Arc 2: Eighth, Ninth... Order? The joy of paperwork.
- Location
- Here
Adam had... vastly underestimated how much additional work would be shoved onto his workbench.
His original plan? A tattoo for each member, anchor the server to the Sect and a few backup points, ensure that more tattoo nodes could be made... and done!
And true, the Server Node didn't NEED to be connected to the world directly, the rings could address it either way... but it was a bit of extra service that could be easily modified later.
In actual consultation though, the work list was massive.
First, the Server was going to be upgraded. All storage modules would use space marked by the Sect Server's master pocket, so that nothing in the Sect would be lost even if their members were robbed or skinned alive or something.
Second? Tiered Tattoo node versions.
After a few weeks of conversation, the final tiers of node were as followed: Rings (Wood, Stone, Copper, Silver, Gold), Tattoos (initiate, outer, inner, disciple, elder, patriarch), and Stations (application, modification, upgrade, maintenance, removal).
If it wasn't obvious, the Station option was the new one Adam had to design. Developed to be heavy, nearly impossible to move, destroy itself if someone tries to steal it, and can be operated by Sect members to do all the various nitty gritty tattoo node detail work.
Anyway, the three types were Rings, Tattoos, and those Stations.
Why so many types? Simple.
Unlike some of the more secretive Sects, the Burning Sword Sect was both an openly 'Righteous' Sect as well as a Sect willing to work with civilians. They didn't take children away from normal families like some places, and they didn't forbid members from mingling with those without power.
So Adam had a new tier of equipment, the 'Wood Ring' nodes. They all came with a custom module installed that absorbed ambient spirit energy to allow non cultivators to access the built in features. The built in, heavily limited and restricted features.
First, these Wood Rings had a simplified storage space. Around a meter cubed to use as desired. They also allowed access to a basic connection to the public Sect Market, where they could sell directly to the Sect from the inventory or purchase small objects to be delivered directly into storage.
Normal shipping would still exist, since many things were larger than three feet or so in size, but lots of small things would be easily moved around this way.
There was also a very basic messaging system, allowing the Wood Ring owner to mark the Soul signatures of people they met with access to the network into a friends list for future conversations. It had to be set up in person, and if the ring was used too long it would shut down to recharge from local energy, but it was more than acceptable to most people.
But that was it. The rings were cheap, going to be mass produced, and would be given out to nearly everyone in the city and towns surrounding the Sect.
So cheap, that stealing one would feel pointless. No reason to kill Sect family members if anyone can get one. They all lacked security too... for safety reasons. It would be better for your family to be robbed than for them to be tortured for a password or maimed to use body parts for authentication.
All Wooden Rings would basically be connected with their own massive network, one that the Sect could moderate if needed... or spy on, not that they would tell anyone that bit.
When some enemy Sect asshole kills their people and steals their equipment? Why yes, the Burning Sword Sect WOULD like a live map, real time audio, and high level thought recordings of those stupid enough to wear the things after attacking their true owners.
The next step up in quality would be Stone Rings, given to any and all Cultivators that live in the local areas under the Burning Sword Sect's control but not able to become an actual member.
As these cultivators would have Qi to operate the stone devices correctly, these rings would all have actual security tied to their owner's energy signature for access. They would also grant the option to pay the Burning Sword Sect to recover your goods if the ring is destroyed or lost, and provide a small selection of optional modifications for a fee.
For one, the Stone Rings could support storage modules of much larger size if desired. It allowed larger amounts and a greater volume of trade to be sent to and from the public Sect Market, and granted access to a public Sect Cultivator Market that sold cultivation resources and other more dangerous goods not suggested for civilians.
But most of all, the Stone Rings could purchase cultivation manuals and techniques that were normally only sold in the public sections of the Sect's Repository of Knowledge Pagoda. While no NEW information would be leaked this way, it would allow Cultivators to purchase and trade techniques without their enemies (Or friends) finding out their secrets or training goals... These were going to be popular.
Meanwhile, the other rings were for the Sect only. Copper for initiates, Silver for Outer Sect members, Gold for Inner Sect disciples and everyone else. When the user got a Tattoo, the mark and the Rings would link together and could share space and abilities, while hopefully making outsiders assume that only the Rings were important.
