The Undying Immortal System

Establishing the guilds in Lord Kang’s city first and allowing him to claim the stewardship of the kingdom was a gift, but expanding these guilds throughout the kingdom during his tenure would be an even greater one. Even Lord Kang had to know that such gifts were never free. So, what did I want?

More than anything, I just wanted to find out if such guilds were even viable. How much essence would they need? How much karmic energy would they be able to generate? Would it be possible to establish such guilds across the entire continent and create multiple shadow empires like the Blue Wind Pavilion? These guilds held a lot of potential, but handing out affinities came with several potential pitfalls that needed to be sounded out.

However, this was only a reason to test these guilds out. Why give them to Lord Kang?

Because he would act as our shield. The guilds were first established in his city. They would first spread across his kingdom. In the future, they might spread across his empire. If anyone wanted to cause trouble, they would cause trouble for Lord Kang, not for me. Smarter, more informed people might look into things more deeply, but by then, our foundations would hopefully be solid enough to weather such storms.

While I had told Lord Kang and his ministers that anyone could join a guild and become a cultivator, anyone did not mean everyone, and it definitely didn’t mean everyone all at once. We needed to roll out our services gradually so that the guild halls were not overwhelmed.

Therefore, we did not go out and advertise the fact that we would raise people’s affinities or teach them to cultivate. When we first opened our doors, as far as the general public was concerned, the Guild of Alchemists was little more than another random pill hall. It might look fancier, and its items might be a bit more expensive than normal, but it wasn’t anything too special. The only thing we did to draw people’s attention was post a small recruitment notice next to one of the side entrances.@@novelbin@@

Wanted: 20 new assistants. No Training Required.

Of course, even this didn’t draw much attention. It was common enough for low-level professionals to recruit assistants, and it wasn’t something to get overly excited about. These jobs usually just involved doing a lot of grunt work for low wages.

This situation led to the first few days of the guild being rather slow. A few people came in to purchase pills, and there was a bit of surprise when they found out that we were selling large quantities of Perfect pills, but the fact that we were only selling Perfect pills limited the number of people who could afford them. For mortals who were unconcerned about the buildup of pill toxins, our prices no doubt seemed excessive.

It wasn’t until the fourth day when a ragged street urchin knocked on the side door to apply to become an assistant that things began to change.

He was a 17-year-old boy with no affinities and no known blessing who had spent his entire life on the outskirts of the city, barely getting by. The recent fighting caused by the stewardship competition had forced him to seek refuge within the city’s walls, and while hiding out, he happened to pass by the guild and decided to try his luck.

XuJian, who was heading this branch, gave him a small room to stay in and assigned him a few menial tasks around the guild. After a couple of days of hard work, XuJian deemed the boy had done enough to earn a low nine-star affinity, so he was given a fire affinity and taught a very basic cultivation technique.

The cultivation techniques we had decided to use for the guild were a bit… rough. As everyone was understandably a bit worried about creating a large number of cultivators with low nine-star affinities and Low-Yellow cultivation techniques, we had chosen which techniques would be offered by the guild very carefully. They were all based around turning a person into a more productive professional and caused mental effects such as focus and being more willing to listen to commands.

In a way, these could be considered semi-slave techniques, and if we had wanted, we could have used this system to effectively enslave everyone who joined us, but that was far from our goal. We wanted people to improve their skills and earn contribution points. Then, they could use those points to purchase higher affinities, better cultivation techniques, and Energy Expulsion Pills to remove the effects of their madness.

While I had created a hard rule that everyone must be warned of the risks before being given a technique, how many would be willing to pass up the chance to become a cultivator? In the end, we would just need to do our best to manage the situation and test different techniques to see which ones had the best results.

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With a low nine-star affinity and a simple cultivation technique, it didn’t take long for this first boy who joined us to gather enough qi that he could activate the guild’s memory orb and absorb its contents. After that, he was able to quickly advance his cultivation base and begin earning contribution points through basic alchemy instead of just mundane tasks.

After this first boy joined us, it took another couple of weeks to fill up all 20 slots for assistants, and almost everyone who joined us was a refugee from the fighting outside the city’s walls.

After less than a month, these 20 boys and girls all knew enough alchemy that they were ready to hire assistants of their own. The guild allowed each active member to hire two assistants, and these assistants would be paid a small stipend by the guild.

After another month, most of these assistants had gained enough contribution points to purchase an affinity and learn alchemy on their own, so the original 20 were allowed to hire new assistants to replace them.

