Jade Dragon Beauty

They finished loading what they could find into an old cart which smelled of death and appeared to be covered in old blood. Shen was certain that Dark had once used this cart to haul corpses, likely before he had a strong enough army to carry them for him. An occasional Dead wondered into the area as they worked, but any of the fighters could easily dispatch the creature.

They had been forced to take frequent breaks in the food cellar, the one place in the fort that was both mostly intact and cool. None of the food there was still good, it having decayed long ago, but Ponma found a section full of bottles of wine as well as two kegs of ale which Danka assured them was still good after a 'taste test', so they were all loaded onto the cart.

Mae had found what was left of the clinic here and found a few intact bottles of pills, a few small jars of herbs, and a small cauldron that was about the same quality as the one she already had. Those also went into the cart. After that she had searched for any scrap metal or intact goods. Most of the metal was rusted or corroded, a result of being exposed to the death energy, to the point that even the silver was heavily tarnished to the point of being pitted. Still, Shen had them collect the materials, as they could be smelted to make them useful.

Shen had started the day by searching the ruins for any signs of relics, leaving the harvesting of cores to Danka. She was going to be relying on Death energy based devices for a long time judging by the thousands of cores she had, so she would need materials to build arrays to convert it to something useful, as she knew very few useful effects that could use Death energy. Perhaps she could convert it to Darkness to refill their bracelets, but the effect on the bracelets had only proven slightly useful so far, and Shen and Lu lacked them, so they hadn't been able to hide from enemies yet either. She would likely end up just neutralizing the chi and then imbuing it with a useful element.

She had been able to find a few useful bits, including several magic bags and minor weapon and accessory relics from the forts previous owners, the Demons that had been stationed here. While the items were damaged, having started to break down from the Death chi, the chi inside of them let them resist to some degree. She also found a large number of items that were damaged beyond repair, though they contained useful materials, mostly low grade spirit materials like Spirit Copper, Spirit Brass, Spirit Iron, Spirit Steel, Blood Iron, and Blood Steel, so she could make things out of them once she found a city to set up in. Though, from the sensation pulling them all west, it would likely be at a business owned by the General. Or, given that he was no more, a business owned by his wife.

Lu had found what was left of the library. Most of the books there were burnt from Shen's attacks, but from the decayed and moldy state of most of those that weren't, he doubted they were worth taking even before they were burnt. Lu did find a few magical books that were in various states of decay. The first and most intact one was Dark's journal, which contained records of his experiments and discoveries. None of them were planning on becoming necromancers, though so it wasn't that useful. The next most intact books were beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced books on Necromancy, written in the Demon language. Lu had learned a small amount, but not enough to translate. The only reason he could read the diary was because Dark appeared to have first written on the left page in his native language, then on the right page translated everything. There were also a few books on Death techniques, Darkness techniques, and a few that were basically the Demon version of The Dao of the Militia and The Dao of the Mage, common training manuals which were handed out to troops and produced in bulk. The only thing that made he and Shen interested in the manual was that there was a version written in the Human language, likely for slaves and the few human recruits to read, which included detailed instructions on how to form a Core. While Shen's cultivation technique actually did include instructions on how to form a Fire Core, none of the other techniques did so, so the manual would likely prove useful to the others, especially if the ability from Shen's technique to incorporate elemental chi could be incorporated into it using other elements and forms of chi.

There were also over three hundred Cores from the Demons that had been stationed here, most of them having been reanimated and killed in her attack. There were, however, a few in what had once been a combined prison and torture chamber, as Dark had converted it into a cooler to prevent the corpses from decaying too much before he got to them, and used the cores as a power source. It appeared to be the only formation the man knew, and was built poorly, having been directly copied from the Basic Necromancy text. It had two halves, one which used Ice chi to keep the temperature just above freezing, and one which used Death chi to take control of the decay process and put the rotting bacteria in a state of sleep. Personally, Shen would have just killed all of the bacteria to make the process all but stop, but she supposed that might be harder to pull off for a beginner in formations. One only needed an underpowered Sleep technique which was too week to effect people with the first, but would need to target bacteria, and therefore require that the formation's creator know what bacteria were and visualize them for the second. While Shen had learned about bacteria from one of Mae's Healer books she couldn't properly visualize them, and doubted she would be able to figure it out until she found someone who possessed a device known as a microscope so that she could see them.

