Calculating Cultivation

Chapter 10: A Model

After returning from the second visit to the sect, Master Yi Rong had excused himself to rest. He wouldnt be alive much longer. He had mentioned that the sect would come and collect his body for disposal once he passed to keep secrets of his cultivation from leaking or anyone disrespecting his corpse.

I had inquired if people might use corpses, but he had refuted that idea. Demonic cultivators stole other peoples cultivation and did not progress on their own. They were basically kill on sight or flee on sight if you couldnt kill them.

The Imperial Sect offered a bounty of a hundred level 1 Spirit Stones for every demonic cultivator corpse brought to them and had the sects underneath them honor that. So, if anyone was a demonic cultivator, they had to keep very low profiles.

I had discussed with Master Yi Rong about modeling my eventual channels, but he knew nothing about it and muttered something about foolishness. That meant I was on my own to figure out my path. While it was tempting to divide parts of my body into quadrants and link meridians up from those quadrants, that was not advised by one book I had read where someone went with two cores.

The issue was imbalance. If the cores were imbalanced, then it would cause massive issues. For my four-core plan to work, all four cores had to pull energy equally from across my body and I couldnt do quadrants. If they progressed at uneven rates, it would be a disaster.

Based on what I read, it was hard to say how much wiggle room there was. There werent many people who attempted multi-core cultivation, and none were in the successful section of the library. The big issue was that a higher mote count was one thing, but a core that was not just as strong meant that my astral soul wouldnt be cleared when I detonated my core.

Once I took a step into the second stage, I would be stuck with the motes I had. I wouldnt be able to remove or add Qi motes. That was why I needed to have a perfect plan beforehand and adjust my final mote count and layout once I had decided on everything.

I could move the motes inside of my body, but it took time and focus. That was one reason the second stage was so long. They were the smallest of pinpricks and acted like a car on ice. Move them too fast and they would slide. That meant going slowly.

I had practiced moving the motes inside of me and could enhance parts of myself. Master Yi Rong and the introduction book from the sect had said that spreading them out in the body was the best option to avoid imbalances and to get used to them. That was what I had done.

I might be reinventing the wheel on a lot of other things, but I could accept advice when it made sense. That still left figuring out the channels. Using the motes inside of me to lay them out wasnt practical with how time consuming it would be and how they would slightly shift. Perhaps in time, as I got better, I could do that with more motes, but for now it was too hard.

That left me with creating some kind of model I could adjust and inspect. This was the one thing a cultivation society couldnt match up with a modern society, three-dimensional modeling. I also needed to decide on the shape of my channels and meridians.

There were a lot of options and ideas on this topic, but there was no clear best option. Some said straight line channels were the best since it allowed the smoothest flow. Others said that curled channels were the best since they could handle stress more. Another claimed triangular channels were best for their stability, others circular.

The same issue was true for meridians. There was no clear best answer. I had looked at what the meridians and channels were supposed to accomplish and the best way to achieve that instead.

Meridians drew in energy to fill up the cores through the channels. Each had to be attuned to an element or concept to endow the formed soul after the core explosion with that element or concept. Earth and water were the two primary elements chosen by cultivators of the Cloudy Moon Sect.

What would work with one element or concept wouldnt work with another. Also, one could only absorb that type of energy through their meridians. There was no neutral or universal option. Cultivators had tried aligning to Qi itself, but they didnt get anywhere.

The more fundamental the concept, the less the energy wanted to be drawn in and the harder it was to find resources that focused on that type of energy. Earth and water cultivation resources, pills, and other things were available. But something like time, there was nothing, and the energy wouldnt budge in the slightest, creating a dead end.

The meridians and channels had to be attuned while you constructed them and by the time you realized you had screwed up at the Core Formation stage, it was too late to go back and change things. But people still tried believing they had some kind of advantage or insight that others did not.

I focused on earth elemental attunement. It wasnt my first choice, but it was a safe choice. I was doing so many other crazy things, a different element or concept could easily make my cultivation worthless. I would look out for other opportunities, but it was the best path forward currently.

Once that decision was made in my mind, everything else slid into place. The channels would be triangular for maximum strength. The meridians would use a hexagon focal lens design. These were the most common options chosen for the earth element that had been successful in my reading.

