1: Chapter 1: Cultivating Immortality is Not as Good as Being a Construction Foreman

"Damn sect, throwing another shitty job at me!"

Jiang Ning cursed inwardly, but her hands didn't stop as she pulled Formation Flag from her Storage Pouch and began setting up the formation. In the Qingyun Sect, Jiang Ning was a famous "Infrastructure Construction maniac," and also the most miserable one. While her fellow disciples went into secluded cultivation, she went to lay spirit veins; while others went down the mountain for trials, she went to repair the Mountain Protection Array. While others were getting spiritual stones and pills until their hands were soft, she earned a bit of hard-earned money and had to scrape some extra perks from the leftovers.

Who told her she had Five Spirit Roots? Her cultivation was deathly slow. If she hadn't been somewhat talented in formations and artifact refining, she wouldn't even have managed to snag the status of an Inner Sect Disciple and would only be able to do the dirty, exhausting work that even Outer Sect Disciples despised.

This time, the task was to repair a nearly ruined spirit vein. It was dirty, messy, and occasionally spat out Spatial Cracks. The elders found it too dangerous but couldn't bear to let go of that tiny bit of spiritual energy, so they simply tossed this hot potato to her.

"Once I reach Foundation Establishment, the first thing I'm doing is resigning!" Jiang Ning held back her frustration and slammed the last array flag into the ground.

But just as her hand touched the broken stone tablet deep within the spirit vein, the expected spiritual energy didn't come. Instead, a flash of white light appeared, swallowing her whole.

When she opened her eyes again, the smell of dust and rust made her cough uncontrollably.

There were no caves or soil around her anymore; instead, there were "mountains" made of iron and gray stone, terrifyingly tall and square-shaped, covered in transparent holes. She couldn't feel even a hint of spiritual energy in the air, and breathing in made her chest feel tight.

She found herself lying on a deserted construction site, with protruding rebar and broken concrete chunks everywhere.

What the hell is this place? A mystic realm? Or some ancient ruin?

Jiang Ning climbed up and habitually released her divine sense, only for it to dissipate barely a meter from her body. She tried to circulate her spiritual power, but her Dantian was empty, showing no reaction at all.

I'm screwed.

That was the only thought in Jiang Ning's head. No spiritual power, and her divine sense was useless; if a demon beast jumped out now, she wouldn't even know how she died.

Just as she was panicking, the birthmark on her wrist suddenly burned. A cold, emotionless voice rang out directly in her mind.

[Host's soul detected as stable. Binding conditions met.]

[Merit Infrastructure System successfully bound...]

[Scanning current world... World name: Earth. Spiritual energy concentration: 0.001%. Rating: Era of Dharma Decline.]

[Novice task issued: Renovate the current area (abandoned construction site) to possess basic spirit gathering functionality. Task reward: 100 merit points.]

Jiang Ning was stunned.

System? Merit? What on earth?

She looked down at her wrist; the birthmark was no longer hot. Her mind raced. According to that thing, she had arrived at a place called "Earth," and the spiritual energy in this godforsaken place was practically non-existent.

"Era of Dharma Decline... No wonder I can't use a single bit of spiritual power," she muttered.

Looking at the task again—renovate the construction site and set up a Spirit Gathering Array?

Jiang Ning's face stiffened. Fuck, even after changing locations, she's still a damn contractor? What kind of luck is this!

She stood up irritably and brushed the dirt off her clothes. Forget it, since she's already here. She'd figure out the situation first and see what those 100 merit points could do. It sounded similar to Sect Contribution Points; maybe she could exchange them for some treasures.

She scanned the area. Although this construction site was dilapidated, there were plenty of materials. She planned to set up the simplest Spirit Gathering Array; she had practiced this thing tens of thousands of times in the sect and could do it with her eyes closed.

The problem was that setting up an array required spiritual power and Array Bases. Right now, she couldn't squeeze out a single drop of spiritual power, and she couldn't open her Storage Pouch, making all the good stuff inside useless.

Was the first task going to fail?

Jiang Ning refused to believe it. She crouched down, picked up a piece of rusty rebar, and knocked off a chunk of concrete. In the cultivation world, these were trash, but now, she had no choice.

"Metal... Earth... These will do for now." She weighed the junk in her hand, and her mind began searching through the obscure books in the sect that no one ever read.

There! A tattered book called "Miscellaneous Talks on Array Dao" mentioned that ancient experts could use ordinary items as Array Bases to draw upon the Five Elements of heaven and earth to set up arrays. Although the power was far inferior, the benefit was that it consumed no spiritual power, and materials were everywhere.

At the time, she had thought this method was too crude, so she had only glanced at it before tossing it aside. Looking at it now, wasn't this prepared specifically for her?

No sooner said than done. Jiang Ning scavenged around the construction site, plunging rebars into the ground according to the correct orientations and using broken concrete chunks to outline the shapes of runes around them.

This work was slow and exhausting. Without spiritual power, she relied entirely on physical strength. Fortunately, her foundation from cultivation was still there; although she was weak, she could still handle this bit of manual labor.

After being busy for a whole day, the sky had turned dark, and a three-meter-wide, crooked, and ugly formation finally took on a rough shape.

Jiang Ning stood in the center of the array. Following the method in her memory, she used her finger dipped in blood to draw the final rune on the central concrete block.

As soon as the blood finished the drawing, the entire crude array let out a hum.

A faint current of air began to gather toward the center of the array. This wasn't spiritual energy, but the messy energy in the air, filtered by the array and made just a tiny bit cleaner.

The effect was pitifully poor, but it actually worked!

A small ripple of energy spread from the array and vanished into the night.

Thousands of miles away, beneath the capital, in the monitoring center of The Ninth Bureau of the National Bureau of Special Affairs, a sharp alarm suddenly blared.

The duty officer jumped from his chair, staring intently at the small red dot that had appeared on the screen.

"Report! Donghai City, South District, coordinates XXX, XXX. Abnormal energy fluctuation detected!"

"The intensity is very weak, but the frequency is stable. Nature... no match in the database! We've never seen this before!"

Jiang Ning had no idea how much trouble her casual little creation had caused. She was exhausted and sat by the array, feeling that bit of energy that was better than nothing, thinking to herself that this "working" life seemed to have a new bit of hope.

"Fine, work is work. What's the difference where I do it?"