The Sect Leader System-Chapter 294: The First Source

Benton had the necessary materials for four of the seven qi sources he planned to create. Kind of. He’d agreed in principle to the terms of the trade for the last Fire material, but it wouldn’t arrive at his sect for another little more than two weeks. That left him with the ability to make Ice, Nature, or Shadow immediately.

Hmm. Ice and Shadow only helped one of his disciples each, while Nature had the potential of speeding the cultivation of a large number of sect members. On the other hand, Yang Xiu and Zou Tian were, quite honestly, more important than all the regular members put together.

Benton sighed. He hated to think of the relative worth of people like that, but his decision required him to be honest. The rank-and-file Nature aspected sect members were, in aggregate, crucial to his sect. They would eventually all reach at least Foundation Establishment and contribute in ways big and small, filling the Pavilions and creating resources and fighting battles.

The sect would absolutely be nothing without them.

But they were also easy to replace. Literally more than ninety-nine point nine percent of the billions and billions of people on the planet could take the place of his current sect members and achieve the same results.

Not only that, but sects weren’t judged by their workhorses for a reason. A single Golden Core could decimate those junior members. Well, such a high-ranked cultivator could easily destroy more than just one in ten juniors, but the point still stood.

The old man who came from Earth still bristled at that way of thinking, but honestly, his prior planet wasn’t really all that different. Fans cheered for the star of the team not the benchwarmer. Celebrities were adored. Trash collectors weren’t.

At the end of the day, all his sect members deserved respect, courtesy, and common decency. The top members simply deserved more. Which left Benton needing to determine which of the two possible disciples got the qi source first.

Yang Xiu possessed phenomenal talent and was pretty much destined to end up astride the cultivator world. She had a real chance of finishing near the top, if not at the top, of whichever bracket she ended up competing in at the tournament. And she was the one most likely to be disappointed if Benton didn’t make the source for her aspect first.

Zou Tian’s spiritual roots weren’t nearly as impressive, but he was probably the smartest disciple. More importantly, he’d recently increased his already strong affinity with Shadow. His enhanced natural ability to hide from spiritual sense was second only to a System given perk.

Most importantly, with his intelligence, stealthiness, and new Knowledge of Spycraft technique, he might actually provide important information about the Jade Chameleon Sect’s plans. He might save lives.

Benton was well aware that he played favorites with his designated heirs, but there was no contest regarding who to give the first source to. Zou Tian’s mission to save his fellow sect members’ lives was orders of magnitude more important than Yang Xiu’s placement in the tournament.

Besides, if things worked out okay, it wouldn’t be long before Benton had the other two qi sources made, anyway.

Time to get to work.

Of the five steps required to create a qi source, Benton had only completed the first—acquiring the materials. Second was extracting the essence from those materials in a cauldron and then combining and infusing them with origin qi for the third step. The fourth was using his skills as a Master Blacksmith to create the container.

He frowned. It made no sense to him to leave the mass of mixed qi-rich materials in a lump while he forged the holder. Logically, it seemed like having the container ready first just made sense.

The thing about cultivation methods and knowledge was that it wasn’t always straightforward, and that problem even extended to System-produced techniques. Something that seemed one way on the first read often turned out to be different later. It was like the technique’s creators took a certain poetic license, leaving their works open to interpretation.

The most probable explanation was simply that the genre of technical cultivation literature utilized its own style. After all, business writing on Earth tended to use buzzwords and be carefully crafted so that the reader couldn’t possibly draw a negative connotation of the actions of the writer. Technical writing, on the other hand, emphasized a straightforward and logical recitation of the facts. And writing fiction, which strove to entertain the reader, required skills that were foreign to the other two types.

Cultivator writing was its own thing, consisting of a lot of flowery language. The author left figuring out the often misleading prose as an exercise for the reader.

All that to say that the manual listing steps in a certain order absolutely did not mean that there was an intention to have the reader perform the steps in that order. Even knowing that, though, Benton hoped he was right about the sequence being optional. Otherwise, he might be about to make a really expensive mistake.

Having made the decision, his first stop was the Blacksmith Pavilion, his favorite forge in particular. Not being a complete idiot, he’d already acquired several dozen ingots of celestial duralumin. When he’d asked around for the best qi-inert material to use in crafting, celestial aluminum was the clear winner, but there was a problem. The material’s strength was lackluster compared to other cultivator materials.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Benton thought about using the metal to create the housing, anyway. After all, the qi sources were presumably just going to sit in a room. It wasn’t like he was building a weapon or structural support out of the stuff.

The counterpoint to that way of thinking was that qi sources were so rare as to be practically mythical. No one could make the things. Acquiring the materials was easy enough, as was making a container. The formation required to finish it, however, was unknown to anyone besides him as far as Benton knew, and a literal Master Alchemist was required to perform the initial mixing. Another hurdle any other cultivator would have was finding a source of origin qi, which was simply much rarer than any other element.