Yi Rong had said he had done the same for stability, but it also meant his cultivation progress was too slow and he was going to die of old age before making a solid core. While he would try for the fifth stage in his last moments, there was almost no chance he would make it and he had resigned himself to failure.

The main thing left was to figure out the meridian and channel design to connect my meridians to my cores.

I ordered a large, life-sized humanoid wooden mannequin. I then used color string to represent my channels, but it was frustrating. This implied that I could wing it, but it wouldnt be optimal, and I needed optimal if this was going to work.

Looking at my core design was also slightly frustrating. The problem was spacing out the channel connections at equal distances to have uniform pressure. This was key while forming a core. All cores were spherical.

But that was the Dantian, the area where the core would reside. It was made spherically to resist the pressure from the energy contained within. But it didnt need to be spherical. People had tried other designs but failed.

Triangles were the strongest shape, but they built most cores using a sphere as a guideline. Not a triangle. Triangles were the strongest shape, because of the property of only having a single shape if the lengths were fixed.

The motes would form a framework inside of me as points to build the scaffolding for my soul. I had already planned triangles for the internal structure, but the core could also benefit from triangles as well.

I had some wire purchased and cut up a piece of paper into equilateral triangles. It took three days of constant work, but I worked out a model that used equal sized triangles. A 20 sided icosahedron, with 12 vertices.

If each face and each vertices had 10 channels at each location and with 4 cores, that would mean 128 meridians and channels. The fake core at the center would have 4 channels and four meridians for 132.

I would assign four channels for the fake core, since it would be much smaller than the other main ones and one channel could come in from the side of the pyramid structure, with a main core at each vertices.

I had made the model by hand in order to gain a better understanding of the shape I would use and ingrain it into my mind. The channels would converge at the vertices to apply focused pressure, but spread out on the faces to ensure stability of the core if there was a shift in pressure.

Too high pressure and the slightest mistake would have a cultivator going off prematurely. The real challenge now became how to route all these channels. The issue being if I made the first one short and straight, the last one would have a much longer path.

One of the main things that was stressed was balance in forming the core. That was why trying to form a core in a limb was a terrible idea. The meridians also needed to be as spread out as possible to maximize energy intake.

I knew there was a solution, but it wasnt something I could work out on a sheet of paper or even a useless mannequin. With the number of channels needed, it would be very packed inside of my body. If two channels overlapped, that would cause an imbalance which was bad.

The next thing I had made was four wooden icosahedron balls with slots for thin rods to form a pyramid shape. I painted each edge on the balls with a black rod connecting them to make seeing them easy. I then got four different colored threads. Red, blue, green, and yellow. I then pushed metal needles into the soft wooden balls with a color of thread attached to it and hung the structure from a beam in my testing warehouse. The other end of the thread had a needle as well.

I then had the frame of an enormous person constructed and set up in my warehouse with a wooden core with colored strings in the middle. All of this wasnt that expensive. It was more my time that I had to spend explaining what I wanted and making adjustments to get things the way I wanted.

Once the model was set up, I stood on a stepladder and handpicked each thread one by one and maneuvered the thread to a place on the humanoid frame and stuck the needle into it. The outer facing sides of the cores connected to the limbs, while the inner portions of the core connected to the torso.

It took five days of carefully maneuvering needles to finish the first iteration of my core design. One thing I had realized was trying to curve the channels around the cores was not a good idea. They would have to go straight out the other side.

The problem with this, though, was that I would place the fake secondary core where the highest concentration of threads went through. At least my small hands made maneuvering all the needles and threads easy, but it was just too complicated. Or a better way to describe it, dense.

Still, it gave me a very good idea of how to maneuver the various channels for an even distribution. Two steps forward, one step back.

The secondary fake core could be quite small. I just needed a dense contraction of energy to allow for a secondary explosion and it would only have four connections. I tossed a blanket over the wooden frame to let it sit and for me to think about the issue some more.

Next, I began gluing short sticks together to make a triangular three-dimensional frame. Once I had the first one built, I built a second, but with a series of many smaller triangles that would eventually form a channel and how to lay them out in relation to each other.

