Chao Su felt like he’d taken a nice, long, relaxing vacation. For the last several years, he’d basically tinkered around inventing things and spent most of each day playing with his great grandchildren. He didn’t even have to do almost any of the actual childcare work as there were plenty of sect members seeking contribution points to take on those tasks.
He just … played, getting really good at literally juggling tykes.
Besides being the person to establish new portal hubs—which only he could do—he really had no responsibilities. The kids had even mostly taken over the task of running the sect, and between Wu Hua, the twins, Yang Lin, and Zou Tian, he trusted that it was in good hands.
Sometimes, though, a situation came up that only he could resolve, and though he wasn’t much of a tealeaf reader, he saw that events were progressing to a point where he’d have to make a decision.
It turned out that he was right. A week after the new portal connection was made in Seventh Brilliant Raven Town—a fortnight after the twins had replaced its mayor—the sect’s council of elders formally requested that he attend a meeting.
Knowing the subject, he accepted the invitation, which, honestly, he wouldn’t have refused anyway. Though he enjoyed relaxing, it wasn’t like he didn’t make himself available whenever the kiddos needed him.
The meeting, still held in the Administration Hall, started out as normal. Each of the pavilion heads gave their status reports, and those all basically amounted to, “Things are proceeding normally.”
After sect matters concluded, the topic turned to the status of the Program, and everything was peachy keen there, too. The twins’ hometown was the last of the settlements on the continent scheduled to get a portal connection, and integration was on schedule there. Labor for the remote farms was a little stretched due to the sheer amount of crops grown with the assistance of their arrays, but no one would be going hungry. The Alchemy Pavilion and its remote factories had even scheduled a severe reduction of the production of mortal fasting pills in response to projections.
The farms, though, were run basically as a non-profit to keep the cost of food low, so the biggest success story from an investment standpoint was the beach resorts and their associated hotels. Sure, anyone could easily access the sand and waves through the portals for a daytrip, but staying onsite had become a status symbol, just as their partners in the Premiere Jade Treasures Auction House had planned.
“That brings use to our final order of business—expansion.” Yang Xiu turned to Chao Su. “The continent is completely accessible. A Foundation Establishment cultivator with a glider can reach from any point to any other point in under an hour. We’re ready to bring the network to new continents.”
The unasked question was—did they have his permission?
Chao Su sighed. He pulled up an illusion that showed their continent in the center and two others relatively close by. “The one plan southeast from us is similar in qi density to what we’re used to. The cultivator strength maxes out at Nascent Soul and the ranks of the spirit beasts are largely within the capabilities of our Golden Cores.”
He pointed to the continent due north. “This one, the Da Qing continent, is different. It’s the one where Lei Bohai of the Twelfth Majestic Order of Formations Masters came from. It’s also where Qian Liqin and the Thousandth Heavenly Li Sect are located as well as the two strong Nascent Souls who traveled with her for the ambush and their factions.
“More importantly, it’s the home to at least five Nihility realm cultivators.”
Chao Su paused to let the information sink in. “I do not feel that it is safe for us to tread the waters of the Da Qing continent yet. We need more Nascent Souls at the very least and ideally a few Nihility realms of our own.”
He hadn’t even reached that vaunted realm yet. Though he knew the requirements by heart, he silently had the System pull the information up for him again.
Modified Average Loyalty was no issue and wasn’t likely to become one in the near future. It turned out that, when your sect became the most exclusive one around and gave out huge benefits to members, the people who joined tended to be quite loyal from the start.
Neither were Qi Gathering realm cultivators an issue. They had thousands and only needed six hundred twenty-five.
The requirement for Foundation Establishment members was likewise easy to meet as they also had literally thousands in that realm as well, compared to the required one hundred twenty-five.
Even Golden Cores weren’t an issue. He only needed twenty-five, and they had over fifty on the roster, about an even split of people who’d been with him from the beginning and recruits who’d joined the sect already at Foundation Establishment from the Jade Chameleons and Swift Blizzards.
Of course, those numbers could have been much higher, but two factors slowed the advancement of those formerly enemy cultivators. For one thing, their cultivation methods had been so dreadful that he’d made every one of them go back to the start of the realm. Some had balked at the imposition, but the expansion of their qi pools and the raising of their spiritual roots had shut them up pretty quickly.
The second reason was more problematic—loyalty. Coming on the heels of the complete destruction of the two sects, worry over former members of the two holding enough of a grudge to join the sect just to sabotage it was a real thing.
