Magnus Pt.-24 Pillars 4-6, Yuan Realm, Bandit Talks, Healing, More Base Building, and the beginning of the healing process
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The 4th Pillar Magnus formed was of the Dao of Earth. The pillar took on the appearance of a growing crystal of Blues, Silvers, Golds, Greens, and some Red material at the core. After closer inspection, you can see the colored crystals were made of Arsenic, Sulfur, Uranium(Torbernite look it up, scary stuff), Asbestos, and Cinnabar(Mercury mixed with Sulfur). These crystal grew at a visiable rate, before breaking off and landing at the foot of the pillar. The piece were then absorbed back into the pillar to grow again.
The 5th Pillar was the pillar of the Dao of Water. This pillar ended up a bit cliché as it looked like a large pillar of purple water giving off purple smoke. It is a large pillar of poisoned liquids, not much else to say.
The 6th Pillar was the pillar of the Dao of Wood. The pillar a collection of dangerous plants that grew together into a pillar like form, but several vines connected to the Water pillar to help it grow more deadly. In the pillar, if anyone else could enter Magnus's inner realm, they would see dozens of fruits and vegetables growing out of the pillar enticing those around it to take a bite. Of course, this would end up killing anyone almost instantly seeing as many of the fruit bearing plants have become even more poisonous than in nature.
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Magnus had gotten arrogant and cocky, there was no other explanation for it. After his first experience in a secret realm, and robbing so many cultivation resources so easily, be believed this Yuan Realm would easy as well.
It started out surprisingly mixed. These stories normally start out with great or terrible luck, but this story starts with both. Soon after entering, Magnus ran into a Jingshen Elder at Core realm. Normally, any semi-sane FB cultivator, even one nearing core realm himself, would avoid causing any kind of trouble for the Elder. Magnus would normally run away as well, but 2 successful, if damaging trials, killing a core realm elder as a Qi cultivator in the first trial, several spare LST, and suddenly jumping from 3rd Pillar to 6th Pillar, had inflated his head like a balloon. Magnus, even with his inflated ego, knew he couldn't win a straight up fight, so he waited in secret to ambush the Elder. He used a breath hiding pillar, and a cultivation masking pill to sneak up on the Elder, who, to be fair, was not really paying proper attention in a secret realm if a FB Poison Master could sneak up on him. Magnus released several poisons mixed with smoke screens, and rushed forward. Along with his rush, he sent his puppet bull to ram into the Elder.
The Bull was mighty, but compared to the Core Realm Elder, it was a toy. Still, a massive wood and metal bull crashing into you while your in a cloud of poison dust is pretty distracting. Magnus was lucky enough to blindly grab something from the waist of the Elder before fleeing. Unfortunately, what he grabbed were the Clock-Dagger and Sharpened Ruler. The weapons held uses of Space and Time Daos, which were not only forbidden, but likely to get the owner killed. It's little wonder that the Elder chased Magnus from one end of the Realm to the other. The most powerful poisons at Magnus' disposal did little to slow down the Elder and maybe even strengthened his resistance to future poisons. That Elder should thank Magnus, Poison resistance is very difficult to improve without killing yourself. In the end, Magnus used several Life Saving Treasures he had spent decades collecting and even the power of the Sharpened Ruler before finally escaping into a Trial to hide for years. Even with the power of the Ruler, the Elder was able to launch one final strike, shattering Magnus' Dantian and crippling him.
Lucky for Magnus, even with a crippled Dantian, he could still control his puppet arms and combat puppets. He was able to easily return home to heal his main physical wounds.
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One would think that losing their Dantian would be a reason not to head into Bandit territory, but for Magnus, it just challenged him to try another method. Just like in his last missing, Magnus disguised himself as a simple merchant and entered the Bandit kingdom. He brought wagons full of his best and most powerful alcohols to temp the bandits into joining forces with the clan. Soon after, he realized that any merchant that dares enter a place known as the Bandit Kingdoms were either very strong or very insane.
Magnus, even with his Dantian crippled, fell into the former category. He still had many poisons that could easily kill any non Emperor FB rank and even weaken a Core Realm expert. He left a trail of dead bandits that tried to steal his wines, or were simply too weak to handle the strength of his brews. It wasn't until he ran into Tao, a Heavenly Bandit King, that he found someone worthy to work with.
Magnus had a new drink known as Maotai. It was five times more potent than his stronger wines and could eat through solid rock. Tao was the first one Magnus offered it to, to drink the whole saucer and ask for more. Not only that, he was the only one who could keep drinking with Magnus until they both passed out together.
