The mob farm modifications took Alexei a little over two hours to finish. He stepped back and looked over his work. The trident killer spun steadily in its housing, pistons firing in perfect rhythm as observers triggered one after another. Everything seemed to be working.
He reached for the lever on the wall and pulled it, shutting off the redstone lamps inside the spawning chambers. The farm was now active.
He moved to the end of the water stream where the experience orbs would collect and waited.
Less than three minutes later, the first glowing green orb drifted along the current and slipped into his chest.
Since the spawn rate was still relatively low at this point, maybe three or four mobs per minute, the item drops barely made it past the first few hoppers before being sucked into the system.
From there, the loot chest fed into his sorting machine. Useless items got automatically routed into a lava disposal unit. Valuable drops were carried via water channels into the storage area of his survival base.
His eventual goal was to create a complete item collection system that could handle every single drop type the cultivation world could throw at him.
He watched the system run for another fifteen minutes, making sure nothing was jamming, no items were getting stuck, and the trident killer was doing its job without creating entity lag.
Everything worked perfectly.
He glanced at the clock he had placed in an item frame on the wall. It was around five in the afternoon, with plenty of daylight left.
His next priority was opening the spatial storage items he had taken from the Ji Clan cultivators.
Six spatial rings and seventeen spatial bags rested in his inventory. He needed Qingxue's help to open them. Most still held traces of their previous owners' spiritual imprints, and he had no idea how to remove them. That made them impossible for him to access on his own.
When he had checked them earlier, the system had provided their proper names:
[Sumeru Pouch:
Spatial Storage I
Spiritual Energy Circuit I]
[Sumeru Ring:
Spatial Storage II
Spiritual Energy Circuit I]
Apparently "Sumeru Pouch" and "Sumeru Ring" were the actual technical terms for these things. But nobody in the Eastern Territories called them that. Cultivators used about a dozen different informal names: spatial bags, storage pouches, holding rings, dimensional pouches, and so on.
He had gotten used to calling them "spatial bags" and "spatial rings." It just made more sense to him.
He left his underground base and climbed the ladder back up into his house. From there, he stepped outside and saw three figures sitting in the pavilion: Qingxue, Yan, and Mengyao.
Qingxue and Yan were drinking tea. Mengyao leaned over a book, completely focused on whatever she was reading.
All three of them looked up as he approached.
"Hey, I need help opening some spatial storage. You free?"
Qingxue set down her teacup, immediately interested. "How many?"
"Twenty-three total. Six rings, seventeen bags."
Mengyao perked up, abandoning her book entirely. "Can I watch?"
"Sure. It's not exactly a secret."
The bags were easy to deal with.
Qingxue picked one up and held it loosely in her palm. "The imprint on these is shallow. It's just a lingering trace of intent."
She closed her eyes for a moment, then released a thin stream of spiritual energy into the bag. She kept the flow light, letting it seep into the storage space.
"You don't break it with brute force. You match its structure first."
Alexei focused, sensing the faint fluctuation coming from the bag.
Qingxue adjusted her qi, smoothing it until its rhythm aligned with the residual imprint. Then, with a slight shift, she increased the output just enough to destabilize it.
The imprint collapsed almost instantly. The bag trembled, then went still. A moment later, its contents spilled onto the floor in a loose pile.
She tossed it aside. "Once the pattern breaks, it collapses on its own. Bags don't have enough depth to resist."
The rings were another matter.
Qingxue picked one up, her expression turning more serious. "These are different. Rings are bound to the owner's soul. What you're dealing with isn't just residual qi, but a stabilized imprint."
She handed it to Alexei. "Feel it."
The moment he focused, he understood. The imprint inside the ring was dense and layered. Its fluctuations were slow and steady, almost like a heartbeat. It didn't drift or fade like the bag's imprint.
"It's self-sustaining..."
Qingxue nodded. "Even after death, it can persist for years. You can't just disrupt it. You have to overwrite it."
She took the ring back and sent a thread of qi into it. This time, she didn't try to match its frequency. Her energy pressed down in controlled pulses.
