Rise of the Midnight King

Bao bi crossed his legs into the yoga butterfly pose as he waited for people to come. He had found a particularly nice vantage point on a rock outcropping. It gave him a bird’s eye view of the underground cavern, but also allowed him to look across the surface around the tower. The tower happened to be located in the center of a grassy plain. Anyone who approached would be easily seen, but no one would see Bao bi from the top or below.

Bao bi thought about sleeping for a bit, but quickly grew anxious. He had already had a good night’s sleep, and when it came to his cultivation, he didn’t need to rest as much anymore. He still had thoughts of his missing mother, as well as the safety of the other children in his mind. Bao bi couldn’t just shut his brain off. What if he was distracted, and as a result he didn’t hear someone in trouble? If an innocent child died because of his negligence, he wasn’t sure he could forgive himself.

Of course, the sixteen-year-olds could take care of themselves. He was mostly concerned for the young kids, those twelve and under, like the Jiang siblings and Dian Ai. He never was parent material when he was alive. He had his tubes tied early on in his career so he could do creampie scenes without risk of pregnancy, and he had never really considered having children later in life.

Bao bi realized that he needed to come up with something else to do to pass the time. He sat down and began cultivating. This was the least he could do. However, as he tried to meditate, a smell struck his nose. He sniffed a few times and then looked around. He didn’t notice it from the ground level but from his vantage point, there was a partially collapsed walled-off area that couldn’t be reached easily.

The tower had sunk into the ground with age, though it was hard to tell just how far down it went. A new entrance had seemingly been carved on the ground level, which was how cultivators were able to enter it. However, no one had ever talked about lower levels. Bao bi had figured it was just one of those secrets that they kept from cultivators, but then he realized that the floor had completely collapsed.

It was more than that. The towers had collapsed into the underground chamber Bao bi had entered from and part of that tower was still intact. This was the walled-off area. Bao bi had to crawl along the wall until he was able to squeeze himself through. As soon as entered the room, he couldn’t help but gasp.

The entire area was lit, artificial lighting seemingly being maintained even after all of these years. The room was filled with flowers and greenery, and most of it he recognized. It was the various ingredients he had been referred to in the point list he downloaded from his badge. There were rows and rows of plants, most of them severely overgrown and sprawling out of their original planters.

This must have been the alchemist’s garden for whatever cultivator owned the tower. It was filled to the brim with innumerable items. This had been missed time and time again by those who were too eager to enter the tower to realize this treasure trove was sitting right under it. If Bao bi hadn’t been sitting right there and smelled the faint scent of some of the more fragrant plants, he would have missed it completely too.

He leaped down and began gathering herbs, checking occasionally for activity outside. Eventually, he filled every bag, his badge, and the ring as well. Yet, by the time he was done, only half of the room had been harvested.

He had left a little of every herb so that they could regrow in a few years, but even then, he couldn’t get to a large amount of the room. He couldn’t help but look at it with a bit of disappointment. He still worried about his mother. Originally, he didn’t have any expectations of winning the competition, and he felt like earning the inner sect position was impossible based on the criteria given. However, now that he happened upon this treasure trove, his ambitions started to change.

Every additional point he earned here was another resource he could acquire that could help him locate and recover his mother. Perhaps, he did have a chance to get the inner disciple position. However, to accomplish this, he needed to maximize his points. He knew that many of the herbs he grabbed were worth minimal points. However, he didn’t like the idea of tossing out stuff, however small its value.

It would be a shame if he had to leave all of that behind. If only there was some way he could make use of it. That’s when alarm bells triggered in his mind. With some excitement, he brought out the alchemy book that Qi Liqui had given him earlier. Liao An had taught Bao bi how to do alchemy, but he had only focused on the handful of recipes that she cared about.

The two big things Bao bi lacked to continue practicing were ingredients and recipes. He had just gathered a ton of ingredients, and if the book had any recipes he could follow, then he would be able to practice them. He still had the complete list of items in his mind, and that list didn’t just have the items, their appearance, and their price, but also what they were used for. He knew various herbs that were used in an assortment of pills.

He read through the book and was surprised to see how quickly he could read. In his former life, he had been dyslexic, and reading had always been a challenge, not even talking about whether he could comprehend those words. Now, he was able to read every word smoothly and recall it. It took him less than an hour to flip through the entire book.

