The Undying Immortal System

After leaving Mount Jiang, I headed directly for the Verdant Forest Sect, and as soon as I arrived, I went straight to SuYin’s house.

When I had left, SuYin’s position in the sect had seemed stable. She didn’t have any enemies, and there wasn’t any reason for anyone to cause trouble for her. She was simply a rather talented herbalist worthy of nurturing. I had been gone for two years, but none of that should have changed. She shouldn’t have run into any serious problems, but the moment I saw her house, I couldn’t help but feel that something was wrong.

It could have been something in the glances of the people as they passed by. It could have been the overly thick coating of dirt on the windows that showed they hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. It could have been the undisturbed layer of pollen on the ground around the front door that showed no one had used it for several days. I wasn’t sure what it was, but something about SuYin’s home gave me the feeling that it had been abandoned.

As I neared, I looked through a window and saw that the inside of the house was a disordered wreck. This made my heart leap up into my throat, but just as I was about to force my way in and investigate, I heard sounds coming from behind the house.

Without hesitation, I dashed around the house with all the speed I could muster.

The sight that greeted me was beyond my expectations, but it allowed me to relax, if only just a little.

Bao was running around a garden in a ragged, dirt-stained green robe.

As I watched the young man frantically rush from place to place, I couldn’t help but notice the plants that surrounded him. Every one of them was vibrant and full of life. The greens of their leaves and stems showed no hint of disease or infestation, and the reds, blues, and yellows of their fruits and flowers possessed an indescribable luster that made me feel like I was looking at precious gemstones.

A short tree in the back corner of the garden caught my eye. Its branches held a small crop of nine-pointed starfruit. While a normal starfruit would be about the size of my fist, the ones on this tree were larger than my head.

As he moved through the garden, Bao used a series of techniques to pull thin streams of qi from the air and guide them down into the soil in complex patterns reminiscent of formation inscriptions. At the same time, he pulled wu from the ground and forced it to dissipate in the air next to the leaves of specific plants.

Following the streams of qi Bao was using back to their source, I saw that the massive formation stone I had provided SuYin was sending energy into the garden at full blast. When I had first arrived, it had been set up to send out significantly more water and earth qi than anything else, but Bao was constantly darting back to its controls to shift its output. Sometimes these changes were subtle, sometimes they were dramatic.

His actions, the way he was controlling various energies, raised several questions about the nature of herbalism, and I wanted to ask him about it, but this wasn’t the right time. SuYin was still missing, her home looked like it had been ransacked, and Bao was running around the garden like a madman. There were far more important issues to deal with.

I ran forward and grabbed Bao’s shoulder.

Startled out of his state of deep concentration, he spun on me like a frightened animal.

“What…. What are you doing?”

A maintained a firm grip on his shoulder. “Bao. Look at me.”

He swerved his head several times, and even though I kept him locked in place, his eyes continued to dart around the garden.

I placed my other hand on his other shoulder and forced him to look at me. When his eyes finally focused on me, his mouth dropped open in shock.

“M… Master?”

I nodded and gritted my teeth. “Where’s SuYin?”

He blinked and cocked his head to the side. “She… she left.”

His statement was matter-of-fact. If anything, it felt like he was questioning why I didn’t already know this. This heightened my anxiety, but I didn’t feel any panic or sadness from the boy, so I tried again. R

“Where did she go?”

Finally, a surge of fear gripped him. “Oh…

With a shaky hand, he reached into his robe and pulled out a dirty, somewhat crumpled letter.

“SuYin… I was… I was supposed to send this to you. It’s just…” Bao looked pleadingly at the garden surrounding him. “Master, these plants. That formation. You have to fix it though. It doesn’t work right. There’s so much to do…”

As he looked around, still trapped by my firm grip on his shoulders, he began sending out tendrils of qi to continue with his work with the plants.