Most of their water for the trip would come from the three intact jars that Shen had found in the cellar that hadn't been filled with rotting or rotten food. As Earth chi was extremely abundant in the desert, and in fact had started to push the Death chi out of the fort now that all of the Dead were finished, Shen had built a partial conversion ring to convert it into Water chi. The Earth chi fed a small bit of Metal chi from a scrap of Spirit Iron, which then fed the Water section of the formation, creating fairly pure Water chi to draw the moisture from the air. While there was very little moisture in this air, the sheer amount and purity of chi in the formation had allowed a fog to form inside the jars which would condense on the walls of the jars and trickle down to the bottom, creating about a small jar worth of water per hour per formation jar. This was enough to meet their basic water needs, but not much more. The jars actually filled up with a speed inversely proportional to the amount of water in them, losing 10% of the speed at 10% full, 50% at half full, etc, so every hour Mae would pour what had been collected into a jar in her storage ring which contained the Water reserves, thus maximizing the amount collected.

The Demons that were once stationed here were getting regular water and food shipments from the nearby oasis towns, and had once had an underground reservoir that worked on the same principle as Shen's jars, but scaled up, with the collection vessels being the size of small buildings, filled with hanging sheets of cloth to speed up condensation, and draining into the reservoir underneath. Unfortunately Dark had destroyed the formation, as he didn't need clean water, and instead had just let the water that was left in the reservoir stagnate. While they could have purified it, and would have done so if needed, it was far easier to gather water the way they were doing so.

Some time in the afternoon they all decided to sleep in the cellar. Lu had read somewhere that in the desert you should sleep during the day and travel at night due to the heat and need for more water if you were sweating, so they had decided to set out as soon as the sun had set.

This trip had been profitable, at least, though it had required the General to kill himself to survive. That was a large loss for them, though Shen forced herself to only consider it a loss to their fighting strength. After all, he had enslaved them, so she wouldn't mourn his passing like the others seemed to be doing.

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That night they poured the last of the water into the stored water jars, returned them to the ring, stored as many bones as they could, having a few Nascent level dead they could use for materials, and set out. Shen had put a formation on the cart so that it could fly, and Ponma was controlling it.

They flew all day, Mae occasionally passing out water to them, and just before sunrise they found a small settlement. It was an oasis town with a population of a few thousand, one of the many city-states dotted throughout the region. While there were a few demons wandering around, mostly merchants trading for the Spirit Iron that was mined nearby or the occasional part of a spirit beast that lived in the deeper desert, most of the people here were humans, descended from the people that had been a part of the Desert Immortal Emperor's empire.

They landed just outside of town and, when the gates were opened, paid the few spirit stones to enter and went inside. One of the larger oasis nearby had a spirit stone mine, and several other oasis settlements did as well, so all trade in this region, even among mortals, was done in spirit stones. Dark's ring had a few thousand of them in it, so they had around three thousand to trade with, but didn't want to put a target on themselves by showing that wealth.

While Danka and Shoom looked for a place to eat, Shen found a relic crafter and sold some of the Condensation and Foundation bones she had gathered. It wasn't unusual for people traveling in the desert to come across Dead, so she also sold seven cores which matched the bones just to keep up appearances. This got them about one hundred stones, and Shen split the money between the party members, giving most of it to Mae and Ponma so that they could buy food, water, and alchemical ingredients.

Now that they had found a settlement, they were able to take a few days off, and decided to rest for a week. The city had an inn, as it had once been a place where the soldiers at the nearby fort would come for leave as well as a place for merchants which dealt with the fort to buy goods, but around a year and a half ago all of the trade with the fort had stopped, causing the Inn's business to almost completely dry up, leaving only the few traders from other cities needing a room. This meant that they had more than enough rooms left, and didn't even mind that the group wanted to let their spirit beast stay inside, even though he barely fit through the door. Shoom ended up sharing a room with Danka, Ponma with Lu, and Mae and Shen were roommates again.

During the days Shen would stay inside, molding the bones from the Dead into useful items. Most of these items were sold to locals, as she used the three remaining Condensation skeletons for practice, and before long she had turned all of them into accessories, other than one complete set of Bone armor with one of the Condensation Death cores, which had a Death retribution barrier, a variation of a barrier which sent chi back at anyone that attacked it, incorporating the energy of the barrier. This meant that anyone that hit the armor with a melee attack would be hit with a burst of Death chi which was tuned to cause extreme paid but not seriously injure them, unless you count minor inflammation. She was able to get two hundred stones for the suit from a local relic crafter, money which went to Mae and Ponma to buy more supplies.

