Zhao Gang sighed with relief as he extended his senses to cover the world he had finally found. The natural energy of this world was very thin, thin enough that just being here was a strain on his being. If he were to truly exert himself here it would take decades to replenish his Qi from the natural energy of the world. He let a satisfied smile appear on his face. This was exactly what he needed. Nobody from the upper realms would ever imagine that he would seclude himself here, in the lowest backwater of the lower planes. The energy here was so thin that his enemies probably wouldn’t risk coming here, even if they imagined that he would.

His senses picked up others, including the pathetic auras of those struggling to take the first steps of the cultivator’s path, but the inhabitants were extremely few, less than a million, and widely spread out. Though the world he found himself on was tiny, hardly a speck of dust in comparison to the vast worlds of the upper realms, he felt confident that none of the inhabitants would ever stumble across him here. He had picked a spot that all of the primitive peoples of this world would find utterly inhospitable.

Content that he was as secure as he could be, Zhao Gang began his preparations. His first step was to dig deeply into the earth, down towards the very heart of the world. The work was slow and tedious, not because it was difficult, but because he had to be careful to husband his strength. He couldn’t simply expend his Qi to make the tunnel. Instead, he laboriously dug it out with his own hands. It took him ten years, but it was worth it.

The hardest part of the whole process was the damn magma. It kept trying to flood into his tunnel as he bored deeper and deeper. When this happened, he had no choice but to expend his Qi to reinforce the tunnel, making it so that it could withstand the pressure and temperature as long as was needed. After ten years he was finally satisfied. He had not reached the world’s heart, had not even gotten particularly close, truth be told, but he was close enough.

Next, Zhao Gang cleared out a wide space, roughly five kilometers across, reinforcing the entire structure so that it would not collapse upon him nor end up filled with water or magma. That eventuality wouldn’t kill him, certainly, but it would be annoying and might slow his progress. Better to avoid it.

Once his cave was sufficiently reinforced, he began with his first big expenditure of Qi – removing the necessary items from his storage ring. While normally such a thing would be utterly trivial, the thin energy of this world combined with the massive amount of materials he needed to retrieve meant that it was going to cost him enough Qi to be a concern. Luckily, he had planned for just this expense.

The problem was that the situation was a bit of a catch-22. He needed the items in his storage ring to be able to set up the formation which would allow him to restore his Qi but to do that he would have to expend his Qi to get it, meaning he might not have enough Qi to create the formation he needed. In the end, the solution had been both simple and expensive – he had gathered a massive number of energy restoring pills. Normally consuming such pills would be both wasteful and useless, since he had so much Qi, and the energy of the highest realms was so abundant, that energy restoration pills were virtually useless, even if they were the highest quality.

In this situation, however, they were priceless. They would allow him the ability to use his storage ring and set up the formation that would make living in this desolate wasteland comfortable. Still, given the ridiculous number of them he needed and the value of the pills themselves, they were an extravagance that few could have conceived of indulging. In truth, Zhao Gang had spent virtually his entire fortune preparing for this journey. If it worked the results would be worth beggaring himself.

For the next forty years, Zhao Gang worked in his cavern, meticulously laying out the formation he had designed. The design itself was both utterly unique and incredibly ingenious. Without it, he would never consider remaining on such a world for any length of time. With it, he could not only remain but advance his cultivation. For this very reason, Zhao Gang had kept it secret from friend and foe alike.

To the uninitiated, the formation in question was common, little more than a basic energy gathering formation, probably the most common type of formation in existence. Virtually every clan and sect worth calling themselves such had places where they employed such formations to increase the density of natural energy. The increased density of such places was a huge boon, allowing one to not only absorb the energy faster but employ that energy to assist in breaking through the barriers that so often stymied cultivators. Without energy gathering formations the worlds would be a constant mess of fighting since places where such higher densities naturally occurred would become incomparably precious. Not that they didn’t find plenty of other things to fight over.

This formation, however, was anything but common. Upon closer inspection, assuming that one had the knowledge to understand the inner workings of such a masterpiece, one would find that the energy gathered by the formation wasn’t simply pumped into the center to be absorbed by whatever cultivator sat there. No, this formation used that energy to turn the impurities of the world into more energy.

It wasn’t perfect. Not even close. The energy it generated was thin, weak stuff, thick with the impurities it was distilled from, unusable by any practitioner with even a lick of sense. If one were to cultivate with such energy they would quickly find their Qi channels clogged into utter uselessness. The real breakthrough of this formation wasn’t its ability to create this energy, or at least not just that. No, the next step of the formation, by far the most complex part, was the process of refining that energy, separating it and condensing it. The impurities were funneled back into the outer layers of the formation, turned into more energy, which was then also separated and condensed. In a very real way, this mimicked what a cultivator did when they absorbed energy, simply on a massive scale. Without a consciousness to direct it, however, the process was incredibly tricky.