In the end, the book had a lot of advice that seemed to directly conflict with everything he had learned from Liao An. He had particularly been confused about the idea of a medical furnace. According to the book, Cauldrons and furnaces were used to make many pills. However, Liao An had always had him create a spiritual furnace from his profound energy and then make it directly from that.

What Bao bi didn’t know was that this was an extreme form of pill formation which was considered far too difficult for all but masters. Liao An never bothered carrying around a furnace since she had been taught by Midnight. Midnight had been raised on the idea of absolute purity. Even the best medicinal furnaces would introduce impurities.

Only by using a spiritual furnace did you create pills most in tune with your own body. However, this had a trade-off. To the maker, the pill would be amplified a bit, being attuned to their body. To anyone else, the pill would be a bit weaker. Considering most alchemists lived by selling their pills, it made no sense to create an inferior pill, especially when the mental and spiritual demand was many times greater.

It could also be noted that due to the time and effort it took to learn alchemy, most alchemists could only produce pills below the level of their current needs. They often would trade many lower-rank pills for a higher-rank pill made by a superior alchemist. This was also a way they compared their talents and improved. The result was that there were almost no instances in which an alchemist produced his own pills, and thus almost no need for an alchemist to use a spiritual furnace. Thus, even the techniques themselves were rare and difficult to find.

However, Bao bi knew none of that. All he knew was that a finished pill could be traded for more points than the sum of its parts. This was basic capitalism. You gathered the parts, baked the pie, and then you could sell the pie for more than its parts. By Bao bi’s best calculation, the pills would trade for about three times the cost of the herbs. More importantly, those pills were much smaller than the bag of herbs. Bao bi would be able to process all of this and end up with pills that could all probably fit in his badge.

Based on cross-referencing the list in his head, the items he had gathered in the largest quantities, and the recipes in the book, he was finally able to settle on three pills that he felt comfortable attempting. The first pill was the Heavenly Mending Pill. It was the same one that Bao bi had been given after he was injured. He had been especially excited to try making it, and he was a bit surprised and how simple the recipe was.

All of the recipes in this book seemed rather simple to him. Of course, he wouldn’t know that the recipes Liao An created were many times more complex and came from the God realm. The recipes inside the Basic Alchemy book would have been little more than trash to her.

The second pill was called the Spiritual Expansion Pill, which was a fancy name for a pill that helped increase your spiritual absorption temporarily. It could be used to help someone cultivate or during a fight. The final pill was called the Fire Resonance Pill. It seemed to be involved in creating the Dantian, but that’s all understood about it.

Bao bi started with the Heavenly Mending potion, both because he had the most resources for it and because it seemed like the most useful pill to have around. He was only a tier one mortal origin, so he only had a primordial dantian. It would take the next nine tiers before he would finally complete the dantian, and this would be the step that brought him into the next realm. Not only did the dantian get made during this tier, but the meridians, the spiritual points of the body, would be opened one at a time.

Each tier one climbed would mean one more open meridian, which would substantially increase their absorptive power and lead to the completion of the dantian, the storage point. The way Bao bi understood it, the meridians were like the hole of a vacuum, the veins were its hose, and the bag was its dantian. All three were developed in tandem, but every one of them was essential for being able to use profound energy.

However, Bao bi’s body was unusual. He had also stored profound power in the individual cells of his body, and this not only allowed him to effectively have a spare dantian but also quickly deliver it to parts of his body for defensive or offensive moves. When it came to pill making, all the profound power had to be pushed externally, so it took him longer to set things up than a standard pill cultivator might.

He still built a spiritual furnace outside of his body and then sent the correct ingredients in. About ten minutes later, there was a puff, and all of the ingredients turned to ash. He had seen this happen countless times while working with Liao An. This would usually be the point where she would critique him and tell him what he was doing wrong. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there.

Still, he had a fair amount of experience, enough that he was able to guess what he might have done wrong. He began another one. It was a third try when the ingredients didn’t instantly go up in smoke, and it was his fifth try when he finally completed a pill. He checked the pill the way Liao An had told him so and let out a sigh. It was 30% purity. This would be called a crap pill.

Of course, he didn’t know that while 50% was needed for a Bronze level alchemist… this was the base level of someone who called themselves a professional. At bronze, you were considered a master alchemist. Completing a pill at all already gave you the name alchemist. It should be noted that Qi Liqui, who wanted to become an alchemist herself and had even purchased this book, had never completed a pill on her own.

