The next few months proceeded peacefully, with me continuing to cultivate and study magic and my various techniques, which surprisingly included at least a couple of the ones for tenaciously surviving monsters.
After I had thrown it across the room, I recovered the book and read it cover to cover, sure something was hidden in the pages. A literal fox monster gave it to me, so I inspected it very closely for illusions but couldn't find anything. If something was encoded in the actual text of the book, then I might never decode it, as I wasn't a cryptologist. I was smart but was never great with that sort of puzzle. Still, it wasn't as entirely useless as I first suspected.
I had initially flipped through the first technique, the Sacred Stealing Technique, too quickly after reading the words: 'Just because the human has turned its back on an item doesn't mean it has forgotten it exists! Wait for your chance, and don't immediately grab and eat it as soon as they turn their back.'
However, much to my surprise, it actually had a qi-based physical technique, similar to my footwork skill, several more pages in. It was a kind of magical pickpocketing technique. It wasn't an easy technique for me to learn, but I made a bit of progress and practised on Xiao Li, much to his annoyance.
It wasn't as magical as Kazuma's Steal, so I would be unlikely to steal a maiden's undergarments while she was wearing them, but it was pretty useful.
It was not only useful for the obvious reasons of stealing but also for my present circumstances when I just noticed an incredibly brazen kid who looked about the young Emperor's age attempt to use a similar technique on me when it was my turn to buy food at the market. The kid wasn't quite a cultivator yet, but he obviously was aware of Qi and had several wisps of it in his spiritual body.
Attempting to steal from a cultivator when you weren't one was pretty stupid. It wouldn't be weird if I violently lashed out at him. However, I didn't want to hurt the kid, but I wanted to make sure he realised he had done fucked up—if only to make him less likely to repeat it so that he stayed focused on prey that couldn't literally crush his skull with their hands. So, I casually cast the first-level necromancy spell Cause Fear. It was like a lower-levelled, nerfed version of Fear that could only target a single person instead of an AoE.
I instantly winced. The boy ran off crying and screaming and I kind of felt bad. I had tried to limit the effects of the spell by limiting the amount of magical energy that went into the spellform, but I think my inherent affinity for necromantic spells increased the efficiency, so it was probably only a little less powerful than normal. Still, the effects of the spell would quickly wear off, and it wasn't generally traumatising. I had used it on myself and Xiao Li for training often enough, after all.
I patted myself down and blinked. Wait, the little fuck had managed to steal the half dozen golden taels I kept in my pockets, mostly as bait for thieves. I narrowed my eyes, irrationally wanting to chase him down and recast the spell on him. That was impressive, though. He kept his hands on the goods even as he ran away in fright.
Certainly, people were looking at me oddly now, so I just got the demonic beast meat from the stalls of a few independent hunters and left. You might think that with such an immense city, there just wouldn't be any wilderness around it, or the resources there would be overhunted to satisfy the demand, but that wasn't the case.
Not only would demonic beasts be much more prolific around large human settlements, almost as a kind of immune reaction from the world, but attempts, intentional or not, to overhunt the wilderness would draw in very powerful diremonsters for some reason, and the outdoors would suddenly become highly perilous. As such, there was significant effort spent on what I would call wilderness conservation. In other words, freshly hunted meat was actually pretty expensive.
It was expensive enough that I had to change in some spirit stones for gold, or rather bank notes for larger denominations, but it wasn't so expensive that I actually needed to pay spirit stones for every meal, thankfully.
Tomorrow was the first day that sects that operated in the city opened their doors to new disciples. It continued on for five days, traditionally, but coming along on the fifth day was an obvious admission that that student didn't have a particular school or sect as their first or even second choice, so people made great efforts to only use the first three days if at all possible.
The Silver Serenities Sword School was one of the top three sects in the city, and the other two were a Buddhist temple that I immediately discarded and the Radiant Starlight College. The latter didn't have very many members, so joining it would be a really nice achievement, but they only accepted new disciples that were at the beginning of the Foundation Establishment realm, not before or after, so it just wasn't meant to be.
I did have a couple of second-line options, including a second-tier sect that focused on illusions named the Mirage Moon Sect. If I had just wandered into this city on my own, this might have been my first choice. After all, I didn't really have a fate with the sword, but I quite liked having a friend, even if it was one as silly as Xiao Li was at times.