Meanwhile, the Tattoos would have the GOOD features too dangerous to put in a portable object alone. Each level of Tattoo would permit more space for modules, and the variety and power of those modules would increase as well...
For example, the Initiate Tattoo was barely stronger than those Stone Rings to be sold outside, while the Outer and Inner Sect Member Tattoos could access both the Cultivation Database (With restrictions of course) and access to the Sect Tattoo Net. The highest permission Tattoos such as the ones for the elders and the patriarch) added tools for moderation, administration, and various modules that generated statistics and helped enforce Sect rules and access permissions.
Higher levels could allow lower levels additional permissions if needed, although those requests would be logged and easily reviewed if someone was trying something tricky.
Needless to say, this made Adam's plan of 'One Server, many Nodes' WAY more complicated. Annoyingly more complicated.
At this point, there were three Servers... The Public Server, handling the Wood and Stone Rings and the Public Sect Market; The Sect Server, which was the major platform for the whole shebang and hosted the Tattoo Net; and The Development Server, where new modules would be created, documentation and additional manuals could be added to the Cultivation Database and then classified to appropriate access levels, and so forth.
And it took a lot of arguing by Adam to keep it down to three! At one point, the Patriarch argued that there should be a server for every branch of the Sect and every department within those branches! It took hours to convince them to just make nested messaging forums inside the Tattoo Net instead, and many examples before the others truly understood the topic being discussed!
Side note: After two weeks of arguments and not knowing the Patriarch's name, Adam just started calling him Pat. Because becoming Patriarch required giving up your family name to become 'neutral' when you gained political power, but Adam was sick of saying 'Our Respected Leader the Patriarch' after only one or two times.
The old guy was fine with it, surprisingly. Though that might be due to the man making cultivation progress after many years thanks to using Adam's' Gentle Rebirth Body Cultivation Technique' (Version 3.6142)... The old guy had visibly relaxed after some sort of breakthrough and seemed much more mellow than the first few meetings.
Anyway, Pat had Adam design a dozen rings that could only do a few things: Scan a manual, jade slip, book, scroll, or slab; Transcribe that data into the Development Server's Cultivation Database for Adam to process (AKA, Fix) and Pat to classify; and destroy itself if discovered or stolen.
The leader had a bunch of personal guards at the Sect's Repository of Knowledge Pagoda right now shoving all kinds of delicious data into the Servers... the same Servers that Rockette had complete back door access to. Score!
'Research' was hungry, consuming, and happy!
All that said though, Adam was still stuck inside his Martial Spirit. His one attempt at freedom a few days ago, to simply walk outside, had a meteor nearly smack into his skull... even before he fully exited the Caverns!
Sure, it was a space rock with all kinds of neat materials in it and the Sect had gone nuts for a few hours examining the thing, but that was more than enough of a sign for Adam to continue laying low.
Oh, and he had broken through to Eighth and then Ninth Order Houtian Warrior.
Woo.
His Qi was thick like heavy mist in his spiritual network, his meridians feeling stuffy... but other than gaining exponentially more space for energy and materials in Rockette, nothing important happened. Didn't even get a pretty light show... maybe because he had cleared out far more impurities than a cultivator was supposed to at this point?
His argument was at this point: 'I do not want to cultivate right now. Period.'
So he wouldn't. Screw it, he had enough power for now anyway.
Instead he was redirecting all that excess energy into making more and more spirit stones for the Sect Market inventory. Focusing on Flame, Fire, Solar, Heat, and Friction energies of course, it WAS a fire focused Sect after all, but he had enough time and a desire to be a completionist that he was adding all sorts of glowing stones.
There were even a few rocks stuffed with Binding energy which... went odd. Pat said they looked like normal rocks and he couldn't sense or access the thing at all! Made it damn odd and hard to set a price on the thing.
A material that was basically impossible to acquire without Adam doing the leg work? Valuable!
A material that was actually impossible to USE by anyone besides Adam and little Tianshi? Useless.
That was another issue, as a side note.
The pricing of the Market.
