Chapter 293 - Procurement

With all the necessary materials in hand to create four of the now seven qi sources, Benton was pretty eager to get started crafting. Life experience was good for many things, and one of the hard lessons he’d learned over the years was that beginning a new project while fatigued was a bad idea. He’d put in a lot of work prior to the auction, and the event itself had been quite mentally stimulating.No matter how much he wanted to throw himself into conquering the next item on his To Do List, he felt he’d be better off taking the rest of the evening and the night off. So that was what he did, even spending a few hours actually sleeping.

The next morning, his first action was to check in with Sun Hua. The girl seemed to be doing fine, and systems were nominal as far as the sect went. It was a big relief to know he had qualified subordinates to run things when needed.

His next task was to create the list of needed materials for Jia Xueqin to procure. Which promised to be a fun activity. First of all, the procurement was part of a mutually beneficial exchange, not at all like asking a favor of Kang Ya-Ting. Not only did Benton expect that whatever was on the list would be acquired at a reasonable price with no markup, but there was no social imbalance being created.

He was free to request anything he could think up.

At the same time, he had millions of greater spirit coins burning a hole in his spatial ring, so unless he started dreaming up really rare items, he could afford to buy anything and everything he wanted and/or needed for his sect.

Obviously, the two materials he lacked for the qi sources, not counting the one that Kang Ya-Ting would be finding and paying for, went at the top of the list with a star next to each one. After that, though, Benton decided his best bet was to go systematically through each pavilion, determining what merchandise might be beneficial.

First up was the Martial Pavilion, and figuring out the needs for that one was easy. They needed more training weapons. Benton would take care of all the sect’s needs for Foundation Establishment and higher—at least until Xun Wu and the other blacksmiths became proficient enough to take over—but his Qi Gathering sect members tended to go through common weapons pretty quickly.

He grinned. Weird that wailing on each other with bodies enhanced with additional strength and toughness from Body Cultivation would be so rough on the weapons.

They weren’t at the point of running out any time soon, but the current circumstances presented the perfect opportunity to acquire more spears, bows, arrows, daggers, hammers, and swords. Heck, why not throw in polearms and battle fans and gauntlets and a bunch of more exotic weapons, too. And for every weapon listed, he might as well request a wide variety of colors, shapes, sizes, construction, and weights.



Considering that he could always simply put up a new building designated as the armory, they had plenty of space. Might as well buy enough to last them for decades.

His mind flashed back to when it had been Su, selecting a weapon from his sect’s armory, how neat it was to see all those choices and be given the opportunity to select whichever one he wanted. Benton had long dreamed of providing the same experience to his recruits, and that goal would soon become a reality.

The next pavilion was Alchemy, and at the top of the list were cauldrons. They actually only had a few that the current members were sharing, and while Benton would gladly craft new ones for them when they hit Foundation Establishment, there was no reason to spend his time for the comparatively low tech, so to speak, ones that would suffice for each of them at Qi Gathering.

The members also needed more knives—field blades that could be used for both harvesting and defense, kitchen knives for chopping herbs, specialty knives for de-veining certain types of herbs. That kind of thing. If a type of blade existed and alchemists somewhere thought it was useful, might as well buy one … or a dozen.

The pavilion also obviously needed herbs. With the weird Nature qi infusion of plants growing near the village, basic, untainted herbs were needed for the sect members to practice with. They’d also start transitioning into the next major realm soon enough and would be able to make basic healing pills and the like. They’d need all the standard herbs to practice with.

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It would be on him to provide his sect with much of the pills they needed for quite some time, though, which meant he needed herbs as well. He listed all the ingredients he needed for all the pills he expected to create for the immediate future.

All that focus on herbs, though, made him realize that his sect really needed to grow their own. With his formation skill, there was no reason he couldn’t create fields that sped growth while keeping out extraneous Nature qi and infusing the herbs with whatever type he preferred instead. That thought led him to place an order for large quantities of seeds and seedlings.