As I got back to the villa, I began dinner. I had gotten some new spices while I was out, including a number of spices like cumin and cinnamon that gave me the idea to recreate garam masala. I was going to try to create a curry and make butter thunderfowl tonight. I could salvage it with Prestidigitation if I made it inedible, but I had discovered it wasn't a good idea to do so, as the Qi in demonic beast meat tended to degrade in the presence of that transmutation cantrip, and it would make it little better than chicken meat.
"Hahaha, are you ready for tomorrow?" asked Xiao Li as I peered at the simmering sauce suspiciously. I had never attempted to make Indian food in my last life, but I did have an Indian American girlfriend for a year and a half in the Navy, so I had memories of watching her make us dinner several times. It didn't end up working out with her, but that was the story of my life.
I nodded, "Of course. I kind of wished I had managed to make it to the fifth level, but I'm still not quite there yet." I groused. I even suspended most of my recreation, focusing almost entirely on cultivation and magic research, and yet I still hadn't quite reached it yet. I was pretty sure that they'd accept me if I was at the fifth level.
"Yes, I've noticed that you haven't even found the nearest brothel. But you needn't worry; Grandma Mei says that with the combination of your constitution, cultivation method and the fact that you're a talisman artist you're a shoo-in," Xiao Li said wryly and then tried to reassure me.
Mrs Mei wasn't active all the time—she was "asleep" the vast majority of the time in an attempt to recover the damage done to her soul—also, we were in a place where she couldn't easily speak aloud as we used to do, in case higher cultivators were listening in on us, so I hadn't spoken with her in some time. Xiao Li had mentioned that she would probably have to stay dormant for most of the time he was in the Silver Serenities School, perhaps only speaking with him often while he was out of the sect on missions or adventures.
I sniffed delicately, ignoring the slander, but decided he was probably right. I then nodded, "Come, I made quite a lot. This is a bit of an experiment."
He looked uneasy as he noticed the simmering sauce bubbling a bit like a witch's brew, too. "Uhh... what is this?"
"Make the rice, and I'll show you," I demanded, and he nodded and got the pot out that he used to make rice. He wasn't as terrible at cooking anymore, but I had gotten better, so it still made sense for me to do it if I wanted the most delicious meals possible, and I did.
I served the chicken curry in the traditional way, and we sat down to eat. I took a bite first and frowned before nodding. It didn't have one hundred per cent fidelity to what I remembered, but it was quite good!
"Spicy!" Xiao Li complained but continued to eat bite after bite. Back on Earth, when I went to an Indian restaurant and they asked if I wanted it spicy or mild, I first asked what part of India the chef was from. If they were from the southern part of India, then I always picked mild!
In this case, I was kind of guessing on what level of spice to add because we were both cultivators. A normal level of spiciness wouldn't do anything to us, so I was using ground spiritual peppers that, even fresh, had the dehydrated look of seriously dangerous peppers, like the Carolina reaper and ghost pepper. I used that to make my own chilli powder from scratch. It was on the spicier side, but it wasn't too bad to my calibrated tastebuds, so I considered it a win.
If there was one thing about cultivation that I loved more than any other, it wasn't the power and strength so much as the fact that it made me brighter—not like hyper-intelligent AI smarter, where I became a paperclip minmaxer, but smarter in the sense that it was really easy to learn new skills and notice things that I might have missed before.
Just the idea of trying to recreate a recipe from scratch based on a few memories, including recreating the spice blend garam masala based only on smell, would have been an insane idea before.
Power and strength were nice, but I was entirely of the mind that with sufficient smarties, the rest would follow naturally from that.
"It's spicy, but do you like it?" I asked. It wasn't as though there weren't tons of spicy food around as I had detected what I might consider both Sichuan and Hunan-style food, but there wasn't Indian food, at least as I knew of it, despite the same spices and seasonings being available.
He glanced down at his plate, which was empty now and made a Dad joke, "No, I hated it." I snorted and gave him seconds. I thought I had put enough on his oversized plate at first, but he ate even more than I did and could easily eat enough for three or four regular people his size.
