The Undying Immortal System

Chapter 280: Life 75, Age 56, Martial King Peak

After several moments passed without anything happening, I exerted my will to cut off the Qi Gathering Formation in my soul and force the Solid Mountain Fire back into my storage space.

This stopped the flow of earth qi into my storage space, but the nervousness radiating from my karmic energy affinity didn’t abate.

I once again considered abandoning this life and escaping to a fresh start. Part of me was even willing to leave my entire clan behind to do so. However, I knew that this wouldn’t do any good. Whatever the ultimate source of this nervousness was, it was bigger than a single timeline.

What should I do? What could I do?

I did my best to try to understand what I was feeling.

Whatever was going to happen... It was inevitable, but it wasn’t imminent. I still had time. I could still prepare.

Prepare for what? I didn’t know. Would my preparations change anything? Almost certainly not. But what else could I do? Hide away? That wouldn’t change anything.

Cautiously, I reached into my storage space and pulled out the seed of the Solid Mountain Fire. Then, after taking a deep breath, I shoved it back into my soul.

Nothing changed. The feeling of nervousness didn’t increase. The world didn’t end.

I nodded to myself.

Whatever was going to happen, I would survive. I just needed to create a place that would allow my clan to survive as well.

There was a lot about my storage space that needed fixing, but the first thing that I needed to do was to get some more land.

The previous ‘ground’ that I had created was a mixture of stone and soil from the territory of the Flowing Mountain Sect. I had done my best to copy the natural terrain of the region that I had pulled the materials from and created layers of bedrock, sandy gravel, and soil. This had worked, but I knew that I could do better.

I wanted to create a space capable of growing high-quality herbs, and I didn’t have the level of herbalism knowledge necessary to design such a place. So, before rushing into anything, I first paid a visit to my disciples.

As I entered the library where Bao and SuYin were busy studying soul cultivation, they stood and bowed to me.

“Greetings, Master.”

I waved this away. “Sit, sit. I need to talk to the two of you about something.”

As I moved to sit down, I cleared my mind and allowed my soul to probe the room around me. When I did, I noticed faint traces of light and dark qi as well as a tinge of special energy. ⱤA₦ỐbĘs̈

I nodded to my disciples. “Have you two been back to the Wood Peak recently?”

Bao shuddered slightly. “Yes... Master... It is... difficult, but I’m strong enough to go there without being overwhelmed now. I haven’t attempted the Trial yet, though.”

I bobbed my head. “Understandable, but you should at least enter and check it out. It might not be as bad as you expect. The barrier around the Trial should shield you from anything on the peak itself.”

Bao ducked his head but didn’t respond.

I turned to SuYin. “What about you? Have you tried it yet?”

“Yes, Master. I’ve been able to raise my wood affinity to peak five-star. Once I advance to Lord, I’m sure I’ll be able to go even further.”

I smiled at her. “Excellent. Though, you two should both look at ascending as soon as possible. There’s no real reason to delay, and SuYin, you only have another four years before stagnation sets in. You shouldn’t put it off any longer.”@@@@

So, then, I had to consider... The higher the Rank of the bedrock, the more powerful of a grand formation I could create.

Still, this was only a theoretical future scenario, and I had to deal with the realities of the situation I was in. Creating a bedrock out of Rank 6 stone might be nice, but it would be insanely expensive, and melding everything together would be a significant undertaking.

After thinking through a few options, I decided on a layered approach.

The bottom-most layer would be pure quartzite. While quartzite was a Rank 4 mineral, it wasn’t a very good one. Ideally, I would use something like corundum, but sourcing a large volume of corundum was tricky. I would have to use sect missions to purchase it in bulk, and people might get suspicious when they never saw me make anything with it. With quartzite, I could just go out and steal a mountain.

Above the quartzite would be a layer of marble, then a layer of limestone, and finally, a layer of granite. With four separate layers of materials from Rank 1 to 4, I would be able to create different Ranks of formations in each one. Then, in the future, I could look at adding additional layers beneath these for higher-Rank minerals.

After running a few numbers, I decided to make each layer 20 meters thick. This would give me 80 meters of bedrock, and then, I could place another 70 meters of soil on top of it.

Once I was happy with my plan, I slipped away from the sect and went hunting for mountains.

As it turned out, finding an entire mountain made from a Rank 4 stone was a bit tricky. Most such mountains were considered precious resources, and nearly all of them were being actively mined. However, after a bit of searching, I found a quartzite mountain that no one was using in a remote corner of the Empire of Eternal Winter, YuLong’s homeland, and since YuLong had a grudge against the empire’s leadership, I didn’t feel guilty about stealing its resources.

Using my earth qi, I carved this mountain up into a series of blocks 20 meters to a side and then pulled these blocks into my storage space one after the other.

To completely cover the bottom of the space, I needed nearly 5,000 such blocks, so this took quite a bit of work, but eventually, I got it done. When I was finished, the only spaces not covered with quartzite were a large circle in the middle and the various places where I had constructed bunkers to store my personal possessions.

I didn’t stop there, though. Upon seeing this base layer of the storage space take shape, I had what I felt was a brilliant idea.

I continued carving up blocks and pulling them into my storage space.

Using these additional blocks, I created a 40-meter-thick, 300-meter-high quartzite wall around the entire space. Once the ground was filled in, this wall would only be 150 meters high, but that was more than enough.

How many apartments would people be able to carve into such a wall?

Manipulating a Rank 4 stone would be tedious, far more difficult than carving into Mount Jiang had been, but eventually, this wall might be able to provide living spaces for tens of thousands of people.

Once I was done with the quartzite, I departed the Empire of Eternal Winter and looked for other mountains to pillage. As expected, marble, limestone, and granite were much easier to find, and once found, they were also much easier to carve up and send into my storage space.

To me, this task felt like it took no time at all, but in reality, it took years to accomplish, and even upon returning to the sect, I still had work to do. Cutting up the mountains into large blocks had been necessary, but for my storage space, I wanted to meld everything together into one large, solid slab.

The only problem was that these stones had to remain in my storage space. I couldn’t take them out to work on them. Instead, I had to use my control over items inside the space to move the blocks into position, and I had to use the ambient earth qi in the space to meld them together.

In the past, this task would have been impossible, but with the Solid Mountain Fire flooding the space with earth qi, it was simply impractical.

I spent months on this task, but in the end, I gave up. Even I had my limits.

“System, how much would it cost to meld all the quartzite, marble, limestone, and granite in my storage space together?”

Cost 8.57 billion credits.

“Purchase!”

Purchase confirmed. 21,647,283,006 credits remaining.

Instantly, hundreds of rocks fused together into a single, giant stone. That stone was the bedrock upon which I would create my new world.