"You'll need higher output and better control. Don't scatter your qi. Compress it."
Her spiritual energy condensed into a fine, dense strand and drove straight into the imprint. The ring trembled faintly as the two forces collided.
"For bags, resonance is enough. For rings, you need to apply pressure and force your rhythm to override theirs."
The imprint resisted at first, pushing back against Qingxue's qi. She didn't rush. She kept up steady pressure.
Gradually, the imprint began to distort.
"Once it loses stability, finish it."
With a final surge, her qi flooded the ring and erased the imprint completely.
The ring fell silent.
She exhaled and handed it back. "You'll need to be at least one full realm stronger than the original owner, or it will take too long."
Alexei nodded.
"There's another issue," Qingxue added. "Without the original imprint, there's no guidance inside the storage space."
She flicked her wrist and activated the ring.
Everything inside spilled out at once, quickly spreading across the room.
"There's no way to control what comes out. You take everything, then sort it yourself."
By the time they finished sorting through everything, the useful items amounted to roughly 130,000 mid-grade spirit stones, over 30,000 low-grade spirit stones, one spiritual treasure, seven magical treasures, thirteen magical artifacts, and three cultivation technique jade slips.
That wasn't counting the three Earth-tier artifacts and three Profound-tier artifacts they had already seized during the battle.
All in all, it was a decent haul.
The real surprise was the spiritual treasure.
[Fire Glazed Crystal:
Spiritual Energy Circuit III
Fire Affinity II]
According to the description that materialized in his head when he examined it, the crystal increased cultivation speed for fire-affinity spiritual roots by roughly 10-15%, though the effect varied based on individual talent and ambient spiritual energy density.
"This is perfect for Mengyao," he said, holding it up to the light. "Her spiritual root is fire-aligned, right?"
Qingxue nodded. "It would suit her well."
"I'll take care of it first," Alexei said, tucking it back into his inventory.
The magical treasures and artifacts, on the other hand, were mostly useless to him. Their functions were too specialized or redundant. He would deconstruct them later for enchantment books.
He took out all the mid-grade spirit stones and began absorbing them.
When he finished, he had converted a total of 49 mid-grade spirit stones.
His level rose to 268.
It was still not enough to assimilate the Verdant Wood Alchemy Furnace.
"Damn it."
He stored everything back in his inventory. Then he spent a few minutes tossing all the unwanted junk into a block fire for mass incineration.
The whole process took less than half an hour.
"All right, I am heading back," he said, standing and stretching. "Thanks for the help."
He waved and jogged off, leaving the three women at the pavilion.
---
Back in his survival base, Alexei had a full agenda.
The spiritual farmland project required a massive number of spirit stone torches and plant seeds. He still had a backlog of magical treasures that needed assimilating. His armor needed upgrading to netherite, which meant he had to find another bastion remnant and locate a Netherite Upgrade Template in one of the chests there.
And that was just the long-term stuff.
Short-term, he needed to connect the iron farm's collection system to his main storage area.
He got to work immediately.
The setup was simple in theory: attach a hopper beneath the iron farm's collection chest, feed that into a crafter, and hook the crafter up to a high-frequency redstone circuit using face-to-face observers.
The crafter would automatically convert iron ingots into iron blocks, which would then be transported via hoppers, droppers, and bubble columns into the storage area.
By the time he finished building the iron block collection system, the sun had set and evening had fully arrived.
He headed back to the mob farm to collect the accumulated experience from the trident killer.
He was now level 270.
Just for the hell of it, he pulled out the Verdant Wood Alchemy Furnace again and checked.
The system interface flickered, then confirmed:
[Assimilation Available]
"No."
He shook his head. He wanted a buffer. Instead of starting right away, he returned to the Nether and continued farming. Between constant grinding and his passive setup generating around 20,000 experience, six more days passed before he finally stopped.
Only then did he take out the furnace again.
This time, he began.
It took him about fifteen minutes to complete the assimilation process, channeling experience into the furnace until its spiritual circuits aligned with Minecraft's logic.
