Chapter 88
Cultivators' Greed
Tobias's relations who had stayed behind in Cloud City were more enamoured with the cultivation world than those who lived in The Three Step Hills. They oversaw his estate and spirit gardens in return for a share of the profits. This had allowed them to progress their cultivation to the foundation realm through their own efforts.
They were all willing to risk their lives for a chance at becoming true cultivators. However, there was a small matter that had to be dealt with first. They couldn't all leave without someone else taking over the management of the spirit gardens, which was one of the reasons why Tobias ended up in Xu Ling's office. The other reason was that he needed to discuss Peace Master So's second offer.
The Cultivation Academy's original disciples were all born with so little divinity that it should have killed them before they left childhood. They'd only survived because their natural talent for cultivation was so great that it allowed them to harness their limited chi more effectively than others. Peace Master So was offering his realm to these disciples so they could nourish the sage realm spirit herbs there and join them in immortality.
Tobias's understanding of miasma was built on the theory that the immortal realm to which immortals ascended was a blank slate. If this theory were correct, then having thousands of researchers follow them to immortality would eventually become very important.
The only catch was that Tobias had to convince Xu Ling it was a good idea.
Xu Ling was not excited by the proposal. "You want to gamble everything I've built!"
Tobias kept his tone calm. "The world lacks the necessary sage realm cultivators and population to end the plague as quickly as last time. If we don't do this, the plague could continue for centuries."
"So what if it does? We're replacing cultivators faster than we're losing them."
"Only below the core realm, and that's a problem because no one can survive a tribulation while the plague is occurring, meaning we can't replace our losses. And we're currently seeing a new core realm cultivator contract the plague every ten days. As their numbers dwindle, this rate will accelerate. As it accelerates, their numbers will continue to reduce faster until everything falls apart. We do not have enough cultivators to survive the length of the Great Plague at our current rate of decline, let alone centuries. And that calculation is predicated on us not losing any nascent soul realm cultivators. We need to do this if we want to survive."
"We don't need to do this. You want to do this. If we needed to do this, you would be taking this offer to the Divine Council instead."
"You know what will happen if I bring this to them. They will immediately shove their clan members into every spot they can, preventing us from being able to save other core realm cultivators. This will lose us the cooperation of those within and beyond our borders, and the world will fall into anarchy, leading to the rise of plague hordes that will consume the continent."
"Use the military."
"They're needed to keep the plague in check."
"My faculty keeps the plague in check."
"Only those with natural divinity. Not the original scholars and professors of this institution. So why are you arguing with me about this?"
Xu Ling leapt to her feet and leaned over her desk, glaring at him. "Because I don't like you coming in here and endangering my people. You don't know them. You don't care about their lives, research, or families. You just care about fixing the problem that's in front of you, and you'll use any means to do so."
Tobias felt her outrage and understood it.
He'd walked into her domain and made demands as if it were his, when it wasn't really his. Yes, he'd started the Cultivation Academy and initially funded it, but he'd only been involved for a little more than a year.
Xu Ling had invested decades of her life.
This was really her academy, not his.
The moment Tobias realised this, he knew what he needed to do. Tobias rose to his feet, cupped his hands, and bowed. "I formally request that I be allowed to relinquish my position as the head of the Cultivation Academy so that I may pursue my dao."
Xu Ling flopped into her chair speechless. She quickly recovered. "You can't walk in here and ask me that."
Tobias remained face down. "You are the acting headmaster of this academy, and your authority is second only to my own. Who else would I ask but you to accept my position?"
"This is not how this is done."
"This is exactly how it is done in sects."
"We're not a sect."
"No. We're a private educational institution. Technically, I should sell the academy."
Xu Ling paused. "You'd do that? You'd sell the academy?"
Tobias returned to his seat, hearing her excitement. "Would you like to buy it?"
"Why me?"
Tobias smiled. "You love this place. You care about the disciples. And you've just proven to me that I don't. For me, the academy was always a way to show my value to the Great Clans and sects and to grow the cultivation world's knowledge. It's doing that without me, so trying to wield the authority I have over it is disrespectful to both you and all the scholars, professors, and students who come under your authority."
Xu Ling bit her lip, trying not to smile. "How much would you want for it?"
"Everything I've invested, plus the academy tending my family's spirit gardens here in Cloud City free of charge for the next century."
Xu Ling smirked. "Will you settle for half and access to everything we learn in perpetuity?"
"I'll accept everything you learn in perpetuity in addition to everything I asked for and throw in turning up for celebrations that require the founder."
Xu Ling pouted. "Be reasonable."
"That is reasonable. Any of the Great Clans would pay me one hundred times what I'm asking you to pay."