They did employ some mitigation, of course. The Rising Tide Sect only accepted former enemy sect members with high karma scores. Obviously, the score didn’t guarantee that none of them acted against the sect’s interests. Good karma tended to indicate good people, though, and good people tended not to commit bad acts—unless they felt like they had a good enough reason, anyway.
Thus, karma scores weren’t nearly enough protection, but it was a start.
The second layer was forcing each of those newly inducted members to cultivate a special Mind technique. There was no brainwashing involved, obviously, as the Rising Tide Sect was a righteous sect. The technique simply strengthened the user’s ability to apply dispassionate analytical reasoning, which made them more susceptible to the viewpoint that the enemy sects were in the wrong.
Zou Tian represented the next layer of protection. Or, rather, his Intelligence Pavilion did. Each new member, regardless of their background, was investigated thoroughly, and their actions monitored closely for years. Three traitors had been caught, which, unfortunately, resulted in their execution.
The final hurdle for potential saboteurs was simply time. New members from those two sects weren’t allowed to progress as fast as others, giving them more years to assimilate into their new community.
To date, the methodology had worked as the only bad impacts had been grudges and rivalries, but even those had mainly been a problem in the early integration period.
Regardless, the Rising Tide Sect had plenty of Golden Cores to meet the requirements and more in the pipeline, so that wasn’t the problem. The next category was—Nascent Souls.
Simply put, Chao Su had no way to accelerate any of their current members to that lofty realm in any reasonable timeframe without employing measures he wasn’t comfortable with. Fatty Ren was the closest, Having been a Golden Core for around eight years, he’d just recently reached the second minor realm, and that achievement was only because Chao Su had long ago installed a Gluttony aspected Time dilation room at the palace.
Without accelerating Time, it would have taken at least eighteen years just to hit the second minor realm, and each minor realm took longer than the one before it. A normal C ranked cultivator from one of the sects averaged about five hundred fifty years to hit Nascent Soul from the beginning of Golden Core, assuming no bottlenecks.
Of course, the System’s top heaven grade cultivation methods shaved off up to a quarter of that duration, so Fatty Ren, without Time dilation, could have done it in about four hundred ten years, more than four hundred times the age of the Rising Tide Sect.
Even applying every shortcut that Chao Su could imagine, reaching Nascent Soul would take any of his disciples a century at least.
His only recourse to advance them more quickly was to have them literally live constantly in an accelerated state. Which he absolutely would not do. In fact, he forbade any of them from spending more than ten objective hours per day doing so, and he discouraged even that much use except for isolated durations.
Life was for living, not just for advancing.
Basically, it would be a long, long time before he reached Nihility. And he could live with that outcome. It just meant that the kids’ expansion plans would have to be put on serious hold.
Obviously, he didn’t lay out his path to advancement for the council, but they understood the math as well as he did. Based on the directive he’d just lain down, they were multiple centuries away, at the very least, from adding the Da Qing continent to the portal network.
“What about the one to the southeast, then, Master?” Yang Xiu said.
“The Xiao continent.” Chao Su was quite familiar with that one, having both been born and joined a sect there. “Not counting our allies, they greatly outnumber us in higher realmed cultivators. I’d be willing to let you establish diplomatic ties with the factions as a first step, though, one we reach, say, one hundred Golden Cores.”
Advancing that many members should take a decade at most, more likely half that.
From their faces, he could tell they were all disappointed, which he understood completely. The sect highly encouraged travel along the path of righteousness, and the Program did truly good work. Mortality rates for common citizens had declined sharply over the last five years. Almost no one died of disease, and both starvation and malnutrition were fading into bad memories. The economy flourished. There was work for anyone who wanted a job. Crime and spirit beast attacks were way down. Quality of life was way up.
Every minute they hesitated in expanding the Program was another minute that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people continued suffering. Thinking about so many people in such dire straits sucked, but Chao Su could live with, for the moment, doing nothing.
Long ago, he’d made peace with himself at the destruction he’d caused following the short lived sect war, but the immediate aftermath had been a dark time for him. He’d personally killed around a hundred cultivators. That was a lot of blood on his hands, and despite his Mind and Soul Cultivation, there had been many sleepless nights.
Moving past it had taken years of thinking. The final breakthrough came one day while he played with Ting’er. A feeling of just how much he loved that little girl—and all the other little ones, of course—had washed over him, and he realized that keeping her and the others safe was worth truly any cost. If he hadn’t killed all those enemy Nascent Souls and Golden Cores, she never would have even been born.
So, in a way, he felt callous disregarding the suffering of so many, but against the lives of the children whom he loved so dearly, even the weight of countless other kids didn’t stack up.