To take the letter from the young man, I had to release my grip on one of his shoulders. The moment I did so, he wriggled free from my grip on his other shoulder and started wandering the garden again, lost in his own little world.

I wanted to stop him, to pull him back and ask him more questions, but first, I needed to deal with the letter.

Upon opening it, I saw that it had been written by SuYin. Most of it was general information about her daily life, but the important bit was at the end. About six months ago, Bao had been promoted to inner sect disciple, and she had been promoted to core disciple. After receiving this new rank, she had to leave the sect and serve as the deputy leader of one of the nearby cities in preparation for taking up a position as a city lord and advancing to Martial Lord. She had reluctantly accepted this appointment, but she wanted to talk to me about the situation with her family before she risked advancing to Lord and being blocked from returning to the Wastes.

I needed to chase after SuYin and have a long conversation with her, but looking at Bao as he roamed the garden, I knew that would have to wait. Something was wrong with this young man, and I had to fix it before worrying about anything else.

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When I had simply grabbed him and held him in place, Bao had been too agitated to speak with me properly. Knowing that it would be difficult for us to have a rational conversation with him in this state, I decided to let him continue with his work. He would run out of energy and need to rest eventually, and I could only hope that would give us a chance to talk.

Several hours after sunset, Bao went to the formation, made a series of adjustments to turn down the flow of qi and wu, and then collapsed to the ground, exhausted.

Before he could drift off to sleep, I walked over and sat down next to him.

“Bao, what’s going on? Why are you so focused on these plants?”

He left out a soft whimper. “Master, there’s… there’s just so much to do… They won’t let me go. They need my help. They won’t stop screaming.”

“Who is ‘they?’ The plants?”

Tears welled up in Bao’s eyes as he nodded. “Yes.”

“Bao, help me understand. What’s going on? Does it have something to do with your blessing?”

Again, Bao gave sorrowful nods. “At first, it was like I told you. When I looked at an herb, basic information about it popped into my head. After you took me to the Verdant Fields Sect, this ability got stronger, it told me more things, but that was it. After coming here… things began to change. When I reached Peak Grandmaster, I started hearing whispers from the plants, and I knew what I needed to do to help them.”

Small rivulets of tears began to flow down Bao’s cheeks. “After SuYin left, I came here and started working in her garden. Using your formation, I was able to help the plants more than ever before, but as they grew stronger their voices became louder and louder. I can’t… Even now… They’re sleeping, but they aren’t silent…”

I placed a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. “I understand. Don’t worry, I’m here to help.”

Voices from a blessing… Voices from plants… How did that work? Where were the voices coming from? How could I make them stop?

While I didn’t know the answers to the questions, there had to be some kind of connection between Bao and these plants. As long as I could sever that connection, the voices should stop.

I pulled out a formation plate for a Rank 4 defensive barrier. It was incredibly effective at blocking both physical and qi attacks. I placed it on the ground and activated it. Then, I turned to Bao.

The young man showed no reaction. It was clear that he was still hearing voices.

How? How could the plants be talking to him?

It was possible that they had formed some kind of karmic connection with him and were communicating through that bond. It was also possible that blessings from the Heavenly Dao were ineffable and that I had no hope of blocking it. If either of these were true, then there was little I could do to save Bao, but there was another possibility.

I hunted around in my storage space until I found a small bag of ziethanite powder. Then, I pulled a tendril of spirit fire from a Profound-Rank earth-based fire seed and absorbed it into my body.

Using every bit of focus that I could muster, I used this spirit fire and my earth affinity to slowly transform the ziethanite into a Rank 5 formation.

Crafting a Rank 5 formation as a Grandmaster was challenging, and doing so without using earth qi was pretty much impossible. Thankfully, I had something to assist me with this. The massive plant growth formation I had built could create pure streams of qi in each of the nine elements. After cranking up its output of earth qi to 100%, I had more than enough energy available to me.