[Verdant Wood Alchemy Furnace (Replica):
Spiritual Energy Circuit IV
Spirit Stabilization IV
Extraction III
Pill Resonance III]
When it finished, his level had dropped from 370 to 101. That meant the furnace had consumed exactly 269 levels.
He stored it back in his inventory. Honestly, to him, all alchemy furnaces were basically the same. He would upgrade its enchantments tomorrow when he had more time.
For now, he was done.
He made his way back up through the survival base, climbed the ladder to the surface, and took a detour through Yan's alchemy room to grab some spirit peaches. He crafted a batch of candy from them using her equipment, pocketed the results, and left before she could catch him raiding her supplies again.
---
Cultivators liked to say that in the pursuit of immortality, time lost all meaning.
Alexei thought that was complete bullshit.
Ever since returning to the Aureate Summit Sect, he had been busier than ever. There was always another project, another system to optimize, another upgrade to implement.
Sleep was the last thing on his mind. Not when there was redstone to wire and farms to expand.
Of course, he didn't neglect his cultivation, even though he was busy. He still made time to meditate and refine his qi. To be honest, cultivating was boring, so he ended up meditating while fishing. He couldn't enter a deep state since he had to keep an eye on the rod, but at least it was something.
The first three months passed in a blur of resource processing. He broke down mid-grade spirit stones into low-grade components for assimilation, converted magical artifacts and treasures into enchantment books, and absorbed cultivation technique jade slips to unlock new spell options.
Just those tasks alone took up more than three months of nonstop work.
And then came the expansion of the spiritual farmland.
The secret realm expedition had netted him an enormous variety of high-grade spiritual plant seeds, and his existing growing area simply wasn't large enough to accommodate them all. So he had spent another two months redesigning the underground facility, carving out new terraces, installing irrigation systems, and setting up the infrastructure to support what was rapidly becoming an industrial-scale cultivation operation.
But it was worth it.
Because now, the entire Aureate Summit Sect had entered what he privately thought of as the "high-grade spirit stone age."
He had initially assumed that high-grade spirit stone lamps would increase the ambient spiritual energy by up to nine times.
He was wrong.
They provided a twelvefold increase.
According to Yan, who had heard this from the previous sect master, twelve times sounded impressive, but it only matched the baseline spiritual energy density found in the poorest regions of the Outer Regions.
In the top-tier blessed lands controlled by major sects out there, spiritual energy was so dense it literally condensed into mist. Birds and beasts developed spiritual awareness naturally. Even plants could cultivate into sentient demon-beasts.
In those places, the only things limiting a cultivator's advancement were talent and mental state. Resources were essentially infinite.
Of course, Yan had never seen such places herself. This was all secondhand information from someone who might have been exaggerating.
Still, Alexei had tried to replicate the "spiritual energy mist" effect.
Even using top-grade spirit stone lamps, which provided a twenty-four-times multiplier, it wasn't enough. He would probably need something even higher-tier to achieve that level of density.
And according to Qingxue, the spirit stone hierarchy went:
low-grade → mid-grade → high-grade → top-grade → spirit marrow → immortal marrow.
"Good fucking grief," he had muttered when he learned that.
His entire net worth, even if converted and compressed, would only amount to five or six top-grade spirit stones. As for synthesizing even a single unit of immortal marrow, he would probably have to rob half the Eastern Territories.
That said, while upgrading to spirit marrow lamps wasn't feasible, his massive underground farmland combined with the essentially infinite energy conversion provided by the lamps had brought the mountain's interior close to the mist threshold. A faint haze had started forming in the lower levels.
Given enough time, it might reach the levels Yan had described.
