Chapter 20 The Ambitious Plan

The ambitious plan took shape in the hours between midnight and dawn, when Yongcheng’s Qi recycler hummed its lowest note and Shen Wei’s apartment was quiet enough for thinking that mattered.

He sat at his desk. The same desk where he had once read cultivation theory papers with the wistful hunger of someone studying maps of a country they would never visit and opened a new journal.

Strategy.

He wrote the heading in clean, precise characters:

THE PATH FORWARD

Reach Qi Condensation Stage 9.

The math is encouraging. My current pace of advancement — accelerated by natural materials, pill augmentation, and Yuantian’s dense Qi environment — has brought me from Stage 3 to Stage 4 and closing in on Stage 5 in approximately two months. That pace is not linear; each subsequent stage requires more Qi accumulation and a deeper foundation quality than the last. But even with diminishing acceleration, my projections place Stage 9 within four to five months, assuming continued access to natural materials and no major disruptions.

Each stage will build on the foundation quality established by natural-enhanced breakthroughs. Natural materials don’t just accelerate breakthrough — they upgrade the cultivator’s infrastructure, widening meridians, deepening dantian capacity, and improving Qi conductivity in ways that compound with each advancement.

Prepare for Foundation Establishment.

The first major realm transition. The graduation of “ordinary cultivator” in Tianji’s social hierarchy. Foundation Establishment cultivators can access better jobs, live in better districts, participate in cultivation politics, and operate independently. It is also the transition with the highest failure rate for Grade C roots: thirty percent success with standard synthetic catalysts, and those are optimistic numbers from corporate marketing materials. Independent studies place the actual success rate closer to twenty-two percent.

With natural materials and hybrid techniques, Shen Wei estimated his odds at eighty-five percent or higher.

Foundation Establishment was qualitatively different from Qi Condensation advancement. It was a realm transition. The process involved restructuring the cultivator’s entire Qi architecture and manifesting a “foundation platform”. That platform formed in the dantian would be the anchor point for all subsequent cultivation. The risks of failure were proportionally greater: a failed attempt could damage meridians permanently, collapse the dantian structure he’d spent months building, or, in extreme cases, cripple him as a cultivator entirely.

He would prepare more thoroughly than any cultivator in Tianji’s history had prepared for Foundation Establishment. He had resources that no one else had, and he would use every single one of them.

He needed a high-quality Foundation Establishment catalyst. Either refined from Yuantian’s natural materials using Qianyuan techniques or formulated using a hybrid of modern and ancient recipe principles. A secure location for the breakthrough. The Qi fluctuation during Foundation Establishment was detectable by any cultivator within several hundred meters, and performing it in his apartment would be noticed. Yuantian was the obvious choice. A valley with the spirit vein would provide an ideal environment. Optimal physical and mental preparation, including body tempering, meridian conditioning. But the risk of advancing in Yuantian was also undeniable. The transition could easily attract a stray beast that could disrupt his advancement.

Establish a sustainable resource pipeline from Yuantian.

He harvested materials personally, carried them across dimensions in a backpack, and sold them through a network of three independent traders. This model was functional but limited by his crossing frequency, his carrying capacity, and his willingness to expose himself to Yuantian’s dangers during every collection trip. Scaling up required several developments.

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Broader exploration of Yuantian. The continent was vast, and his operational area was a microscopic fraction of what was available.

More sophisticated distribution in Tianji. Additional buyers, better cover stories, possibly a legitimate business front that could explain the flow of high-quality materials without inviting investigation.