Chapter 295: A New ... Pavilion?

Benton felt elated at his success in crafting the Shadow qi source. It wasn’t that he had doubts about his ability exactly, but the route to get to that point had been long and difficult. He’d had to raise his craftsmanship level in three major areas all the way to master and acquire various difficult to find, expensive materials.The harder the goal, the greater the sense of accomplishment when achieved.

More than simply being proud of himself, he was happy for very practical reasons. His ability to craft the sources was integral to his plan to speed his sect’s advancement. And the faster he added more Golden Cores to his sect’s defenses, the safer he’d feel.

Judging from the amount and quality of qi being emitted from the source, Benton estimated that cultivating near it would speed Zou Tian’s cultivation by a factor of anywhere from two point one to two point three Times, the exact rate depending on too many variables to accurately predict. Which was a little bit better than Benton had told the kids.

What he hadn’t told the kids was his true plan.

He grinned. It wasn’t that he believed in protecting the sect’s secrets at all costs or anything like that. Nor was he truly worried that he wouldn’t be able to deliver on his promises. No, the reason for keeping the real details from them was much simpler—he truly looked forward to the looks on their faces when they found out the truth.

That moment would be so much fun!

In reality, he intended to stick the qi sources in a room with an array that made Time run faster inside. The formation he’d designed could accelerate Time by a factor of ten. Thus, one hour passing outside the room would give the person inside ten hours to cultivate. And since the qi source would improve the efficiency of cultivation by approximately an average of two point two Times, an hour outside actually equaled the equivalent of twenty-two hours of progress.

If Benton allowed Zou Tian to stay inside for a full day outside, he’d come out having cultivated a full twenty-two days.

Of course, someone at Zou Tian’s level couldn’t handle sessions anywhere close to that long. He was pushing it going for twelve to fourteen hours straight, and considering the increased qi levels provided by the source, Benton was far more comfortable limiting it to only ten at a Time for all those in the Qi gathering realm.



Maybe the Foundation Establishment level disciples could handle more. Up to fifteen? He’d have to monitor their cultivation pretty regularly to make sure they didn’t suffer any ill effects and base his final decision on how their channels and meridians handled the stress.

Still, that didn’t mean Zou Tian would be limited to a single session in a day. He could remain in the room to rest for, say, ten hours to make the math easy before cultivating again. Thus, out of a full objective day, Zou Tian could spend half of it progressing, meaning advancing his cultivation a full eleven days.

Currently, he was more than three months away from reaching minor realm eight, meaning there was no way for him to achieve Foundation Establishment prior to needing to leave for his mission in Sixth Flawless Flowing City. Without using the Time dilation room and the qi source, that was. With those two elements and a pill to get him to minor realm nine, he could reach that next major realm in a little over three weeks.

Benton laughed. A cheating cheater who cheats indeed!

Still, he’d only completed half of what he needed to accomplish for Zou Tian to accelerate his cultivation. Next up was creating the Time bubble room.

Benton didn’t want to use any of the existing buildings for the task. For one thing, he liked each of his sect buildings to have a separate function. For another, the new one would provide an advantage to his sect on the order of the Trial Pagoda’s benefit. Such an important role deserved its own space.

The final reason he wanted to house the room in a separate structure was that he could envision constructing a lot of Time dilation rooms. Sure, he could only create three qi sources at the moment with four more to come, but eventually it was possible that every conceivable element that one of his sect members used would have its own chamber.

Hmm.

Honestly, Time dilation wasn’t just good for cultivation. There was no reason that his sect members couldn’t use the rooms for practicing techniques as well. Those would be even easier to build as no qi source would be required.

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What a fantastic idea!

Benton teleported to the grounds of the former Righteous Rain Sect and quickly selected a five story building. Each floor was divided into up to twenty sparring rooms, apparently mainly for Qi Gathering realm cultivators judging from the fact that the formations were not very robust.

The structure was perfect for Benton’s purposes. There were over eighty rooms all told, and the scant arrays didn’t matter because he would have to create all the ones from scratch, anyway.

He quickly stowed it in his ring and teleported back to his sect.

