Calculating Cultivation

I sat in my new playhouse watching from the main balcony with my father and several other important people he had helped me invite. When I had first toured the city over six years ago, I had gone through the entertainment district, which was mostly brothels, a gambling hall, and a theater that did music.

That was it. The cultural scene of this city was fairly dead. That was why I had come up with the idea of an actual theater with props, costumes, and even music. The entry to the ground floor was a single bronze coin, standing room only.

Light beer and food were available as well at a slight markup. No outside food or drink allowed. Then there was the balcony seating. The center balcony seats were all reserved for the elite of the city, which were cultivators. I had gifted free seats to the elite for a month. After that, they could pay a yearly fee to keep their seats or let someone else have them.

While I was the owner and creator of the theater, I was still technically under my father’s authority. So, we were to the left of the main balcony. Very good seats, but not the best. That seating was reserved for cultivators who wished to attend. To the right of the main balcony was the seating for the City Lord.

My father had looked over everything and had approved my allotment of the balconies. Cultivators of the Cloudy Moon Sect could always attend for free. Other cultivators would be asked for a tael. The theater would cover food and refreshments for the cultivators that attended.

Right now, there were three cultivators attending the opening performance from the Cloudy Moon Sect, which was a great honor. I had noticed many people come to just glance up at them.

“Cultivator Skywalker, you cannot resist the Demonic Sect and Immortal Black Dragon. You will submit to her authority!” The hero had been bested in swordplay and had lost his hand. It had gone up his sleeve, and a device had propelled red streamers out as fake blood to the amusement of the audience when that happened.

“Never! You are demonic cultivators plunging the land into chaos and ruin. I will never follow you!” I was glad I had used my mother to help pick out the actors. She had an eye for maximum drama. She was even attending with my father instead of his wife and had gone on constantly whenever I saw her about how amazing I was for setting all this up.

“Sense my energy and cultivation technique, Skywalker. I am not just Elder Vader, but your father!” The dark-robed actor pointed dramatically at the hero of the play.

“Nooo!” He then jumped off a fake cliff that they had set the stage up on. Elder Vader went up and looked for the cliff. The music had lined up perfectly. I had multiple rehearsals to get things just right.

“Foolish child. All will come to know the power of the Demonic Sect in time.” The curtains closed to applause and cheering.

“You have quite the sense for drama, my son,” my father said to me as servants brought refreshments to the balconies and drinks were sold below. It took about a minute to change between scenes. I had insisted on getting that time down. Light intro music played in the background. I also kept the length of my script to two hours.

“Thank you, father, but I don’t believe I got that from you,” I replied. He nodded and smiled at that. My mother was busy fussing over what food to pick. The curtains pulled open to the next scene.

Casting the villains as demonic cultivators in black and the heroes in blues and whites was a subtle nod to the Cloudy Moon Sect. All the plays I had written had Demonic Cultivators as the bad guys. Immortal Sauron forged cultivators into a ring of power, and so on. All my stories were like this.

Sorry Disney, but I was praying your legal team couldn’t find me in cultivator land. I even paid for a consultant to be on staff to ensure that the Cloudy Moon Sect would not get offended. There had been many changes to certain scripts, and we had thrown others out. Elder Scar had killed his brother, Elder Mufasa, to take his cultivation while his son Simba revealed his treachery and took him down. That was no good. Sect members didn’t betray other sect members.

Also, the good non-demonic cultivators had to triumph in the end as well. That meant no tragedies. Comedies were also out as well, since mocking any cultivator was not allowed. They could slightly mock demonic cultivators about how evil they were and how much ruin and chaos they caused.

But all that censorship was necessary. If the Cloudy Moon Sect or any cultivator got offended, it would not be good. Demonic cultivators getting offended about how evil they were was alright. Since they would be killed anyway if they made a fuss.

Now that would be a twist, a demonic cultivator hiding out as one of my actors playing the role of a demonic cultivator. That was a drama I didn’t want to happen.

“Cultivator Skywalker, you have come before me at last. Now as my trap is complete to take over the continent,” Immortal Black Dragon cackled loudly.

“Never! I will not cast aside the teachings of Master Green Dragon and Sword Saint Rong.”

