Chapter 14 – Sabotage

I looked at the burnt-out warehouse that had been making soap. No one had died, and the fire had been contained, but clearly someone was not happy with me. Well, it wasn’t a big deal financially. I easily had the tael to start up in a new warehouse which my employees were working on.

I was no fire investigator, but the way the stone was burnt, and the smell of lantern oil indicated that it was deliberately set. Either the person would keep targeting me or some figure would come out to have a meeting with me to suggest something and point to the fire as a reason why. If that happened, I would have my culprit.

The best thing to do was to beef up security by a lot. That would cost me another two taels a day for twenty more guards. It was just the cost of doing business. I moved away from the burned out structure and Ting was looking nervously at me.

“You know who did this?” I asked.

“No, young master,” she replied.

“Well, coordinate with Hong. We need twenty more guards. That should double the amount I currently have. And make a night shift,” I replied. They both gave their affirmatives as I made my way back to my office.

How annoying, but I took a deep breath and let it out. People clearly didn’t like me being successful. Even after I had gone out of my way not to step on people's toes, this happened. “Ting, did we displace a business with our soap?” I asked her.

“There are other soap makers. We hired several people from them,” she replied.

“Anyone important own the soap makers?” I asked.

“I am not sure. I will have to check them out,” she replied.

“Do so. Someone is clearly sending a message and I want to know who,” I told her. I made it back to my office and let out a sigh as I sat down at my desk.

This was the kind of thing my brother Yuan Niu should have been handling, but he had just left the city in charge of the trade caravan I had funded. I had moved up the senior manager of my mining operations to be my new Director of Operations.

They were doing alright but were clearly struggling. I was hoping they would get a handle on the role quickly, considering this sabotage. I got up and opened up the locked chest next to my desk and popped in a Qi Pill, gaining another 100 motes.

At 13 years of age, I had reached 930,000 motes. I felt incredible all the time. I was exceptionally strong and quick for my age and size. That was the other thing though, my growth and puberty weren’t coming in properly.

I looked like a kid four years younger than I should be. Cultivating from an early age had clearly messed things up‌. But it was also a good sign, since it indicated that my life span was being stretched out.

Reaching immortality as a geriatric old man was not my idea of success. The biggest headache would be when I began aligning the motes. Yi Rong had told me that my growth would all but freeze at that point. This was another reason why people picked the age of 20 or around there to advance to the second stage.

The skin, hair, and flesh could wear down and change over time, but it would be far slower once a person began cultivating at the second stage. The elders I had seen looked to be middle age, slightly on the older side, while Yi Rong had appeared much older. He had also aged rapidly in his final years as well.

Being stuck as a child would be annoying, but Yi Rong had also informed me that the younger a cultivator appeared, the more dangerous they were considered. This was due to them rapidly advancing through the cultivation stages.

Seeing a young man in the fourth stage compared to an old man, the young man would be a much greater threat and one should be much more cautious. Imagine the shock when I showed up as a child. They would probably think my parents stuffed me full of pills from birth.

Some other sects did that, but the Cloudy Moon Sect didn’t. The proof was in who would reach immortality first and having elders to maintain the status and operations of the sect. If a sect lost all its elders, other sects would move in and take everything. It was a rare occurrence, but it did happen.

One could go from being a low ranked sect with no one in the fifth stage or higher to a mid-ranked sect. But going back down was a death sentence. The high-ranking sects had immortals, so unless the immortal died in combat, they would never be demoted.

I didn’t have any paperwork or reports to look at in my office, so I made my way to my warehouse. There I lit an incense stick while looking over all my diagrams and models. I had grouped clumps of channels into quadrants in my body for ease of labeling them.

The challenge was picking out where each one would go to when it exited my pyramidal core structure. I had even designed additional bracing and buttressing between and around the cores as well. I had a sheet of paper with a triangular grid layout and numbered labels representing the channels.

The number 1-5V-7-5 referred to the channel connecting to the first core at the fifth vertices in the number seven position. The number five referred to the fifth quadrant, which was my left leg. Or 3-6F-2-1 was the channel connecting the third core at the sixth face of the icosahedron and in the second position on said face. The last number of one referred to the first quadrant in my head.

