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According to Jin, that would be fine. I could ascend to the Summit at any time. There was no need to reach any specific advancement threshold. However, while Emperor 4 might be good enough for the sect and the clans, it wasn’t good enough for me. If at all possible, I wanted to reach Peak Emperor.

If I reached the Summit as a Peak Emperor, it was likely that additional opportunities would be available to me, and even if not, advancing to Peak Emperor as soon as possible also meant reaching Martial Sovereign as soon as possible. Additionally, something unexpected might happen at the Summit. Reaching Peak Emperor before leaving Heaven City would ensure that I received as many credits as possible no matter what.

However, while reaching Peak Emperor within the next few years would be ideal, I needed far more contribution points than I could possibly accumulate in that time.

If I wanted any hope of advancing to such a level, I needed help. My friends might be able to spare a few points, but they weren’t much better off than I was. None of them had high-level Rank 6 skills. I could ask Jin for help, but I had already relied on her too much.

As I saw it, I only had one option. My putative ‘master.’ Formation Emperor Shen.

I used a token Shen had given me to travel to the Earth Peak and directly enter his cave at the peak of the mountain. Not long after I arrived, he showed up to greet me.

“Here to use my cultivation cave already?”

I noticed a twinkle in his eye as he looked at me. He knew something.

Taking a deep breath, I gave him a steady gaze.

“No. I need help. Can you… loan me contribution points?”

That simple twinkle turned far smugger and more self-satisfied. “How much?”

“Enough… Enough to purchase all the karmic energy I need to reach Peak Emperor.”

Shen bobbed his head up and down sagaciously. “You’re asking for a loan? This means you plan to pay it back. When can I expect repayment?”

“I…”

Shen closed the jaws of his trap. “You can’t, can you. That is a bit of a problem. While I have been an Emperor in the sect for long enough to build up a substantial number of points, as the Master of the Earth Peak, there are rules that bind me. I can’t just give you points. Even if you are my beloved disciple, that just isn’t allowed.”

I let out an exasperated sigh. I had gotten a good enough sense of Shen to know he was going to give me the points. He was just playing around.

“What do you want?”

“Well, you see, I can’t just give them to you, but I can use them to purchase something from you in advance. Let’s call these points a… downpayment. I’ll hand them over to you now, and you just need to bring me my purchase at a later date.”

My mouth dropped open slightly. “You’re not allowed to give me points, but you’re allowed to give me points if I promise to give you a random item at an unknown point in the future? That doesn’t seem like a very secure system.”

Shen lifted two fingers and tapped his right temple. “That’s how Oaths work. It’s all about intent. Well, mostly. Anyway, I have to sincerely believe that if I give you these points, I am, in fact, purchasing an item from you. I have to believe you can obtain it, that if you obtain it, you will give it to me, and that the item is worth what I am paying for it. As long as those conditions hold, my Oath remains unbroken.”

He gave me a wide grin. “So, Fang, are you willing to sell me an earth-based Earth-Rank fire seed?”

I blinked at him.

“Of course, you will

need to deliver it and pick it back up whenever you give me my memories. That will be a bit of a burden. So, I’ll give you the points now, and then every cycle, those same points will belong to you. You’ll get them whenever you deliver the seed to me. What do you think?”

I stared at Shen. I couldn’t help but feel as if he had been planning this for years. Did he even have those points at the beginning of the loop, or had he been building them up ever since he got his memories back? Had he been waiting for this exact moment?

It was a horrible deal. An Earth-Rank fire seed was worth far more than the energy needed to reach Peak Emperor. That was true… but was it true for me? If I were able to get such a seed once, I could go back and retrieve it countless times. I could build up a small stockpile of Earth-Rank seeds. They would hold little value.

Also, I already had to deliver and pick up his memory orbs. Adding an extra jade box containing a fire seed wouldn’t be any trouble. In a way, he was offering me free access to Emperor-level karmic energy.

However, that was only true if I could actually acquire such a seed.

“I can’t make any promises. I’ve never even heard of such a fire seed. But if I can get it, I’ll let you have it.”

Shen nodded with a sly smile. “That’s good enough. As long as you make a good-faith effort to obtain it, I’ll be satisfied. However, I will not give you even one more point until I get the seed. Understood?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He turned around and waved me away.

“Go on, I’ve got work to do. I’ll transfer the funds into your account.”

Using Shen’s cultivation cave and the karmic energy I purchased with his points, my cultivation base grew rapidly. To reach Peak Emperor before I needed to go to the Summit and meet with Emperor Li, all I needed to do was ascend two or three times a year.

So, between each advancement, I had a bit of extra time. While I maybe should have spent this time learning Rank 6 alchemy to help earn contribution points in the future, I was far too focused on a different project.

Having mastered the soul visualization technique, I was working on learning how to carve formations into my soul. This was a bit tricky, but once I figured out the basics, it wasn’t too much different from carving a formation into solid rock.

One thing that made the whole process a bit strange was the entire concept of size. How ‘big’ was my soul? With the visualization technique, I saw it as a large walled-in garden surrounded by an expansive field of flowers, but it couldn’t really be so big, right? Didn’t it need to fit inside my body?

