The Undying Immortal System

After returning to the city, Deacon Ma took me to a seemingly random apartment. It was nearly completely empty. The only thing inside was a crystal orb like the one the Su Clan used to test affinities.

The deacon walked up to the orb and then turned to give me a careful look.

"You have multiple affinities, right? These things don't work well with people like you, but it should be able to show us your highest one. That's good enough for what we need. You know what to do, right?"

I nodded.

Expecting this and having been tested before, I stepped forward and put my hand on the orb calmly. When I pushed my qi into an orb in the past, it had always lit up with a dark red flame that slowly got brighter as I injected more energy. This time, that didn't happen. All I could see was a chaotic mix of lines and colors.

My confusion must have shown on my face because Deacon Ma explained.

"That's from your multiple affinities. The orb can only show a single affinity. If you try to use it with multiple affinities, they will cause interference and show you nothing. Your fire affinity should be above the others, though, so if you focus on your fire affinity and give it a mental push, we should see a clear picture."

I did so. After exerting more will, a flame finally appeared. It was not the same red color as usual though. Instead, it was a brighter, more vibrant shade of red.

Ma looked annoyed. "Mid eight-star fire affinity, is that all?"

At his words, I pushed with all my strength. The flame grew once, then, after another pause, grew a second time. This should be peak eight-star. I pushed harder. The flame began to shrink and change. It became a small orange fire in the center of the orb. After a final push, I was able to increase its size once, but at that point, I knew I had reached my limit.

The deacon gave me a strange look. "Mid seven-star? I'll report this to the elder. Go back and cultivate. The outer sect exam is in four months, and you need to raise your cultivation to Martial Master 1. Just don't advance any further than that."

I looked at him and spoke with confidence. "Yes, Deacon Ma."

Before upgrading my affinities, trying to form threads of fire qi into perfect meridians had been a chore since the qi was constantly fighting against my efforts to shape it. Trying to shape it into smooth even ribbons required every ounce of willpower I could muster. Taking those ribbons and weaving them together without ruining them had been a nightmare.

After raising my affinity to peak eight-star, everything went much smoother. My qi was willing to go where I wanted it to go and be shaped how I wanted it to be shaped. At that point, with enough effort, I could have formed a perfect meridian. If not for the planned baptism, I would have already used the control granted by that increase in my affinity to advance to Martial Master.

Now, with a mid seven-star affinity, forming practice meridians was simple. It still took a little time to ensure that everything was perfectly smooth and uniform, but the qi felt like it would do anything I wished. It was almost like it wanted to weave itself into meridians on its own.

After a few days of practice, I began the process of weaving my first true meridian.

Having practiced forming the correct structure for years, I was confident in my ability to create a perfect meridian, so the only important variable I had to worry about was its positioning.

Each meridian I created had to be aligned as instructed in my cultivation technique. On its own, this wouldn't have been too difficult, but the problem was that my body had natural qi flows that attracted the meridians and tried to pull them out of position. Constructing the meridians in accordance with the sect's Rank 2 technique made me feel like I was fighting my own body.

Thankfully, my high affinity showed its worth here as well. It allowed me to keep the meridian locked down as I formed it. That said, even with my improved affinity, I had to maintain my focus. I was weaving tiny ribbons of qi into a complex tube that was over half a meter long, and I couldn't allow for a single mistake.

Doing too much in one sitting meant my concentration could slip and small flaws would enter into the weave, so I had to take regular breaks. However, whenever I wanted to take a break, I had to suture the weave in such a way that it wouldn't catastrophically unravel. Then, after the break was over, I had to shift the meridian back into the correct position, undo the suture, and fix all the small imperfections the pause had caused.

Working in this manner, I finished my first meridian after a total of two weeks. Once it was complete, it snapped into place and was no longer affected by my natural qi flows.

I had advanced to Half-Step Martial Master. Constructing that meridian had been stressful, but I was confident in my result.

Sadly, this was no time for a celebration. Completing one meridian just meant that I had to start working hard on completing the second.

The more meridians in my body, the longer each new one would take to create. Based on past experience, I estimated my second meridian would take a month and a half. That gave me two extra months of downtime.

I could have started on my second meridian immediately, but I needed a rest. Two straight weeks of focused concentration had left me mentally exhausted, so I took some time off to relax and practice a little alchemy.

This downtime didn't last long. I didn't want to feel rushed to complete my advancement before my deadline, so after only a week of rest, I began again.

Creating my second meridian, with it also being located in my chest, was significantly more difficult. Not only my natural qi flow, but also my first meridian worked to pull it out of position. Forming the second meridian was like a constant battle against two different sources of gravity, where if I stopped concentrating for even a moment, all my effort would be wasted.

The difficulties I faced were far greater than I had anticipated. When I had made weak meridians with a Mid-Yellow technique, the pull from them was nowhere near as strong. Because of this, my estimate for how long my advancement would take ended up being far from accurate. It took nearly three months of hard work before I was able to place the last thread, and the meridian snapped into place.

Once it did, I smiled. I had returned to Martial Master 1.

I circulated my qi with all the power my Peak-Yellow Rank 1 technique could muster. My meridians didn't even tremble. They were built to handle this level of energy.