More importantly, he had unlocked three new techniques from the cultivation jade slips he had absorbed:
[Known Techniques:
- Cultivation: Verdant Lamp (Heaven-tier)
- Wind Walking Technique (Earth-tier)
- Flame Fist (Profound-tier)
- Firefly Light (Yellow-tier)
- Intermediate Earth Reinforcement (Body)
- Intermediate Earth Coating (Tool)]
The Wind Walking Technique enhanced his speed and made his movements lighter and more agile. Flame Fist, on the other hand, was a fire-element combat technique, focused on direct offense. Firefly Light was much simpler. It was just a basic skill meant to provide illumination. Through constant training, his Earth Reinforcement and Coating had also improved in rank within the system. It was no surprise. He kept his hands reinforced and coated almost all the time while working on excavation and other projects.
Unfortunately, he still hadn't unlocked the Verdant Lamp.
----------
Early in the morning, Mengyao woke to someone shaking her shoulder. She opened her eyes to find Yan standing beside her bed.
"Get up. I want to show you something."
Still half-asleep, she stumbled through a quick wash and followed her master out of the room.
Instead of heading outside, Yan led her to the bedroom wall where a landscape painting hung. She pressed her hand against it, channeling a thread of spiritual energy, and the painting rippled.
A doorway opened.
"Come on."
They stepped through into what Mengyao immediately recognized as an alchemy workspace.
So there really is a hidden space inside the mountain, she thought, looking around with interest.
It was her first time entering.
Through a smooth glass window, she could see rows of spiritual plants. Round, fuzzy bees occasionally drifted past, moving between flowers.
That's where the bees from the courtyard went.
Most of the spirit fruits growing here were familiar. These were the same varieties Alexei regularly brought to the pavilion for everyone to share.
She wasn't particularly shocked by the scale. She had already guessed that maintaining the constant supply of fresh spirit fruit they enjoyed required at least two or three hundred plants.
The alchemy room itself was surprisingly simple. It contained a jade workbench, a set of herb-processing tools, and two pill furnaces. Three meditation cushions were placed neatly to one side, along with a square water basin about a meter tall. One entire wall was lined with storage chests.
"This is just the start," Yan said, smiling. "Our destination is further in. Come on."
She opened a door on the far wall, revealing a smooth stone corridor about twenty meters long. A faint mist drifted through the air.
The moment Mengyao stepped out of the alchemy room into the corridor, she felt the dense spiritual energy hit her all at once. It was more than twice as concentrated as the cultivation chamber in her courtyard.
This level was comparable to the outer-region sects she had visited in her previous life with the Celestial Path Sect. And it was completely pure, without the slightest impurity.
She looked around but couldn't spot any spirit stone lamps.
"Almost there."
"Where are we going?"
"You will see."
It was only a dozen meters to the end of the corridor, maybe five seconds of walking, but Mengyao's heartbeat started to quicken anyway.
She had a feeling she was about to uncover one of the Aureate Summit Sect's secrets.
The corridor opened into a vast chamber. She stepped through and came to a stop. The space was enormous, easily several thousand square meters, with a ceiling that disappeared into shadow. At the center stood a raised stone platform, about a hundred square meters wide and five meters tall, with stairs leading up from all four sides.
Flowers and neatly shaped trees decorated the platform, showing careful design. Beyond it stretched fields of tilled farmland.
And working in those fields were… tall people. Each of them stood at least two meters high, dressed in simple clothes and wide-brimmed straw hats as they tended the crops.
"The sect has more than thirteen members?"
There were seven or eight of them just in her line of sight.
Before she could process that, Yan summoned her flying sword.
"Get on. Where we are going is higher up."
"Higher?"
Mengyao looked up and froze.
The chamber didn't stop at the ground level. It extended upward for nearly a hundred meters.
Starting about thirty meters up, ring-shaped terraces extended into the mountain at regular intervals. Even from this distance, she could see they were packed with spiritual plants.
And at the center, hovering sixty meters above the ground, was an irregular floating island.
Water poured from it in perfectly square streams, falling like waterfalls before landing on the smaller floating islands below. Somehow, it never spilled or overflowed. The water simply stopped when it reached the lower islands, defying every law of physics she knew.
"What is this place?"
Yan waved a hand in front of her face. "Still with me?"
"Master... where are we?"
The spiritual energy density alone suggested there were thousands of spiritual plants inside this mountain.