I had the channels come off my core, but they all had to twist around and then move into quadrant groups as they exited the core structure. I needed to make sure it evenly divided the channels across my body, as I had made six quadrants. One for each limb, my head, and my torso.

Then I had a diagram for each quadrant listing which channel connected to which meridian point. Right now, I was confirming the pathway of every single channel through my body and trying to keep the motes in position.

It was a constant struggle, but I had confirmed the pathways two separate times and planned to do it three more times, at the very least. This was a measure as much as you can cut once kind of situation. I had to make sure my meridians were spaced out as evenly as possible and my channel lengths were as even as possible.

I had already found multiple errors where channels would have overlapped. It was incredibly exhausting, but absolutely necessary. I would use my core diagrams and the two-dimensional diagrams of the edge of the core structure, my limbs, and my neck to connect the points in my body.

Every channel I had to commit to memory and be able to instantly trace the path in my body through the motes I had laid out. The constant shifting was annoying, but constantly putting the motes back into place made me quicker and better at mentally shifting them. I considered this important practice for the second stage.

The core design was finalized as an icosahedron for the main Dantian or cores, where the core would form and then two outer icosahedrons with as small a gap between each icosahedron as possible. There was some stretchiness between the connections of motes, but the connections didn’t compress.

That was why there were no connections between the icosahedrons. The inner one would expand, hit the second, and then the third. The channel connections to the core itself didn’t touch the icosahedron shapes.

I had gone back to 10 channels per vertices, since five triangles came together at each one. Two channels would come in from each side. The faces of the icosahedron core structure had an outer triangle formation of channels going through six, then an inner triangle of three, and then a final channel at the center of each face.

The fake secondary core was not forgotten either. It was a sphere and would have twenty-four channels, four from each side that would connect to each quadrant of my body. That would put my total channels at 1,304 channels.

It was less than my planned 1,320 channels, but there was just no room between my cores for more channels to exit from the interior of the core structure. The core sizes were set. The second core wall on each of my main cores was the standard size for a core. So, they would hopefully start small and have room to expand.

The entire thing was a nightmare of fiendish complexity. I could only imagine the people reading the tome I would leave behind in the sect. It would probably get a place of honor or shame. Its own shelf as people tried to make sense of all of this.

To put the size in perspective, the entire core structure was about the size of two hands clasped together or a softball. There were 1,304 connections in that structure that had to be charted to somewhere to the edge of my body or astral soul.

Thankfully, the numbering system, combined with my diagrams, and using my body as a template and memorization tool, was helping. Still, there were issues that came up and I had to tweak the length of the channels to prevent sharp terms and to keep them all to a similar length.

I was also working out the order of construction. While I would only partially align each mote before moving onto the next, it was important to decide the order I would lock them into place. Since one had to decide on what other motes to connect a mote to.

That order also mattered, since barriers would form while connecting the motes. I needed to avoid barriers forming in my channels, since that would make them much harder to carve out. The first step would have to be the channels themselves.

While it was tempting to say the core, I needed the channels to smoothly connect to the core. This was a common mistake people made. They made the core structure first, which made it harder to connect the channels and slowed down the energy entering the core.

When motes were aligned, I could place connections between them. This also included surfaces. But the trick was that a surface wouldn’t go through another surface. And clearing out surfaces in the third stage was very slow. I couldn’t afford to waste that kind of time, so I needed the optimal build order.

The channels had to be clear, so they would be first and then would come to the core next. Then the meridians. Then the internal and outer support structure would have to be last. Most people had gone with the core, then the support structure, then the channels.

But I was going to build my channels first. This was the benefit of having everything planned out ahead of time. Normally, people did this as the last step since they started aligning their motes right when they entered the sect at twenty to save time.

They might spend a few weeks or a month or two looking over the books, but many rushed forward to move as quickly as possible. A few took longer, but there was a lot of pressure to advance in one’s cultivation.

This was where I had an advantage. Yi Rong, taking me as a disciple and letting me look in the library, had been an immense advantage since I could plan things out ahead of time. I knew I wouldn’t have time to spare with how complicated my cultivation plan was.

Also, by laying things out ahead of time, I could ensure I had the precise number of motes as well. It would probably be around 1,320,000, but that was just a close estimate. Even being off by one percent would be 13,200 motes. I wanted the margin of error to be zero percent.