"Alright, I'm going to get some sleep before the morning," I said with a nod.
He looked at me weirdly, "You don't have an issue falling asleep before an important day?"
I shook my head smugly. I never had issues falling asleep. I'd always been able to dream as soon as my head hit the pillow, which a lot of people were envious of. It wasn't a big deal if Xiao Li couldn't sleep, though. He could probably stay up for days at a time with no ill effects, as could I. However, I'd never go without sleep if I could avoid it.
---xxxxxx---
We took the train up into the upper city. I had travelled in the train before, and I always found the passenger cars a little unusual—in the sense that they seemed so familiar. I suppose form followed function to some extent, but it seemed exactly like pictures I've seen of passenger cars from the age of steam locomotives. The train tracks entered a tunnel in the side of the plateau's cliff and spiralled upwards until we exited the tunnel a few minutes later.
"Hmmm," I said as we stepped out of the train station, looking around. Things looked fairly swanky up here. This wasn't the first time I came to the upper city, so it wasn't as though I didn't recognise it, but this was the first time that I had walked through it for any length of time.
It wasn't that we were too poor to live up here... well, I wasn't, at least. It was just that there was no good reason to pay the extra expense, amounting to at least double what we were paying for food and rent down below.
Theoretically, someone could come into our villa and murder us in the middle of the night and be perfectly fine with the city authorities, but they wouldn't be fine with the entity that owned the villa, as fights between cultivators tended to destroy buildings, and I suspected most large businesses had backing from strong people. Otherwise, they wouldn't exist in the lower city at all.
Also, I had already used a combination of Arcane Lock and Glyphs of Warding to provide a nasty surprise for anyone who just kicked our door in.
I glanced down at the map and up at the property at the corner, frowning. It was a big lot and a huge building, but...
"Are you sure this is the place? How can thousands of disciples live and cultivate in here?" I asked, quizzical.
Xiao Li squinted and frowned, "I can't see in the dark as well as you can just yet, but yes. The actual Sect is several thousand li away. It's on a mountaintop with high qi density to the northeast. This is just the office they keep in the city."
Oh, that made a lot more sense. We had started out early this morning, more like late last evening, but as we approached the gate, it appeared as though we weren't the first to get there. It was staked out like the GameStops used to be before digital delivery became common, like GTA3 or Black Ops back in the 2000s. There must be a thousand people here, and I could see about a hundred disciples wearing the distinctive silver robes of the school setting up next to the gates.
This was the first time I saw so many cultivators in one place, and most of them were about my level, so I didn't feel quite as bad for not reaching the fifth level. The vast majority were human, but the Silver Serenities accepted diremonsters as disciples as well, so I saw a few people with what I would consider animal features. There were others that I considered anomalies who I believe must have practised some really strange methods; for example, there was one man whose skin appeared indistinguishable from brass.
That wasn't a particularly strong metal for cultivators, so I wondered if, as he practised this ability, his skin would shift to stronger metals? Or was he stuck with brass?
Another odd sight was a gentleman who was black—and I didn't mean African or that he had a lot of melanin, either. He was clearly Chinese, just his skin looked like Vantablack, one of those super-black paints from my last life. He just absorbed light, I suppose, except for his eyeballs. It was quite interesting.
Almost everyone had a sword, too. I guess that wasn't surprising. I was wearing my peak-grade sword treasure on my hip as well. I mean, even if you were following the Dao of the Brick and just liked smashing people with bricks, if you wanted to join a Sword Sect you'd at least put one on your hip decoratively.
I did notice that it was a sausage party, though, but that wasn't particularly unusual in the cultivation world, including a couple of men who catcalled me. I ignored it, thinking it was pretty stupid. The members of the sect were right here, and I'm sure they had some Junior or Senior Sisters they looked up to or protected. Making it obvious what kind of douchecanoe you were before you even got admitted was silly.
Also, the level of catcalling was below par. I had apobviously never experienced it in my past life, but Merildwen had, and a good bard made these attempts look sad and amateurish.
Not to mention, I was much stronger than the man doing the catcalling myself. I was sure there were rules in place. Otherwise, this many unaffiliated cultivators would have already resulted in a dozen duels, at least, so I controlled my desire to cast a spell at him.