If the entire field was the size of my body, then the garden at its center would only be about the size of my fist, and the spirit flame at its center would be smaller than a pea. So, if I made what would seem like a regular-sized formation in this soul garden, would it, in reality, be tiny? I had no clue, Shen didn’t know, and the System refused to sell me the information.

That being the case, I could only work with what I knew. If I wanted to create a Qi Gathering Formation that would cover my entire soul, it would need to be designed like a massive grand formation, and learning to make a high-quality Rank 6 formation on that scale would be incredibly difficult.

It would also be exceedingly dangerous. I had no experience with soul formations, and creating one that would contain as much power as would be normal for a formation of that size would be a terrible idea.

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So instead, I chose a different route. In my soul visualization, I saw my storage space as sitting atop a large plinth. My first formation would be limited to that plinth. In the future, when I was more skilled and knowledgeable, I could make a formation large enough to cover the inner garden. Much later, I could make one that would blanket the entirety of the outer fields.

A small formation within the storage space’s plinth wouldn’t be as effective as a larger one, but discretion was the better part of valor. No need to push for too much. If this smaller formation didn’t have the strength I needed, I could simply scale it up.

Still, even with limiting myself to a small-scale formation, I didn’t have the skills needed to make a perfect Rank 6 Qi Gathering Formation. So, I studied. Anytime I wasn’t cultivating, I was studying.

Nearly three years after entering Heaven City, I was able to produce a Rank 6 Qi Gathering Formation that Shen described as ‘adequate.’

I could have pushed for more, but I was running out of time. After this life, I didn’t know how long it would be before I would be in a position to work on Rank 6 formations again, and since I didn’t know what dangers the Summit would bring, I had to complete everything before ascending.

While I couldn’t create a ‘perfect’ Rank 6 Qi Gather Formation, I could create one that was good enough. I just needed to be able to work around its flaws in the future.

Secluding myself in Emperor Shen’s cave, I looked inwards, saw my soul, and focused on the white stone plinth at its center. It had a two-meter-wide circular base extended half a meter above the ground. The column at the center of this base was one meter tall and a quarter of a meter wide. My fire seed sat at the apex of this column.

Ever so delicately, I used a soul manipulation technique to carve the thin swirls of qi vortices at several places around the base of the plinth. These lines were much narrower than would be normal, and the space between them was excessive.

This was my plan. I would carve the best formation I could, and when I later improved my Rank 6 formation skills to the limit, I would be able to carve a far superior version overtop the original.

I carved five equally spaced vortices around the plinth’s base. However, these were not the simple spirals they appeared to be. One line formed the primary spiral and circled toward its central nucleus. A secondary line coiled around this initial line, making a circular pattern around the initial spiral while also spiraling toward the central nucleus itself. A tertiary line coiled around this secondary line, and a quaternary line circled that one.

In total, as a Rank 6 Qi Gathering formation, there were six iterations in each of the five primary spirals. Every sub-spiral had to have a precisely attuned pitch and radius so that the various lines amplified each other and didn’t cause any sort of interference.

After painstakingly carving these five initial inscriptions, I then used a similar technique to create a five-armed spiral connecting each of these outer vortices to the center of the plinth.

Finally, I created a cone-shaped spiraling coil throughout the central column. The tip of the coil was placed at the nucleus of the five-armed spiral, and the wide base of the cone was flat against the top of the column, allowing all the collected energy to flow directly into the spirit fire seed.

In total, working as fast as I could, this took me nearly eight months to create. I was running out of time, but I still had enough to get done what needed to get done. Even if not, even if I had to miss my meeting with Emperor Li, this task was worth that loss.

Gazing at the completed formation using my visualization skill, I couldn’t help but be excited for the possibilities it would unlock.

Tentatively, I pulled five thin strands of qi from my energy body, through an acupoint, into my soul, and used them to activate the five outer formation vortices.

As my small initial investment of qi cycled through the vortex, more energy appeared as if from nowhere and slid into position, increasing the amount of power flowing through the system.

In less than a minute, the outer vortices had gathered enough energy to operate at full power and started feeding energy into the five-armed spiral that covered the base of the plinth.

Before I even had time to blink, the base’s spiral was at capacity and was pouring energy into the cone which then dumped an incredible amount of energy directly into the seed of the Slicing Winds Fire that sat atop the plinth and surrounded my storage space.

The light-green flames showed no reaction. The moment the energy touched them, it simply vanished, consumed by the fire.

Wondering what was going on, I looked inside my storage space.

Everything was pandemonium.

Jade boxes filled with spirit stones, spirit fires, fire seeds, equipment, and more were being flung around at bone-shattering speeds. When they crashed into each other, the boxes burst open and flung their contents into the growing maelstrom. This new debris was then whipped around by the vicious whirlwind and hurled into anything that remained in one piece, destroying or damaging all my possessions.

Reacting as fast as I could, I shoved a large amount of qi into my soul to clog the formation and deactivate it.