If this failed because it just didn’t work, I could accept that. I was taking a lot of risks. But if it messed things up because of a mistake, I wouldn't be able to accept that. I had always been an overachiever in school, aiming for those ‘A’ pluses.

The real challenge I was faced with was how to speed up the third and fourth stage. Many people used the concept of a drill for their channels, but my channels were triangular for maximum stability. The average rate I had seen was two channels and meridians per year. The top people could do four a year.

I would have 1,304 channels. I needed to manage much more than four per year. The few people who had done triangular channels in the past had just slowly carved them out with dedicated focus based on what I had read.

That was why most people went with circular channels. But circular channels had issues of being larger since they needed more motes to create the circular shape. I had too many channels to use up that much room, and the pressure on my astral soul would be immense. That meant I needed to go with triangular channels.

I would probably have to do two passes through each channel. The first would clear out the main portion with the drill method. Then another method to clear out the sharp corners. But that ran into the issue of each pass through a channel made it harder to remove what was already there.

Perhaps doing each channel in stages, like the Foundation Establishment stage and aligning the motes. I could drill a bit, then clear out the corners, drill a bit, and repeat the process all the way from the meridians to my core.

That still left with coming up with a mental model to slowly and painfully carve out my channels in my astral soul. How did one carve out a triangular hole out of something? I knew there had to be a way. Well, I had a while to figure it out.

I had also worked the meridian structure out. Triple layered hexagon to transition from the outside of my astral soul to the channel. Each hexagon would get smaller, eventually funneling into the channel. I might change the order and build the meridians first instead of the channels, but I would need to do more reading when I went back to the sect before I decided one way or the other. This would align with the hexagon pattern I planned for the edge of my astral soul.

I had made progress and was continuing to make incredible progress. I would hit my target number of motes in about three years. There was nothing on how many motes a person could have. I guess the limit was based on the size of their soul and compacting them as densely as possible.

That would be somewhere in the 10 to 20 million mark, depending on the size of a person or the size of their soul. I had seen nothing about the size of a soul versus the size of a person. There had been some discussion about what would happen if a cultivator lost a limb.

The answer was that their core wouldn’t form properly. There were powerful medicines, but crippling a cultivator was the same thing as ruining their cultivation. Since their core would become unbalanced. Many would prefer death instead. While there were rare medicines that could provide regeneration, they were very expensive, rare, and hard to make. Also, their impact was limited to how much they could recover.

The higher up one went, the supposedly fewer fights there were. Also, the damage to the surrounding terrain would be catastrophic once you got into the fifth stage. I didn’t want to be sucked into any fighting. I was not a fighter, and yet the parting words of Master Yi Rong echoed in my head.

I had spare time, even with the sabotage and my cultivation work. That was the nice thing about having subordinates and doing a weekly check in to make sure there were no problems. The money flowed without my constant input.

Most cultivators used techniques. This basically involved shaping energy that was aligned with your element and expelling it. There were no techniques before stage 4, but a cultivator would become more resilient.

Body cultivators had huge spikes in their personal power. But that involved aligning the motes with your physical body and not your astral soul. But the power would go directly into one’s body. Body cultivators had an advantage up to stage 4, where it got muddled and depended on a person’s techniques.

Weapons would use energy channeled into them from a person, while a body cultivator would use their fists or very sturdy materials. What I needed was a gun or multiple guns. I am sorry Master Yi Rong, but your personal disciple would look at your Parting Cloud Sword Style, but he wasn’t about to wave metal around.

I would train a bit to stay in shape and to know the basics, but if I was going to use a weapon, I would use a gun. A focused, accurate, ranged attack was the best option. The trick was figuring out how to make one.

Sects had knowledge of crafting with spirit materials and formations. While they outsourced work to experts in the field, they held control of the resources. The spirit wood for the special-order rocking chairs was a good example.

It was actually quite rare for a cultivator to have a profession outside Alchemy or Formations. Some seniors took up a hobby once they advanced to the fifth stage, giving up on immortality, or seeking to take a break from cultivation. It was rare, but not uncommon.

The problem with those elders was that anything you requested to be made would be expensive, very expensive. The kind of things that were treated as treasures. They couldn’t mass produce things either since the materials were equally rare, even the lower ranked materials.