In the morning, Tao had sworn an oath of friendship with Magnus and agreed to work with the Golden Devils for certain benefits including a steady supply of the powerful drink. Magnus left the stock he brought with him and returned home to spread the good news.
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A shattered Dantian is a difficult thing to repair and more often then not, will be permanent. Magnus being both an expert of healing pills and an expert in replacing body parts, decided if his dantian was destroyed, he would get a better one.
He spent months learning exactly how a Dantian was shape and how its functions worked to an extent. He gain much more knowledge dissecting various spirit beast and enemy prisoners. For spirit beast, their core works almost the same as a Dantian, but they seem to produce more energy for the same levels and tissue volume. The beast cores also seemed to contain less Qi that human's Dantian, even though they are generally stronger at the same level. After extensive research and killing animals to see what happens to their Qi. Magnus concluded that much of the beast's Qi is subconsciously drawn into it's body strengthening it and setting up a sort of automatic growth. Their Qi is constantly flowing through their bodies giving a continuous strength boost and the constant use and strain allows the body to keep improving. The downside, or upside for humanity, is that it means that most beast never learn to consciously use Qi until they reach RB realm and therefore, they gain Qi very slowly. Also, with the bodies dependent on their cores, if the spirit core is removed or destroyed, the lack of Qi kills the beast quickly as their bodies can no longer sustain themselves.
For Humans and animals with wisdom, the Dantian or core doesn't tend to leak energy as much. An intelligent beast learns to control their Qi so it doesn't leak out as much and they can raise their Qi faster, but their bodies tend to be weaker then other beast. Humans start having to consciously learn to manipulate Qi, but that gives them better control, and a faster increase in cultivation level. On the other other hand, Human's "core" is more integrated with the body, so removing a Dantain requires a lot more work than removing a beast core. This does mean that a Dantian's destruction wont mean the death of the user.
At first, he tried to build an artificial one like his arms. The first trials were on Spirit beast to see if replacing their core with the artifical one would keep them alive and make them stronger. It was made from some of the strongest most Qi conductive materials he could get a hold of, but in the end they were complete failures. They could hold Qi, and after some work, could generate a small of it from absorbing bit from the atmosphere. The problem was, dead wood and metal do not grow like a natural dantian. Whatever level Magnus made them at, it was what level it would stay. So a Qi level Dantian at 5th Heavenstage would never allow someone to reach 6th Heavenstage, much less Foundation. The other limits were that the Dantian could not be inserted without the previous one being either destroyed or removed. Finally, at most a Dantian 1 small realm larger than the current natural dantian can be installed in the patient without mess consequences. An experiment with a captured 6th heavenstage being given an 8th heavenstage artificial dantian showed promise. The installation was successful, and for a few minutes, the subject gained 8thheavenstage strength. Unfortunately, the energy was too much for the body and it exploded. This was with a beast's stronger body, a human probably would die if you added even 1 small realm stronger.
So, with that avenue of experiments hitting a dead end, Magnus went to see if transplanting a core into a human or the core/dantian mix thing that an intelligent animal would work. At first, Magnus started by moving cores between beast to see if a quick enough move to a beast with a newly removed core would save it and what changes would happen. Magnus was amazed to see all the interactions. Though, he nearly cleared out his new Beast Taming Hall to finish his work.
For example, he tried placing a fire elemental beast's core into a beast with wood attributes, and the beast ended up lighting itself on fire before dies. Then, he tried putting a fire core in a metal beast. This one became stronger than before and could start using fire in addition to its metal properties. From there, Magnus tried several more complimentary mixes and for the most part they ended with the beast getting stronger. The interesting side effect was that only the new element continued to grow, and Magnus believes that if they live long enough, their main element would eventually change to the new core, with their old element being a minor boost.
As for giving beasts the core of an intelligent beast, it was a complete waste. While the beast would survive, the hybrid core did nothing special to the beast(besides normal elemental changes). Also, after a few years, the hybrid core turned into a normal core.
On the opposite end, giving a normal core to an intelligent beast gave similar elemental boost, but after a year, the core would become a hybrid core as well. With a renewable source of hybrid cores, Magnus turned his experiments to them.
First, Magnus tried to absorb a hybrid core for cultivation, but found them too different to work properly. So, he then moved on to adding cores and hybrid cores to humans. The pure beast cores would kill any human who wasn't a spirit beast core cultivator, which in the desert was basically everyone. It was noted by Magnus, that beast core cultivators would survive 50% of the time, and would be horribly mutated by the cores. The survivors were the ones who received cores from beasts that were similar to humans; 2 legs, 2 arms, non-compound eyes, and the like. Insect beast cores made rather interesting, but very short lived mixes. The hybrid cores did allow most who received them to live. They only received minor mutation at most, and that mostly came from donors that were stronger than the recipient. Careful study of the humans with hybrid cores showed that they had gained a passive body strength increase like spirit beast, and their cultivation speed would improve or slow depending on how compatible the new core was to the new body.