It tried to fight me. It wanted to absorb my qi and feed it to the flames, but my peak four-star earth affinity was enough to put up a fight. It took longer than I would have wished, but I was eventually able to kill the formation and end the flow of energy.

Once that was done, I assessed the situation.

In my soul, everything seemed normal. There was no damage, nor were there any signs that the formation had even been activated.

In my storage space, nearly all my possessions lay scattered in several heaps. Low-level refined items had been busted and torn apart by the maelstrom that had unfolded.

Why? What went wrong?

Looking at the half dozen fire seeds that had been knocked out of their jade boxes, I began to understand.

I switched my focus to the Slicing Winds Fire that sat contentedly on the plinth in my soul and surrounded the small orb that represented my storage space. I wanted to curse.

Instead, I took a breath. This was a learning experience. I had learned something.

As I stared at the fire seed, a new thought popped into my head.

I found an unbroken box, stuffed the wind seed into it, and pulled the Cold Mountain Fire into my soul. Then, I unclogged a single vortex of the Qi Gathering Formation.

Energy was pulled through the formation and pushed into the Cold Mountain Fire, but it showed no reaction.

However, in the center of my storage space, a large, spherical granite rock had appeared and was growing at a prodigious speed.

I cut the flow of energy to the formation, took out this new stone, and then rooted around in the piles of trash that was my storage space until I found the mysterious stone from the end of my last life. They were nearly the exact same. The only slight difference was that the new one was covered in small beads of moisture.

Everything began to click. The Expanding Realms Fire burned energy to create space. The Cold Mountain Fire burned energy to create stone. The Slicing Winds Fire burned energy to create… air?

I would need to be careful with that last one. It formed something, but was it normal air? Was it oxygen? Was it carbon monoxide? I would need to do some tests, and it probably wasn’t a good idea to stuff anyone into my storage space until I knew if its new atmosphere was breathable.

Before anything else, I swapped the Cold Mountain Fire for the Expanding Realms Fire. Then, I activated the formation one final time.

Energy poured into the black flames of the spatial fire seed, and I watched as my storage space grew at a visible rate. Every minute, nearly 5 cubic meters of new volume was created. If that kept up, my storage space would grow by over two and a half million cubic meters every year.

Those numbers sounded impressive, but there were a billion cubic meters in a cubic kilometer. At its current rate of expansion, growing a space large enough to store an area the size of NanLu City would be the work of millennia.

However, this was a start. My space was finally growing on its own at an impressive speed, and that speed would only increase in the future.

That was, of course, if I stayed in an area with high qi levels and could keep the formation active at all times. Unfortunately, doing so might be a problem. High-Rank Qi Gathering Formations could drain the environmental qi for miles in every direction. If I kept this formation active in the Wastes, it would easily drain all the energy in Dragon City, and no one would be able to cultivate, not even me.

I returned my focus to the world around me and looked in energy vision to see the effects of my new formation. When I did, I was confused. There were zero signs that it was even active.

I stood up and went to find Shen.

He was working on the same giant stone slab that he had been standing on when we first met.

“Emperor Shen, can you take a look at something?”

He snorted and turned his head to me. “What is it? Another attempt at a formation?”

I furrowed my brow. “I just finished inscribing the formation into my soul. Can you sense anything? Do you see any signs that it’s active?”

He squinted his eyes and looked around the room. “No… Is it working properly? Is pulling in the normal amount of energy?”

I nodded slowly.

“Interesting… I’ve never worked with soul formations myself. This is something worth investigating…”

Since he didn’t have any ideas, I returned to the cultivation cave and sat down. I tried to think of anything that could explain the situation.

Slowly, an important memory crept into my thoughts. A while ago, I had purchased information from that System that seemed a bit… overpriced. I asked if there would be any problem with my soul space when I entered a Trial. The System had told me that there wouldn’t be because the Trial was an expanded physical space. It wouldn’t affect my soul or anything inside of it.

Was that related? Was the formation pulling energy from… elsewhere? From some type of spiritual space?

That… That had the possibility of being problematic. Would running a Qi Gathering Formation be detectable? Would it cause new issues with some type of… spiritual entity?

I couldn’t allow myself to be chained down by unknowable ‘what ifs,’ but I could take reasonable precautions against them.

“System, how much to… to conceal the effects of my Rank 6 formation? It doesn’t have to be perfectly concealed. I just want to make it so that its effects won’t be noticeable unless someone at the level of an Emperor or above is intentionally looking for it.”

Cost 225 billion credits.

That was a tough cost to swallow, but I was trying to hide the effects of a Rank 6 formation, so it made sense. I could probably lower the cost by lowering the power of the formation, but that wasn’t going to happen.

“Purchase.”

Purchase confirmed. 63,213,100,550 credits remaining.

I felt a subtle change in the world that I couldn’t quite describe. Suddenly, things just felt… calmer.

I looked into my soul and storage space. The formation was still churning away, and the space was growing as rapidly as ever.

Then, my eyes landed on the piles of trash that my storage space now contained. The large heaps of broken boxes, spirit stone dust, and random spirit fires were shifting and tumbling as the space around them grew.

It was time for some spring cleaning.