“You refuse me even now. You are no match for my lightning technique!” The actor shot out blue streamers at Cultivator Skywalker, who screamed and collapsed to the ground.

“Father! Help me, I know there is still good in you.”

“Foolish child. Your father knows my true power and seeks the path of immortality himself! He will never turn his back on me.” Another blue streamer was unleashed from his sleeve.

“No!” Elder Vader drew his fake sword. Immortal Dragon spun about, also drawing his own fake sword. Elder Vader lunged and there was a brief bout of sword play before they stabbed each other.

Immortal Black Dragon screamed. He fell through a trapdoor, leaving his dark robe behind. Elder Vader staggered over to his son. “My son, let me look at you with my face one last time.” They pulled his dark mask off to show a scarred visage. I had hired a scarred actor to play the role. He had a wonderful voice.

“Father, don’t die.”

“It was a mortal blow to my child. But with Black Dragon’s death, so too are his followers, for he tied his cultivation to ours to empower himself. I was a fool to ever turn my back on the sect and look towards his dark powers.”

“Father, do not worry. I will succeed on the path to immortality. I swear to the heavens and the earth.”

“I know you will, my child.” The curtains swept closed and there was cheering and applause. The actors came out and took a bow as people dispersed from the theater. Looking over at the nearby balcony with the Cloudy Moon Sect cultivators, they were smiling slightly as they left.

That was good. That was very good. A fresh story where a cultivator trained hard, defeated an evil sect, and reunited with his father, who still perished because he was evil, was something there was zero objection to. Those lines about Immortal Black Dragon’s followers perishing were put in to bring closure to the story and have a complete victory for the good guys.

It had some depth, but we cut entire parts out like Leia being Luke’s sister. She was the daughter of the good sect leader. The good sect was never named, but with the coloration it was implied, it was the Cloudy Moon Sect. Han Solo had become a rogue cultivator who traded between cities. Elder Green Dragon was a traveling master who had lost to Immortal Black Dragon and sought revenge.

There was only so much room in the theater, even though I had tried to make it fairly big. The main issue was making sure the sound carried. Anyway, the real money would be on the balcony seating. The ground standing room and refreshments helped a bit, but having a balcony was a sign of being upper crust.

The symbol of each organization, family, or the sect was displayed on the balcony where they were sitting. Since the Cloudy Moon Sect got in for free and refreshments for free, I had been allowed to display their symbol as long as it was well taken care of.

Everyone else would have to pay up at the end of their first free month and their refreshments weren’t free, either. They would get a menu and could select what they wanted provided to them and one of their servants paid up or it was put on a tab. I had hired a top tier chef, and they were the most expensive part of this entire operation.

There were eighteen balcony seats on either side of the large central balcony in a three-by-three grid. The prices ranged from 100 taels a year to 10 taels a year for a balcony. They could invite whoever they wanted to sit on their balcony for free for any of the performances.

There was one servant assigned to each balcony who was instructed to memorize the names and faces of the people of that house and greet them by name when they arrived and see to their requests. Each balcony could fit four people, while the central balcony could hold eight.

It felt like a waste to give up the central balcony to the Cloudy Moon Sect, but it was necessary to give them respect, or as it was called in this place, face, if I wanted cultivators to attend. They had to get treatment above everyone else. This was even more so since the plays would be about cultivators.

The refreshments had done well. I had kept the prices reasonable. There would be one showing of the play per day for six days a week for a year or until the numbers died down. Then things would close for half a month and a new play would be released and start the process all over again.

The plays were in the afternoon, while they spent the mornings in rehearsals and getting ready. The salaries were quite cheap, since they considered the work quite easy. Each actor got 40 bronze coins per day of work, while the lead actors got 50 bronze coins. Support personnel got 20 bronze coins per day. The chef got 100 bronze coins a day. I paid people for 6 days of work.

With the servants and everyone else, the theater cost about a tael a day to run and about twenty taels to pay for a play. The floor people brought in about a tael. A fifth of that was the entry fee, the rest was for drinks and snacks. So that covered the wages of the workers, actors, and operating cost.

The real money came from the balconies, which went into my pocket. That would be 900 tael a year if all balconies were purchased and the refreshments on opening night had run about 35 tael. Figure about 10 tael per day normally, that would be around 3,000 just for food and drink per year. So about 4,000 tael per year of profit goes into my pocket. It was only around 10 tael a day, but it was something.