We waited there, with at least as many people arriving after us. About thirty minutes into our wait, a loud booming voice shouted, "Alright! Each one of you: orderly queue up in front of a station. Answer the questions asked! No arguments!"
Ahead of me, I saw the line start moving, with the people funnelling into one of the about two dozen lanes that were set up with members of the Silver Serenities sect manning them. It appeared that they were conducting some filtering.
The line moved surprisingly quickly, but I saw a lot of people leaving each of the lanes and walking away, looking dejected. When I got closer to the front of the line, I started to hear what some of the people were saying in each lane.
"Your meridians are damaged. Did you use some sort of forbidden technique? Get out!"
"Qi density too low! Scram!"
"There's no future with the current method you use, leave!"
Xiao Li went ahead of me, and I followed to one of the newly open lanes and walked up to a man in silver robes. He was in the Foundation Establishment realm, and he nodded in the direction of a small orb on a table. It kind of looked like a crystal ball used to tell fortunes. He said tersely, "Insert your qi into the sphere."
I blinked and held out my hand, placed it on the sphere and inserted some of my Qi, not exactly sure when I should stop. However, after a couple of seconds, I could feel it vibrate, and it stopped accepting more energy. Haptic feedback, how interesting. I put my hand back at my side and looked up at the man. He had a small jade sheet in his hand and peered at it before finally nodding, "Acceptable." He produced a small sheet of paper, a bonafide form and handed it to me, "Fill this out. If you pass the next step, turn it in."
I walked forward and met Xiao Li, who was grinning, giving me a thumbs up. I asked him, "Do you know what's next?"
He shook his head, "I hear that usually there is a tournament at the end to decide who amongst the new disciples gets to join the Inner Sect and who has to remain in the Outer Sect, for now. Are you going to try?"
I shook my head, "Probably not. Besides, that's putting the cart before the horse." From what I could tell, the main difference no matter where you were, between the inner and outer sects was that the inner one got more cultivation resources and didn't have to perform chores. But with the good came the bad, and at the same time, these bright stars of the sect were overseen quite a bit.
If I just joined the Outer Sect and later decided to leave, I didn't think anyone would care. It might be different if they had already invested a lot of resources into me. Besides, I could always enter it later.
Xiao Li nodded. It took another hour for the rest of the line outside to be filtered through, and less than half of the people that were waiting were here, perhaps nine hundred people. I used that time to fill out the form with a pencil. It was obvious things: name, age, name of your cultivation method, that sort of thing. However, one block asked if I had ever used any of a long list of techniques, including demonic cultivation methods, ghost cultivation, and the like. If so, I had to provide a brief explanation.
Mrs Mei, through Xiao Li, already told me to expect this and that I should be "as honest as possible." I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but she said that these things weren't actually disqualifying for almost any sect. After all, some of them were very effective.
Moreover, since they often had enemies that were from demonic sects, it would put them at a severe disadvantage if they didn't know how any of it worked. They would likely use a karmic method to check my sin-virtue balance and just make sure I wasn't a psychopath, though.
Suddenly, a man wearing elaborate dark silver robes appeared. I couldn't see how he arrived, just one moment he was there. I wanted to laugh because he looked exactly like the Pai Mei from the Kill Bill films, but I felt a huge threat from him, almost taking a step back in surprise. It wasn't that I thought he was going to do me any harm; it was just that I had the feeling that if he decided to, then I wouldn't be able to stop him at all. Was he higher than the Foundation Establishment, then?
He said, "Listen up! The next step will have to be conducted at the Sect itself. I will open the permanent portal we keep here, and you'll go through it. No dawdling. You'll arrive at the base of the mountain, and the goal is just to walk up the stairs." He frowned and added as an aside, "Do not sabotage anyone; just mind your own business. You'll be ejected if you do."
I suddenly was paying close attention. A permanent spatial portal? How intriguing. That was on the level of highly legendary items back in Merildwen's world, even if it had a limited range. I opened my senses to him as he seemed to fiddle with something with a directed probe of Qi intangibly.
All of a sudden, a large portal opened up in the centre of the courtyard. It looked something like the magic portals Dr Strange could make using sling rings and also like what the Gate spell was supposed to look like, although Merildwen had never seen that spell, just read about it. However, it was much larger, the aperture being an oval about ten metres wide and five high.