Many of the things Adam was stuffing onto the virtual shelves never existed before, or at least never in theses quantities and at these qualities. Forget the most rare items like Soul Water and Yin or Yang Spirit Stones, he was putting items never discovered in the past like the sugar pinecones and the water apples on sale.
Then there were existing items that were being sold right now in the Sect store that would be literally worthless once the Tattoo Public and Internal Sect Market went live.
Who would buy a bruised 300 year old ginseng herb when Adam was filling the shelves with week old versions with a hundred times the amount of contained spiritual power?
Not to mention, some items like the previous storage rings would be both over priced and under quality once Adam's supply smashed down onto the table.
In the end, Adam just bit the bullet and used his never ending contribution points to just buy out the whole Sect Store, while the Patriarch temporarily put a ban on buying new stock. Basically, Pat would forbid the store to resupply NOW, let them do a bunch of sales and last minute clearance attempts... and Adam would guarantee in contract to purchase any leftover stock at cost after two weeks.
Then the new Sect market (both Public and Internal) would go live, and the Sect members running the store outside would take over all the hard work in the Tattoo network.
...It was a bit disturbing how Adam could buy everything in the Sect's store right now and still have funds left over. True, it didn't count some of the really rare and expensive stuff that you had to visit the Store to purchase, like the vault treasures and historical goods... but still, he was rolling in the coin at this point.
And uh. The amount in his accounts would probably only go higher when all these new items go online. Not counting the hundreds of new techniques, methods, and tricks he personally added to the Cultivation Database. And the payments he was earning for reviewing all the incoming literature the guards at the Sect's Repository of Knowledge Pagoda were passing along.
After all, it only took a few examples before Pat gave Adam a custom Sect mission to analyze all Sect cultivation literature and provide translations, clarifications, and possible improvements. It felt odd to have access to things FAR beyond his clearance level, but Pat's argument was the things Adam had discovered already went beyond most of the manuals in quality and danger levels... so why not bend a few rules to make the Sect's most powerful techniques easier to use, cheaper to activate, and more powerful to apply?
...That said, this mission was classified out the wazoo. Very unlikely to ever be declassified either, and his name wasn't being placed on ANYTHING when it came to the most delicate materials being added to the Cultivation Database.
Which was fine by him.
Adam didn't want people bothering him every five minutes, he was already considered a genius and a prodigy... why would he want credit for THIS mess of paperwork and frustration?
Must have been some OTHER powerful unknown cultivator who simplified a text that generations had agonized over. And improved it. And made dozens of variations of the stupid thing, because more than a few of these super high level techniques were actually tricks to turn people into cultivation resources for their masters and family.
Seriously, cultivators were twisted. It was clear that half these cultivation methods were only documented because the people who were supposed to kill the user for their delicious, succulent Qi... had just met some bad end before the final moment of victory.
Then their unknowing victims begin passing down the suicide tricks as rare and treasured methods to gain power.
In a way, the hard to read language and technical errors when transcribing their knowledge actually saved a few generations from being consumed by Sect outsiders who happened to train in similar skills!
At least it was fascinating. Some 'attacks' were actually simple quality of life techniques that someone attempted to enhance with more power and better control, like the camp fire lighting trick that some dude tried to turn into a flamethrower. Or the water collection technique that a messed up woman had twisted to slowly dehydrate her enemies.
Others were just... slightly scary. There were a dozen or so documents that after analysis were... just disturbing.
This one, for example, was a collection of technique fragments that some cultivator assumed were connected to each other.
'Research' disagreed.
However, through dumb luck or reality having a sense of humor, some moron combined a beast taming method, a knife sharpening technique, an electricity generation cultivation derivative process, and a method to preserve strawberries... into a perfume generating smoke cloud attack.
The cloud would make tiny cuts into the victims skin, modify the target into generating certain pheromones, and... well, it didn't even smell like strawberries. It smelled like sweet lemons. Oh, and it paralyzed the target for around ten minutes.
If any one thing hadn't worked out, this same technique would have basically liquefied the user's skin. The moron was damned lucky.
