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Using both my Rank 2 token and one I borrowed from JiaQi, I entered the wood libraries and grabbed all of their techniques. I also took tokens donated by LiTing and Yan to enter the metal libraries.

To round things out, YuLong gave me two tokens to use on the water libraries. I didn’t need anything from there myself, but I wanted to try to use a water-based formation to help him with the Fire Peak Trial. Because of the qi situation in the Trials, the formations would have to be charged before entering. This meant he would only be able to use them a limited number of times, but some help was better than none.

At this point, I was feeling the limits of my ability to learn and develop new formations quickly enough. Master Qin was my ‘formations teacher,’ but all he did was show up once a month, give me a few suggestions, and then leave me to figure everything out on my own. To deal with this situation, I purchased an enhancement to my formation comprehension to give me the boost I needed.

Purchase confirmed. Cost 49.5 million credits. Credits remaining 1,522,275,658.

Over the course of five months, I created everything I thought I might need in a wood-based environment.

Wood qi would be available in abundance, so I had a lot of freedom to work on any formations that used it. Since wood was weak to metal, I also wanted to use metal-based formations, but because those would have to be ones that I could precharge, my options there were a bit more limited.

Ultimately, what stopped me from preparing too many formations was their size. We couldn’t bring storage bags with us, so everything would have to be carried in a regular backpack. As a cultivator, I could haul around a heavy load, but if my backpack was too large for the Trial’s entrance, I would have to leave it behind.

While I was limited in the number of formation stones I could take with me, I had far more freedom to carry around a large number of pills. I stocked up on plenty of incendiary fire pills and metal-based herbicides.

Inside the Trial, I was faced with various plant monsters to slay, trees to climb, and bramble patches to force my way through. I was able to use the pills I prepared to brute force my way through most situations, and when I faced tough opponents, I used metal qi shaped charge formations to destroy them.

There were a few places where this ‘salt the earth’ strategy failed, such as an area where the intended solution seemed to be controlling a tree limb to create a bridge, but I was able to use a combination of the formation stones I had prepared to force my way through the early obstacles.

My first trip through the Wood Peak Trial saw me reach stage 16. I took notes on what additional formations would be needed to go further more smoothly, and when I returned six months later, I completed stage 20. That gave me enough essence to reach mid five-star in my wood affinity. However, unlike in the Fire Peak Trial, I wasn’t given any extra reward for my performance.

As soon as my affinity broke through, I went ahead and made it permanent. I didn’t want the discount from raising my affinity to fade away.

Purchase confirmed. Cost 335,210,414 credits. Credits remaining 1,187,065,244.

Unfortunately, it seemed like I had lost a great deal of the potential discount because of the six-month delay after my aborted first run.

During the time I was preparing for the Wood Peak Trial, the date of Lin LiTing’s death in the previous timeline passed without fanfare. We had a competition against another class close to the date it was supposed to happen, but I didn’t see the boy who had killed her with them. My presence and how I had altered events must have been enough to avoid that tragedy.

I knew that her death hadn’t simply been an accident during sparring. She had been assassinated, and the reason had to be related to her profession. In the last loop, I had not been there to provide pills or formations, so the group must have broken down and decided to use her weaponry.

It was a little odd that Zhuge Yan allowed that, but in truth, I didn’t even know if this group had stuck together after I left. A few of them might have had too much trouble paying for the elite classes and dropped down to the regular ones. Either way, it did tell me that the source of LiTing’s problem was that she revealed her profession to the wrong person in the Academy. It wasn’t something that had followed her from home.

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I planned to leave again at the end of this term, and new problems would likely emerge after I did so. I would be extremely focused on rushing my cultivation after I left, so it would be hard to keep an eye on things here, but I needed to find a way to do so.

Using all the resources available to me, I was able to push through to the thirtieth stage on my third trip to the Earth Peak Trial. On my fourth attempt, I was able to reach the thirty-fifth stage. This allowed me to gain enough essence to break through to low five-star. The process of breaking through felt slightly… deeper than it had when I broke through with fire, but the difference didn’t seem important. I registered on the testing orb as a normal person with a low five-star earth affinity.