For the Formations Pavilion, they mainly needed more inscribing tools and basic plates to practice on. Benton ordered a wide variety of each. The way a tool felt in an individual’s hand didn’t just depend on the size of the tool relative to the fingers. Instead, a lot of subjective personal preferences went into the decision.

For the Blacksmith Pavilion, the main item was easy—metal. The more ingots, the better. Benton started out by listing basic metals like iron, steel, copper, silver, etc. After a bit of thought, he added a note asking for any metals sects liked their junior members to practice with to get used to forging qi-sensitive materials. He also made a request of lots of starsteel—as that was rapidly becoming his favorite—as well as several ingots of any more exotic metals that Jia Xueqin believed might enhance the value of weapons to be sold in the auction.

For the remaining three pavilions—Healing, Punishment, and Woodworking—he really had no idea what they needed and wasn’t sure even the respective members could tell him. Instead, he asked the auction house to obtain any basic Qi Gathering and Foundation Establishment level tools and materials commonly needed for such pavilions in sufficient quantities to last a decade or so.

He was actually quite pleased with himself on that one. If there were actual stuff out there that other sects believed were standard for the pavilions, the auction house would supply it, making him look like a genius for thinking of it to his sect members. And if Jia Xueqin failed to come up with anything, Benton could put on a vaguely displeased expression, saving any loss of face.

At that thought, he shook his head. Loss of face. Apparently, cultivation culture was insidious if one lived with it continuously.



Next, Benton had some ideas for other pavilions that, like the Herb Pavilion, he hadn’t officially established yet. The first of those was a Talismans Pavilion. Since he would be creating a bunch of those for his sect members prior to the tournament, he might as well try to find some people interested in the art to start teaching them to do the same. After all, while the craft wasn’t quite as important to sects as the big four of Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Formations, and Martial, it was a quite popular way to provide an extra measure of protection for talented juniors.

Another common use of talismans was to allow a fighter to use an attack or defense of a qi element that differed from their aspect. Though expensive and one-use, such a talisman utilized at the right time could turn the tide of a battle.

For the techniques Benton wanted to imbue in talismans, he needed top-tier paper and ink capable of channeling Golden Core and Nascent Soul level attacks and shields, which were sure to be expensive. He shrugged. Not like he couldn’t afford it after his success at the auction.

Much less expensive, even buying in quantities in the thousands, were the beginner level papers and inks. Those were so common that one could almost pick them up for taels instead of spirit coins for the lowest tiers.

The other new pavilion was one he’d never actually established though he’d discussed it—the Beast Pavilion. The goal was to combine three important functions into a single command—research of beasts to include strengths and weaknesses and where nearby ones were to be found, how to process corpses and uses for the parts, and taming. Each of the three had a completely different emphasis, but he thought he could get by with combining them into a single organization because they all dealt with beasts. As his sect expanded beyond somewhere in the ten to fifty thousand member range, he’d have to determine if splitting it into multiple pavilions would be beneficial.

There wasn’t a lot he could think of that a Beast Pavilion needed, though, so he did like he did for the others he wasn’t sure about—basically described the functions and asked for common materials and tools that would help the members.

The final pavilion on his list wasn’t a pavilion at all, but it was something he’d wanted to create from the beginning—a sect library. While he could produce any cultivation method or technique he wanted, the Sect Menu didn’t include any tabs for manuals or reference materials. He noted for Jia Xueqin to obtain a copy of any book that might be useful for any pavilion that any sect found to be useful as well as basic books on cultivation, philosophy, history, mathematics, and any other subject that anyone might possibly be interested in reading.

Oh, and also novels. Benton’s personal supply was running low, and he’d already re-read his favorites multiple times. Instead of listing specific genres, he simply asked the auction manager to procure ten thousand fiction books in a wide variety of types.

“There,” Benton said as he re-read the list. “That a better use for the spirit coins that I earned than having them sit in my ring.”

He channeled a bit of qi into the special paper he’d used, and it folded itself into the form of a dragon and launched itself. Perfect. With that task accomplished, he could work on the thing he was most excited about—creating qi sources.