Jade Dragon Beauty

The Red-skinned demon saluted and knelt in front of his superior. Carnage Prince, nephew of the Emperor, looked down at the red skinned general. "Report." he said, and the man began.

"My Lord." he said. "We managed to get agents into nine of the ten civilian groups that escaped, but only one of the groups of guild members. They had set up large teleportation arrays and used them to evacuate to nearby caves. We are sending scouts to find the other caves in order to catch the guild members, but are letting the civilians leave so that we can have more spies."

"Forty two thousand." said Carnage Prince.

"My Lord?" The general asked, confused.

"Forty two thousand, eight hundred and two. That's how many soldiers died under your command in that one battle." Normally the Lord of the new world wouldn't care about the loss of low ranked soldiers, but he only had around three hundred thousand troops under his command before that battle, so the loss was significant. "How could you lose so many, fighting a mere twenty thousand cultivators?"

The General bowed deeper. "I'm sorry, my Lord, My battle strategy was obviously flawed. I shall try to do better in the future."

The Lord scoffed. "It will take at least a year to recruit enough troops to replace those you lost."

"Perhaps you can levy troops from the minor nobles in your realm, My Lord?" The general offered.

Lord Prince scoffed at the suggestion. The nobles wouldn't like it, but it would reinforce his troops until they could be restored. "See that it doesn't happen again."

The General bowed again, "Yes, My Lord." With that, he backed out of the room.

---

Mo Shen sat on a cushion in one of the hundreds of cultivation caves carved into this cave structure, surrounded by candles. She had taken a day to prepare for this moment and, now that she was ready she had spent over a day in deep meditation, trying to rebuild her cultivation as quickly as possible. While her meridians were already conditioned to high quality Fire chi, letting her complete the process more quickly, she needed to adapt to having pure fire chi without any balancing elements. This had meant that she had to keep bringing it into her dantian and, whenever the problems started to become a bit too much, she had to stop and focus on adapting to it, using the techniques within her new cultivation technique to make sure that it didn't harm her.

Yesterday she had taken inventory of everything she had. The demon she had killed had a few useful items in its ring, including a book written in another language and several technique books in the local language, likely taken from locals that he had killed, but none these items were useful to her at the moment. His sword was made of Foundation level Blood Steel, so it would prove useful, yet had no formations on it. She would have to add some in the future.

In the supplies she had taken from the workshop she had found several blue and green bracelets with the slider built into them, something the others were making so that one could adjust the purity of chi they were receiving. These would prove useful.

She took one of the green ones and focused on adding fire collection and purification to it. While it would collect all five elements, it would only use the extra elements to purify the Fire chi, discarding any excess chi from them. To the top of the bracelet she added the Burnt Fox core, and set up the slider to let her adjust how pure the Fire chi which entered it was. The material eventually limited the purity to around 11%, and Shen knew that the core could handle more than that, so she removed the core and duplicated the design with a Blue Jade bracelet. This time the purity was able to reach around 21%, about the maximum the core could safely handle and not much lower than her own purity, so she was satisfied by the device for now.

After that she made one each for her friends. Mae got one for Wood chi and Ponma got one for Water chi. While at first she wasn't sure what to make for Danka, as she didn't know much about Sword chi, upon seeing what she made for the other two he asked for a Metal chi bracelet, as he could convert Metal chi into Sword chi with around 70% efficiency, and it may go as high as 90% with enough practice. That only left Shoom, who couldn't wear a traditional bracelet, as even his front legs were too large. She ended up taking a strip of leather and adding a jade plate to it which fed him Water chi, which his dantian automatically converted to Ice chi.

Once she was finished, she marked all of the branch points in her meridians, finding over three thousand with her divine sense, and swapped her bracelet to the new one before breaking her cultivation. She then went to one of the private baths and, after submerging herself up to her neck, started expanding the new branch points. Ten hours later she got out, the water gray despite the fact that it was being continuously replaced, got dressed. After that she returned to her room and sat down, once again meditating, but this time focusing on conditioning her meridians to Fire so that she could break through to the next level and start storing Fire in her dantian. She could also condition her meridians to other forms of qi if she wished, weakening the effect of such attacks on her, but for now she would stick with the one that was part of her new cultivation technique.