Shen wanted to smelt all of the scrap metal that they had gathered so that she could use it, but none of the local smiths or relic crafters were willing to let her rent their forge to do so, only offering to buy the scrap metal from her. As she wanted to keep the metal for crafting and not earn money, she declined. This meant that she was only able to use her own cauldron to make it, which was a slow process. Thankfully she was able to make a formation to gather the local Fire chi and focus it underneath the cauldron so that she didn't have to use her own, so she was able to use her chi to make relics instead. While this wouldn't have worked on the forge in the sect, as Fire chi was rarer and the forge much larger, there was more than enough Fire chi in the desert, especially under the mid day sun, to make the process work.

Mae spent the time making pills out of whatever materials she could find. Most of the herbs she had found at the fort were secondary ingredients, like the local version of spirit grass, a type of sage grass, so she wasn't able to do much with them, but some of the materials she needed were available from the various vendors, so she could keep her two cauldrons running about half the time. The Alchemy Path book she had chosen had several methods for making pills in multiple cauldrons at once, and she had chosen the simplest one to practice, one which made identical pills in multiple identical cauldrons. While the two weren't actually identical, they were of the same quality and size, so she was able to make it work.

Most of the materials gathered or grown here were from one of three paths, Earth, Fire, and Life, the seeds for the Life plants having been brought in several decades ago to deal with the occasional Dead from the wasteland, with the growth of such plants having been greatly expanded this year due to the massive increase in the number of Dead in the region. The locals assumed that this increase was due to a migration of a horde from deep in the wasteland, as Lord Dark, the ruler of a nearby city-state, had told them that a horde had wiped out everyone in the local fort. The group now knew that Dark had actually attacked the fort and seized it, and that the Dead horde belonged to him, but it was unlikely that any of the locals would believe them if they told the townsfolk.

Mae purchased many of the Life ingredients, as they could be use to enhance recovery pills and make healing pills, and some of the Fire ingredients, as they could be useful to Shen. While the first few batches with the new technique failed, soon she was able to make mediocre pain relief pills. It wasn't until the last day of the week that she started making proper healing pills, those of high enough quality that a store would be willing to sell them. To make these pills she had used Wood chi, which synergized with the Life element and fed the Fire element, making the effects stronger than normal. If she had used neutral chi it was unlikely that any of the pills would be good enough quality to sell, so she still had a bit of training to do.

"I would like to spend at least one more week in town, but we really need to head west." Mae told them as everyone sat around the table, eating together. Even Shoom was sitting with them, though he needed a reinforced stool to sit on. He was wearing simple large pants that Mae had made for him, as he was mostly human shaped at the moment, with a bipedal body but the head of a wolf. He had been practicing his shifting all week, but wouldn't be able to change his size until reaching Nascent, making him at least half a height taller and twice as wide as Danka, the largest of them. At Nascent the shifting technique could combine the Nascent ability to manipulate the soul as well as a bit of Space path knowledge similar to magic bags and storage rings to store excess mass within the soul. It could then be used to speed up healing by sacrificing size, though mostly just sat there until he returned to his natural form. The dragons had a technique to do this without needing to reach Nascent, essentially turning their stomach into a storage bag, and the technique was inside the shifting book Sho had once gifted her, so she would teach Shoom the technique if he needed it.

Everyone nodded in agreement, but Ponma spoke up. "I would really like to sell off a lot of our supplies and buy trade goods. There is a shortage of a lot of minerals in some of the nearby towns, including the Spirit Iron that is mined here, so we can probably earn a nice profit if we loaded up on it and sold it in the town that's about six hours west of here, judging by our flight speed, about ten hours if you walk or ride a mount." Unfortunately the cart was too full at the moment, so they would need to sell things before buying trade goods. They had the alcohol, and were certain they could sell it, but it would likely be more valuable outside the desert, as it was made from local ingredients. They could try to buy another cart, but it was unlikely any of the local merchants would be willing to sell them, as that would directly cut into their profits. She could sell more bones, of course, but the more they sold the more suspicious the locals would become of them. One or two skeletons for each of them were easy enough to explain, given the large number of Dead in the area in recent days, but if they sold many more than that the people would get suspicious of where they got them, maybe even seeing them as easy victims if they revealed that the had the skeletons of over a thousand Dead, and thousands of Death cores, each skeleton and core worth a few stones.

In the end they agreed to sell the bulky ale to a local tavern and use what money they had left, including some of their savings, to buy two barrels of smelted Spirit Iron for trade in the next city. The density meant that they needed to rearrange the things in the cart, but after thirty minutes they had gotten the balance well enough that the cart wasn't too difficult to control and set off to the west.