His next decision was placement. Since the new building was to be such an important part of his sect, he didn’t want to put it behind one of the other buildings, meaning that it belonged on the main road. That determination made picking the ultimate location easy. It had to go at the end of one of the rows, and the one on the left was somewhat shorter given the size of the amphitheater on the opposite side.

Thus, the new yet to be named Time building would be placed next to the Healing Pavilion.

Considering all his techniques and abilities as a peak Nascent Soul cultivator, digging a foundation and placing the building was a trivial exercise, and soon the Rising Tide Sect had a new … pavilion? Was it a pavilion? He didn’t really know. They definitely had a new building, though.

The first floor had the typical open spaces of the lobby and a large area for lectures, leaving only four sectioned off rooms. One of those was clearly intended to be an office, another a library, and another a storage room. He honestly couldn’t discern the purpose of the fourth. It was just an empty space approximately twelve feet square.

He decided to leave that floor for administrative purposes as it appeared to have been intended. The second floor would be Time dilation rooms for technique training, meaning Zou Tian’s Shadow room would go on the third floor.

Benton chose a room across from the entrance to the right stairwell and got to work. First, he got rid of the padded flooring designed for sparring and replaced it with stylish bamboo planks, making the room feel much more homey. He added a few decorations from his ring—a few paintings, a couple of small tables with decorative vases, an incense burner—and, of course, a nice cultivation mat.

Perfect.

With the form finished, he just needed to nail down the function portion. The first step in that regard was completely removing all the existing arrays. Even the useful ones like the array for temperature control had to be demoed because it was tied to a central system. Since each room was to be separated from the rest of the building in terms of Time, the formations had to be isolated as well.

With his skill, power, and speed, the demo went quickly, leading to the next step. Adding new formations, obviously, was a much more complicated and labor intensive project than ripping the old one out.



The main array needed was obviously the one that provided the Time dilation, but there were so many more that were needed, starting with the necessities for living in the room for subjective months at a Time such as lighting, temperature control, a stasis unit for storing food, water supply, and sanitary disposal. Then came the ones that became necessary due to the fact that the room would be so isolated. For example, air supply.

In general, there was little chance of a regular room running out of fresh air. Since the Time dilated ones would be completely cut off from the outside, though, that fear was real. The person inside could easily use up all the oxygen simply by breathing over the course of a month or more.

Thus, Benton had to add one array that created fresh air from Wind on one side of the room and another that fed stale air to the Void on the other side, balancing the two so as to create a small, constant flow.

Other specialized arrays included an isolation barrier that prevented qi from entering or leaving, an emergency stop button that immediately popped the Time bubble, a communications function that would allow messages to be sent to and from the bubble, and two clocks, one that displayed the objective Time outside the room and the other that counted Time passage inside.

The final step was to create a coin slot device, which required quick trip to the forge. Not only did it have a place to insert each of the types of greater spirit coins needed—Wind, Water, Void, and Time—but it also held storage for each of those types of coins and indicator lights and warning alarms for when the slotted coins were nearly out.

By the Time everything was inscribed and tested, it was deep into the night, and Zou Tian—and most of the rest of the council—were sound asleep. Despite how excited Benton was to show off his new creation, he wasn’t so selfish as to wake up sleeping teenagers. The big reveal could wait until morning.

His first thought about what to do with his remaining Time was to create Yang Xiu’s Ice element source. The part of him that had spend a good chunk of his life actually raising children instead of spoiling them as a grandparent felt that it would probably do the girl good not to be the first person to benefit from his new creation, and surprisingly, the rest of him listened. Not that she was truly spoiled, per se, but he could see how she could get that way if he kept indulging her.

Instead, he spent the rest of the night planning out the Time dilation rooms on the second floor. Out of the twenty rooms, he set up two with cauldrons for alchemy, two with small forges and anvils for training blacksmiths, four with mats and larger air exchangers and other utilities to facilitate sparring, four with combat dummies, and the final eight fairly generically with tables and chairs for whatever other crafts sect members wanted to practice.

By the Time everyone started to wake, he’d completed about half of the rooms, a really good start. After all the work he’d put in already, he was really looking forward to showing off his progress, positive that Kang Lin, at the very least, would have a great reaction.

He grinned. Time to call the kids.