The Undying Immortal System

A novel pill recipe. This wasn’t entirely a surprise, but the message served as absolute confirmation that no one had been able to perform alchemy with parts from demonic beasts before.

Did I want to submit the recipe to the ‘Dao?’ What did that mean?

In the past, I hadn’t cared too much because I had only been submitting somewhat worthless cultivation techniques that were likely only important to myself. This pill recipe, on the other hand, had the potential to revolutionize the way people thought about alchemy. Before handing it over to anyone, Dao or not, I needed to do my best to understand the implications.

“System, what does it mean to ‘submit this recipe to the Dao?’ Aside from giving me a small discount, what impact will this have?”

Calculating… the cost of the information is… cost paid for by external entity… Purchase confirmed.

A novel recipe is one which is entirely new to a given domain. The recipe for a Rank 1 Strengthening Pill is novel to the world in which you reside. Submitting this recipe to the Dao serves as proof that this world has progressed to the point that it is capable of independently devising such a recipe. Further release of relevant information will no longer be considered interference.

As a reward for initiating this advancement in the local Dao, you will be rewarded energy, in the form of a System discount, and will be provided enlightenment on information relevant to this breakthrough, including all knowledge which this advancement has unlocked.

I narrowed my eyes.

‘Further release of relevant information will no longer be considered interference.’What did this mean?

Blessings. By submitting this information to the Dao, the Earthly Dao would be able to start handing it out in blessings. There might be more to it than just this, but this was enough to give me my answer. An enlightenment on beast alchemy would be nice, but it wasn’t worth the cost of making the information freely available to everyone in the world.

Of course, the fact that I could have simply bought said information from the System suggested that the Earthly Dao had figured out ways to bypass whatever restrictions were in place long ago. If I chose to never share this information, it would almost certainly have ways of spreading the knowledge without my consent. Even so, the offer of a discount and an enlightenment wasn’t enough to make me open the floodgates prematurely.

I looked up to the ceiling of my workshop and stared at the unseeable entity that was looking down on me.

“No, I do not wish to submit it.”

As soon as my answer left my lips, an invisible presence vanished from my workshop.

With a new path of alchemy mastery open to me, I decided to focus my efforts on expanding my knowledge as much as possible, and to begin this pursuit, I used my analysis ability on my newest creation.

Perfect Rank 1 Strengthening Pill, 27% Medicinal Efficacy. Value: –

The low medicinal efficacy wasn’t a surprise. I had no doubt that my harvesting and storage of the chicken blood had been inept at best, and even if I had done the job perfectly, it was likely that the animal hadn’t been raised properly for use as a medicinal herb.

Additionally, while the weed and herb I had used to complete the pill had worked, they weren’t necessarily the best possible ingredients. Small discrepancies in their energy signatures could have caused the medicinal energy in the chicken blood to deteriorate more than it should have.

So, if I wanted to deepen my understanding of beast alchemy, there were three paths forward. I needed to research more suitable herbs, I needed higher-quality materials, and I needed to find better ways to harvest and store these materials.

These were no small tasks. With a common, overlooked weed being a key component to the pill I had just crafted, I now had to consider that any random plant could potentially be an invaluable hidden gem. Nothing could be entirely ruled out.

To make matters worse, I couldn’t just pluck any random plant and use it directly. Each plant would need to be grown under the care of a trained herbalist who was skilled enough to understand the needs of an unknown specimen and could infuse it with as much energy as possible. Bao was able to do this, but if I had to rely on him to personally grow a copy of every single plant in the world, then these experiments would take centuries. I needed to hope that he could train my clan’s herbalists to take up his mantle.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

As for raising and harvesting better demon beasts, I was at a complete loss.

Using the orbs that I had filled with System-granted knowledge of beast taming, members of my clan had been able to gain a basic understanding of how to raise animals. However, the knowledge in these orbs only concerned information available on this continent, and raising beasts to serve as alchemy ingredients was a skill unknown to the entire world. While the knowledge in these orbs might help lead our beast tamers down the right path, I couldn’t help but worry that relying on System-purchased knowledge too much would stifle their innovation. �

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I needed a ‘Bao’ for beast taming, but I didn’t know where to even begin looking for such a person. JiaQi had studied taming in the Nine Rivers Sect, but she had never been overly interested in it. Besides, with LuLu being unable to enter the Wastes, it would be difficult to pull JiaQi in as a member of my clan.

It might be a good idea to head off to the Nine Rivers Sect or a specialized beast taming sect to see if there was anyone worth recruiting, but I didn’t want to do that immediately. Finding someone worth investing a significant amount of time, effort, and emotional capital into would be a challenging task. For the moment, I would just wait and hope that the Earthly Dao gifted me someone with a powerful taming blessing.

