A month and five days after I left the town we came back into town. And I was so ready to stop travelling. This world was barbaric, but I had managed to build myself a little bubble of comfort and civilisation inside of my own house. Comfort that I lacked while travelling. I shuddered just thinking about some of the stuff I needed to do over the last weeks.

I also felt glad I cultivated as much as I did, my cultivation allowing me to live without eating more than once a week, and the unpleasantness that came with it. The month had been productive nonetheless. I made deals, or simply told the mayors or leaders of the towns I visited what would happen. My approach depending on their behaviour. Or if they agreed to my demands. Which weren't all that many really. A small shop, and telling all cultivators when my caravan was expected to stop by.

Selling all the extra robes we produced to the outlying towns, with the implied information of better quality robes being available at my home town. After all, why not help the town out a little more, getting even more cultivators to join in.

And those cultivators surely could escort a couple of mortals to town as well, increasing our overall population. Not that we needed more mortals, considering the way the town had grown after the tournament.

Something else that grew quite a lot was my new pet. She wasn't fully grown yet, at least from what I could tell, but close enough. And about the size of a small cat, meaning she was perfect for my original purpose. Having an animal to pay attention to when talking with people. Like the prick in front of me.

“You can feel honoured,” he said.

“Wait for a moment,” I interrupted him, snapping my fingers.

Minx, who had been exploring my office up until that moment, ran towards me, jumping on my sitting form. I took her in my arm and started stroking her soft fur.

“You can continue now,” I said.

The cultivator in front of me sputtered a bit, his eyes looking between me and Minx, taking a few moments to gather himself.

“You can feel honoured, for I have decided to allow you to hire me to work for you,” he stated.

“Have you now?” I asked with a smile, never looking up from the animal in my arms.

“I have. You need someone of my incredible power, to protect you. I am a modest man and will only take a fifty percent share of your profits,” he explained, a little anger in his voice.

“You can go. I don't care about you, and I don't need a random, useless and lazy noname in my employ. You’re barely a second realm cultivator. I could defeat you with my eyes closed and a hand bound behind my back,” I said.

“WHAT! USELESS NONAME?” he yelled, throwing his arms in the air.

“You forgot lazy and random,” I added helpfully.

“I demand a fight! To show you my awesome power,” he stated out loud, a proud, angry glint in his eyes.

“Come back when you’ve reached the third realm, you don't stand a chance against me otherwise,” I said. “You can go now, and stop wasting my time.”

“This guy wants to be shown his way out.” I called out, alerting the guards standing next to my door to “show” him the way out.

“THIS IS NOT THE END! I WILL RETURN AND YOU WILL REGRET DENYING ME!” He yelled as my guards easily dragged him out of my office.

Yeah yeah. He would return, just like the other entitled brats like him. And be beaten down by my guards when he got pushy, not even having managed to enter the third realm as I told him to.

Like really. Progress until the third realm was easy and relatively straight forward. After that things got a little more obscure, but I was sure any third realm cultivator would eventually get the idea to connect their soul and body - we lived stupidly long lives after all. Though, cultivators had a strange obsession with the work and secrets of their predecessors. On the one hand, I could understand them a little, considering the precursor civilisation managed to find runes and stuff, but on the other? Not so much.

Using old knowledge was only useful if you used that knowledge to build on it, to improve and grow with it. Just endlessly repeating the same old stuff was useless. Sadly, even my employees had this shortcoming. I was slowly managing to cure them of it though, having started re-educating them from things they already developed individually. Techniques.

After all, every cultivator knew best what their qi intent could do, and using another’s technique meant you used a suboptimal one. Why did doing other things your own way not work better too then?

The answer I mostly got was because their elders didn't do things this way, which infuriated me to no end. After all, it was the same! But, no it wasn't for whatever reason. Still, I allowed Minx to leave my arms, and return to explore the room. After all, she needed to know her new home. Qi really was a cheat though. Taming an animal with only positive reinforcement was as easy as breathing if you could tell it what to do.

“Come,” I said a few minutes later.

Dutifully, Minx bounded over to me and waited to be picked up. I bent down, putting her on my shoulder before making my way up. I had apprentices to check on personally, a few questions to answer, and a mink that needed to know my flat.

