Upon returning to my apartment, I had a decision to make. I had only been given an extremely basic Low-Yellow cultivation technique, and cultivating it ‘properly’ would mean subjecting myself to several severe restrictions that would slow my speed of advancement.

Completing tasks for the Hall would allow me to purchase better techniques and spend more time in the Sharp Crescent Sect’s cultivation chamber, but how long would this take? If I were registered as a full alchemist, I could just turn in a few high-value pills to gain the access I needed, but I wasn’t. I was a lowly servant, and I was only allowed to take on the most basic assignments.

Was I willing to spend the months—possibly years—that it would take to slowly climb up the ranks normally? Maybe, but only if that were my only option.

Thankfully, it wasn’t.

I could begin advancing immediately. With the knowledge, skills, and resources at my disposal, I could easily sidestep any roadblocks the Hall tried to put in my way.

Without a ‘Lord Yong’ to take credit, rapidly advancing my cultivation base might throw up several red flags and cause the Hall’s leadership to become suspicious of me, but that was a risk worth taking. If I ran into problems, I could start over and try again. With higher affinities, and no strange language barrier that suddenly disappeared, I would be able to start off from a much more respectable position.

I had no intention of abandoning this life before I got everything out of it that I could, but if the worst came for me, I would be ready.

With these thoughts firmly planted in my mind, I opened my mental library and pored through all the cultivation techniques that I had accumulated over the years.

I had a lot of options to work with, but what did I need? While pill qi should allow me to concoct anything that the Hall of the Herb King might require, to remain a member in good standing, I still needed to cultivate some type of weapon qi. So, I needed a technique that would allow me to cultivate two distinct types of qi.

‘Distinct’ was key. Most of the two- and three-element techniques I had focused on blending the different types of qi together. The Writ of Wood-Burned Earth, for example, melded wood qi into fire qi into earth qi to create a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

This wasn’t what I wanted.

Combining moon spade qi and pill qi together would only mean the loss of the qualities that made each element special. What I needed was a technique that would allow me to cultivate these two types of qi entirely independently of each other.

After several long hours of combing through my mental library, I stumbled upon a technique that I had nearly forgotten about: The Focused Hearth Fire Mantra. This was the first novel technique that I had ever created. A cultivation technique that required the user to create two entirely separate sets of meridians—one for wood qi and one for fire qi. Then, upon ascending to Grandmaster, the cultivator would create three

separate dantians—one for each type of qi and one for karmic energy.

The Focused Hearth Fire Mantra was a cumbersome mess of a technique that had only been ‘novel’ because much of what it did would have been easier and more efficient as a proper Earth-Rank technique. It was also perfect for what I was trying to accomplish.

Shifting to another section of the library, I found the set of Mid-Profound techniques that the Focused Hearth Fire Mantra had been based on. As dual-element wood-fire techniques, they would need to be adjusted to meet my specific needs, but the basic premise of these techniques was solid.

That said, while substituting pill qi for either fire or wood qi shouldn’t pose much of a problem, moon spade qi was a different beast entirely. So, before delving too deeply into creating a new version of the Focused Hearth Fire Mantra, I first needed to perform a few experiments.

Reaching into my inner world, I pulled out dozens of crescent moon spades. Some were refined weapons, others weren’t. Some were made from Rank 1 materials, and some were made from Rank 6 materials. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any high-Rank weapons that weren’t refined, since at that level, non-refined weapons were next to worthless, so I would just have to make do with what I did have.

Deciding to start with the most basic weapon available, I sat down and channeled my new cultivation technique through a training spade made from mortal wood.

I spent more than a month locked away in my room, testing different weapons. During this time, I didn’t complete any tasks for the Hall, and I didn’t attend any lessons. Essentially, I was paying 20 gold a month to rent a small, run-down apartment. This was rather wasteful, but what I learned during this month was more than worth this small investment.

First, our teacher had been correct. Cultivating moon spade qi outside of the Sharp Crescent Sect’s cultivation chamber was nearly impossible. There simply wasn’t enough moon spade qi in the environment to make it worthwhile. Taking Moon Spade Attunement Pills would fix this issue by temporarily turning my body into a magnet that would draw in qi from much greater distances, but until I could make Perfect Attunement Pills, I wanted to avoid them if at all possible.

Thankfully, this problem was easily fixed. For a single credit, I was able to buy a seed of the Soft Moon Fire to make my own moon spade qi. Sadly, when I tried to add an additional Yellow-Rank seed to this purchase, I found that they were all one full credit each. No bulk discount was available. I also checked the cost of Profound-Rank seeds, but they were priced at 1,000 credits each, far too expensive for my liking.

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I could have bought a Profound-Rank spirit fire for only 10 credits, but this seemed wasteful. So, I stuck with my original plan and bought a seed of the Soft Moon Fire.

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1 credit. 1,312 credits remaining.

With this fire seed filling my apartment with moon spade qi, I was able to learn my next important lesson: the weapon one used to cultivate was vitally important.

Of course, our teacher had made a point of telling us this, and since one’s weapon acted as their qi filter, it had been obvious from the outset, but I was still surprised by the magnitude of this effect.

My basic, mortal, wooden training spade almost seemed to actively repel moon spade qi. Switching to a proper weapon with an oak staff and iron heads helped, but it still didn’t do much to filter out impurities.