For that to happen, though, I might need to break the Su Clan’s blockade on giving me anyone with a profession-related blessing.

In any case, I had more than enough to keep me busy for decades to come. I still needed to completely master Rank 3 refining, I needed to improve and redesign my plant formation, I needed to research beast alchemy, and in my spare time, I needed to learn what I could about herbalism.

Aside from these personal projects, I needed to continue growing my clan, assist Bao with soul cultivation, and do my best to stay in contact with SuYin during her trials in the Verdant Forest Sect.

So, yes, I had more than enough to keep me busy.

During the following months, while I worked on my various projects, GuiMing was hard at work establishing the first residences within Mount Jiang itself.

The final design that the leadership council had come up with split the mountain into eight equally sized regions. Each region was then assigned to a different member of the clan’s leadership.

The western region, where my house was located, was assigned to me. The northwest, where the Soul Cultivation Library was, was assigned to Bao. Mo was assigned to the north, which held the workshops, and Liang was given the northeast, which held the Rank 1 Affinity Hall. GuiMing was given the east, with the cultivator residences, and GuiAi was assigned the south, with the mortal residences. NiangBa was assigned to the southeast, though his responsibilities lay in the center, with the arena. Finally, ShouLi was assigned to the southwest, where the Rank 2 Affinity Hall was.

I couldn’t help but notice that by assigning themselves regions equal to me and Bao, they were making themselves de facto elders. Also, by ShouLi taking the position next to me, opposite Bao, she was claiming a role equal to his.

This might have all been unintentional. After all, if we were building our residences, then someone would need to take charge of them, and the current leadership council had been running things since the very start of the clan, making them the default choice.

Still, I didn’t like the idea that the current six members of the council were permanent and unchanging simply because they were the first people I had recruited. I needed to start looking at ways to implement a more meritocratic system of governance.

However, aside from that one caveat, I agreed with the gist of their proposal.

So, each member of the council was put in charge of one of these eight regions and was given full authority to build five floors of apartments in their respective sections. The top floor, the one directly beneath the plateau, would primarily be for the leader’s residence, though close aides and supporters would likely live there as well. The apartments on the lower floors would be much smaller and would hold the various members of the leader’s faction.

With the size of the plateau, each leader had enough space to build roughly 12 small rooms on each level. By fully utilizing the plateau’s interior, they would have been able to expand this number by quite a bit, but at my insistence, apartments were only built around the outside edge of the mountain, giving everyone access to a view outside. The interior space was to only be used for workshops, storage areas, and the like.

Once all six members of the leadership council fully built out their sections, there would be enough space to house everyone in the clan, but at the rate we were growing, that wouldn’t be the case for long. We would need to keep building down the mountain.

However, as we did, our leadership team would need to expand as well. With each set of five floors, I intended to add eight new nominal elders to our number. This would hopefully limit the extent of the original six’s influence while also rewarding other valuable members of our clan with official positions of leadership.

As building out these apartments was a high-priority task, I allocated each member of the council 60,000 contribution points to pay for workers to construct the new dwellings. I even went as far as personally crafting dozens of Rank 2 pills to give everyone something valuable to buy with this new wealth other than time on an Essence Gathering Formation. I considered making a few luxury goods available for purchase as well, but for the time being, I didn’t want anyone wasting their money on such frivolities.

I worked on mastering various crafts, the members of my clan worked on building out Mount Jiang, and time quickly passed.

After a year and a half of work, I was finally able to create a Strengthening Pill with over 90% efficacy. At this point, I started allowing members of my clan to take them and see what effect they had.

The results were, unfortunately, somewhat underwhelming. As the name implied, the pill strengthened a person’s physical body, but it did so in the same way that eating meat from a demonic beast would. Not only that, but the pill also had the same upper limit to how much it could enhance one’s strength that eating meat had.

After the first results came in, I had hoped that it might have a different effect on people with physical blessings, but after several tests, this didn’t seem to make a difference.

The only person whose reaction to the pill differed in even the slightest way was ShouLi. For most people, the effects of the pill were permanent, but for ShouLi, the effects slowly wore off over the course of a month.

While this difference might seem inconsequential, or even detrimental, to me, it was a clear sign as to why the Earthly Dao kept sending me people with ‘beauty’ blessings.

ShouLi’s beauty blessing was consuming the wu the pill injected her with, further strengthening and purifying her skin. None of the other physical blessings had any such effect. This made me convinced that if some type of cultivation for the physical body was possible, then it would need to start with the skin.

Like everything else, developing an entirely new cultivation system would take time, but I had been given more than enough clues to get started.

As the end of our ninth year on Mount Jiang approached, the radius of my storage space reached 250 meters. I was finally ready to take the next step.