So, while they might build up some experience making low-level stuff, they would quickly focus on high-level stuff once they knew what they were doing. Again, all of this wasn’t cheap. That meant if I wanted a gun, I would have to make it myself.

I wouldn’t be using gunpowder, and the weapon would require formations to work. That meant the project was on hold. A big consideration for a gun was my small stature. I would have a much harder time against larger cultivators with longer reach.

Well, I finished looking over my cultivation notes for the day and the incense had run out. I locked up, nodded at the guard outside, and got into my personal rickshaw to take me home to the compound as four guards followed behind me.

“Elder brother,” my sister Yuan Chuntao greeted me before I made my way into my room. She gave me a demure bow, with her hands folded in front of her. She was only four years younger than me, but my mother had dragged her out to the theater and the spa.

“Younger sister,” I returned her greeting with a head nod. I was going to get cleaned up, have some dinner, and then go to bed.

“Wait,” she said, and I paused and turned back towards her. She was flustered and standing there nervously, fidgeting. She clearly wanted to say something but didn’t know what to say. I waited calmly as she gathered up her courage.

“I want to go with you tomorrow,” she blurted out. “I mean, see what you do,” she stammered.

“Most of it is quite boring.”

“I still want to,” she said. I considered what I had planned. Just a lot of traveling and visiting places to collect motes.

“Very well. Make sure you tell mother and are ready to leave tomorrow at dawn,” I replied.

“Thank you!” she said and ran over and gave me a hug. I gently returned it. She then raced off. I did not know what that was about. After freshening up, I paid a rare visit to my mother’s rooms.

“Enter,” she called out after I knocked on the door. I opened it up, and she was a bit surprised to see me, and then smiled.

“My genius son, what brings you here?” she asked. I bowed my head slightly out of respect to her as my mother.

“My sister Yuan Chuntao spoke with me about coming with me on my tasks tomorrow. I wonder what that was about?” I asked.

“Ah,” my mother said and turned away slightly.

“Ah?” I asked.

“She wants to spend time with her older brother,” my mother replied. “She has been pestering me, and I told her to ask you if she wanted to spend time with you.”

“I see. Well, I will arrange something safe and appropriate for the day,” I replied.

“Thank you, my son. Things are going really well thanks to you,” my mother said with a smile. I smiled back slightly and left.

The next day, my sister Yuan Chuntao was up and ready to go. We both got in the same rickshaw and went from business to business. She was wide eyed as she looked about the city. I stopped by the new soap warehouse, and it was coming together quickly.

For lunch, we stopped at a local shop for some ramen. We got several looks because of the guards with us, but no one made a fuss. In the afternoon, we went to my office. I arranged for some colored wax crayons and paper to occupy her while I had my meeting with Ting.

“I looked into the matter, Young Master. One of the other soap shop silent owners is the Xiang family,” she replied.

“Do we have any dealings with them other than the soap?” I asked.

“No, and it is one of their side businesses. But there are rumors they have been heavy-handed in the past in the textile businesses which they focus on.”

“Their patriarch or someone else?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but I would have to guess their main family.”

“Their income?”

“Around that of your father’s, but they have more expenses for their businesses, but this is an estimate.” I nodded at this. That meant their financial position was weaker than mine.

“Any connections to the Cloudy Moon Sect?” I asked.

“They supply the disciple robes. The elder and member robes are made by the sect themselves,” Ting answered. So, they had some backing.

“For now, we do nothing. They are just venting their anger or sending a warning. They haven’t reached out, have they?” I asked.

“No, Young Master.” I let out a sigh.

“Then the additional guards should be enough. That has been taken care of?” I asked, and Ting gave an affirmative. I considered the situation some more, but escalating was the wrong choice. If they came after me again, then I would retaliate, but for now I will let things go.

“Arrange a rumor that they did it and say I am a coward for not responding,” I replied.

“That… Young Master, I don’t understand,” Ting replied.

“When you are strong, appear weak. I am in a strong position, so let people think I am weak. If they strike again, then the guards should be able to catch the culprit or at least stop them. We have a night shift now. If they don’t respond, then they will feel happy. If it isn’t them, then the person will feel they got away with the crime and might act again or be happy and not act. Regardless, it puts us in a stronger position by appearing weaker,” I explained. Ting took a moment to process all of that.