Each triangular frame made a cell, and I couldnt have two channels inside of a cell. The channels and the frame would attach at the closest points, but be independent of each other in terms of structure. I then went back to the mannequin and worked out the density of the cells I would need in the core's interior structure and outside of it by thread count.

About a third to two-fifths of all the threads moved through the interior of the structure to the opposite side from each core. Each batch of threads or channels would need to be slightly offset from the center to create four lanes of channels.

This would create space in the center for the secondary fake core as well and reduce the headache of trying to cram a lot of channels into a small space where they would overlap. That didnt change the general destination of each channel.

I would have enough motes for it all or be slightly over my initial target of 1,320,000. I shifted the motes inside of me and looked at their placement to my targeted total, and the size of each cell. It seemed that I would have enough space to keep one channel per cell.

It would be very packed. I considered the four channels that would connect to my second fake core. One channel each to my limbs.

The entire design was a colossal mess, but I had worked out a model. It hadnt been simple or easy, but building the full-scale design had been critical. A three-dimensional software design program would have been much better, but it wasnt needed.

I had everything broken up and burned after that, including my models. I would rebuild them once more, right before I joined the sect full time, but for now I wanted to let the ideas marinate for a while. There was no rush, and I had a general plan and total mote count.

If I looked at the models constantly, then I might not come up with a better idea or get stuck in a rut. Better to get rid of everything and then start fresh a couple of years or even a decade from now. I would use two shades of each color next time to show inner channels that passed through the core structure and outer channels. I would also have the fake secondary core as part of the design as well.

For now, there was nothing more I could work out, and I turned my attention back to my businesses. The wood carving was going smoothly. I had replaced the useless manager and hired a caretaker, another manager, and then an apprentice woodcarver to work on other toys.

I focused on a line of cultivation action figures, with equipment and packaged sets of the highest quality. The apprentice worked on the equipment since master woodcarver Kang only did dolls and action figures, which he called dolls. I used my sales channel with my first and third brother to sell the sets. I couldnt use any sect logos, but I could add fancy clothes of various colors and appearances, so rich kids could customize their dolls or action figures.

Once sets were made and stored in fine wooden cases, I began exporting them and selling them to other cities and sects, fixing that portion of my business drastically. High value low-volume goods were the key for exports. An entire childs set for 1 tael was not much for a rich person or a cultivator. This allowed middlemen to make money from the sets and have them buy them up in batches.

The worst thing was having a product that didnt sell, which meant lugging something around that didnt have value. For the hot sauce, my manager had worked out how to produce it in powder form. There was a lot of grinding, but that was easy enough to do with the cheap labor out there. Offering 20 bronze coins a day to spend it grinding up ingredients into the finest powder, using a crank that turned a drill, which was lowered into a metal basin.

Grind for half an hour and then pour the powder through a metal sieve and then into wax paper rectangular bricks. Warning labels were applied, along with the date of manufacture. Fold up the wax paper and package it inside a standard crate for transport. I sold each brick for 100 bronze coins and it cost about 30 bronze coins to produce with materials and labor.

They then exported the bricks out. I had to arrange deals with two more farms to sell peppers to me to handle the demand. I wasnt able to buy a portion of them up, which annoyed me, but there were only so many failing businesses available.

The mine was also doing well since we had connected the vertical shaft to the main shaft. The air quality improved immensely, and it was much easier to get the ore out. Also, two pumps were set up. One at the top of the vertical shaft and one at the bottom with a pool to dump the water into from lower in the mine. Otherwise, it was too far for a single pump to pull up all the water. The main thing was that my loan was being paid off quickly from the mine with a constant stream of ore being transported and my smelter running constantly.

The next area I was looking into was beast hunting. The entire process was permitted and licensed, which were separate things. Basic permits were required to show that they had approved you to hunt beasts and knew how to extract cores. Then you needed a license for each beast killed. A permit cost 100 tael and was good for life or until you screwed up.

A license cost half the value of the spirit stone that could be extracted from a beast. That meant a level 1 license cost 500 tael. Most hunters formed teams for safety and to split the cost.

The Hunting Guild was a mix of mortals, and a few low ranked cultivators and was fairly insular. But Ting had informed me that a team was looking for a sponsor after some losses. I had Ting invite the leader of the team to a meeting. He wasnt a cultivator, so I had seniority in this situation at least.

