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This reminded me of problems I had with my Rank 1 cultivation technique. I had to be careful about the size and locations of the acupoints I used. If I wasn’t careful, they would begin to interfere with each other and slow down my cultivation rate. I wasn’t even sure how to address this problem from a cultivation standpoint, much less how to handle it for a factory filled with formations.

These thoughts reminded me of the Earth Rank cultivation technique I had stashed away in my mental library. It seemed to have some method for controlling the turbulence, but without cultivating it, I couldn’t be sure how it worked. I could give the technique to a Hu clan youth with high earth affinity and learn from their experiences, but I wasn’t sure if that would be a good idea or not.

While I was pondering this option, the Hu clan representative walked up and broke me out of my musings.

“This turbulence is difficult to deal with. Our usual approach has always been to avoid putting so many formations in a confined area,” he admitted. “This floor alone is probably going to have at least forty or fifty of them by itself when we’re done, and that’s causing new issues.”

“Do you have any ideas for how to fix it?” I asked directly.

He sighed. “This was one of the reasons we suggested using the Rank 4 Qi Gathering Formation. We were hoping that by pumping the area full of qi, this wouldn’t be a problem. Don’t get me wrong, it has helped. Having the extra environmental qi means that even if it’s somewhat turbulent, there is still always enough to keep the formations functional. The turbulence is only stopping them from running smoothly, so they create a worse final product than they should.”

We walked around the factory floor together while he contemplated how to proceed.

“As I see it, you have three options. The first is to install a few formations around the walls. We can use those to generate a kind of laminar qi flow over each individual production line. That would somewhat isolate the effects of each production line to its own stream and reduce the overall turbulence. That would require constantly moving large volumes of qi, though, so it won’t be cheap. We’re talking at least Grandmaster level with high maintenance costs.”

I shook my head. With a high price and low effectiveness, this wasn’t the way to go. “And the other options?” I asked.

“The second option is going to be even more expensive. This problem is caused by having multiple independent formations within the same room, each drawing upon the environment to power themselves. The straightforward method to solve this is to integrate them into a single large-scale formation. Think of it like this. Right now, each formation is drawing its own power. Instead, we would create one central power supply and use that to send power to each part of the factory. We could even look at restructuring the existing Qi Gathering Formation to provide qi directly to the formations instead of only creating a bubble of higher density.”

“If that was an option, why didn’t we do that to begin with?”

He slumped his shoulders. “The cost. Having a small formation that powers itself locally is simple to create with cheap materials, but if we wanted to do a distributed system like this, ordinary rocks would fail almost immediately. We’d have to use a much stronger substrate for the formations because the central power unit would constantly be pumping out a much larger volume of qi at a high density.”

I cocked my head to the side. “If gold can solve this problem, it isn’t a real problem.”

“Not gold,” said the representative. “You need Rank 4 materials. That costs spirit stones. Also, we would need to establish pathways and distribution hubs throughout the entire factory to control where qi gets sent and how much to send. This would likely require a Formation Lord. Having multiple separate formations is far simpler. Especially because if something goes wrong, you can just replace the piece that broke instead of needing to do major repairs on the entire system.”

The analogy that came to mind was wiring a building for electricity. Right now, we were essentially powering each formation off individual solar panels, but he was suggesting replacing that with an electric grid that would allow us to plug in formations and let them draw from a single generator. The complications inherent to creating a distributed qi network meant this would need to be put on the back burner for now, but it was an idea to look into in the future.

“So, you should know that isn’t going to happen, right? What’s the actual solution we are going with?” I asked.

He gave a wry chuckle. “Well, you built this monstrous damn factory. It’s over a hundred meters long, and each formation only takes up about a square meter of space. I was thinking we would have loads of extra room in here. Instead, we’re going to start spreading everything out as much as possible. The further the formations are from each other, the less they will interfere. It will mean a more robust track system, and it will slow down pill production a bit if the ingredients have to be carted across the entire floor, but it should mostly take care of the turbulence issue. Not perfectly, mind you, but it should be good enough.”

“Right now, our system is set up so that a production line is only working on a single pill at a time, right?” I asked. “If we change it so that there are five or ten pills in active concoction at any given time, the travel time shouldn’t be an issue. An herb gets melted, and when it advances to the purifying stage, another herb is added to the line to get melted immediately instead of waiting for the first to complete the entire process.”

This was how a real production line was supposed to function. Machines on production lines were constantly at work, they didn’t wait for an item to pass through every machine before starting on the next.

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“If the line is too long and there is still a wait because of the herb’s travel time, separate the journey into steps,” I continued. “Melt the herb, move the track once, melt another herb, move it again, and melt a third. On the fourth step, a fourth herb is melted, and the first herb gets purified.”

The Hu representative looked pensive at this proposal. “Lord Su, doing this would indeed solve the issue of travel time, but it would destroy the original purpose of spacing everything out. The herbs need to be suspended in formations, and if so many are added to a track, the final result would be turbulence far greater than we are dealing with right now.”

I nodded. “I understand, but it’s worth attempting. Having the steps in between the stages might not work, but we should be able to get away with always having an herb at every station.”

“I’ll talk with the other specialists and see what we can do,” he conceded.

Construction in the factory continued for another week before everything was installed and operational. The formations weren’t perfect, but they were good enough.

My ministers had all been briefed, and they were ready to handle the first delivery of pills. Minister Lu would take care of purchasing the ingredients and selling the pills, while Minister Bei, my Minister of Personnel, took care of deliveries and distribution.