A purity of 30-40% would be considered the purity of a head apprentice, and they would do the majority of the alchemy work in place of their master. In this world, most pills sold in the mortal realm would be below 30%, and even the Xaoi sect would keep countless pills of this purity in stock for emergencies. For Bao bi to reach such purity on his fifth try with a new pill would be enough to make most cultivators salivate. Even head apprentices would take weeks of meditation, consulting their master, and a few dozen tries to learn a new recipe. Meanwhile, Bao bi had picked it up rapidly.

He had picked this one on purpose because he knew he’d mess up. He was a bit rusty and he had never done such a recipe before. However, now that he got the hang of it and had produced a product, he got set on making it. Each process took about twenty minutes, so a few hours passed by. He not only cut the time down to ten minutes, but he also started to see multiple pills after each round of production. His next pill was a 50% and then he generated a 60%. The next few rounds seemed to teeter on the 60% level. He had only ever reached 70%, even with Liao An’s help, but this had less to do with his knowledge, and more to do with his lack of spiritual energy.

Normally, one couldn’t even begin alchemy until they reached the second realm. They needed profound energy, and you couldn’t store it until you had a primordial dantian. Bao bi was naturally an exception to this rule, but even with his cells and his primordial dantian, he still only had the profound energy of an apprentice. Liao An had used every technique she knew to squeeze out his potential with what he had. This wasn’t because she was trying to turn him into a savant, but because she knew she wasn’t able to make pills he could endure, as her techniques were too evolved for a mortal world being.

The result was obvious. He used profound energy extremely efficiently, although it came at the cost of purity. He was able to use energy so efficiently that he was able to create pills in a spiritual furnace nonstop for nearly six hours. Finally, after finishing nearly twenty pills, he had to take a rest. It should be noted that although you can buy pills as a single, many pills were sold in groups. Three pills were considered a vial, and nine pills were considered a bottle.

Pill vials and bottles were often labeled by their lowest level pill. This sometimes prompted masters to make large amounts of pills and then group them by purity, leaving the highest quality for themselves. In Bao bi’s case, he had produced two bottles of Heavenly Mending Pills with a purity of 50% or greater, or Bronze Pills. These bottles would go on auction for anywhere from 500 to 1000 spiritual stones each depending on the demand.

When translated to the amount of points the Xaoi sect would give him, it was naturally a complete rip-off. They had their alchemy department which produced their own Heavenly Mending Pills, so the Xaoi sect had no great need for them. They also held the local market on pills, what with every alchemist either being part of the Xaoi sect or a loose cultivator living in fear of the Xaoi sect. In short, they did not need to inflate the value of the pills, even if they were Bronze quality. They even had a Silver alchemist in the sect, so why would simple Bronze healing pills excite them?

Of course, Bao bi didn’t know any of this. He didn’t know the history behind these pills or their respective value. The pills were worth more than the ingredients, and they took up a fraction of the space. After meditating for a bit and recovering his spiritual energy, he was about to make more when he noticed movement. He glanced up and saw a group of three people heading toward the tower. These were people who were familiar to him.

The girl leading them was Tian Mei, and behind her were Su Fan and Dian Ai. It was like all of the girls who had come had all inexplicably ended up in the same group. Bao bi was a bit relieved to see that Dian Ai had found others. Although she had her strengths, she was the youngest and the weakest. He naturally didn’t include himself in that assessment. As they grew closer, he could even make out what they were talking about.

“…was asked to make sure that you go through this safely, Dian Ai. Your brother even demanded I help, hmph… as if I would leave a helpless girl alone. This is one of the most dangerous times for female cultivators.

“Thank you for looking after us,” Su Fan said. “I’m not sure what I would do if I didn’t run into you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Tian Mei replied. “However, once we all get past this, if you want to repay me, you can look for my sister. Tian Day? She is a faction leader. She is the head of the Fairy Orchid. Every disciple who wants to do well needs to find a faction. If you try to advance on your own in the sect without the help of a faction, you’ll be crushed.”

“M-my brother…” Dian Ai managed to get out.

“Oh, that’s right. Your brother is also a faction leader. He probably wants you to join the Hidden Tigers. Well, that’s okay. Fairy Orchid and Hidden Tiger are on good terms. We can still collaborate from time to time.”

The three women entered the tower, still talking amongst each other. Bao bi had overheard something interesting.

“Factions… huh?” He sighed and got back to his alchemy.

He decided he’d ask Jiang Bo what he was doing, and likely follow him and Jiang Ying Yue. He had no particular preferences. He just needed to find his mother.