Greetings Young Master Yuan. I am hunter Xiaotong. He gave me a fairly deep bow.

Greetings hunter Xiaotong. Please, sit and enjoy some tea while we talk. I returned a slight bow to him and then gestured at the table with some tea. Ting carefully served both of us and then retreated to the background.

I sipped my tea, and he did as well. I invited you here today because I heard your team is looking for a sponsor?

Yes. Most teams either have a sponsor or a cultivator. I thought about breaking our team up, but there is no room on other teams. The hunting guild is very competitive, and the teams are insular. Becoming a free hunter, not on a team, is the first step on the path to retirement. I nodded at this explanation. Xiaotong appeared fairly young, mid-twenties, if I had to guess.

What exactly put you in the position you are in now? I asked.

My father died. Killed on a hunt. While we werent the best team, he had arranged for a sponsor he knew personally. With his loss, the sponsor rescinded their support. They refused my request for a meeting.

Any reason why? I asked.

We got one spirit stone every three and a half hunts. It has gotten better to two and a half hunts recently. That made them far more expensive than the market rates. I frowned at this. They were spending 1,250 tael in license fees alone to get a 1,000 tael spirit stone. That was not even counting their personal expenses.

Why the high failure rate? I asked, and Xiaotong let out a sigh.

The issue is capturing a beast and then extracting a spirit stone. If you kill or harm a beast too much beforehand, the spirit stone will break. Also, locating the stone inside a beast is difficult. That is why rogue cultivators are often part of teams.

But your team are not cultivators? I asked, and he nodded.

Yes. My father, while great at hunting, didnt pay to upkeep our equipment, traps, and other gear. As our hunts failed more, we had to cut more corners to stay afloat until we reached this point. That all made sense.

So, what would a sponsor do exactly? I asked.

Purchase spirit stones as we produce them.

Wouldnt the guild purchase them?

They offer the standard rate of 1,000 tael and then upsell them afterwards. A sponsor would get first right of purchase at the rate we collect spirit stones at to make sure we stay afloat. Normally, this is the cost of the licenses plus ten percent. I leaned back in my chair and sipped my tea.

That meant I would pay about 1,500 tael a spirit stone. But if their hunting ratio improved, that could be brought way lower. We also need new equipment, which will cost about 1,000 tael, he replied.

What kind of equipment and how long is it good for? I asked.

Clamps, snares, a core drill, a core extractor, bait, scent concealer. That would cover us for about a year. We go on about 6 hunts a year or would like to if we can cover the license fees. The best option would be to purchase 10 licenses at once and then go on an extended hunt for six months.

So, six thousand tael upfront. And lets say you get five spirit stones with the new equipment. I would get five thousand tael back.

You would get spirit stones and could sell them yourself or trade for favors with cultivators.

Your success rate is about forty percent, perhaps fifty percent, if I am charitable. What are the best teams success rates? I asked.

One and a quarter hunts per spirit stone. But they have cultivators. For regular people, the best hit one and a half spirit stones per hunt. That was eighty and sixty-six percent, respectively.

What is stopping you from becoming a top team? I asked.

Experience. That is another reason why we have been struggling. My fathers old team retired, while we brought new people on. It takes time to get good. In five years, we will be one of the top teams, Xiaotong replied. I considered the man in front of me.

What he wasnt saying was that hunting was high risk. He could easily get wiped out, and then I would have nothing. The good thing was that once I signed on as his sponsor for his team, none of his team members could work under a new sponsor unless I agreed. So, no jumping ship after I had invested in them.

That was why some teams didnt get sponsors and just focused on earning for themselves. Still converting my wealth to spirit stones would be useful. Spirit stones could be directly traded for spirit coins, which were minted by the high ranking sects.

It wasnt easy to convert tael to spirit stones. While the standard rate was 1,000 tael, one could not go out and buy 100 spirit stones for 100,000 tael. There would be markups. That is where sponsoring a hunting team came into play.

I might even get a good deal if I was lucky, but it wasnt a moneymaking venture. It was a currency exchange venture. Very well, I will sign on as your sponsor, I replied. Xiaotongs face brightened considerably. I would have to tighten up my budget for a bit, but it was doable.