"Quickly now, step through! Time is money!" he yelled, and we all obeyed, moving with prudent haste through the portal. Did it cost spirit stones for every second it was activated? Maybe, but I didn't know enough. The energy to fold space or however it worked had to come from somewhere.
Xiao Li and I walked through in the middle of the pack, and less than a minute later, the portal behind us winked out of existence. I tried to learn as much as possible through the process of stepping through the portal, but the fact was that the transportation seemed instantaneous, just like stepping through a door. It wasn't like Misty Step or Dimension Door that, while also immediate, had a distinct feeling of twistiness as the teleportation happened.
There were a number of silver-robed people here too. One of them said, "Okay, just walk up the steps. No talking until you make it up to the top. The use of talismans or pills is prohibited. If you stop for more than a minute or leave the step in a way other than proceeding to the following step, you fail, and one of our disciples will remove you back to the bottom, and we'll transport you back to the city later today."
Xiao Li glanced at me, and I nodded. There was clearly something not normal about these steps. For one, they were incredibly wide and tall. I'd have to jump to get over them instead of stepping, as the step height was over a metre.
Still, we were in the first group to jump up to the first step. Some people held back a little bit, if only for space reasons, as while the steps were wide, they weren't hundreds of people wide—at most, maybe ten people could be on one step at a time.
As I touched the first step, I frowned and detected a pressure, as if my weight was slightly increased. I frowned, hoping that this wasn't solely a physical test, as I wasn't as strong physically as most others. Still, I internally shrugged and just jumped to the next, as did everyone else.
The process repeated, with the pressure increasing at each step until about thirty steps later, I had to pause for a moment and kind of vault over the top. I was using a little bit more qi than I could passively regenerate now, but it still wasn't difficult. Xiao Li had already left me in the dust, but I was still amongst the first five or so people.
It soon became apparent that this strategy of just using Qi might not work. My Qi was dense, so I might have enough to make it all the way up, but I'd rather not work on a maybe. So, I cast the Enlarge spell on myself, instantly doubling in size and cubing in volume and mass—thankfully, the spell works on your clothes and equipment, too.
A cubed increase in mass might have been a bad thing if this actually was gravity, but I had long realised that it wasn't. It was just a pressure pushing down on me. The increased strength was instantly helpful.
The people on my step gaped at me for a moment, but I just started taking the steps as if they were a normal staircase, running up them as fast as I could. I waved cheekily at Xiao Li as I passed him.
About midway up the staircase, the pressure disappeared, and I frowned. I kept myself Enlarged for a few more steps until I discovered the pressure was replaced with an increasing mental effect.
I let the concentration go on my spell, shrunk back down to my original size and took steps the old way, just hopping up. It took me a couple of more steps before I realised that I was feeling a bit anxious. Ah, it was a fear-type effect. Was this why Grandma Mei demanded such continuous training using my fear spells? She might not know the entry requirements for this particular school, but this might be a pretty common test.
Also, it turned out I wouldn't have needed to use Enlarge. I was assuming that all of the steps would be gradually increasing physical pressure, but apparently, it was a half-and-half thing, so I had more than enough Qi to make it up this far. Oh well.
I had stopped to think about it long enough that Xiao Li had caught up with me, and he waved and passed me. Hey! I chased him. It was true he practised under the fear effects a lot more than I did, but I did it enough that I barely took a step back when I cast Fear these days.
A few of the steps caused me to pause for a couple of seconds. The effect wasn't even quite as strong as my spells. After chasing Xiao Li to the top of the stairs, I suddenly realised that I had intended to slow down a little bit and not make waves, letting a few people pass me up. However, my first instinct was not to lose to him in a race, but now he was first, and I was second.
I coughed a little, glancing around. Xiao Li gave me a thumbs up, and I just hung my head.
There were about two hundred steps, so it actually took close to forty-five minutes for everyone to come up or get eliminated. Surprisingly, a good ten females, including myself, had succeeded, but they were still outnumbered by forty successful male cultivators. The young women all clustered around me, apparently taking me for a leader for some reason.