In general, using weapons of a higher Rank filtered moon spade qi more efficiently, but this rule wasn’t absolute. Even at Rank 3 and above, some materials were dreadful while others worked wonders.

Importantly, I found that using refined weapons was about the worst idea imaginable. The energy that was locked away in the weapon tainted any qi drawn through it. With as many impurities as I was drawing from most weapons, this effect was barely noticeable at Ranks 1 and 2. However, when I tried pulling energy through a refined Rank 6 weapon, my body was flooded with impure metal qi.

These tests proved, yet again, that I didn’t just need a high-Rank weapon, I needed one that had been specifically designed to serve as a focus for cultivation.

Eventually, I would want to research cultivation-focused weapon designs further, but for the moment, the information I had was enough. Swapping to a dual-element metal-earth technique, I quickly raised my cultivation base to Martial Master 3 and used resources from my inner world to create an exact replica of the moon spades in the Sharp Crescent Sect’s cultivation chamber.

Then, I took an Energy Expulsion Pill to cleanse myself of impurities and sat down for a serious cultivation session.

I sat in the middle of my apartment. My legs were crossed in front of me, my forearms rested on my knees, and my replica crescent moon spade sat lightly across the palms of my hands.

I was surrounded by a formation that was attempting to enclose me in a bubble of pure pill qi. And in front of me, a flame that I had extracted from the seed of the Soft Moon Fire burned brightly as it transformed half of the bubble’s pill qi into moon spade qi.

After taking a moment to clear my mind, I created vortices to draw in qi through four different acupoints at the same time—the ones in the center of my palms and the ones on the back of my wrists.

Pure moon spade qi flowed into my palms, and I injected it into the muscles along the inside of my hands and forearms. Pure pill qi passed through the filters on the back of my wrists, and I sent it to the muscles along the outside of my hands and forearms.

By pulling in qi through all four acupoints at once, I was able to break through from Martial Disciple 1 to Martial Disciple 3 in a matter of only a few hours. With a higher moon spade affinity, this could have gone even faster, but my general qi affinity was high enough that I could cultivate at a speed that was both safe and efficient.

Next, I placed the replica spade across my chest and held it there by tucking it in under my arms. Then, once I was ready, I pulled moon spade qi into my triceps while pulling pill qi into my biceps.

A day later, I broke through from Martial Disciple 3 to Martial Disciple 5.

This was where I decided to stop. While breaking through to Martial Disciple 5 after a month of seclusion might be noteworthy, it shouldn’t be seen as too suspicious—at least, it shouldn’t be any more suspicious than having access to an entirely unknown dual-element cultivation technique. In any case, advancing any further without first understanding what this cultivation technique was doing to my body would be a mistake.

So, after storing away any incriminating evidence in my inner world, I left my apartment and headed up to the building’s roof for a bit of light exercise.

I stabbed out with the crescent end of my staff. Then, I whipped it around and sliced upward with the spade end.

Capitalizing on the momentum of this attack’s follow-through, I performed a backwards somersault while twirling my weapon toward the ground.

When I landed, I spun a full 360 degrees with the spade extended to slash at any opponents who might be encircling me.

These moves were far from practical in actual combat, but they were flashy, and they helped me better understand how my weapon wanted to move. I was also hoping that they might show me the benefits that I was getting from cultivating moon spade qi, but unfortunately, nothing was immediately apparent.

After half an hour of basic practice drills, I moved on to testing out the two Yellow-Rank martial skills that our teacher had given me.

The first was simply called Moon Strike, which channeled moon spade qi to either end of the staff, increasing the power of my attacks. The second was called Moon Block, which channeled energy into the weapon’s staff, helping it to absorb blows without shattering.

As I practiced these techniques, they both felt… awkward. They weren’t ‘wrong’—not exactly—but my moon spade qi refused to smoothly flow down the staff of my wooden training weapon. It was far easier to ignore what I was supposed to do and just wrap the weapon in qi directly.

The more I practiced, the more annoyed this made me. Eventually, I had enough and sat down to figure out what the problem was.

Put simply, my qi was flowing along the outside of the wood’s fibers. Any variation in the orientation of these fibers or the density of the surrounding lignin would cause one portion of my qi to veer off course and interfere with another portion. By the time my qi made it all the way to the end of the staff, it was a disordered mess.

Initially, I thought I would need wood qi to fix this issue, but a twinge from my newly purchased refining affinity suggested that this might not be necessary.

Following my instincts, I began pouring moon spade qi into my weapon.

In some places, the staff’s wooden fibers snapped apart and reconnected to form straighter pathways. In other places, the wood’s lignin shifted so that the weapon had a uniform density across its entire length.

The most dramatic changes occurred at either end of the weapon, where the wood has been roughly cut into the shapes of a spade and a crescent moon, with no concern for the underlying grain pattern. Here, the wood fibers reformed to take on the appearance of the carved channels that connected the edges of the blades to the lines of fibers that now ran straight down the length of the staff.

When I was done and my refining affinity was satiated, I channeled my energy into the weapon and performed a Moon Strike.

As I struck out, the tip of the spade lit up with a soft, white glow. I still felt a hint of resistance from the wooden weapon, but it no longer felt like it was constantly fighting against me.