I had written the first five plays that would be used, but I had Ting looking for a professional playwright who could take over for me. The building had been cheap to make using pre-cast blocks. For a large part of it, including the base of the walls.

It was in the nicer part of the entertainment district, but ‌building the structure had only cost about 1,000 tael. I had looked into opening a fighting pit or boxing matches, but fights were outlawed in the city.

While Hong had told me there were underground fights, I didn’t want to get involved with something like that. As little drama as possible was my company motto, which seemed odd since I opened a theater which was filled with drama.

But I had built a theater, and I was going to maximize the use out of it any way I could. Late at night, it would be turned into a dance club. The families could still use the balconies, but curtains would be available to close them off from the public.

The actors rehearsed in the mornings, but the other employees would still work, including the musicians. They would set tables and chairs up at the ground level. The play had flyers made up and handed out to advertise the play schedule.

But my employees' word of mouth, and a donation to Yuan Liang, spread the word among his party friends and beyond them. There would be recreational drugs to enjoy, like cannabis and tobacco. Those were legal in the city, so I didn’t see the problem and many people smoked. Also, only the house was allowed to sell drugs, drinks, and food. No one else.

The theater’s roof was supported on struts, so the airflow was quite good, and it kept the rain out. In the morning, a cleaning crew would come through and tidy everything up for the next play in the afternoon. My parents left as I remained behind to oversee the transition.

There was an hour of closure to allow stuff to be moved around and the workers to rest and recover a bit. Then my night club opened to loud, fast-paced music. After making sure the switch over happened smoothly, like we had rehearsed, I mostly remained on my balcony resting.

It had been a stressful opening day, but everything had worked out well. Once the night finally ended past midnight there were boos, but things closed up at one in the morning. My people needed sleep and rest for the next day as much as I would have liked to keep things going. They gave people in the balconies half an hour to leave after the music stopped.

If people passed out or fell asleep, we put them in a barebones room with water and a bed. Two workers would stay through the night and check on them. I even had a doctor on call if there was an emergency. One worker could run off to get them while the other remained with the person.

Having a young master die would be a scandal I didn’t want. I had talked with my father about this and having private rooms set aside for something like this, servants, and a doctor on call was enough to make sure no blame landed on me. Most establishments didn’t go that far, but if someone died, they would be shut down.

My eyes went wide. We had a profit of 57 tael worth of food, drink, and drugs. Okay, if that kept above 50 every night, then it would be golden. My daily profit for this place had jumped from around 10 tael to about 60 tael.

The young masters weren’t allowed to start a tab. They had to pay up front. Their parents could start a tab with the theater stuff, but no tabs for young masters. I had all the servants repeat that over and over. I could bill the parents monthly for their food expenses, but billing them for their kids running amuck would just bring drama.

A lot more drama than telling young masters tough luck. They could set up a line of credit, though, by paying in advance. If they did that, they would tally the bill up at the end of the night and if they went over, we cut them off until they paid it back.

Those young masters sure were rich and liked their drugs. Yuan Liang managed the nightclub operations and knew exactly what the young masters wanted. He also enjoyed his new life and salary. I had another manager handling the day to day, while Yuan Liang’s job was to make sure this place stayed popular and there wasn’t a scandal.

Also, it wasn’t a brothel, either. Any women or escorts would take people back to a nearby brothel I had a deal with. Nothing in the theater turned nightclub. If people wanted to really go at it, they could go back to the brothel, which was a stone’s throw away.

They handled their own payments and affairs and didn’t make a scandal. The matron was more than happy to agree to the terms. While the culture wasn’t prudish, having sex in public was something that wasn’t done and embarrassing a young master was bad for business.

The women kept what they could get and led the young masters out at the end of the night. It also helped clear people out. The bathrooms were a mess, but that was for the cleaning staff in the morning to deal with. They got paid good wages to deal with that nightmare.

While they hooked us up to the local sewer system and had running water from the aqueduct, there was barf all over the place. One person had even missed the toilet hole and had shit everywhere around it.

That was another reason I used the pre-cast blocks for the ground floor and cement. It was easy to clean off. Water would be used liberally, and the shit pushed into a drain. Once the first rinse down happened, there would be a liberal amount of fruit scented water tossed all over the place to make it smell nice.