---

“Finally,” I exclaimed, looking at the work in front of me.

It was the first array I designed myself. The first major array that is. This one was quite simple still, but if it worked, it would increase the security of my house significantly.

The array itself was made of several, interlocking geometric shapes, for now just carved into a slab of stone. An array that created a physical, normally invisible forcefield was in the middle. It was simple, only projecting a force field that repelled solids and fluids directly above itself. That triangle was surrounded and connected to three cubic arrays, simply bending the forcefield itself into a dome. Those arrays themselves were connected to two hexagons. I compressed that array down to about a quarter of a square metre and surrounded it by a circle of arrays simply meant to gather and store qi. Now, I only had to finish the array by carving the last line.

I breathed in and out.

And carved the last line.

A dome of glowing blue immediately surrounded the plate. Good, the colouring worked then.

Immediately, I threw a small stone against it. The stone bounced off. Perfect.

I took one of my test crabs, now also being used as snacks for Minx, and threw it against the dome. The crab bounced off the dome and was immediately jumped upon by a small mink, who retreated after a warning glare from me. Arrays were off-limits for her!

Now, the moment of truth. I took a small, wooden amulet, keyed to work only with my personal qi, and touched the dome.

My arm passed without problem, the forcefield appearing as a simple illusion. Perfect.

That’d make things easier. With this, I could create doors that only I or anyone I keyed into them could pass unobstructed. And, considering I built that array from the ground up, only using the things I gleaned from my book - a few runes, and the basic geometric shapes, the need of qi to power it, and my early experiments in linking arrays, I could start to think up ways to add arrays to my other work.

An array that formed a shield to block fire, or water. An array for all of the most typical qi intents around. And one for all of them, at less efficiancy of course.

I looked at the masterwork in front of me and used a little gravity to crush it into dust. No need for someone to see my proficiency in arrays. I never forgot something I didn't want to, and my knowledge about arrays steadily expanded, so I could redesign it if I wanted to.

Still, getting as far as I got wasn't hard. Which meant the book did not describe any advanced stuff. And a sect should be more than big enough an organisation to have several highly intelligent people working on stuff like this exclusively.

The bastards held out on me!

Probably once again the strange importance most cultivators had on keeping secrets. I just hated it. Why would anyone try to willingly halt the advancement of their society? Exchange of thesis was an integral part of advancement, after all your own viewpoint was skewed towards your own thesis. With another person thinking about it, you could find problems you never thought about.

And with another thousand thinking on it, completely new ideas could come up. And you could use that stuff to better your own ideas. It was simply stupid, like crippling yourself because you didn't want another to learn how to walk. Absolute idiocy. I sighed a little more, and retreated into my cultivation chamber, filled with arrays to gather and store qi.

It was finally time to advance my cultivation further. Not by breaking into the fourth realm - I was still far off from that, but my qi intent. I had long thought about it, about its current state. I still agreed with most of my previous thoughts but planned to add onto them.

Gravity was the reason life as we knew it existed. It was one of the four fundamental forces of the universe and the force behind the most powerful natural phenomena I could think of. A black hole. Everything massive regardless of its total mass had its own gravity, whose influence decreased exponentially over distance, but never stopped. The force that made a moon orbit a planet, a planet orbit a star and that star orbit the galaxy.

How the gravity of smaller masses combined into a bigger one if they were near enough to each other, and the gravity of an object always pulling you towards the centre of its mass if you were on its surface. How the moon and star were responsible for tides, and weight depended on mass and gravity.

But also how any gravity altered the fabric of space-time, slowed time when it was powerful enough, directly swallowed light itself, or could work as a lens.

I pushed my modified version of gravity on my qi, changing it a little more, aligning it with the universe more than before and thus increasing its power further.

Bettering your intent was a subtle way to gain power, just like opening your meridians and dantian were. I decided to just stay here for a moment though, and bask in the sheer amount of qi around me. It didn't hold a candle to the qi in my body but felt great nonetheless.

Perhaps I should build such an array for my workers? Before you entered the third realm getting qi was quite the challenge, considering you lacked the huge aura I had now. Yes, that did sound like a good and useful thing to do. Increasing their power made sure I didn't have to do as much fighting.