Chương 87: The Road to Heaven is Also Paved with Good Intentions

Jin sat cross-legged beneath the clear night sky on a rock in the forest, taking in the beauty of the moon.

"Moon moon moon, you make me swoon, why so pretty, yet so far," he said in a dramatic voice as if reciting a poem, before furrowing his brows.

"What positive adjective rhymes with far?" he wondered. A few more minutes went by as he worked with the words and tried to find an appropriate way to phrase the moment.

"Silver moon in evening air," he eventually said slowly.

"Cool as jade, pale and fair." He nodded his head to an invisible beat.

"Elegance. No: Beauty drifts where night winds flow, yet you stay far; too far to know," he concluded happily with a clap. Then he frowned. He was supposed to be cultivating. A sigh escaped his lips as he looked at the pale sky. He was supposed to be working towards core formation, yet here he was creating irrelevant poems to insert into Skyrim to flesh out the literature found within it.

The rumours that the future inter-sect tournaments would not differentiate between inner disciples from combat and non-combat sects had rattled him, but apparently not enough. He pulled out his pouch of spirit stones and looked at the dimming blue light they exuded. The foundation establishment stage consisted of refining the body into being more suited for cultivation. It was divided into three stages, each divided into three pillars.

The higher the quality of the metaphorical pillars one crafted, the more potential one would enter core formation with. Jin had recently started working on the seventh pillar, and with the help of the spirit stones, his previously slow pace had increased significantly. It was during this time that he realised that cultivation was like a washing machine. Somehow, it always said it was five minutes away from finishing the cycle.

But then, when you went to check on it after half an hour, it would somehow say that it needed another four minutes. Cultivation was similar in that it dragged on exponentially. If the first 10% of the foundation establishment stage took a year, then getting another 10% from there would take two and so on.

The limiting factors were many, mainly consisting of the cultivators' suitability for the chosen method, their intelligence, their ability to draw in qi from their surroundings and their ability to do something with it. One of these factors was not like the other four. After all, suitability, or in other words, talent, intelligence and the ability to manipulate qi were things that were simply there.

The limiting factor was often the qi intake capacity, consisting not only of personal ability but also of the environment. This, for example, was why sects often sought out specific environments rich in the sort of qi they wished to cultivate with. It was also one of the reasons why sects occasionally went to war.

Jin hadn't experienced enough to determine if the abode of the Illusion Room sect was low or high quality, although considering the fact that might often made right, he somehow doubted that a non-combat sect creating non-essential goods had somehow managed to snatch the best mountain far and wide. Regardless of the quality of the mountain or one's own ability to draw in qi, however, spirit stones were hacks made to resolve the issue for the unlucky or the unskilled.

Just like rare minerals and composites in Jin's past life, which formed throughout many million years through constant pressure, spirit stones were essentially a special form of rock. The specialest rock, a rock that could, over time, store the qi in its surroundings. There were veins of spirit stones, or rather, spirit ore, running through the world. Or rather, there had been? Jin wasn't sure about the specifics.

The thing about a rock that stored qi was that if you emptied it of the substance, it would simply start storing qi again. There were different grades, and Jin had a reasonable suspicion that he'd received the lowest grade. The shittiest spirit stones might need thousands of years to refill completely, while the purest stones could do so in just a few years, depending, of course, on the environment in which one stored them.

Jin would keep his after emptying them to see, and if they were too slow to refill, he'd simply sell the empty husks. Still worth a few contribution points, better to have in one's pocket than a bunch of maybe glowing rocks. A finger went up to rub at his temple. The issue with using spirit stones to cultivate was actually something that should have been obvious from the beginning. They increased the qi in one's immediate environment and thus increased intake.

Unfortunately, increasing the intake of a substance also impacted one's ability to manipulate that substance. Manipulating larger amounts of environmental qi was something Jin was slowly getting used to. It was like being a writer and thinking that ingesting a magical substance that increased one's typing speed by a factor of two would increase one's writing speed by the same amount. Unfortunately, there was more to writing than just typing, and the increase in efficiency was more like 1. 25x.

Good, amazing even, but not world-breaking. If one didn't manage this increase in speed wisely and simply wrote like a maniac? One would find themselves editing a lot of pages of shit. Just that with cultivation, once you progressed down the path, you couldn't edit it anymore. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

For Jin, who'd taken a more relaxed approach to cultivation in the past, applying his wide knowledge base and unhurried mindset to progress steadily, he was now struggling. Using spirit stones to cultivate was like riding a wild horse. You had to be on watch the whole time to make sure you weren't going to get thrown off and make a change you'd regret.

Incidentally, this was also why people like Lung Junior, who had connections but shit for brains, couldn't simply rely on spirit stones to beat out their more talented (and handsome) foes. It turned out that anyone who actually needed spirit stones to advance when they otherwise couldn't was likely bad enough at actually cultivating that they built shitty foundations that were more hindrance than benefit. The optimal combination was talent and resources, obviously.

