would have required only sixteen levels instead of nineteen.
But that meant waiting another day. And tomorrow's experience gain would definitely be enough for Unbreaking anyway.
Why delay?
He applied the Mending enchantment, watching the pickaxe's glow intensify slightly as the magic took hold.
[Iron Pickaxe:
Efficiency IV
Fortune I
Smelting I
Mending I
+5 Attack Damage]
The cost for Unbreaking III had jumped from ten levels to eighteen now that the pickaxe had multiple enchantments. Enchantment costs scaled with each addition, making it more expensive to max out a tool.
He used the remaining mobs to fully repair the pickaxe's durability via Mending, then got to work on his real project: expanding the mob farm.
---
The current design was functional but inefficient. Single-layer farms had limited spawn rates because only so many hostile mobs could exist in a given area at once.
The solution: go vertical.
He planned to build five layers in total. Each layer would function independently, spawning mobs that would drop into collection channels and eventually funnel down into a central killing floor, where he could harvest them.
It was not a small undertaking. Each layer required roughly a full stack of logs to construct, including the floors, walls, and collection systems.
He needed to add four more layers, which meant gathering four additional stacks of logs on top of the three he had already prepared.
It was a perfect excuse to continue farming trees while he waited for mobs to spawn and for his pickaxe to repair itself between mining sessions.
As for spending time with his so-called junior sect siblings, he had no interest in the idea. He was sixteen years old, not a babysitter. He had more important work to do.
---
The next several days followed the same pattern.
On the first day, he focused on tree farming. From the second through the fifth, he expanded the mob farm, fished while holding his pickaxe in his off-hand to repair it passively, expanded the structure further, and then repeated the entire cycle.
During this period, he managed to capture a second zombie villager.
Unfortunately, it had no profession. It was just a generic zombie in villager form, offering no useful trades even after being cured.
The witch still had not spawned.
He was starting to suspect the spawn rates for witches were absurdly low, or there was some condition he wasn't meeting.
Changgui tried to chat with him a few times during this period, but Alexei was usually too busy to do more than grunt acknowledgment. The kid was persistent, though.
"Alexei! Alexei, what are you building?"
"I am expanding the mob farm."
"What's it do?"
"It spawns monsters. I kill them. I collect the drops."
"Oh! Can I help?"
"No."
Alexei felt slightly bad about being short with the kid, so he grabbed a handful of fruits from his inventory and pressed them into Changgui's hands.
"Here. Try these. They're good for you."
Changgui's face lit up. "Really? Thank you!"
The boy ran off, most likely to share his prize with Mengyao.
Alexei went back to work, already forgetting about the interaction.
---
Changgui bit into one of the fruits Alexei had given him. It was green and round, resembling a lime.
The taste struck immediately.
Sour.
So incredibly, intensely sour that his entire face scrunched up and his eyes started watering.
He tried to power through it. Alexei had said they were good for him, so they must be valuable spirit fruits, right? Cultivation resources were supposed to taste bad sometimes. That meant they were working.
He swallowed the last bite, his teeth aching and his mouth still drawn tight from the intensity.
Later, when he tried to eat his lunch from the sect kitchens, even the roasted fish tasted sour. Each bite sent a dull ache through his teeth.
"Are you okay?" Mengyao asked, watching him wince with every bite.
"I'm fine," Changgui said, forcing a smile. "Alexei gave me some really strong spirit fruits. They're probably purifying my body."