Point was, at least the busy work was keeping him occupied in between the never ending negotiations. At least Adam could see some light at the end of this stupid tunnel.
Because even Pat was getting annoyed at trying to price the mountain of goods being entered into the new Tattoo Markets, so he was going to begin reading in some more Sect members from the various financial departments and throw this thankless task THEIR way.
Seriously, this was why Adam always found smart people to do this bit of the job. Being a leader was never as fun as being the dude running around causing problems.
~~~Broken Adventure~~~
Sister Quan just fell into the chair. "I don't care if other people get annoyed, they can just live with it."
The lead guard (Who may officially be joining Adam's team soon, if the paperwork goes through), chuckled. "At least she is having fun."
Little Tianshi's voice was very high up. "Ahoy Captain Whiskers! To the starboard with ye!"
The women watched the massive tree sway, the tiny girl having grown it behind the orphanage. The top branches were woven into a massive ship, vine ladders hanging from the sides.
Apparently weeks of nighttime stories had convinced the child to steal away all the younger orphans from their work to help conquer the 'seas', as it were.
Sister Quan hummed as the branches far above them swayed. "I'll be honest, I thought she was only able to build her first tree house this large thanks to Rockette's assistance."
The guard hummed with her, a glass of pressed purple sweet berries frosty in her hand. "I've had my people keep an eye on the little one. From what we can detect, her whiskered lizard friend is causing her spiritual network to expand at a nearly unhealthy rate... but living inside her system is also allowing it to grow stronger and more powerful."
She took a sip of juice. "Little Tianshi's easily a dozen times stronger than I was at her age, even considering the personalized cultivation methods given by her master. If she didn't care about modifying the shape of the tree and keeping it active, it could probably double in height."
One of the younger children, a boy with a few missing teeth, was yelling from one of the whipping branches. "Captain! Ah she boarders coming from the left!"
Tianshi frowned even as she began climbing the vine rigging. "Port, that is the port side."
The boy paused. "But theresh no wine there."
She blinked... and sighed. "Moving on. Everyone prepare to repel invaders! Yo ho ho!"
At least the children 'attacking' the ship on that side hadn't joined in on that short argument. Being a pirate captain was suprisingly hard work!
His original plan? A tattoo for each member, anchor the server to the Sect and a few backup points, ensure that more tattoo nodes could be made... and done!
And true, the Server Node didn't NEED to be connected to the world directly, the rings could address it either way... but it was a bit of extra service that could be easily modified later.
In actual consultation though, the work list was massive.
First, the Server was going to be upgraded. All storage modules would use space marked by the Sect Server's master pocket, so that nothing in the Sect would be lost even if their members were robbed or skinned alive or something.
Second? Tiered Tattoo node versions.
After a few weeks of conversation, the final tiers of node were as followed: Rings (Wood, Stone, Copper, Silver, Gold), Tattoos (initiate, outer, inner, disciple, elder, patriarch), and Stations (application, modification, upgrade, maintenance, removal).
If it wasn't obvious, the Station option was the new one Adam had to design. Developed to be heavy, nearly impossible to move, destroy itself if someone tries to steal it, and can be operated by Sect members to do all the various nitty gritty tattoo node detail work.
Anyway, the three types were Rings, Tattoos, and those Stations.
Why so many types? Simple.
Unlike some of the more secretive Sects, the Burning Sword Sect was both an openly 'Righteous' Sect as well as a Sect willing to work with civilians. They didn't take children away from normal families like some places, and they didn't forbid members from mingling with those without power.
So Adam had a new tier of equipment, the 'Wood Ring' nodes. They all came with a custom module installed that absorbed ambient spirit energy to allow non cultivators to access the built in features. The built in, heavily limited and restricted features.
First, these Wood Rings had a simplified storage space. Around a meter cubed to use as desired. They also allowed access to a basic connection to the public Sect Market, where they could sell directly to the Sect from the inventory or purchase small objects to be delivered directly into storage.
Normal shipping would still exist, since many things were larger than three feet or so in size, but lots of small things would be easily moved around this way.