I had cut it a lot closer than I had wanted, but I was ready for the outer sect disciple competition.

Before the preliminaries, Deacon Ma told me which testing site to go to.

Once there, we were given a set of herbs and sent off to concoct them. As usual, we were not directly observed during our work in the preliminaries.

Before, I had thought that this was either because the sect trusted us or because observers were watching us in secret. Now, I was pretty sure that there wasn't anyone watching. This wasn't because I thought they trusted us. It was because I now understood how little this test mattered. Most of the victors would have been pre-selected. If someone did cheat and turn in a pill concocted by someone else, the judges simply wouldn't care.

For the test, we only needed to make a single Rank 1 pill that I could have finished concocting in only a few minutes. However, to avoid drawing too much attention, I forced myself to slow down. Turning it in too early would be bad, so I waited until after three hours had passed before even beginning my work.

The pill I needed to make was unfamiliar to me, but it was still only Rank 1, so I could have made a Perfect pill without too much effort, but that wasn't the goal. I needed to focus on making the pill good, but not too good. It would be a delicate balance, but I was experienced enough to be able to roughly predict how my actions would affect a pill's efficacy.

When I looked at the herbs, I was a bit surprised. One of them was completely new to me. It hadn't existed in Rudy's workshop. Looking at it, I could tell that it would add some kind of healing effect to the pill. I considered it in relation to the other herbs. They all had red fire-based medicinal energy, and every herb was focused on healing. So, this seemed to be some sort of fire-based healing pill. However, without being more familiar with the herbs, it was difficult for me to tell exactly what the pill would do.

Even though I had never seen one of the herbs before, concocting the pill was still simple. First, I melted the physical body of the herb. Then, I burned away nearly all of the pill toxins while purposefully damaging its medicinal power. Since this pill was new to me, it was hard to estimate the exact efficacy I would end with, but I could roughly guess what the results would be based on my experience.

When I judged the medicinal energy to be in an acceptable condition, I condensed it into a pill. After it solidified, I inspected it.

High-Purity Rank 1 Fire Qi Expulsion Pill, 57% medicinal efficacy. Value: 71 silver.

The name didn't tell me everything, but since I was already confident that this was some type of healing pill, I had a decent guess at what it would do. If I was right, it would help heal people who had been injured by fire qi.

In the past, there had been times when I had lost control of my qi and accidentally burned myself with my own fire qi. When that happened, a small portion of that qi became stuck in the wounds. Before the injury could heal properly, the qi needed to be expelled. Likely, that was what this pill was designed to do.

It was a good pill to remember, so I noted the recipe down in my journal for the future.

After that, I turned in my pill and went home to await the results.

There were no surprises this time. I was confirmed to be in the finals and was placed in the top twenty. Not at the front of the pack, but not too far back. I figured this was so that I would be low-key while keeping my eventual win believable, but I couldn't say if the organizers even cared about such things.

As always, the task of the finals was to create five Superior Qi Gathering Pills. Deacon Ma said that I should aim for a total efficacy between 460 and 480. This was supposed to be good enough that I could be passed through without challenge, but not so high as to draw undue attention.

At the same time, I also had to put on a bit of a show.

It would be easy to perfectly trim away all the pill toxins on the surface and then intentionally damage the medicinal energy just enough to drop the efficacy by a few points. This was what I had done in the preliminaries, but I couldn't do that here. With a crowd of spectators, I needed to make everything look natural. The damage to efficacy had to come from proper errors.

Also, I had to mind my speed. I couldn't do everything too fast. I had to watch the bright stars of the competition and spend a little more time on everything than they did.

Honestly, it was the greatest challenge I had faced as an alchemist in years. I'll never know how successful all the ruses were, or if my acting even mattered, but I did it. I completed five sub-par pills to the best of my ability. I could only hope working with Elder Mu would be worth all the trouble.

After concocting my final pill, I moved to stand with the other contestants who had completed their work ahead of me, and we had to wait a couple more hours as everyone else finished up. Several of the contestants were extremely slow and methodical in their process, but no matter how much I wanted everything to wrap up quickly, I couldn't fault them for their dedication to the craft.

Knowing that the pills we spent so much time on wouldn't affect the final results in the slightest, I wasn't worried about the quality of my pills. However, I was still anxious as I awaited the results of the exam. If Elder Mu's plan fell through, I would be stuck in the outer sect for at least another year. I needed to move up if I wanted to continue advancing.

The announcer's voice pulled me out of my reverie.

"First place, Wen Hao, 493 points."

The crowd burst into cheers. This was considered an incredibly high score. Assuming he hadn't made any Perfect pills, at least three of his pills had to have an efficacy of 99%. This showed that Wen Hao had a lot of potential.

I couldn't help but wonder if his result was true. I doubted they would completely falsify the top score, but I wouldn't rule anything out at this point.

Announcements for second, third, and fourth places all followed, but I didn't hear my name.

"Fifth place, Su Fang, 476 points."

I smiled. It wasn't a high enough rank to receive a spirit fire, but I didn't need one. I had to wonder if that was part of Elder Mu's plan. This would get him an extra alchemist who could secretly concoct Rank 2 pills that no one knew about. It probably was.

The games of the powerful didn't matter to me. They would do as they willed. I just needed to focus on my personal progression.