Even with this assistance, crafting a formation that was both powerful enough to do what it needed to do and small enough to hang on a chain around Bao’s neck took me hours. This entire time, Bao was moaning in pain. With the formation focused on providing me with the energy I needed, the plants weren’t getting the sustenance they required, and they were making their displeasure known.

The moment my work was complete, Bao shot to his feet and ran to the formation. He slammed his hand on it to abruptly cut off the majority of the earth qi that it was outputting and redirected it to begin making a mix of the other elements. Then, he ran into the field and started moving energy around in a complex weave of qi and wu.

As he did this, I added the finishing touches to my new formation and attached it to a thin metal chain. Then, I stood and walked over to him.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Without saying a word, I draped the formation around his neck and activated it.

The moment I did, Bao froze.

“What… what… they’re gone… I

He turned to me with a look of fear. “Master, I can’t hear them anymore… What happened?”

I nodded slowly and then tapped on the formation, reducing its effects slightly.

This caused Bao to suddenly look around, still somewhat fearful, but calmer.

“They’re back… but… it’s like they’re just whispering to me now…”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Alright, do what you need to do. We’ll talk in a bit.”

Bao stumbled away and got back to work. As I looked at him, I couldn’t help but feel a torrent of anger surge through me.

The formation I had given him was designed to protect someone against soul attacks. I didn’t know how it all worked, but from what I could tell, his ‘blessing’ had made his soul incredibly sensitive to soul attacks from plants. As the plants around him grew stronger, the intensity of these attacks only increased.

After letting him work in the garden for a few hours to calm his nerves, I tapped on his formation necklace again and increased the power of its barrier. This caused Bao to become agitated, but I just wrapped an arm around his shoulder and guided him to the house.

“Go inside. Get some sleep. These plants can survive for a few hours without you.”

He glanced around nervously, but he didn’t fight me. Without the constant voices in his head pleading for attention, Bao was much more willing to listen to my advice.

After settling Bao down for a proper rest, I went back outside and investigated the garden he had spent so much effort on. When I looked at the plants, when I really saw them, I was stunned. Before, I had been captivated by their color and beauty, but now, looking at them in both normal and energy vision, I couldn’t help but be shocked by the amount of energy they contained.

Most of the herbs looked somewhat familiar, but they looked so different from what I was used to that I had a hard time identifying everything. My eyes were inexorably drawn to the herb I was most familiar with. The blue peony.

The blue peony I was used to was a bright blue flower that grew from a rather normal-looking green shrub. Unless a person knew something about herbs, there wasn’t much that differentiated a blue peony from any regular, mortal flower. It contained a purified form of medicinal energy that could be used to help people cultivate, but the flower itself didn’t look like anything special.

The blue peonies in Bao’s garden, however, were different. The shrubs looked like they were carved from jade, and the leaves looked like large emeralds. The flowers themselves were translucent crystals with only faint hints of blue in their petals.

Just looking at these flowers, I could tell that they were something special. In energy vision, I didn’t see even the faintest hint of toxin. They were pure medicinal energy, and the structure of their energy was flawless.

I reached out a hand and plucked one of these flowers. The moment its connection to the shrub was severed, the flower fractured and broke apart into small crystalline shards. These shards then turned to dust and dissipated into nothingness.

I couldn’t help but frown. The medicinal energy in Rank 1 herbs was usually rather robust. The energy in these peonies was far too fragile. It felt more like what I would expect from a Rank 4 or 5 herb.

Reaching out, I plucked another peony, but this time, I used my wood affinity to hold the flower’s energy in place.

I didn’t bother with melting its physical shell or trying to remove non-existent toxins. I just attempted to form a pill directly from the raw flower.

Using just a small fluctuation of my affinity, I compressed it into a small, clear blue pill. Then, I examined it with my pill analysis ability.

Perfect Rank 1 Basic Qi Gathering Pill, 200% Medicinal Efficacy. Value: —

The System hadn’t even been able to give it a value.

What had Bao done?