There was also a very basic messaging system, allowing the Wood Ring owner to mark the Soul signatures of people they met with access to the network into a friends list for future conversations. It had to be set up in person, and if the ring was used too long it would shut down to recharge from local energy, but it was more than acceptable to most people.
But that was it. The rings were cheap, going to be mass produced, and would be given out to nearly everyone in the city and towns surrounding the Sect.
So cheap, that stealing one would feel pointless. No reason to kill Sect family members if anyone can get one. They all lacked security too... for safety reasons. It would be better for your family to be robbed than for them to be tortured for a password or maimed to use body parts for authentication.
All Wooden Rings would basically be connected with their own massive network, one that the Sect could moderate if needed... or spy on, not that they would tell anyone that bit.
When some enemy Sect asshole kills their people and steals their equipment? Why yes, the Burning Sword Sect WOULD like a live map, real time audio, and high level thought recordings of those stupid enough to wear the things after attacking their true owners.
The next step up in quality would be Stone Rings, given to any and all Cultivators that live in the local areas under the Burning Sword Sect's control but not able to become an actual member.
As these cultivators would have Qi to operate the stone devices correctly, these rings would all have actual security tied to their owner's energy signature for access. They would also grant the option to pay the Burning Sword Sect to recover your goods if the ring is destroyed or lost, and provide a small selection of optional modifications for a fee.
For one, the Stone Rings could support storage modules of much larger size if desired. It allowed larger amounts and a greater volume of trade to be sent to and from the public Sect Market, and granted access to a public Sect Cultivator Market that sold cultivation resources and other more dangerous goods not suggested for civilians.
But most of all, the Stone Rings could purchase cultivation manuals and techniques that were normally only sold in the public sections of the Sect's Repository of Knowledge Pagoda. While no NEW information would be leaked this way, it would allow Cultivators to purchase and trade techniques without their enemies (Or friends) finding out their secrets or training goals... These were going to be popular.
Meanwhile, the other rings were for the Sect only. Copper for initiates, Silver for Outer Sect members, Gold for Inner Sect disciples and everyone else. When the user got a Tattoo, the mark and the Rings would link together and could share space and abilities, while hopefully making outsiders assume that only the Rings were important.
Meanwhile, the Tattoos would have the GOOD features too dangerous to put in a portable object alone. Each level of Tattoo would permit more space for modules, and the variety and power of those modules would increase as well...
For example, the Initiate Tattoo was barely stronger than those Stone Rings to be sold outside, while the Outer and Inner Sect Member Tattoos could access both the Cultivation Database (With restrictions of course) and access to the Sect Tattoo Net. The highest permission Tattoos such as the ones for the elders and the patriarch) added tools for moderation, administration, and various modules that generated statistics and helped enforce Sect rules and access permissions.
Higher levels could allow lower levels additional permissions if needed, although those requests would be logged and easily reviewed if someone was trying something tricky.
Needless to say, this made Adam's plan of 'One Server, many Nodes' WAY more complicated. Annoyingly more complicated.
At this point, there were three Servers... The Public Server, handling the Wood and Stone Rings and the Public Sect Market; The Sect Server, which was the major platform for the whole shebang and hosted the Tattoo Net; and The Development Server, where new modules would be created, documentation and additional manuals could be added to the Cultivation Database and then classified to appropriate access levels, and so forth.
And it took a lot of arguing by Adam to keep it down to three! At one point, the Patriarch argued that there should be a server for every branch of the Sect and every department within those branches! It took hours to convince them to just make nested messaging forums inside the Tattoo Net instead, and many examples before the others truly understood the topic being discussed!
Side note: After two weeks of arguments and not knowing the Patriarch's name, Adam just started calling him Pat. Because becoming Patriarch required giving up your family name to become 'neutral' when you gained political power, but Adam was sick of saying 'Our Respected Leader the Patriarch' after only one or two times.
The old guy was fine with it, surprisingly. Though that might be due to the man making cultivation progress after many years thanks to using Adam's' Gentle Rebirth Body Cultivation Technique' (Version 3.6142)... The old guy had visibly relaxed after some sort of breakthrough and seemed much more mellow than the first few meetings.