The result was an endless loop, where energy and impurities were sucked in and turned into dense and pure natural energy. The excess energy, energy not needed to run the formation itself, equivalent in density and purity to the energy of the high heavens themselves, was then released to gather in the center of the formation.

With this formation, Zhao Gang could create a space that was equivalent to the highest planes even in this place, which was so thin on natural energy that the idea of cultivating here was akin to madness. Even better, once the formation was set, which granted would cost an extravagant amount of heavenly resources, it would be permanent. There would be no need to recharge the formation or do any type of maintenance upon it. It would use the energy it created to continue expanding itself, drawing in and creating more and more energy over time in an ever-growing process.

Used on a higher plane, such a formation would be worse than an outright act of war. The formation would have access to massive amounts of natural energy and thus would grow rapidly, expanding itself until it drained the entirety of whatever world it was placed upon. Such a thing would be the enemy of every cultivator and beast in existence. Used on a world like this one, where the energy was so thin that few would even notice its disappearance, however, it was perfect. It would allow Zhao Gang to literally drain an entire world’s worth of energy into his cavern. Given enough time, it would provide exactly what he needed.

The meticulous work of creating the formation engrossed Zhao Gang utterly. To him, a cultivator who had lived hundreds of thousands of years, forty years of work was nothing more than a small project, barely worth noting. If it had not been for the thousands of years he had spent researching and designing the formation, one would think that it was nothing more than a passing fancy. Despite the relative ease of the work, Zhao Gang gave himself over to it with a dedication and passion that was akin to madness. He was meticulous and thorough in the extreme. Every line, every curve, every node, and every connection, all of them were done with absolute precision. If he somehow failed to create the formation properly, he might end up stuck on this forsaken rock until his energy could replenish itself enough that he could escape. A thousand years, at least, would be wasted, leaving nothing to show for it but his poverty.

So Zhao Gang worked with single-minded focus. When it was finally complete he sighed and stood, relieved to be able to stand straight despite the strength and durability of his physique. Not that his back truly ached, but the stretching felt wonderful. He had neglected his physical training while he was working and felt the definite need to stretch and work his body. But before he could do that, he needed to power the formation.

This part was the most dangerous. If it failed it would not only leave him dangerously depleted, but it would waste a prodigious amount of resources. Carefully he arranged massive piles of the highest quality spirit stones, laying them out so that their energy would be absorbed directly into the formation without the least bit of waste. This part he did as quickly as he could; even letting the stones sit in the open air in such a desolate environment would cause their energy to leak out. In less than a minute he had everything arranged.

With a deep breath, he sat in the center of the formation and directed his Qi into it, letting it draw in as much as it needed in order to prime itself. The rate that it drew in his Qi was alarming, draining his massive reserves faster than many would have believed possible, but he had been expecting it. Once he was nearly dry he cut his connection, allowing the formation to go on to drain the spirit stones he had laid out. In an instant, they all turned to dust, drained dry of their inherent energy.

Still, the formation sought out energy. Finding its interior empty of what it needed, it quested outward, drawing in the natural energy of the world around it. Zhao Gang held his breath as he watched the process begin. This would be the point at which he either succeeded brilliantly or failed utterly. For a time the formation teetered, still lacking enough energy to begin the processes for which it created. Like an underfed engine it stuttered, guttering, but finally, after agonizing seconds of struggling to catch, it flared to life.

Zhao Gang sighed in relief. No energy bled into the center of the formation yet - he figured it would take a fair amount of time before that began - but once it did it would escalate quickly until he had more energy than he could possibly use. Content that things were going as planned Zhao Gang arranged himself in the center of the formation and sank into meditation, diving deeply into his own soul. Now all he had to do was wait. Wait, and focus on breaking through. On transcending.

If his enemies knew that he was beginning such a process, they would spare nothing to disrupt him, to kill him before he could complete his breakthrough. They all knew that if he succeeded nothing would save them from being slaughtered to the last woman and child. The thought made Zhao Gang smile. Finally, he would be able to put his enemies behind him.

The cavern descended into silence and darkness and stillness for a very, very long time. The world moved on, day by day, month by month, year by year. Century by century. Zhao Gang sat in utter stillness, time passing over him without meaning. The formation expanded, sinking itself deep into the roots of the world.

Above him, the world changed. The thin energy that had once permeated everything was drained away, leaving all else barren of its nourishing influence, save tiny trickles that were greedily sought out and sucked dry nearly the moment they appeared. Where once there had been scattered tribes of people scraping by as little more than savages, civilization started to take root. The few cultivators died out, their arts having lost all potency, leaving only myths and legends of greater things behind. In their place a new world was taking shape, a world that assumed that existence was rigid, absolute; a world that lacked the natural energy to prove otherwise.