Eventually she managed to fully condition them to the chi from her new bracelet, then the old bracelet. She brought out the chi purifying device she had made during the siege as well. As it was designed for purity, not chi generation, it made very little chi, but all of the chi it produced was at 37.4% purity. Shen wasn't quite sure how to use this, but was certain she would find a way. She attempted to use it to further condition her meridians but, when she mixed it with the chi from her old bracelet it increase the purity of the old source, she was only able to stand a purity of 27.8%. This was much higher than the 26% she had estimated before, but she knew that it wouldn't increase until she used the various body cultivation techniques within her new cultivation technique book.

While she could do so now, she decided to wait and do so later. Right now she wanted to advance back to Foundation so that she could leave the cave. She doubted that the demons would just let them escape, which meant that she and her friends would need to leave this place before the demons found them.

She took the demon core out of her ring so that she could have a large source of neutral chi for her breakthrough, then activated Restrict as strongly as she could, just to verify that her lowest level was at its maximum size, and when it started to badly hurt she deactivated the technique, then put on her Recovery ring, letting it fix any stress on her Dantian or meridians as she went over the breakthrough technique again in her head. While the standard technique used neutral chi to create a shell around the dantian, the new technique asked that she do so using Fire chi. While this wouldn't fill the lowest level with Fire chi like it would do for the other levels, it would mean that any chi that was drawn out of it or leaked out would be Fire chi, being imbued with the pattern as it left. This would automatically cause her meridians to be filled with Fire chi just from the natural regeneration.

Once Shen started to construct the shell, using the Fire chi in her bracelet's Beast Core at 21%, she found that there was a downside to this technique. While her meridians were conditioned to the chi, and therefore unharmed when it started to leak out, her other body tissue wasn't. With every passing minute she felt hotter, and was in more pain. She kept pushing, but soon found that the pain was too much. She was forced to split her attention, something that was rarely advisable during something as critical as a breakthrough, and started using the Fire body tempering technique on her whole body, not caring about which tissue it improved, as all would eventually have their use and she was just trying to mitigate a side effect at the moment. Soon the Fire in her tissue could only slightly be felt and she was able to put far more attention on creating the shell, which hadn't seriously advanced for several minutes.

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After an hour, though, she felt the chi in her meridians and dantian get pulled into the shell and it started to solidify, having a bright red color instead of the normal white. While she didn't need to continue the technique at this point, she knew that if she did it would only improve the breakthrough, so she started pulling chi from the demon's core, using the chi in her dantian to imbue it, the Beast Core having been depleted thirty minutes ago, and pushing the chi into the outer shell. The more she fed it, the thicker and stronger it would become, and eventually she surpassed the level it would originally reach.

She now had a choice. There was a technique in the book to artificially increase the pressure inside a dantian, effectively increasing its size. The problem was that if the shell around the dantian was broken, either through damage or a cultivator's recultivation, the increased amount of chi could cause the dantian to rupture and release all of the chi. In order to get around this, when one tried to recultivate they would have to lower the chi level in that layer to below its normal maximum, then destroy the shell.

So she had to decide whether she wanted to risk forgetting about this the next time she recultivated or taking damage from a technique which damaged a dantian. That wasn't unheard of, but was a rare injury on the battlefield.

After a bit of pondering she decided that she had large enough chi reserves already, and could supplement it with relics or beast cores if she needed to. She let the shell around her dantian solidify, not risking building it too thick and therefore restricting the flow out, which would increase her capacity similar to the rejected technique, but also restrict her access to the energy. When she was done she was fully in the Gathering stage.

She got up and stretched, though a part of her was still focused on the body tempering. She would need to continue the technique until all of her tissue was conditioned to it, or risk damage. She walked around the cave for a little while, then went to get something to eat. While her friends weren't there she did see Xing Lu sitting with another boy about his age, talking. After getting her food she went over and sat down with them. "Ah, Mo Shen." said Lu. "I wasn't expecting to see you again so soon. Though it feels as if your cultivation is going well. You are already in the early parts of the Gathering realm." Shen nodded.

"Mo Shen?" The other boy asked. "As in the relic crafter?" Shen nodded. "I wasn't expecting to meet you so soon either. My name is Ling Ping. I am the grandson of Ling Tso."

"Oh, then it is a pleasure to meet you." She bowed slightly. "Your grandfather was a skilled senior relic crafter."

Ping nodded. "He actually asked me to find you and give you something. He knew Lu would be going to the same place you did and asked me to travel with Lu and give you something." He held his hand over the table and an amulet appeared. It was made of the Nascent level Flame Steel she had given Master Ling. "To be honest, I had kind of hoped that I couldn't find you. A Nascent level relic, regardless of what it did, would be worth thousands of spirit stones, enough for my mother and I to have a good life in whatever city we decided to settle in. But, as I've found you, I have no choice but to give it to you." He slid it across the table to her.