I also had guards all over the place as well. If people started a fight, they would both be tossed out separate entrances. Thankfully, that didn’t happen the first night.

Half Moon City had a population inside its walls of around 250,000. So, there was quite a lot of opportunity for my theater to do business and my nightclub was exciting for young masters who wanted adventure, but was safe enough for their parents to be okay with it.

The following days, it was all anyone could talk about. People even lined up for standing space. I had thought about running two showings a day, but I wanted to draw out the length for each play and run a nightclub out of the same building.

The servants handling the balconies all had to inspect them carefully each morning for any issues, smells, or other things. Thankfully, I had put procedures in place to catch any issues. Like a pair of undergarments tucked into a chair cushion.

Didn’t want the concubines to be scandalized when their husbands brought them out. Each servant double checked another one’s work and two double checked the cultivator’s balcony. The lower floor stuff was less important to get perfect every day.

If the lower-class bathroom smelled heavily of lemons and shit, that was fine. But the upper-class bathrooms had to be worked over carefully to ensure a high standard. The nightclub people only got to use the lower-class bathrooms. The upper-class bathrooms were closed off to prevent any young masters from making a mess.

There had been a few complaints about that, but tough luck. Young masters were like a stampede of destruction, crushing everything in their path and leaving a mess to deal with. They brought money, but I was not dealing with a messed up high-class bathroom where there were delicate things like mirrors.

I told the guards that they could be bribed to let young masters use it, but to make sure nothing was wrecked. They could set the bribe price, but any mess that was made, they had to clean up themselves and pay for damages out of their salary and bribe.

They had been amused at that and had figured twenty bronze coins would be their going rate. It was up to them. But everything else was a hard no. No one could go to balconies their family didn’t own. The public wasn’t allowed in locked up areas. No going on the stage where the orchestra played and women from the brothel sang occasionally.

If they wanted, they could deliver an invitation which all the women were happy to accept. Their dream was to be picked as a concubine by one of the young masters that came through my establishment. The singing allowed them to show off instead of going right to the sex.

I had also said no to harder drugs and made my stance clear on that. I did not want a person to overdose and die. Also, the harder stuff was illegal. They could mess up their livers instead. Yuan Liang knew all the best liquors and how to price them.

He liked to party as well, but he also knew how to run a party and keep things going and exciting, so the tael kept flowing out of people’s pockets into my pocket. My mother enjoyed watching the auditions, evaluating the actors, and getting an early, sneak peek at the play.

She had become the queen bee with my ascent and Ting had let me know there were whispers she might replace Yuan Guangli as the main wife. That wouldn’t happen, since Yuan Guangli had connections to the Cloudy Moon Sect, but the fact there were even rumors showed how strong my mother’s position had become.

She had even been hosting other women at the Illuminated Moon occasionally with the tael I gave her. She asked for more, but I had refused. Ten tael a month was more than enough.

The theater ran fairly smoothly once it got going as another division as part of Zhou Holding Company Limited. I also had to arrange things so that my third brother did not report to my fourth brother. It was annoying, but I had my third brother listed as nightclub consultant in the organizational chart where he tangentially reported to the general manager but was his equal and answered directly to me.

I needed him to make the nightclub a success, but I didn’t want the drama. In another decade, he would be run down, and I would replace him with another young master if he caused any issues. I was running a business, not a charity. Also, our father only asked me to help Yuan Niu, not Yuan Liang.

What I needed now was another idea to get off the ground, but I was tapped out for an idea that met all my requirements. I considered writing books, but there was very little market for reading. The masses were mostly illiterate, which was why the theater had been the hit it was.

There was only so much wealth I could squeeze out of the city. Oh, that gave me another idea. A spa for women. Each of them would be treated like a princess. Other women would carefully care for their nails, hair, and bodies.

It wasn’t just people like my mother who would go there. All the prostitutes would also want to go to a spa. I would need to have two different sections so the groups didn’t intermingle, but if I could bring a theater and a nightclub into this world, I could bring a spa.

The price would be a 100 bronze for a full treatment, which included a massage, 40 bronze for just nails, and 20 bronze for hair. It was easy enough to purchase some land in the commercial district and make a warm and inviting spa. Ting easily knew the right women to hire to handle female appearances.