"We are still in the Aureate Summit Sect," Yan said, reaching over to mess up her hair affectionately.
Mengyao just stared upward.
The underground facility had only been completed seven or eight days ago.
But once you had access to a proper cultivation environment, who would willingly go back to that cramped meditation chamber with its fifteen Brightglow Fruit trees and middling spiritual energy density?
Yan certainly wouldn't. And neither would anyone else in the sect who had been given the same opportunity.
The floating island Alexei had constructed at the heart of the mountain's interior was, without question, the single best cultivation spot in the entire Aureate Summit Sect.
On that island sat the sect's only top-grade spirit stone lamp.
It provided its spiritual energy multiplier across a 49x49-meter area. Combined with the hundreds of Heaven-grade spiritual plants Alexei had scattered across the island's surface as "decoration," a single day of meditation there was equivalent to an entire month of cultivation elsewhere.
It was excessive. And Yan loved every second of it.
She remembered pestering her master when she was younger, always asking for stories about the geniuses of the Frostpeak Domain, the great cultivation powerhouses of the Outer Regions far beyond the Eastern Territories.
According to those stories, what the Eastern Territories called "immortal-grade spiritual roots" were merely the baseline for core disciples in top-tier Frostpeak Domain sects.
The holy sons and heirs of the supreme sacred lands possessed true saint-grade spiritual roots.
There was even an organization called the Celestial Registry that maintained something called the Prodigy List, ranking the most talented young cultivators across all regions. Without an exceptional immortal-grade root, preferably one with unique elemental properties, you couldn't even break into the top one hundred. The top thirty was reserved for absolute monsters: cultivators reaching Spirit Condensation by age twenty, Dharma Aspect by fifty.
Her master had once mentioned the Divine Cloud Empress, who still ruled the Divine Cloud Dynasty to this day.
The empress possessed an exceptional saint-grade spiritual root, along with both the Celestial Flame Body and Phoenix Rebirth Body constitutions. She had been born already at Core Formation realm, successfully passed her tribulation in her thirties, and reached the Near-Immortal realm shortly after.
Even now, at just over 1,700 years old, no one knew how powerful she had truly become.
And yet, for all her legendary status, the Divine Cloud Empress ranked only third on the Prodigy List. Above her were the second-ranked Jade Blossom Saintess from the Jade Blossom Immortal Domain, and the first-ranked Primordial Saint from the Primordial Immortal Domain.
Yan's master had told her, back then, that the cultivation path was incredibly long. Even reaching the Immortal realm and gaining an eternal body wasn't the end.
"Cultivate the Dao, but cultivate the heart as well," her master had said. "Without both, you will eventually return to dust, no matter how powerful you become."
There was an old saying among cultivators of the Eastern Territory: "The immortal path is endless. Do not forget your original purpose."
Yet very few truly understood what it meant.
Or maybe understanding it didn't matter. The spiritual energy in the Eastern Territory was simply too thin to ever reach the higher realms where such insight would make a difference.
Yan glanced at the young woman standing beside her.
Mengyao had changed over the past few months. Her cultivation had advanced at a pace that would be considered miraculous even in the Outer Regions.
She had spent two months tempering her body and seven months refining her qi. Now, she stood just one step away from Foundation Establishment.
And that was with her meridians still developing, limiting how long she could safely cultivate each day. If not for those biological restrictions, she would have progressed even faster. Of course, Foundation Establishment was only the true beginning of a cultivator's journey. After that, advancement would slow considerably.
But based on the talent Mengyao had displayed during the Body Tempering and Qi Refining stages, she clearly surpassed even Qingxue, and Qingxue was already considered exceptional.
As for what tier of spiritual root she possessed, Yan didn't know.
At minimum, it had to be immortal-grade, possibly higher.
She recalled that when they had first accepted Mengyao into the sect, they had only used a basic qi-sensing stone for testing. They had never taken her to the Immortal Alliance for a proper assessment.