Anyway, Pat had Adam design a dozen rings that could only do a few things: Scan a manual, jade slip, book, scroll, or slab; Transcribe that data into the Development Server's Cultivation Database for Adam to process (AKA, Fix) and Pat to classify; and destroy itself if discovered or stolen.
The leader had a bunch of personal guards at the Sect's Repository of Knowledge Pagoda right now shoving all kinds of delicious data into the Servers... the same Servers that Rockette had complete back door access to. Score!
'Research' was hungry, consuming, and happy!
All that said though, Adam was still stuck inside his Martial Spirit. His one attempt at freedom a few days ago, to simply walk outside, had a meteor nearly smack into his skull... even before he fully exited the Caverns!
Sure, it was a space rock with all kinds of neat materials in it and the Sect had gone nuts for a few hours examining the thing, but that was more than enough of a sign for Adam to continue laying low.
Oh, and he had broken through to Eighth and then Ninth Order Houtian Warrior.
Woo.
His Qi was thick like heavy mist in his spiritual network, his meridians feeling stuffy... but other than gaining exponentially more space for energy and materials in Rockette, nothing important happened. Didn't even get a pretty light show... maybe because he had cleared out far more impurities than a cultivator was supposed to at this point?
His argument was at this point: 'I do not want to cultivate right now. Period.'
So he wouldn't. Screw it, he had enough power for now anyway.
Instead he was redirecting all that excess energy into making more and more spirit stones for the Sect Market inventory. Focusing on Flame, Fire, Solar, Heat, and Friction energies of course, it WAS a fire focused Sect after all, but he had enough time and a desire to be a completionist that he was adding all sorts of glowing stones.
There were even a few rocks stuffed with Binding energy which... went odd. Pat said they looked like normal rocks and he couldn't sense or access the thing at all! Made it damn odd and hard to set a price on the thing.
A material that was basically impossible to acquire without Adam doing the leg work? Valuable!
A material that was actually impossible to USE by anyone besides Adam and little Tianshi? Useless.
That was another issue, as a side note.
The pricing of the Market.
Many of the things Adam was stuffing onto the virtual shelves never existed before, or at least never in theses quantities and at these qualities. Forget the most rare items like Soul Water and Yin or Yang Spirit Stones, he was putting items never discovered in the past like the sugar pinecones and the water apples on sale.
Then there were existing items that were being sold right now in the Sect store that would be literally worthless once the Tattoo Public and Internal Sect Market went live.
Who would buy a bruised 300 year old ginseng herb when Adam was filling the shelves with week old versions with a hundred times the amount of contained spiritual power?
Not to mention, some items like the previous storage rings would be both over priced and under quality once Adam's supply smashed down onto the table.
In the end, Adam just bit the bullet and used his never ending contribution points to just buy out the whole Sect Store, while the Patriarch temporarily put a ban on buying new stock. Basically, Pat would forbid the store to resupply NOW, let them do a bunch of sales and last minute clearance attempts... and Adam would guarantee in contract to purchase any leftover stock at cost after two weeks.
Then the new Sect market (both Public and Internal) would go live, and the Sect members running the store outside would take over all the hard work in the Tattoo network.
...It was a bit disturbing how Adam could buy everything in the Sect's store right now and still have funds left over. True, it didn't count some of the really rare and expensive stuff that you had to visit the Store to purchase, like the vault treasures and historical goods... but still, he was rolling in the coin at this point.
And uh. The amount in his accounts would probably only go higher when all these new items go online. Not counting the hundreds of new techniques, methods, and tricks he personally added to the Cultivation Database. And the payments he was earning for reviewing all the incoming literature the guards at the Sect's Repository of Knowledge Pagoda were passing along.
After all, it only took a few examples before Pat gave Adam a custom Sect mission to analyze all Sect cultivation literature and provide translations, clarifications, and possible improvements. It felt odd to have access to things FAR beyond his clearance level, but Pat's argument was the things Adam had discovered already went beyond most of the manuals in quality and danger levels... so why not bend a few rules to make the Sect's most powerful techniques easier to use, cheaper to activate, and more powerful to apply?