Xiaotong stood up and bowed deeply. Thank you, Young Master Yuan.

I will want to see the rest of your team and your equipment purchases. I will also pay for six licenses up front. That was how much I could afford at the moment.

After that, we went to the Hunters Guild and signed a sponsorship contract. He introduced me to his team. Two other men and three women. All of them looked worn and a couple of them had serious scars, but they didnt look like drunkards, fat, or lazy.

Once introductions were done, we went to purchase equipment. Everything was set up in a shop run by the Hunters Guild. I looked over the various items as Xiaotong explained them to me.

One of the hardest things is figuring out exactly where the core is. I am our core expert on the team.

There is no device that can detect a core? I asked, and he shook his head.

A cultivator can sense it if they are skilled enough, but normally no. Even then, I have been told it is very blurry and imprecise. I use the density gauge on the drill as it shows how much qi is present. Once it spikes, that is where the core is. Most cores are in the head or by the heart. But you only get one, possibly two chances to drill if you are lucky, he replied.

Extracting it is easy? I asked.

Once you have it located, then it is simple. I only failed in extraction twice years ago. Now, if I can locate the core, I dont fail. I nodded at this.

I would be interested in going on a hunt sometime. What are the requirements? I asked. Xiaotong paled a bit.

Young Master, I could not take responsibility for your safety. If anything happened, I would be in grave trouble.

I meant getting a permit to be a Hunter, I asked. He calmed down a bit at this, probably thinking I was just curious and not wanting to get eaten.

A training course and then a series of tests. There is a book available if you are interested in reading through it. Then you are given a provisional permit. You complete five successful core extractions out in the field in the following year, and your permit is no longer provisional.

The book cost a tael. They clearly meant the high prices as a barrier to entry into this profession. Xiaotong purchased his equipment with my money. He brought out his old equipment and showed where things had broken, how the gauge wobbled all the time on the drill, and how his supplies of consumables had run low.

I also purchased him six licenses as well. Each team could get 20 level 1 licenses at most per year. Most teams didnt get that many. There was a total cap of 100 licenses per year for level 1. A sponsor could only sponsor a single team, so I couldnt take over the guild by supporting multiple teams.

There were six other teams, making for seven. Rogue cultivators who were trying to fund their cultivation through hunting led four of them. I was quite curious if I could gain an advantage with my sight.

The biggest roadblock was locating the spirit core or stone of a beast. If I could spot it, then it would be easy to build up a lot of wealth. I would use Xiaotong to learn the basics and then I might go hunt on my own.

The real money was in extracting a core from a level 2 or 3 beast. But I had to be careful not to get blinded by greed and ignore the danger. It wasnt cheap remaining in the sect. While I planned to do chores to get sect points, resources for cultivating werent cheap, especially at the higher stages.

It also explained why most cultivators didnt start businesses. They could just go out and kill a few beasts to get insanely wealthy. It also explained the disconnect between tael and beast cores. Cultivators wanted to use up the cores, but there was a limited supply.

That was why there were fluctuations in the price as demand ebbed and flowed. I probably wouldnt go into hunting full time. But it would be good to see how things were done. More knowledge was never a bad thing.

Now I just needed to make more money, a lot more money. Perhaps selling mining solutions would be the best way. I would go in and offer to take over various mining operations for a slice of the profits or a large set fee.

It might put pressure on my own mining operation and revenue stream if people copied me. I frowned at that, but it wasnt a tremendous deal, even if they did. There was always a demand for metal and they could export it out if the city had a surplus. It was high value and small enough to be easily carted away in the trade caravans.

I would need to put together a presentation and figure out the other major stakeholders in the various mines around Half Moon City. Then I would invite them to the Illuminated Moon and make my pitch. I would need to sit down and work out the numbers and contracts that would be acceptable.

But selling mining solutions would be a good way to bring in a sizable amount of revenue while avoiding an equal amount of debt. I had enough business success and income that the movers and shakers of Cloudy Moon City were aware of me. I hadnt stepped on that many toes either, and was under my fathers protection. That was why there had been no pressure or attacks on my businesses.

The risk with selling a mining town improvement service was that it might drag me into the local drama in a way I didnt want. I would have to give it a lot more thought.

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