Which was fortunate, because if word got out that an immortal-grade spiritual root, or worse, a saint-grade one, had appeared in the Eastern Territories, every major family in the region would descend on the Aureate Summit Sect like locusts.
It was better to keep that secret buried.
"Stop gawking," Yan said, pulling Mengyao out of her daze. "Come on."
She summoned her flying sword and gestured for Mengyao to climb on.
They rose slowly toward the floating island above.
The closer they got, the denser the spiritual energy became. By the time they landed on the island's edge, Mengyao was shivering from the sheer concentration of qi in the air.
And then she saw the trees.
Hundreds of them, each about three meters tall, covered in blazing crimson foliage. Hanging from their branches were fruits marked with flame-like patterns.
Mengyao's eyes went wide.
"Flameheart Fruits?"
She had never seen a Flameheart Fruit tree before, but the pattern was too distinctive to be anything else.
A fully mature Flameheart Fruit was a standard high-grade Heaven-tier spiritual resource.
In her previous life, a half-ripe mid-grade Flameheart Fruit had sold for nearly 400,000 mid-grade spirit stones.
So what would a fully mature one be worth?
She did some quick mental math. Assuming about thirty fruits per tree, and at least three hundred trees in the immediate grove... That was roughly 9,000 Flameheart Fruits.
Just this grove alone could buy out the so-called "richest sect in the Eastern Territories" several times over. And that wasn't even counting the spiritual plants growing on the terraced cliff walls surrounding the island.
Mengyao seriously doubted whether all the spirit stones in the entire Eastern Territories combined could afford what was growing inside this mountain.
What kind of sect had she joined?
Even the major sects she had visited in the Obsidian Domain during her previous life only offered one or two mid-to-low-grade Heaven-tier spiritual fruits per month for disciples to exchange. And that was considered generous.
This was beyond generous. This was absurd.
"Come on," Yan said, leading her toward a pavilion at the center of the island. "We aren't here to count fruit trees."
The pavilion was elegant but simple. A top-grade spirit stone lamp hung from the ceiling, bathing the interior in soft golden light. Five meditation cushions were arranged in a circle around it.
Clearly, this space was designed exclusively for cultivation.
Mengyao stepped inside and immediately felt the spiritual energy density spike even higher. It was more than twenty times the ambient level outside the mountain.
She had never visited the sacred lands or immortal domains of the Outer Regions, so she had no direct comparison. But this was on par with first-tier sects in those regions. She was certain of it.
Even the sects she had toured in the Obsidian Domain during her previous life hadn't maintained this level of spiritual density.
"From now on, until you learn to fly a sword on your own, I will bring you here every day to cultivate for half an hour."
"Half an hour?" Mengyao blinked. That seemed short.
"Your meridians are still developing. Until you turn fourteen, you shouldn't cultivate for extended periods. Pushing too hard now will hinder their growth later."
Mengyao nodded.
Yan gestured toward the grove of Flameheart Fruit trees visible beyond the pavilion's open walls. "The fruits on those red trees are yours to take. Eat them whenever you like. They will help stabilize your fire affinity and speed up your cultivation. Just don't touch the plants growing along the cliff walls outside the island, except for those on the lowest terrace. Understood?"
"Why not?"
"Those plants are inherently toxic. Their only purpose is to purify the surrounding spiritual energy. They have no other use."
Mengyao opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again.
That didn't make sense.
She recognized several of those plants from her previous life. They were valuable medicinal herbs, often used in high-grade pills to enhance cultivation. Saying they were only useful for purifying energy was like claiming gold was only good for weighing down paper.
But if her master said they couldn't be refined, then there had to be a reason. Even if it went against everything she thought she knew, her master's word came first.
"I understand."
Yan smiled. "Now, let's begin today's cultivation session. Once you are done, I will give you a proper tour of the facility."
Mengyao sat down on one of the meditation cushions, closed her eyes, and began circulating her qi.
Spiritual energy rushed into her meridians faster than she could handle. It felt like trying to drink from a waterfall.
Before long, she lost herself in the steady rhythm of her breathing.