“I understand. I will make the arrangements,” she replied, and I dismissed her. My younger sister rushed into my office.

“Brother! Look at what I drew!” she replied, showing me a picture of stick figures. “That is you, then me, then mother, and then father.”

“I love it,” I replied and gave her a hug. “I will have it framed.” I wrote up a note for Ting to have someone make a wood frame and backside with a glass cover on the front. Completely over the top for a child’s drawing, but it was cute.

One did not dare respect the cuteness. We made our way out of my office then and back home. Yuan Chuntao was exhausted and took a nap. After that, I went back to my warehouse to work on my cultivation plans again.

There was a lot of work left to do and it was something I needed to put all my focus on consistently. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t make progress. Like writing a thesis, one needed to devote the majority of their attention to the project to complete it.

This meant reviewing each channel and pushing the motes carefully into position every single day. Since I collected motes from pills and from the air, they entered my body at my center or the outside. I had made temporary outlines and didn’t build the framework. Just lines of motes for the various channels.

But now I was filling everything out carefully. I had started on my legs first. Moving each mote, exactly where it would need to go and building the outline of the structure upwards through my body, replacing the outlines I had been using.

Once the legs were done, I worked on my head and neck. I had long gotten used to the feeling of the motes, but having them move through the head portion of my astral soul was distracting and spine tingling with how weird it felt.

Now I was working on my lower torso and the cores. It was very slow going and everything needed to be incredibly precise. The work had also gotten slower since I had to put the motes back into their proper positions every single day.

It was a lot of work but it was something I enjoyed slightly. Like finishing up a massive puzzle, there was a sense of accomplishment. It had taken a long time, but everything was finally coming together.

Most of the time that I worked on moving the motes I had diagrams hung on a wooden board in front of my rocking chair. I would reference them as I checked and rechecked all the future channel paths. The area around the core and my torso were a complete mess, even with the outlines I had done before.

The density of motes was incredibly high and every time I spotted an error or issue, it would require moving lots of other motes to fix that one issue, which had a chance of creating another error from the motes shifting about.

But there was progress. My torso would take a long time to get right, since it was the center of my cultivation. My cores would reside around my gut or navel in my astral soul, and my pyramidal core structure was oriented with a core facing downwards and not up. This allowed for better access for my channels to spread out and move up through my torso.

The two enormous obstacles remained, a fast way to clear out my triangular shaped channels and the energy I would need for my core. The first problem had a solution, I was sure of that. I just had to think of it. But the second problem was called the great bottleneck for a reason.

I was doing everything I could to mitigate the issue, but it would still be a serious issue. That was where I anticipated needing a lot more resources, but that was where everyone else needed resources as well. There were secondary concerns about elemental attunement for my channels and meridians, but since I had picked the earth element, I wasn’t that concerned.

The number of resources might be high, but it wasn’t something that would be a huge roadblock in my mind. The real question was what should I do once I got all the motes I needed?

I had spoken to Master Yi Rong in the past, and he had indicated that I could join the sect early. But that would see me with less of a war chest starting off. I would take a year, maybe two, to ensure all my motes were perfect, backwards and forwards, then I would join around eighteen years old.

Getting the motes in their positions was fundamental to the following stages of cultivation. If I screwed that up, then it would all be for nothing. I had the time to be careful and double check things, so I was going to use that time to the fullest.

I wanted to chart my channels and entire mote structure without a reference to any diagram. It needed to be something I completely understood at all times. A human mind could memorize quite a bit if put to the task, and it focused me on my cultivation structure for years on end, tweaking and refining every single mote placement.

It wasn’t enough to have the channels move through the pyramidal cell structure, but they had to interlock with it as well. Where all the connections would come to be was critical. It would have been much easier to do a cubic pattern instead, but it wouldn’t have been as strong.

That strength was needed to support the pressure of so many cores and channels. That was when I considered the cores again. If pressure from my channels dropped, there could be backflow, which was a bad thing.

Valves, I needed to add valves to the core. That would stop backflow, but it would also stop me from doing techniques. I would be able to increase the pressure to a much higher degree. That was something I would have to look at once I returned to the sect and was able to look through the library again in more depth.