"Yes, but they're not as pretty as me."
"And you're not as pretty as me."
Xu Ling's eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open with fake outrage. "How dare you be so honest."
Tobias smirked. "You offered half of what I invested after decades of growth."
"Your clone is never this rude."
"My clone understands you might destroy him if he's half as cheeky as I am."
"I wouldn't do that."
"I have my clone's memories. I know you threaten it constantly."
"Those are jokes."
"Hanging someone upside down from the ceiling is not a joke."
"It is when the memory is passed along to you."
Tobias chuckled. "Do you accept?"
"Can I pay with the academy's resources?"
"No. But the academy can pay with its resources. It will become an independent entity in that scenario."
"Would you be willing to remain a member of the faculty if it did? You teach infrequently, but your lessons are always valuable and insightful."
"I'm willing to do that."
"Then I accept on the academy's behalf. You may collect your payment from our accounting department."
Tobias blinked, trying to process her statement. "How does the academy have enough resources to pay me back?"
Peace Master So was loaning them several of his better storage treasures, but even then, they couldn't possibly have replaced everything Tobias had invested. It was far too much.
Xu Ling rolled her eyes. "Our professors have proven their ability to guide cultivators to the peak of the foundation realm in a fraction of the time the Great Clans and sects can achieve. We are responsible for the most successful generation of second and third-tier noble clans that they have ever seen. By working with Elder Xi to create better alchemy techniques, we have also ensured that alchemists now have significantly fewer failures and better successes than in the past."
Tobias immediately groaned. "I'm going to have to investigate this."
Xu Ling froze.
"You just told the 1st Minister that everyone is lying about their production rates and the taxes they should be paying."
"Can you forget I said anything?"
Tobias stared at her. "I might not enjoy being 1st Minister, but I take my duties seriously."
***
Giving up control of the Cultivation Academy was a simple matter. Convincing Xu Ling to approach her scholars and professors with the offer was not. Tobias and Xu Ling argued back and forth for nearly a day, enjoying their time together while they infuriated one another. They were both headstrong and highly intelligent, with a breadth of knowledge the other lacked, so they had many different arguments and counterarguments for one another.
There were underhanded tactics Tobias could have used to end their debate, but he wanted to test Xu Ling's character. She had grown a lot since they first met, but she still tended to be overprotective when it came to anything she cared about. He needed to see if this had changed.
If she was going to lead the academy, she needed to allow its members to take calculated risks. If she couldn't, she would harm their potential.
In the early hours of the morning, Xu Ling finally admitted that while she didn't like the idea of the disciples risking their lives to become true cultivators, it was not her place to deprive them of the opportunity to reach immortality, no matter how dangerous or tenuous the circumstances would be. Tobias left the academy shortly after, heading for The Three Step Hills to collect his relatives.
With the academy returning his investment to him, Tobias could raise anyone willing to contract the plague to the foundation realm quickly. He'd already been planning to improve their cultivation as much as he could, while Peace Master So built his family a hidden realm, so little had changed except for a slight delay. That delay grew longer when he discovered that everyone who had finished raising children had put forth their name to help end the plague sooner.
The younger generation of Tobias's clan had grown accustomed to the idea of living for centuries. The thought of missing faces they had expected to see for the next few hundred years did not sit well with any of them, so they had decided to rise or fall together.
Tobias escorted them to Cloud City and left them to consume the pills, informing Peace Master So of their intent, leaving the rest in his hands while he returned to the ministry headquarters to manage the plague and continued his research.
Tobias returned to The Three Step Hills a few weeks later to study the creation of the hidden realm. Peace Master So had placed it deep in the heart of the Three Step Hills, in the valley where his grandfather had found the original Three Towns Tea plant and bound his family's fate to the land that they now called home.
The hills around the valley had been shaped millennia ago to create a natural formation that enhanced plant growth. The formation once affected the entire region, but its effects had dwindled over the centuries as the land shifted.
Peace Master So had reshaped the valley into a massive bowl two miles across, creating a natural chi-gathering formation to complement the growth-enhancement one. The small waterfall and river, which once cut through the valley, now split as it entered, encircling the garden before coming back together as it exited the valley.
Upon his return, Tobias had noticed a significant change in the chi saturation. The natural formation had pulled in all the surrounding chi, making the area outside it even more chi-deprived, and that was before he added a secondary and significantly more powerful chi-gathering array.
The array was on loan until the realm was strong enough to stabilise itself. Once it could hold the minimum chi needed to be self-sufficient, Peace Master So intended to take it back. Tobias's family would have to purchase their own arrays if they wished to enhance the chi saturations.