We had a little small talk while waiting for everyone to finish. When everyone was either up here or eliminated, a stunningly beautiful young woman descended from the sky on a flying treasure that resembled a lotus flower, hopping off of it at the last minute. She was petite like I was, but I still had a little growing to go until I reached Merildwen's mom's height while she looked full-grown.
Her hair was jet-black, and her skin was as fair as mine, which was a bit unusual. She had the figure of a ballerina, rather than my own curvier figure, but that was really nice, too. She also had an effortless grace with the way she moved, as well as a confidence that I was instantly attracted to.
My small gathering of girls started buzzing, with one of them saying, "That's Xi Mengyao! She's well-known in the entire city as one of the rising stars of the Silver Serenities Sword School."
"Oh, I'd like to be her friend," one said.
"I want her to help me study my sword forms," another said.
"I want to be her," said a third, rather parasocially. But at least she was honest.
'I want to sit on her face,' I thought, also honestly, but I had the emotional intelligence not to say it out loud, especially since she could definitely hear everything.
However, I glanced to the side and frowned when I saw Xiao Li. He looked... well, smitten, I suppose. I could almost see the stars in his eyes.
Well, shit. Did the Bro code bind me here? I wasn't a "bro" anymore, precisely, but it felt binding. At least with Xiao Li, anyway. A firm part of the Bro code was that if a bro was interested in a woman first, you had to cede the opportunity. It could be said that we saw her at the same time, but it was clear to me that his interest was romantic while mine was just lust, so he had the stronger claim.
I sighed. The pretty girl smiled and said, "The only thing left is individual interviews. I'd like to congratulate everyone on passing thus far. Please follow me."
---xxxxxx---
"So, were there any stand-out talents this year or anomalies?" the Pai Mei look-alike asked in the middle of a large room as dinner was being placed in front of everyone. Cultivators at their level didn't really need to eat, so it was rare that they'd have an excuse to get together like this.
An older woman said, "A few. I interviewed a young woman by the name of Mei Wen. She finished second up the stairs and is in the fourth level at the age of twenty-six."
Someone interrupted her, "That's not very good at all."
She waved her hand, "She claimed that she had to dissipate her entire cultivation not too long ago when she discovered her present cultivation method. It's not in our records, but it appears to be a very pure Lunar-type yin method. Her qi-to-true-qi ratio meets the definition of it being a top or peak-graded technique. She's also a talisman artist."
"Nice. What's the issue?" the same person asked.
The old lady stared daggers at the man for interrupting, but it was clear that there was no real malice behind it, "She's a ghost cultivator. More than that, she may have a special ghost constitution. It bears some resemblance to the Nine Nether Spirit Body recorded in our records."
"That is not likely," Pai Mei said definitively, "I don't think the Netherworld Kingdom has misplaced any living princesses."
The old lady sighed, "She could also be the near-descendent of a Celestial Ghost Cat, possibly one that mated with a human, as an alternative. I ran follow-on tests, and she tests either as ambiguous or not human on the species tester orbs depending on which one I use."
"That's a lot more likely. Can she transform into her monster cat shape, or was she born a human? Did you test her sin levels?" Pai Mei asked curiously.
The woman shrugged, "I didn't ask. It seemed impolite. I did ask her to show me some of her techniques, and she must have a fairly comprehensive ghost or death inheritance already, too, which is very unusual at her level. She has significant karmic merit but very few karmic ties."
"It's fine, then. Make sure she's aware of our policy about the study of what might be considered demonic techniques or cultivation methods, but as long as she is discreet and doesn't commit vast amounts of evil, I think we'd be fools not to admit her," Pai Mei said.
The old lady nodded, "I agree, which is why I already did. Anything else?"
Pai Mei grinned, "I found a genius of the Sword Dao."
"You say that every year!" the old lady cried, exasperated.
Pai Mei sniffed, "It's true this time. He was first on the stairway this year, and he said he plans to challenge for a spot in the Inner Sect. He's only sixteen and has already reached the one-with-the-sword level and is on the threshold of understanding the one-with-the-world stage. If he wins, I may take him as a personal disciple."
The old woman looked sceptical, but taking a sip of her wine distracted her from her perennial feud with the old fuddy-duddy, and she said, "Oh, this is excellent. Did this come out of your latest batch, Jingwei?"