In this manner, all of the guilds were able to rapidly expand, and by the end of the competition’s six-month timeframe, they all had hundreds of members.

Unlike a sect, there were no formations or jades to keep track of who was a member of a guild or how many contribution points a person had. Everything was recorded via ink and paper, and dozens of people had been employed to keep track of it all.

While this was a bit inefficient and prone to error, it was simply another means of providing contribution points and essence to the people who had little talent for the professions themselves. The point of the Guild of Alchemists wasn’t alchemy. The point was to produce karmic energy, and that was best done by employing as many people as possible.

This strategy of having the guilds start small and ramp up their membership numbers over the course of several months prevented them from having a truly explosive impact on the stewardship competition. However, as Lord Kang’s victory had been the likely outcome anyway, the cumulative effect of the seven guilds working together was more than enough to make it a certainty.

So, to no one’s surprise, as soon as the competition ended, Lord Kang was promoted to the position of Steward of the Black River Kingdom.

Immediately after this was announced, most of the kingdom’s Lord-level stewards resigned. They already had all the Lord-level karma they needed, and without a higher position to fight over, they no longer had a reason to stay. Ŗ𝘈ɴȏＢЁ𝐬

At the end of the competition, only three of Black River’s ten cities had stewards. The ones who stayed behind were me, one of Lord Kang’s men, and a former subordinate of one of the failed challengers.

Seven cities sat empty.

Since the next competition for the kingdom wouldn’t be for another 15 years, these seats would have usually sat empty for a while, but this time, the moment they became available, people stepped forward to claim them. Five went to members of my clan. Two went to Kang’s subordinates.

As for the city originally controlled by Lord Kang? It was purchased by ShouLi. As an inner sect disciple in Profound City, she was allowed to make such a purchase, but considering the potential for growth that the city held, a normal inner sect disciple at her level would have had a hard time convincing the elders to let them have it. Kang’s backing may have helped with this, but I suspected the sect’s upper echelons were already aware of her status as a body cultivator, and they were likely giving her a bit of special treatment.

In any case, this gave our clan control over a total of six cities in Black River, and we got right to work on expanding the guilds into each of them, as well as the three cities controlled by Kang’s direct subordinates.

With everyone in the kingdom now aware of what the guilds represented, it was extremely easy to recruit ‘assistants,’ and the different branches rapidly expanded. The only problem was that each guild only had a single memory orb that had to be shared between all of its branches.

This was a bit annoying, but as everyone was allowed to use the sect’s teleportation network to return to Dragon Peak at least once a week, we could just take the orbs with us and make the exchanges when we went. The teleportation network wasn’t supposed to be used for things like this—it was only supposed to be used for sect-related activity—but officially, we were using the network to return to the mountain on official business. These exchanges were just private trades that happened while we were there.

With guild branches in only nine cities, moving the orbs around like this was workable. Each city would have the orbs for three days each month, and anyone who needed them would be able to use them during that window. However, if we wanted to expand further, we would need more orbs, and my supply was nearly exhausted.

So, with competition out of the way, I buckled down and got to work on improving my refining skills.

With the seven guilds active in TongBei, the city generated karmic energy at a truly insane pace, and in only four years, I was able to reach Peak Lord. I could have happily resigned at this point, but I decided to stay on for a few more years to help provide everyone with a stable home.

During this time, several members of my clan took up random positions across the North Empire, and ShouLi had even started working with Kang on his bid to compete for the position of imperial steward. I supported them where necessary, but I did my best to stay out of it. With all the advantages I had given them, if Kang and ShouLi couldn’t claim an empire without me, then they didn’t deserve it. Instead, my focus was only on mastering beast alchemy and refining.

After years of work, I was finally able to acquire enlightenments for both Rank 2 and 3 beast alchemy, catching up to RuLan. This gave me two additional discounts, one for 100,000 credits and one for 10 million credits. I also gained a basic understanding of Rank 4 refining, but I really needed to slow down and spend more time understanding the details of both topics without the distractions of needing to run a city.

So, after accumulating sufficient contribution points, I resigned from my post, purchased the karmic energy needed to ascend to Martial King, and settled down in a private courtyard in the capital of the Black River Kingdom.

Officially, Kang had hired me to provide routine maintenance of the kingdom’s formations. Unofficially, I was deep in seclusion, working on my crafts. If anyone needed me, there were several ways to contact me, but I planned to spend several years returning to my roots as a hermit.