Jin sighed and opened his senses to the qi to begin absorbing it once again, guiding it to refine his body, molecule by molecule. Jin was talented enough that it would have been more beneficial to keep the stones for when he'd actually reached a bottleneck. Unfortunately, he had to reach the core formation stage before anyone got the bright idea to throw him into another death trap. And thus his watch continued.

-/-"The lengths I go to avoid labour," Jin muttered softly to himself as the rays of the sun started tickling his eyelashes hours later to herald the beginning of the day. He opened his eyes and promptly sneezed.

"Fucking stupid ass world." -/- The mornings of the Illusion Room disciples remained scheduled for combat practice. The tournament was over, but considering the result of Jin's so-called "win," the Elder Flower faction had become more emboldened than not; combat practice was now a daily thing, not a biweekly one. Sure, many of the Illusion Room disciples had embarrassed the sect on an international stage, the only exception being Hashimi, actually, but face was face, and victory was victory.

The cultivation world was weird like that… Face was important and losing face in defeat was shameful, but if losing face resulted in victory, then the amount of face gained was still in the positives rather than the negatives? Someone was probably going to invent the Navier-Stokes equation of face distribution, but until that point, Jin was just going to have to guesstimate. Currently, he probably had a lot of face, and people treated him more respectfully.

Many had even asked to join his project, clearly without even knowing what it was. A lot of them were the same people who'd rejected Jin in The Last of Us collaboration due to Lung Junior's bribe. Jin took some delight in shooting them down. The Elder responsible for the morning combat practice didn't even chastise Jin when he used a randomly picked-up stone affectionately named Mr Pebble to knock out a particularly annoying former hanger-on of Lung Junior.

His eye did twitch at the catchphrase, which Jin was sure was going to become a thing one of these days, though.

"You've just been pebbled!" Jin's face stock was at an all-time high. All early investors, such as Hashimi, Francis and Elder Flower, were reaping a very high return on investment. In other words. In other words… Life was good. If not for one thing. -/- Jin's face smacked down onto the scroll he'd been working on most recently. Programming functions filled every corner, making the whole surface have less white than it did black. The rendering was still progressing too slowly to be ready anytime soon.

Jin could already see the prompt he'd get when his team finished Skyrim, but couldn't run it. int main() {int deadline = 9; printf("Task started... \n"); for (int i = 1; i <= deadline; i++) {printf("Time passed: %ds\n", i); sleep(1);} printf("\n⚠️ WARNING: Task was not completed soon enough! \n"); return 0;} Critical failure. He paused as he turned away from the rendering and reviewed the data shared to him by Da Bendan and Ting.

Da Bendan's success didn't surprise him, actually; the sample the boy had given to get the job was already exactly what Jin wanted, it just needed to be shaped into specific effects and be remade into a non-Eastern aesthetic. The fire atronachs were sufficiently… gifted in all areas, and even the spells that Da Bendan clearly wasn't so interested in, such as Oakskin, had received the appropriate attention. What had surprised him most was Ting, actually.

Her redesign of Alduin had definitely gone in a direction he hadn't expected, but that had been why he'd hired her in the first place, and the result was miles better than the original. She'd kept the black; you couldn't mess with the black. She'd kept the spikes; you couldn't mess with the spikes. The maw, though? The proportions? Chef's kiss. Alduin was now 25% mouth, and Jin meant that in the best way possible.

His lower jaw, which ended in a spiked shape, was huge and threatening, shouting with a voice so loud it shook the heavens in an appropriately dramatic fashion. The upper mouth was shaped and sized more like the original Alduin's, but the fact that there were now two introduced a fascinating gameplay aspect that Jin had never thought about. Alduin had two mouths, which technically meant that he could use two shouts at the same time, or use one shout twice.

That opened up all sorts of interesting combat mechanics, all of them more complex than just making him have more health and hit harder than the other dragons. He was shaping up to be a proper boss. Unique, threatening and a bit uncanny. Honestly, his team was working like a well-lubricated machine. Hashimi was rushing through the world like a storm of artistic inspiration and blue-collar commitment, and Francis was pulling the strings like a puppet-master to make all the different parts fit together.

Jin thought he was doing a pretty good job himself as well. He'd decided on making the Skeleton Key an alternative way to get to the afterlife and had mostly completed the quests involved in joining the Thieves Guild. More quests, more thrills, and more ca- horse-chases. He just wished he could find someone to offload the rendering on. Or at least someone on whom he could rely to keep up with his pace in developing everything from scratch.

As if summoned by a heavenly machination, the door to his apartment suddenly knocked. Jin dully looked at the scribbles covering most of the walls and the furniture. He didn't have the energy to care if anyone saw.

"Come in!" Bao entered the room with his breakfast and cringed when she saw the state of the space… Jin scowled at her. Maybe if he had a real servant instead of a glorified free-loading wannabe gold-digger, he'd have someone to clean his messes faster.

"Ok, you know what," Bao suddenly said as she laid the tray of tea, rice and side-dishes on his table.

"I've been looking at this crap and dying on the inside for long enough, but I have to ask."

"Ask what?" Jin muttered with crossed arms.

"Why is your room covered in syntax errors?" Jin froze and woodenly turned to the somewhat apprehensive-looking mousy woman.

"What?"