Molting the Mortal Coil

To advance after becoming a Nascent Soul required a deeper understanding of laws. Sage had been at an impasse on how to proceed further. When he was on the precipice of life and death he’d understood the connection between poison and corruption. That momentary flash of insight had saved his life and pushed him to a new level. Since then, he had no idea how to advance. There was a reason that all the great powers in the world, that he knew of, were all Nascent Souls. Advancing the understanding of laws was no simple thing. The little Dragoon had understood something great and stepped onto that path to a higher peak, but it was purely a thing of luck. Without any proper guidance, the many Nascent Souls had no idea how to advance. The few Immortals that were spoken of in legend had purely gotten lucky. Or at least, that was the commonly understood explanation.

Sage, on the other hand, had come into contact with some beings that knew far more than they let on. Both Tao Ba, Guan Zhenyan, and even the Lang Clan Ancestor, seemed to know many secrets. He’d tried a few times to get more out of them, but they weren’t willing to share. From the way they each deflected his questions, he was sure that somebody else was calling the shots. It was like there were some rules they couldn’t break and no matter how he tried to bribe Guan Zhenyan, or how much he flattered Tao Ba he couldn’t get anything out of them. Over the two years he was stuck on that other world, he’d tried quite a few times without any luck. 

In the past, even without great aptitude, he could merely put in more time and effort training and while slow, he still felt progress. Now, he didn’t even know what to do. It was like he’d developed a muscle that he didn’t know how to exercise. Yet, he wasn’t discouraged and still spent a few hours a day just meditating. 

Somehow the disaster of a Heavenly Tribulation descending had provided him some sort of inspiration. The mysteries of the heavens assaulting him that day were vivid in his memory. Innocent lives were dead by something he had done. Even if it was inadvertent, he was still the source. Mourning that loss led to questioning his own morality and decisions and without realizing it, he sunk into contemplating the corruption of his own self and almost instantly stepped into the 2nd Degree of the Primal Law of Corruption. That lifted the cap of his cultivation and without any trouble he steadily advanced through two stages. 

Even so, Sage wasn’t sure how much farther he could progress upon this path. While the Law of Corruption seemed quite useful in combination with his use of poisons and hypnosis, he had no idea where it would lead next. It was already a miracle that he’d found the path to a greater Law than Poison. He’d always felt that because of his Heavenly Materials, studying the elements would be his true path to power. Being a poison tester for Guan Zhenyan had inadvertently led him to the law of Poison, and the trip to a Hidden Domain had pushed it further. Laws contained the understanding of the truths of the universe. He believed they were all just parts of the whole, and so there was no way any of them were a dead end. Yet, he also had no idea how to progress it any further.

I’ll just have to see if I can stumble upon the next path forward.

He made the decision to stop trying to force his understanding of the Law of Corruption, and instead work on the other laws he’d been neglecting since he’d fallen into Guan Zhenyan’s hands. At the same time, he focused upon the restoration of the Lang Clan. Well, not literally: he still hadn’t gone to visit the Zhu Clan yet. They had nearly snubbed him the last time he visited, and he wouldn’t go there again without having the power and prestige to force their good behavior. 

Sorry, Zhu Jiao. I’m making you wait.

The Dragoons were really not the brightest. Sage had to coordinate with the Engineers and Architects to guide the construction efforts. As a five star Formation Master, he also took it upon himself to lay arrays into the foundations of Lionheart Town as it was being rebuilt and remodeled. Using the wealth from their business deals with Thousand Treasures, they purchased many special materials that were required for the arrays. 

The construction of the city’s sewer system was the part of the remodel that he was the most involved in as he came up with another idea that gave the engineers a headache. He’d always planned for the sewer system to not just be a drainage tunnel like used in the other cities. Given his desire to make this city into an example for the world, he also needed it to handle sewage. For the mortals of this world, much of their waste was ‘recycled’ in that bathrooms were built with chutes that led right into pig farms. It was a pretty ingenious system, but it also meant there were pig farms on every other block. Of course the wealthy had ways around it, with maids and servants to take away their chamber pots and keep their properties free of smells, but in the city it just meant that the beautiful and clean streets usually had another right next to it with pig styes. 

So, by having a true sewer system, Sage could clean up the city and also introduce indoor toilets. It was a silly thing for a cultivator to care about, but being from another world he wanted those modern comforts! In the past he’d been dissuaded by the lack of manufacturing. Plumbing was no simple thing. Creating a few pipes for a single building was one thing, but doing it on a mass scale would require building pipes on a mass scale. That meant mass production of metal pipes. He’d considered trying to use other materials like bamboo, but they wouldn’t last very long, requiring constant replacement and maintenance. There were also the many strange and unusual special materials of this world, but they would be even more expensive. 

Hehe, maybe we can get a rich and powerful Sect to fork out their cash and pay for a plumbing system made out of beast bones or something. That would be wild!

All these considerations led to his new idea. Since creating pipes to cover a city was outside his means, he could only go with a different option. Instead of an intricate system of metal pipes, he chose to use a simpler option. Stone canals. Since they were already tearing up the streets and building a sewer system, it wasn’t that much worse to add a second set of tunnels meant for carrying clean water. With so much manpower at his disposal, Sage used a Warp Worm to do the initial digging and then teams of Dragoons to excavate the earth and lay bricks. Bricks that were also built by other teams of Dragoons and inlaid with the simplest of arrays. In fact, it could barely be considered an array, since each brick had only a single ‘cleansing’ symbol upon it. It was normally used merely to repel dust to keep pathways a bit cleaner than normal. With the whole sewer and canal system covered in these bricks, the subtle effects overlapped and would help to keep the drinking water clean and prevent the waste waters from contaminating the ground. 

Of course, they also used other engineering practices to help with that. The clean water canal was closer to the surface while the sewage tunnel was deeper, so if there were any leaks or damage to the ground, only the clean water would be contaminating the sewer and not vice versa. With the canals came another problem, supplying and retrieving the water. That required the invention of a pumping system. He had to build a large pumping station, adapting the inventions he’d already created for the Palace of Prosperity to be used on a large scale. To keep the water source clean, he would do away with the standard system of pulling water from a well with a bucket. That made the water supply far too easy to poison or access, and instead he chose to create many public fountains to start with. 

Each fountain had an energy gathering array, a steam engine, and a water pump. He also added some spigots to control the operation and water flow, and while it wasn’t as convenient as running water in every home it was still better than hauling buckets up wells. It was also easier to upgrade later by connecting to the canal system. While he would prefer to leave small hand pumps all around the town, it was actually just as expensive to have the metal parts made as it was to just purchase the array materials. Creating metal parts to be watertight and with such tolerances was not easy for a bunch of blacksmiths. So, Sage went with just creating a few large fountains and using more arrays to cover for the problems. It was a problem he’d previously had to solve with the Steam Engine that he didn’t feel like handling all over again just for some water pumps. Instead, he chose to put more expensive and also extravagant looking fountains all over town. 

The rest of the projects proceeded quickly, the many people in town were eager to rebuild their city and also the absurd number of Dragoons working for no pay helped quite a bit.