I took this opportunity to see if my supposition about my affinities was correct. I doubted I would be charged for the information this time since if the System did want to charge me, it wouldn’t matter. I would be told for free the next time I died anyway. Knowing early might change the importance I placed on cultivating essence for the rest of this life. However, if cultivating it was doing something other than giving me permanent affinities, I would only be more interested in doing so, not less.

“System, how much to permanently increase my earth affinity to low five-star?”

Cost 0 credits.

I might have put myself through hell in the Earth Peak Trials to get there, but I had saved myself 100 million credits. Even if it was a small amount for me these days, saving anything was nice. It also pointed me in the direction I would need to walk if I wanted to push my affinities to the very limits of this world.

With my speculation confirmed, I could have switched to absorbing the essence normally at this point, but I decided to try my best to grab another free permanent affinity boost since I had to participate in these Trials several more times anyway.

In the following three attempts, I reached the thirty-fifth stage, then the fortieth stage, and on my final Trial as a first-term Master, I was able to reach the fiftieth stage. Even pushing so far, I was unable to accumulate the essence needed to break through to mid five-star.

After reaching the end of the fiftieth stage, I was exhausted. I had run out of formations and pills, and I didn’t have any time left on the clock. As the final seconds were ticking down, a voice echoed from the walls of the Trial, much like it had at the end of the Fire Peak Trial.

“Why haven’t you switched to just absorbing it? You\'ve consumed enough essence to take a normal person to the peak of five-star. You’re just wasting it at this point.”

This comment made me laugh. I couldn’t tell it the truth, but I could tell it a truth. “I don’t know. I should have given up on this long ago. I just couldn’t let go of the feeling that this was what I needed to do.”

There was a long pause after my words. Likely, this was from the person I was talking to cursing at me.

“When you join the sect, are you going to choose the Earth Peak?”

This was something I’d been thinking about, so I had my answer ready.

“Yes, I want to study more about formations. I want to learn more about spatial bags and… areas like this.” I waved my hand around at the Trial.

“Fine. I will accept that you have passed the Master-level version of the Earth Peak Trial. Just remember what you said.”

As I was about to respond, a tide of essence entered the cavern and tried to drown me. I cultivated it as quickly as I could, not wanting to let any of it go to waste.

When the last drop of essence was gone, I felt a deep snap and knew my earth affinity had advanced to mid five-star.

I bowed to the empty air before departing the Trial.

Outside, I saw LiTing waiting for me.

“How did it go?”

I gave a weak smile and responded laconically. “My affinity broke through.”

She wanted to congratulate me, but I wasn’t in the mood. Yes, I had achieved my goal, but it wasn’t entirely through my own efforts. It was hard to feel too excited about just being given the affinity.

“Don’t worry,” LiTing said, sensing my mood. “This is only the beginning. There’s still a long way to go from here. We’ll get plenty of more chances against these things in the future.”

When we returned to school, Instructor Yuan gathered us together.

“With the final Trial over, we only have a few weeks left until the end of the term. You should disperse your meridians and begin cultivating the Rank 2 technique that you wish to use moving forward.”

She looked around at us, giving me a bit of a side-eye. “Even though some of you have tried to fail, you have all been able to accomplish your requirements for staying in this class next term. You may do so if you wish, but you first need to understand what it will involve. There will be no more Trials. If you are assigned to teach a class, you won’t participate in any more martial contests either. The second term is focused on training you to teach Disciples. Other than that, there will only be lessons on soul cultivation.”

She paused for us to consider this before continuing.

“As far as the Nine Rivers Sect is concerned, these are lessons that are only required for those who wish to walk the path of a Sovereign. Having a good understanding of how to guide others is valuable for Rulers, but the sect has paths all the way through to Emperor that you can walk without this knowledge. It is only if you wish to challenge for a position as a Sovereign that it is essential.”

“What if we don’t continue?” asked JiaQi. “What would we do instead? And how will it hurt the others?”

The instructors smiled at the last question. “This is your choice alone. It won’t negatively impact anyone else. If you choose not to continue in these lessons, you have a few options. You could take the regular classes for Martial Grandmasters, you could leave the school for a time, or you could try to enter the sect directly. Right now, you should all be capable of passing the Exam as outer sect disciples.”

I knew what I was going to do, but I was worried about what would happen to my classmates when I left.

“Take the night to think about it. This is an important decision, so you shouldn’t rush it. You might want to talk it over together.”

With that, she left the room to give us time to think.