When the first cart filled with jade pill boxes left the factory, a surge of karmic energy immediately streamed into my dantian. My subjects didn’t have the pills in their hands yet, but the moment they left the factory, I was already credited with changing the futures of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

When I looked at my middle dantian, where my karmic energy was stored, I found that this energy boost had provided me with more than enough to advance. I could finally step into the realm of Martial Lord.

Not wasting a moment, I rushed to the Water Library to begin studying the Rank 4 cultivation technique.

The first part of the Water Lord’s technique manual focused on warnings about how to know if one was ready to attempt ascension. This is how I learned how much energy I would need before I could proceed. Having now met all the requirements, I was ready to take the next step.

The cultivation technique was designed with only a single element in mind, but after studying it, I realized that this wouldn’t pose a problem for my dual-element technique. If the elements couldn’t form a constructive relationship, there would be problems, but I could simply feed wood into fire and use the resulting empowered qi where needed.

To begin, I took a small portion of karmic energy and shaped it into a flat disk. I didn’t have a karmic affinity, if such a thing even existed, so I was relying only on the strength of my soul to do this. The technique was designed for people without such an affinity, though, and my soul was unusually strong for someone of my age and stage of cultivation, so I was easily able to perform the necessary work.

Once the disk of karmic energy was formed, I treated it like a piece of clay. I pressed into the center and worked to slowly mold the energy from a disk into a hollow sphere the size of a large marble with a single small opening. Once it was shaped as well as I could make it, I moved it to the center of my middle dantian, and it locked into place.

Before the marble could fully set, I took additional karmic energy and generously layered it on top of the original, increasing its thickness. In a side commentary, the cultivation technique suggested if one were capable of creating a sphere of sufficient thickness without needing to do it in layers, it might be better, but it said that this layering process was necessary unless one had extremely strong control of their karmic energy.

The last step of the core formation process was the most difficult. I needed to create an aperture over the opening that would act as a one-way valve that would allow me to push qi into the core while letting none of it escape.

The valve design in the manual seemed questionable. It was extremely complex and required the karmic energy in some places to act like a metal and in others to act more like a rubber. This difference was caused by injecting small bits of qi into the karmic energy, weakening it. After studying the manual for some time, I decided not to follow it. It was clearly stated that the only purpose of the valve was to seal in qi that was injected into the core, and I believed I could create something better.

I decided to use a design based on the poppet valves in internal combustion engines. In concept, they were very simple to make, and they would create a positive seal within the core to keep anything from escaping even at extremely high pressures. Best of all, they could be created using only solid parts, so I didn’t need to try and weaken the karmic energy anywhere.

I built up the marble core a little more, rounded out the inside of the injection hole, and created a small structure on the outside of the core to hold the valve stem. Then, I created the poppet valve directly inside the core and attached the stem to the outside structure.

The only problem was that there was no pressure inside the core to hold the valve in place, so if I wasn’t manually controlling it, it didn’t seal the hole correctly. I could have tried to create some type of spring mechanism to hold it closed, but that would have been a bit complex, and once pressure started building in the core, it would be completely unnecessary.

With my core complete, I could be considered a Half-Step Lord, but that was a meaningless title. All it meant was that I was ready for the real breakthrough.

Before, qi refused to pass from my two outer dantians into the middle one, but now things had changed. With my core in place, I was able to easily pull streams from both dantians. There was only one opening in the core, so it could only accept a single type of qi. I began feeding the wood qi to the fire qi, making the fire qi fiercer and much more powerful.

Little by little, I worked on sending the combined qi into my core.

After an hour of work, the pressure started to build. I mentally grabbed the valve and slid it into place, trapping the qi in my core. I felt my power to see if it had changed, but all I felt was drained since my dantians were empty. My core needed more qi, but I didn’t have any to give it.

I sat down to rest and used Rank 3 Qi Gathering Pills to quickly restore my energy. I set my jaw, gathered a large quantity of qi from both dantians, and sent it to my core. The pressure inside meant I couldn’t open the valve with my soul strength alone, but by pressing on it with the force of my combined qi, it popped open easily. I didn’t want the valve to move too far out of position, so I didn’t push too hard. Instead, I constantly built up the pressure I was using, making sure to never have more than a small gap between the core’s wall and the value.

An hour after I started this, my dantians were emptied, and the qi flow suddenly cut out. The moment the external pressure vanished, the pressure inside my core slammed the valve shut.

I rested, gathered energy, and began again. It took me several cycles, but after half a month of slowly forcing more and more qi into my core, I felt like I was on the verge of a breakthrough. I immediately cut off the stream of qi and allowed the valve to slam close.

If I had kept going, I would have broken through with qi alone, and that would have given me a far inferior result.

After taking time to refill my dantians, I centered myself and focused on my core. I pulled in strands of qi from both dantians and merged them, feeding wood into fire. Then, I grasped my last remaining strands of karmic energy. I could only hope it would be enough to finish the job. I started braiding them with my qi in the pattern the cultivation technique described. This bonded my qi with the karma of the city, strengthening and empowering it.

I forced the braided energy into my core. It met resistance almost immediately, but I kept pushing as hard as I could. A slow, sluggish qi flow wouldn’t work here. I need it to be sharp and forceful.

When my energy was nearly depleted, I felt the world break. The compressed qi at the center of my core collapsed into a singularity, opening a small hole into the world beyond.

A spear of braided qi and karmic energy pierced through that hole and attacked a chain forged from the laws of Heaven and Earth. With the power of that strike, one of the invisible chains that had been restraining my body shattered, and I gained a deeper connection with the world.

I had advanced to Martial Lord.