Shen was certain he was right about the price. Just the material it was made of could likely sell for over two thousand, and a good effect could double or triple that price. Shen looked over the amulet. It looked like a flaming bird in flight. "A phoenix?" she asked in surprise. Phoenixes were the first spirit beasts to reach immortality, and built their societal structures around superior strength and cultivation, much like the dragons did. Unlike the dragons, however, they didn't have a problem with interfering in human societies if it could benefit them. "Any idea why he made it a phoenix?"

Ping shook his head and Shen examined the formation on the back of it. While it was a nascent level formation, and she therefore couldn't completely understand it, she recognized parts of it. Some parts were similar to the Shifting technique. Some parts were to contain a soul fragment and let it influence the effect. Some parts gathered and purified Fire chi. As far as she could tell the last effect could reach 50% or greater purity. Some parts even looked like telepathy. Still, she didn't know what the effect was. Still, it was a quality effect, whatever it was, and she was certain that she would make great use of it in the future.

She waved her hand and five large bags of stones appeared on the table as the amulet disappeared. "Each of those bags contains one thousand stones." she said. "You and your mother shouldn't struggle for money unless one of you reaches Immortal, and even then there is enough there to invest in a few businesses."

Ping looked surprised and looked at her. When she nodded he waved his hand and the items flew into a magic bag on his back, as his ring couldn't contain that much volume. He got up, bowed and thanked Shen, then went to find his mother.

"Quite generous of you." Lu said.

"I only gave him what the item is worth, and could afford it." said Shen.

Lu nodded and returned to his meal.

After eating what was technically Last Meal, but which was essentially First Meal for Shen, she returned to her room and started meditating again. During the meal most of her body had been tempered by the flames, so she started on one of the more specialized versions of the technique, improving her muscles. She repeated the meditation from before the siege, seeing her muscles as charcoal and letting the Fire flow into them, reinforcing them and reinvigorating them. At first it was slow, though not particularly painful as her muscles had already been tempered to the Fire, but with time the process sped up, as she got more used to it. A few hours later, while she wasn't enhanced to her current limit, she had reasonably advanced, and started on her tendons. Every few hours she switched to a different body part and when it reached the time for Middle Meal the next day, she got up and went.

Now that her body had been enhanced by the fire chi, all of her body was infused with it at close to her maximum purity. All of her body's functions had been sped up, from movement to reactions to thoughts. This did not, however, speed up her aging, and may have actually slowed it, as many of the weaknesses which cause aging later in life and are caused by aging were burned away. This likely meant that she had a lifespan 50% longer than she normally would as a Gathering stage cultivator, and would continue to increase as she further advanced with the technique and advanced through the realms.

When she reached the dining hall she found a pleasant surprise. All of her friends were at one of the tables, with Shoom even sitting at the end of the table, eating from a large bowl. She got her food and sat down next to them. "I didn't know if you would eat this meal." said Danka. "You've been in cultivation for so long." Shen could feel Sword chi coming from inside of him.

"Danka was just asking if we wanted to go on patrol with him." Mae stated. Her chi was strange, but felt like it wanted to give you a hug. If she were an adult, or even a teenager, Shen knew that many boys would be drawn to this.

"Yeah? Do you need my help?" Shen asked.

"Getting the full group together would be pretty good." said Ponma. "We've been in combat together and are friends, so we should be able to adapt to anything that goes wrong." He somehow seemed more limber, like his moves included a fluid grace, and she sense fairly pure Water chi inside of him, no doubt from her bracelet.

"Does that include me?" Shoom's voice said in their heads. "I haven't fought with you before." Shen could tell that his speech was considerably better and he seemed a bit more aware. She checked his pressure and found that he had advanced to the Middle Foundation stage, not having had to break his cultivation like they had.

"Well, you fought beside me," said Shen, "so I know how to work well with you. So I think you should come along."

"And we could use the attack power, if we come under attack." said Ponma. "He would be the only Foundation ranked person in our group, after all."

Danka nodded in agreement. "Welcome to the team, Shoom." he said before whispering to explain the mission. The sect wanted to make sure the Demons hadn't followed them, so they were sending out former guards on patrol. Of course, the official story was that they were looking for bandits and hostile spirit beasts, but the primary goal would be to look for signs of the Demon Army and, if found, tell the Elders at the cave immediately so that the people could evacuate.