Even with both arrays, it would have taken decades for the realm to be saturated with enough chi to support the sage realm herbs. So once Peace Master So had filled the garden with spirit herbs and accelerated their growth, he collected the chi storage bowl from the Civil Realm and poured its contents out inside the array. No one dared complain, fearing that he would not return the bowl when he was done.
The sudden influx of chi strained the chi-gathering array, allowing him to add more spirit herbs. Peace Master So quickly transported his family's spirit gardens, before adding additional core realm spirit herbs to stabilise the effect. Once that was done, he began adding the nascent soul realm spirit herbs.
The strain of the chi gathering array was obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. This experiment was the culmination of both their understandings of cultivation, and neither of them knew if it would work.
Tobias and two dozen scholars from the Cultivation Academy watched from a nearby hillside with bated breath. They all wanted to see whether this would work and to study how much miasma was released during the tribulations.
Scholar Chunhua developed a way to accurately measure miasma, which they used to roughly estimate how much miasma had been released into the world during the Great Plague. This number was being used as the benchmark for how much miasma would need to be consumed before the plague ended.
Tobias hadn't lied to Xu Ling when he said there weren't enough cultivators left to end the plague. The cultivator world was a fraction of its former size, and even if everyone became infect there simply weren't enough people to displace that much miasma. This was their best option.
And it was a good option.
The first experiment, in which a nascent soul realm spirit herb ascended to the sage realm, had proven that. It had consumed more miasma during the tribulation than a sage realm spirit herb could in a year with a core realm cultivator feeding it.
It was more than Tobias or Peace Master So expected, but after considering what they had seen, Tobias felt it was only because the spirit herb had been so weak and sickly. He expected many of the spirit herbs that were going to ascend this time would require significantly less miasma to reach the sage realm.
Peace Master So appeared beside Tobias as he finished planting the nascent realm spirit herbs in their new home. The lower realm spirit herbs outnumbered them hundreds of times over, filling the landscape with a cultivation paradise, which would most likely be destroyed during the tribulations. Their destruction was necessary to stabilise the realm long enough for the nascent soul realm spirit herbs to begin their tribulations and create a cultivation foundation for the Three Step Hills.
His family didn't have a seed, sapling, or cutting left to its name outside of Cloud City. Decades of painstaking growth were about to be sacrificed for this attempt. The only spirit herbs that had been partially spared were the spirit willows at the peak of the initiate realm, which Peace Master So had gifted them. They had been placed around the edge of the massive garden beside the river to lower their chances of destruction.
They were the children of Peace Master So's beloved tree, which was the only reason they received special consideration.
Peace Master So sighed. "There is significantly less chi here than when I was cleansing the Civil Realm, Senior. It will take them longer to balance their environment before they attempt to ascend. Based on what I can sense, you might be waiting a few days. I cannot remain here while nothing happens"
Tobias nodded. "I'll call you when it begins."
Three days later, Tobias used the Three Pigeon treasure to call him back. Tribulation clouds had begun to appear over the garden, and the wind was picking up. Without the sage's presence, being so close would be lethal.
Peace Master So immediately appeared.
Both they and the scholars spent the next three weeks in a state of constant shock as the garden underwent a transformation none of them had expected.
Tobias and Peace Master So had assumed the miasma from the tribulations was the same as the miasma from the plague, but it wasn't. The behaviour of the ascending spirit herbs was also different when they were surrounded by other lower-realm spirit herbs. Instead of taking every tribulation bolt like the previous ones they studied had, the nascent soul realm spirit herbs would occasionally raise a barrier to deflect it. This created an explosion of miasma mist, which was then somehow absorbed by the surrounding lower realm spirit herbs without destroying them.
It was clear to everyone watching that the ascending spirit herbs were trying to assist the heavens through their efforts to unload the miasma onto the world. Whether they knew that the spirit herbs that filled the garden were from the best bloodlines with more potential than others, or whether they were simply following their nature, was a matter of heated debate, but what was clear was that they extended their tribulations as long as they could to assist the other spirit herbs. These extensions triggered other breakthroughs and miasma tribulations, causing a cascade effect that caused thousands of years of growth and development in the space of a few short weeks.
The researchers watched as every spirit herb ascended realm after realm until they could go no further. The miasma tribulation didn't change the nature of spirit herbs, so only those with the dao insights necessary to reach the next realm attempted to ascend.