Basically, no one knew how to make these things, and Benton didn’t have much to go on as far as details went. It might be that the molten mixture he created would exert a weight or metaphysical force that was too strong for the celestial aluminum to handle.

Since there was a solution available, an alloy of celestial aluminum that was just as inert but had a higher strength, there was no reason for him not to acquire that instead. So that was what he had done.

With his first ingot of celestial duralumin, he simply played with it, getting used to how the material responded to the heat of the forge and being shaped. It didn’t take long for him to get a good feel for it, and he threw the resulting flattened lump on the scrap metal pile. He didn’t want to risk imperfections caused by re-working the metal, and his practice materials wouldn’t go to waste, serving as a great training tool for the blacksmiths when they graduated to working more complex materials.

Benton’s next choice was the shape of the vessel. His first thought was to use part of the sect’s crest, but the boat was too indicative of Water. And he wanted each qi source to represent the element visually. After a lot of thought, he decided on a Yin-Yang symbol. Which wasn’t great. But really, how the heck does one symbolize Shadow as an element with a single color?

It was then that Benton hit a snag. How big should the housing be? Though he knew the dimensions of each of the three materials that would make up the mixture, weird things happened in alchemy. There was no guarantee that he wouldn’t end up getting rid of ninety percent of the mass of each piece when he extracted the essences. For that matter, it was just as likely that the total volume would end up far greater than the sum of the component parts. Which made no sense but that was just the way things worked with qi.

Alchemy didn’t feel constrained by the laws of physics. Benton wasn’t even sure that the craft even treated what were considered to be the fundamental rules of nature on Earth as suggestions. Instead, it just did what it wanted.

Basically, though, Benton was left with an unsolvable problem. With no way to determine the necessary final volume, he couldn’t forge the housing in advance.

Well, heck. That was probably why the step was listed fourth.

Benton let the fire in the forge die and cleaned up after himself before teleporting to his designated room in the Alchemy Pavilion. Step two it was!

Extracting the essences from the three materials actually went pretty well. He simply chunked each of them respectively into his new cauldron and added heat. The vessel was so well made that he barely even had to make any adjustments to the qi to keep things even, and there was a formation that kept stray ambient qi from intruding into the bottom where the material was melting, eliminating a major source of contamination.

The process was fairly time consuming as the procedure was a bit more complicated than, “Put it on high heat and stir occasionally.” Instead, he had to use very low heat, meaning it took hours to melt each three materials.

Complicating matters was the fact that he had to store each of the essences in an inert container while keeping them heated so as to remain in a liquid state. Which meant he needed two more cauldrons.

Luckily, the pavilion members didn’t practice their craft continuously, devoting most of their day to cultivating, so he borrowed the necessary equipment.

He still performed the actual melting in his own cauldron, though, because the superior craftsmanship eliminated a lot of the potential for introducing impurities into the resulting product. That meant he had to melt the materials consecutively instead of concurrently, though.

Finally, after hours and hours of tedious waiting and stirring and monitoring, all three of the materials had been melted, the essences pulled out, and the leftover sludge disposed of.

Benton was ready to proceed to step three—combining the three essences together and infusing the mixture with origin qi. That process was much less time consuming than the second step, and eventually, he had a perfect fusion of three Shadow essences with, as far as he could tell, no impurities.

As he suspected, the addition of the origin qi had caused the blend to swell somewhat. There really had been no way for him to predict the final volume.

Since the instructions told him to forge the housing next, he assumed that the mixture would remain stable with little oversight needed from him, but if that hypothesis were incorrect, the result would end up being an expensive setback. Thus, Benton stowed the mixture, cauldron and all, into his spatial storage, hoping the stasis effect would solve any potential degradation issues.

To further mitigate that possibility, he maxed out his Time Aura while forging the housing, even going so far as to take off his ring and leave it outside the time bubble.

There was actually nothing super complicated about the forging process. The need for a Master Blacksmith came into play simply because working with qi inert cultivation materials was quite tricky. Benton had enough experience by that point, though, that creating the vessel was quite easy, and after a couple of hours of subjective time, he was finished.

The final step was to inscribe a formation to activate the qi source, which wasn’t exactly a huge issue for a Formations Master. Unfortunately, though, he couldn’t just inscribe the array on the vessel prior to pouring in the liquid.

That would have been way too easy, apparently.

Instead, the formation had to exactly account for certain physical and metaphysical properties of the liquid, which meant that he had to add the mixture to the housing and then perform the inscription.

Luckily, his Body Cultivation was so high that the heat from the molten metal didn’t bother him at all. The array was complex, however, and took many subjective hours to create. Finally, though, he finished.

Holding his breath and metaphorically crossing his fingers, he channeled a bit of Shadow qi into the activation formation. The qi flowed smoothly through the channels, and the entire mixture and vessel glowed. Over the course of a few seconds, the liquid cooled into a smooth solid, and Benton sensed Shadow qi emanating from it.

Yes. He’d done it.

The first source was ready for use.