Chapter 6 The Scientist’s Approach

Three days. Shen Wei gave himself three days before the next crossing.

It was the hardest discipline he had ever imposed on himself. The pendant sat on his desk, inert and patient, while he moved through his daily routine with a mind that was anything but routine. Every idle moment—every transit ride, every slow stretch at the furnace monitors, every minute of his lunch break—he spent planning.

Day one: equipment.

After his shift, he walked through the Lower District’s sprawling night markets with a list memorized in his head. He could not order online, where purchases left digital traces. Everything had to be cash, anonymous, unremarkable.

A survival knife with a fixed blade and a belt sheath—the kind hunters used in the rural provinces, common enough to draw no attention. Sixty yuan. A water purification kit for field use, smallest model available, with replacement filters. One hundred and ten yuan. Fifteen meters of lightweight synthetic rope, rated to five hundred kilograms. Forty yuan. A compact first aid kit, supplemented with extra bandage rolls and broad-spectrum antiseptic. Ninety yuan. A hand-crank flashlight requiring no batteries or Qi cells. Twenty yuan. A set of airtight, chemically inert sample containers from a bulk laboratory supply stall. Thirty yuan for ten.

Total: three hundred and fifty yuan. Nearly a week’s discretionary spending. He also bought a cheap backpack to carry everything.

Day two: knowledge.

He called in sick to work for the first time in fourteen months. He spent the entire day reading.

Wilderness survival guides for temperate highland environments. Field botany references for spirit herb identification, with emphasis on the historical sections describing pre-depletion specimens. Basic zoological profiles of spirit beasts by rank and elemental affinity. And the spatial theory papers he had been studying, supplemented by everything he could find on primordial Qi and pre-depletion cultivation environments.

The economic research was what stopped him cold.

Stolen story; please report.

He had known, in an abstract way, that natural cultivation materials were valuable. Synthetic materials were the backbone of modern cultivation—affordable in bulk, consistent in quality, available to anyone who could pay. But they were still inferior copies. Natural spirit herbs, grown in Qi-rich environments with intact ley lines, contained trace compounds and structural complexities that no synthetic process could replicate. These trace elements improved breakthrough quality, reduced cultivation bottlenecks, and enhanced the long-term stability of a cultivator’s foundation.

The problem was supply. Tianji’s natural spirit herbs were nearly exhausted. The few that remained were cultivated in artificial environments by the Five Great Families and the megacorps, hoarded as strategic assets, and sold at prices that put them beyond his reach.