...That said, this mission was classified out the wazoo. Very unlikely to ever be declassified either, and his name wasn't being placed on ANYTHING when it came to the most delicate materials being added to the Cultivation Database.
Which was fine by him.
Adam didn't want people bothering him every five minutes, he was already considered a genius and a prodigy... why would he want credit for THIS mess of paperwork and frustration?
Must have been some OTHER powerful unknown cultivator who simplified a text that generations had agonized over. And improved it. And made dozens of variations of the stupid thing, because more than a few of these super high level techniques were actually tricks to turn people into cultivation resources for their masters and family.
Seriously, cultivators were twisted. It was clear that half these cultivation methods were only documented because the people who were supposed to kill the user for their delicious, succulent Qi... had just met some bad end before the final moment of victory.
Then their unknowing victims begin passing down the suicide tricks as rare and treasured methods to gain power.
In a way, the hard to read language and technical errors when transcribing their knowledge actually saved a few generations from being consumed by Sect outsiders who happened to train in similar skills!
At least it was fascinating. Some 'attacks' were actually simple quality of life techniques that someone attempted to enhance with more power and better control, like the camp fire lighting trick that some dude tried to turn into a flamethrower. Or the water collection technique that a messed up woman had twisted to slowly dehydrate her enemies.
Others were just... slightly scary. There were a dozen or so documents that after analysis were... just disturbing.
This one, for example, was a collection of technique fragments that some cultivator assumed were connected to each other.
'Research' disagreed.
However, through dumb luck or reality having a sense of humor, some moron combined a beast taming method, a knife sharpening technique, an electricity generation cultivation derivative process, and a method to preserve strawberries... into a perfume generating smoke cloud attack.
The cloud would make tiny cuts into the victims skin, modify the target into generating certain pheromones, and... well, it didn't even smell like strawberries. It smelled like sweet lemons. Oh, and it paralyzed the target for around ten minutes.
If any one thing hadn't worked out, this same technique would have basically liquefied the user's skin. The moron was damned lucky.
Point was, at least the busy work was keeping him occupied in between the never ending negotiations. At least Adam could see some light at the end of this stupid tunnel.
Because even Pat was getting annoyed at trying to price the mountain of goods being entered into the new Tattoo Markets, so he was going to begin reading in some more Sect members from the various financial departments and throw this thankless task THEIR way.
Seriously, this was why Adam always found smart people to do this bit of the job. Being a leader was never as fun as being the dude running around causing problems.
~~~Broken Adventure~~~
Sister Quan just fell into the chair. "I don't care if other people get annoyed, they can just live with it."
The lead guard (Who may officially be joining Adam's team soon, if the paperwork goes through), chuckled. "At least she is having fun."
Little Tianshi's voice was very high up. "Ahoy Captain Whiskers! To the starboard with ye!"
The women watched the massive tree sway, the tiny girl having grown it behind the orphanage. The top branches were woven into a massive ship, vine ladders hanging from the sides.
Apparently weeks of nighttime stories had convinced the child to steal away all the younger orphans from their work to help conquer the 'seas', as it were.
Sister Quan hummed as the branches far above them swayed. "I'll be honest, I thought she was only able to build her first tree house this large thanks to Rockette's assistance."
The guard hummed with her, a glass of pressed purple sweet berries frosty in her hand. "I've had my people keep an eye on the little one. From what we can detect, her whiskered lizard friend is causing her spiritual network to expand at a nearly unhealthy rate... but living inside her system is also allowing it to grow stronger and more powerful."
She took a sip of juice. "Little Tianshi's easily a dozen times stronger than I was at her age, even considering the personalized cultivation methods given by her master. If she didn't care about modifying the shape of the tree and keeping it active, it could probably double in height."
One of the younger children, a boy with a few missing teeth, was yelling from one of the whipping branches. "Captain! Ah she boarders coming from the left!"
Tianshi frowned even as she began climbing the vine rigging. "Port, that is the port side."
The boy paused. "But theresh no wine there."
She blinked... and sighed. "Moving on. Everyone prepare to repel invaders! Yo ho ho!"
At least the children 'attacking' the ship on that side hadn't joined in on that short argument. Being a pirate captain was suprisingly hard work!