Finally, Magnus did what he saw as the most boring, but need control part, moving dantians between humans. Once again, a dantain stronger than 1 realm above the subject would cause a messy bloody death. Weaker dantians would regress the cultivation, but in most cases, the one who received a new dantain could regain their old strength at an average of 1 small realm per year until they reached their old level. Other than that, except a few cases where even a properly implanted dantain would be rejected by the host body, nothing unusual happened to Magnus's great disappointment.
So, in the pursuit of greater heights of power, Magnus searched for a poisonous beast with intelligence no less then a humans. These kinds of beasts were usually smart enough to avoid fighting humans and stuck to the wilds where dumber beasts were easy to control. Magnus went deep into the desert where he eventually found a 8-Star-Eyed Rainbow Death Spider of Doom. This spider had eight sided star shaped eyes that glowed a different color of the rainbow and literal name aside, the Spider was known to be a very intelligent and patient hunter with a poison able to kill anything in the same realm. Not only that, the spider had 8 cores, 1 behind each eye, and each charged with a different aspect of nature and poison. Normally, this spider would be a perfect cultivation aid for Magnus to solidify his pillar and ready himself for Core realm, but now, the cores would be the perfect thing to replace his Dantian and possibly make him stronger. Also, since he has been using 8 limbs for so long, and his natural limbs had been lost for so long, the cores should not create much of the problem.
The battle with the spider was actually a bit anti-climatic. Magnus as a poison master, and someone who had lived through holding a poison in his body that could kill a Core Realm Elder, was mostly immune to the spider's poisons. Magnus simple waited for the spider to try to bite him after faking defeat from the poison gases and stabbed the spider in its brain.
After bringing the cores back to his home, Magnus placed his puppet arms on a mannequin and added the cores to himself in a rather questionable operation. In the end, Magnus could cultivate again, and was ready to fight in the coming war with Jingshen.
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Before Magnus left on the mission to recruit bandits, he hired an up and coming group with a leader only known as the builder. He tasked them with making a Medicine hall to be the equal and opposite of the Poison hall, All Things in Perfect Balance. Also, Magnus asked them to make a Beast Tamer's Hall. Magnus had some ideas to fix his Dantian problem and he needed many beasts and a safe place to work on medical experiments.
When Magnus met the Builders, he was surprised at how enthusiastic they were with working with one of the 13 from the trials over a hundred years ago. While Magnus clearly remembers the desperate struggle to save the city and nearly dying to kill a Core Realm Elder while still a lower Qi Cultivator, lately, fewer and fewer of the new generation remembered the story. Now they remembered him because of all the weaklings he saved from the latest Trials. Still, the builders energy could only be a good thing when building uo his base.
With a set of plans Magnus had been holding on to for over a century, the builders got to work setting up the large areas needed for the Beast Hall. There would be several buildings to handle the different beast. There would be a roost for birds, a temperature controlled building for reptiles, a small water tank for the lake/oasis creatures, and large individual rooms for extra large beast.
When Magnus returned from his mission, the Builders had not only finished both halls, they had set up the Herb gardens as well. Instead of a single location, they made many smaller garden all over the empty spaces of the base leaving only the planned sites for future buildings alone. These small herb gardens dotted the base in different environments using similar formations as the ones on the poison and medicine halls to concentrate certain Qi. Thanks to that, the gardens could make all kinds of herbs that were needed for all the halls and Magnus's wine experiments.
After thanking the builders for their hard work, Magnus set up a contract with them to build the rest of the base as soon as he had the funds for it.
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Jin Miyu was a friend.
Jin was a fighter.
Jin was Loyal.
I was there when Jin gave up his humanity to help buy just a little more time for the poison to be completed.
He was the first among the 13 to reach Core realm.
He found, was consumed, and fought back against a treasure that could battle a Nascent Soul equally.
He gave his life to ensure the future of the clan.
He will be missed.
Magnus finished his words to himself before pouring a jug of his strongest and most potent Wood wine on the remains of Jin's vines. Magnus then got up and left as quickly as his speech did. If he had stayed, he would have seen a small bud growing where he poured the wine.
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Almost 3K words anew record for me
@Mochinator if you ever want to start over with Jin or his offspring thing, I left a way, if not, it was just for me then
@Alectai @ReaderOfFate @Kaboomatic link please
Also I would like to heal the crippling Magnus got and hope it doesn't get worse thanks to the war(really bad time for me)