My mother was more than happy to invite people to the spa and drum up interest and excitement, since she got a discounted price for herself and any friends she brought. She had a lot of friends, but the business was still profitable as word quickly spread among the women of Half Moon City.

It was a place for women and run by women. There were technically no female guards, but I had some beefy women handle security and guards stationed outside if there were issues. It was in the commercial district, so I thought nothing could happen, but better to have staff on hand for rich people's issues.

The spa only brought in about a single tael a day for the spa services. So, it wasn’t a tremendous success, but the business was functional and making a profit. I also introduced the idea of regular appointments and reservations. That way, women could maintain their appearance long term with less upkeep needed.

What rich man would say no to his concubine or wife, looking more beautiful? Even the high-end prostitutes enjoyed the service, to appeal more to the young masters. I kept the two groups separate, of course, but offered basically the same services with just some special perks for being an elite.

Things like food and drinks being served. Full body mirrors and chairs with fluffy cushions. The other side had to deal with half mirrors and less fluffy chairs and no treats being served to them. I only charged them 80 bronze coins instead of 100 though.

The major problem was that while women might have some money, they didn’t control the purse strings like their husbands did. That is why I worked out scented soap and shampoo and sold it inside the spa. That was the real moneymaker.

Smelling nice was something all women and their husbands enjoyed. So, while there was regular soap, I made scented soap and sold it as an elite product. The women bought it up by the crateful. It was a sign of status to smell like flowers or fruit. The real trick was to not make the smell overpowering.

My mother was the trendsetter in all of this. The soap business brought in around 20 tael a day, making the spa a success in my mind. I had pushed my daily income up to around 160 tael a day after I finished these business ventures.

That was almost 60,000 tael a year of money flowing into my pocket, but it honestly wasn’t enough in my mind. I needed to get my daily income up to 250 tael a day to afford the cultivation resources I wanted. As it was, I was popping a Qi Pill daily to boost my daily intake of motes.

The incense sticks were just too expensive. I kept some on hand when it rained since there was only so much traveling I wanted to do in the rain, and I needed to build up my war chest. That was about a tenth of the days and I spent those days going back to my cultivation plan while I let the incense burn for 8 hours.

It also gave me time to look at my notes, diagrams, and more models I had built. I had angled the quad core design upwards but was considering if that was the best orientation for the channels.

It focused me on trying to work out the exact number of cells that were needed to be between cores to let channels move through and how they would spread out. The simple answer was a third of 320 channels each core would have, which was 106.6. How would the channels converge at the vertices was another issue for the icosahedron shaped cores? How to create buffering for the cores?

The list of details and complications in working everything out was immense. No wonder why most people just made some tweaks to the standard template and called it a day. While I hadn’t read everything in the library, I had covered about four-fifths of the useful books by my estimate.

I might have missed some critical insight, but I wasn’t about to hold my breath and wait for my official entrance into the sect. I would need to adjust the number of channels. Each vertex on the core would have nine channels converging, but working that out with the internal pyramidal structure was a pain.

The size of each pyramidal cell structure would be quite small, but I was slowly making progress while stacking up paper in the useless pile. It would all be burned once I was done, but for now I wanted to review older drafts.

I had even taken the time to move motes around in the center of my body to slowly start laying out the structure. The motes would shift over time, but getting everything set up around the core and having an internal model to compare to my plans and ideas was absolutely necessary.

The problem was the intense focus it required to move each mote into position. Like sliding ice chunks across a frozen lake while not trying to hit the other ice chunks. I could only move one mote at a time. It was slow, very slow, but I was slowly laying out the core structures and the pyramid support cells around them.

The channel structures were being done as well. While the motes were points in space, they did have a slight area around them they affect, like bouncing off other motes. I was pushing the boundary of how detailed I could make everything.

The channels were the trickiest, and I considered using another internal structure like a grid, but it would be a lot weaker, and I needed the strength of a triangular structure and separate triangular channels. The worst part was the slight shifting of the motes over time, which was why I didn’t want to do this, but there was no other way.

Once I started locking motes into place, I would enter the second stage and become stuck with the motes of Qi I already had.