What do you mean I'm a cultivator?-Chapter 53

Cheng sat cross legged beside the low table, the book still open, its pages weighed down with small pebbles. Faint morning light filtered through the cracks in the cabin walls, casting faint lines across the wood and Charcoal made words.

He re read the careful notes he'd made over the years. Diagrams sketched, then smudged, then sketched again.

Cheng was no artist, but he could draw quite the array on paper. Once again. Another connecting piece. Everything could be used for another purpose.

You can Form an array? Well that just makes you good at making precise strokes of the pen.

Array patterns were drawn and redrawn with tighter spirals and sharper lines. Margin notes in a smaller hand, almost a whisper to himself.

Cheng's hand hovered over one particular drawing. His plan for the Foundation Establishment array.

It was absurdly complex. Over a hundred interlinked sigils and lines, A two fold gathering array, what he had settled on calling this particular method of carving an array on the outside, and supporting it with another one on the inside.

The version on the small notebook Cheng had was one made after a hundred attempts. Each time, he would fix something. Extend a line here. Focus more on his intent.

And indeed. He had nearly reached the limit of what he could do with the small knowledge he had from the books and his own experimentation.

He leaned back, rubbing a charcoal stained thumb along his jaw. The plan was sound. But the foundation needed more than theory. It needed him to be sharp in mind, body, and craft.

And that? The array was the easy part. Sketch it good enough, and it would serve his purpose. But Cheng wanted to go the extra, extra step.

He needed a room. Not a normal room. By any means of the word.

It took him a lot of time, but the arrays were finished. He was sure his design would raise an eyebrow, no matter the array master. It was almost too much, even for himself.

The only reason, that he would be able to form it, was because he knew exactly what each line was for. How Qi would flow, and gather.

And most importantly, how it could fit with the other important array.

The sealing array.

But for now, Cheng was satisfied. And to continue, he'd need the room required. And so, the long, long journey of gathering enough material began. Cheng needed Spirit iron, to be exact.

As much as he could get his hands on.

And that was precisely why he was standing in front of the mission board, his eyes glancing over paper after paper.

His master would be of great help, but even he could not swindle what would likely be thousands of jin of material.

Cheng went on mission after mission.

It didn’t matter what they were. Herb gathering in dangerous terrain. Monster hunting. Requests from villages. If it earned contribution points, he took it. His higher cultivation realm that when he took his first one, made him a bit less afraid of something happening.

Because if he found himself against one of the foundation realm, be it human or monster, he wouldn't be able to do much.

Every point he earned, he spent.

Not on pills. Not on cultivation manuals. Not on protective robes or other accessories.

He spent them at the bazaar.

The sloping market, nestled against the high, looming Wall that separated the inner sect from the outer.

A border, physical and symbolic. Even in the market, the difference between the two was clear. Outer sect robes were faded and patched; inner disciples passed by like they owned the dirt the others walked on. It was natural.

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Those of the inner sect were simply more talented and valuable to the sect.

Cheng didn’t linger to watch, Though.

He moved through the bazaar with a purpose, eyes scanning the stalls, his trained eyes looking for one thing. The inner disciples had no use for damaged goods or old gear, especially if it was of a low grade. But to Cheng, these were his lifeblood.

The thing that would push him from an average cultivator to a pioneer. One of the perfect foundation.

Anything forged with Spirit Iron, he bought.

Chipped swords. Bent daggers, broken arrowheads, and even a set of

Spirit iron chopsticks, for whatever reason. Just goes to show how different life was in the inner sect.

Cheng didn’t care.

Weight was weight. Spirit Iron was Spirit Iron.

His master helped, too. Quietly. Occasionally, Cheng would come back from a mission and find a few slivers of the stuff waiting in a box near the forge, nothing said, no explanation given. But he knew where it came from.

He always nodded, even if no one was there to see. If only he were in the inner sect. He wouldn't have to do all this. Just ask his master, and he would bring loads of the stuff.

Even though it was a useful material, there was plenty to go around.

In tandem, Cheng began to dig.

It had started as an idle thought. An absurd idea while sketching his foundation array for god knows what time.