When it was finished, Tobias and Peace Master sat on the hill overlooking what had become a true cultivation paradise, while the researchers calculated the final total of the miasma released and absorbed. A ring of nascent soul realm spirit willows circled the river's edge, creating a natural barrier that restrained the garden's chi, while core, nascent soul, and sage realm spirit herbs filled the spaces in between. Almost every spirit herb below the nascent soul realm had reached its peak before the cascade of tribulations was over. Seeds and sprouts filled the wild realm, waiting for harvest. Extra growth needed to be removed, so cuttings were waiting to be extracted.
It was beyond anyone's expectations, and Tobias and Peace Master So had long since figured out that this was what the heavens wanted. This was how they were supposed to release the miasma as quickly as possible. However, they didn't have the spirit herbs necessary to do over and over again.
Peace Master So's treasure trove had been emptied of everything that could possibly work together, and none of what remained would be able to ascend in his family's garden without causing catastrophic instability. Their daos would conflict too much with what they had built.
Tobias wasn't much of a gatherer, not when compared to his grandfather, but he could tell how unbalanced the environment inside the realm already was. The spirit herbs were all fighting each other instead of acting in harmony. This disharmony had prevented a hidden realm from forming.
Tobias breathed in deeply, tasting the wood chi on the wind. The entire Three Step Hills could now support the growth of a core realm cultivator. The hills directly around the garden they'd created could support the growth of nascent soul realm cultivators.
Despite not becoming a hidden realm, the Three Step Hills had become one of, if not the strongest, cultivation regions in The Three Kingdoms. The chi saturation, which had seemed so high only a few weeks ago, had plummeted as the spirit herbs absorbed what they needed to cultivate. If so many spirit herbs hadn't been trapped at their peak, producing spiritual energy, which was released as chi, the chi saturation would have reduced enough to have been lethal.
As the last of the tribulation clouds faded, Tobias turned to Peace Master So. "How far does the wood chi saturation extend?"
The garden was a wood chi cultivator realm, so the changes to the area were also wood chi changes.
Peace Master So peered off into the distance. "The core realm chi saturation extends into the edge of surrounding districts. However, all of those districts can now support the growth of foundation realm cultivators. Beyond them, the chi saturation has risen slightly, but not significantly. Beyond that, there is nothing. The creation of this garden has drained those regions dry. You'll likely want to study this phenomenon. I think we've somehow artificially created a cultivation mountain. The sudden drop off in the chi saturation can't be explained any other way."
Tobias nodded. "Can you rebalance the realm?"
Peace Master So shook his head. "Not before the plague ends. There is too much that needs to be done. The best I can do is remove some of the more problematic spirit herbs and return them when I come to fix this mess."
"It's bad, isn't it?"
Peace Master So nodded. "The wood dao influence is too strong and chaotic. Over the coming seasons, mortals are going to begin to feel lethargic, suffer from stiffness, and feel an overwhelming urge to stand in the sun. They need to be evacuated."
"I'll make sure it's done." Tobias saw the researchers finish tallying the miasma absorbed by the spirit garden and smiled. "That's not bad."
Peace Master So sighed. "It's still only 11.3% of what we believe was needed to end the Great Plague."
"It's a single spirit garden. This is still cause for celebration."
"I only have enough spirit herbs left to make a garden twentieth of this size."
"They will be more useful if you use them to cause a cascade effect in your realm."
Peace Master So scowled at the suggestion. Doing so would destroy the balance of his realm. "I know the spirit herbs that comprise my realm, and while I could cause many of them to ascend if I chose to do so, the total effect would remain less than what took place here."
Tobias didn't bother asking him if he was certain.
They had been studying the effects miasma had on spirit herbs for three straight weeks. They had a lot of information to base their calculations on. This endeavour had been worth every second they had spent on it for the data alone.
"What do you plan to do with them then?"
"I like your cascade idea. I just don't believe that it is appropriate for my realm. I'm going to investigate the other realms across the continent to determine where they can have the greatest effect."
Tobias smiled. "You're going to make a lot of clans and sects very happy."
Peace Master So shook his head. "Using them now would be a mistake, Senior. It's better to use them once the Divine Council or others discover miasma's beneficial effects. This way, I can distract them from your realm with the sudden expansion of their own."
Tobias scowled at the idea of prolonging everyone's suffering to prevent cultivators' greed.
"Ending the plague sooner would be better, but I don't believe we have the time. You said yourself that Elder Chow and several others have already noticed improvements to their meridian networks, so someone outside our control will eventually realise why it's happening. It's only a matter of time before the Great Clans and sects are forced to take their people to their realms instead of the Civil Realm. We need to minimise the fallout."
"And transforming their own realms is going to make them so damn greedy and excited that they might not look for opportunities elsewhere."
Peace Master So nodded. "We're fighting a war for survival."
"And our enemy is cultivators' greed."