It was another one of his weird thoughts. And yet, it made perfect sense.

You'd need a good place to seal in Qi. And what better, than a huge, thick walled room?

As his planning changed, so did the need for secrecy and space. And so he hollowed out the earth beneath his cabin, shovel by shovel, handful by handful.

He made the hole beneath the floorboards of the cabin.

To his surprise, the wood was tougher than he remembered.

He pressed a hand against it, feeling the grain, running his fingers along an old seam.

Then it clicked. Of course. He had reinforced the beams with more wood when he repaired the cabin. It had worked better than expected, thanks to the passage of time. It even felt similar to freshly cut wood, in a way.

Back then, he hadn’t known what he was building toward. He had only wanted his home to be warm enough for the cold not to bother him, and the sunlight not to pierce through the ample holes the cabin once had.

Now, he was carving his path forward. Literally.

Day by day, the hollow beneath his cabin grew. It was cramped, dark, and quiet. The perfect place to build the chamber. The place where he would attempt the impossible. At least the current Impossible.

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Cheng kept digging. Digging and digging and digging.

What had once been a shallow crawlspace was now something else entirely. A cavern was slowly taking shape beneath the earth.

His pile of Spirit Iron grew with it.

Swords dulled beyond repair. Spears with shattered shafts. Armor plates pitted and warped, their arrays long since faded. Everything found a place in Cheng’s growing hoard.

If it had Spirit Iron, he kept it. Every gram counted.

He sorted them carefully, stacking them by density and shape. One corner of the underground chamber was little more than a mountain of forgotten armaments, a graveyard of discarded weapons waiting to be reborn.

And he dug deeper.

Every dozen Zhang, he’d pause, reinforcing the walls. Not with bricks or stone, but with his Qi.

The forging technique he’d honed for years served a second purpose now. Just as he had fixed the Well years back, now he was making sure the dirt walls would hold up.

He pressed his palms to the dirt and willed it to harden, his Qi flooding the loose earth, guiding the particles into denser, interlocking shapes, pressing dirt on it.

The walls solidified under his touch, losing the softness of soil and taking on the weight of stone. Not just packed dirt. This was Earth forged by intent and precision.

It made him wonder. Just how much could one take, even the most humble of material?

Could mortal iron carve a mountaintop? to split the sea in two?

It was laughable. But a certain quote his thoughts brought made him consider that.

"He who masters the sword, splits the heavens with a leaf."

Thanks to Cheng's packing the walls, the cabin hadn’t collapsed.

Why the ground didn't sink or shift. It was slow work, precise and exhausting, but it worked as intended.

Eventually, the chamber reached one hundred and fifty Zhang deep.

The air grew cool down there, the silence deeper than sleep. Even sound didn’t seem to carry properly anymore. It was perfect. No one would find this place. Not unless he wanted them to.

"Maybe I've overdone it." Cheng murmured, looking up at where the cabin was.

Perhaps he had. But it was better than underestimating how thick the walls would have to be, and ruin everything.

He stood at the bottom of what was now nearly two hundred Zhangs deep, the walls rising around him like the insides of a great pit.

A square space, almost perfectly measured.

A hundred Zhangs wide, and two hundred in depth.

It was massive. Almost unreal to think that he had dug so much in barely two years.

And yet, it was real. He had made it so.

In one corner, the pile of Spirit Iron glimmered like old treasure. swords, armor, tools, even fragments no bigger than a fingernail. All waiting to be smelted, reshaped, reforged into something worthy.

And beside it, another pile, comprised of all kinds of discarded metal. Shackles. Nails. Plates. Iron scraps without spiritual quality. Not useless, but not enough. Not yet.

Cheng had grabbed those from every village he visited. Getting those down here was easy. No one cared if he took mortal iron for himself. It was practically useless to the sect. The spirit iron was the thing he had to be careful with.

Those would take even more effort to form into something useful. But Cheng had all the time he needed. After all, he wasn't even forty years old yet. He had close to a century more, if the books were correct about how long cultivators lived.

He stepped closer to the Spirit Iron mound, ran a hand across a warped sword hilt. Cold to the touch. But waiting.

He didn’t have enough.

But he had enough to start.