Time moved on. Scattered pockets of civilization became thriving city-states, then kingdoms and empires, and then even those died out, leaving behind nations. The mysteries of creation were explored logically, methodically, with a cold and calculated mindset that firmly denied the possibility of mystic energies and divine secrets. Technology, magic’s bastard sibling, truly thrived for the first time as the forces necessary to contradict its fundamental logic were diverted to more important pursuits.

The people prospered. Not just nobles and cultivators, not just the powerful and the rich, but all people. Sure, those with power did much, much better than the average person, but the average person lived a life that couldn’t be imagined without seeing it. Strangely, scholarship thrived, becoming the penultimate pursuit. The learned overtook the world, with books, then computers, then phones and tablets becoming so common as to be ubiquitous.

Deep underground, in the Canadian portion of the Rocky Mountains, far below where even the most dedicated miners and oil seekers dug, in a cavern nearly five kilometers in circumference, powerful energy coalesced, building to a crescendo of truly epic scale. At the center sat a man, the energy so thick in the air around him that it had formed a mist, even that mist condensing until it formed raindrops of pure energy, pooling into a thick lake at the man’s feet, a lake of the world’s very blood and soul.

A beat rippled through the misty energy, a vibration as if the world’s biggest kettle drum had taken a single sharp rap from the fist of a god. Everything stilled for a moment afterward, then again. A moment of stillness. Then again. And again. And again. Slowly the powerful vibrations took on the rhythm of a beating heart, one powerful enough to shock the very earth with its awesome might. Yet none noticed, for the mystic symbols carved along the walls seemed to contain the jumping pulse of power, each beat lapping against their might and rebounding only to be met by the next beat of the titanic heart.

Each beat grew, throbbing more and more powerfully into the gathered energy, stirring it into a frenzied torrent, churning it into a frothing maelstrom of power vast enough to sunder the very fabric of the firmament. It tore at the foundations of the world with every beat, causing the very stuff of existence, that most fundamental canvas upon which all of creation is painted, to whip and stretch as a sail left fully rigged in the direst of storms. The beats went on and on and that film stretched and thinned, growing ragged and finally tearing in places.

Finally, the beats reached their peak, a final thump that could have been mistaken as the very heart of the world. The containment of the formation broke, sending a shock wave out through the surrounding rock. No longer contained, the energy rushed out, carried along in a single massive pressure wave. The pressure passed through the reinforced rock of the cavern, cracking it but failing to destroy it. Outside it, the ocean of magma reverberated with the explosion of power, reacting very much like a firecracker going off in a bathtub, save that the pressure wave which caused the reaction didn’t dissipate like normal, losing very little energy to the surrounding matter. Instead, it passed through it at high speed, imparting only tiny fractions of its total power as it passed by.

No matter how tiny the portion of energy that the wave actually released into the environment, it was enough to cause the magma to seek any place where it could go. On the surface, volcanoes thought long since extinct erupted, a whole line of them along the Northern Rockies blowing their tops in an instant and spewing thousands of tons of molten lava into the air. As a result, thousands of square miles of forest were destroyed and the entire northwestern quarter of North America was blanketed in darkness for close to three weeks. Nearly an entire season of crops was lost due to the loss of vital sunlight, leading to a year-long worldwide food shortage. A few starved, but the numbers were surprisingly low.

The real killer was the earthquake - the strongest ever recorded. The cities of Vancouver and Seattle, nearly 400 miles away, experienced widespread devastation, though Seattle failed to shake loose from the hill it had been built upon as doomsayers had been predicting. Calgary, just over 100 miles away from the epicenter, was hit much, much harder. Estimates would claim that as high as 90% of the population was killed in the initial quake. There were survivors, but for a city boasting almost 1.5 million people at the time of the quake, the losses were devastating. On-site reporters were quoted as saying that the land looked as if God had tilled the earth itself, leaving massive furrows.

The following weeks and months would see billions in donations for the affected, with recovery efforts expected to take decades. The Pacific Northwest would never be the same. Months and then years passed as the world slowly worked to return to normal. Unbeknownst to the people of the surface, normal would soon become a thing of the past.

Deep under the Rockies, nearly three years after the massive explosion of energy, Zhao Gang let out a contented sigh and opened his eyes.

“Success!” he cried, reveling in his newfound strength. Inside he could feel that his soul had undergone a qualitative change. No longer would it require a physical vessel. No longer would his power be constrained to what his feeble body could handle. Shedding his mortal shell would be as simple as stepping out of his clothes, rebuilding and re-entering it just as easy.

He had transcended.

Eager, he stretched his awareness, understanding now what it was like to truly have perception without limits. What he found left him shocked and dumbfounded. On the surface, on a world that until the containment of his formation failed had not had more than the tiniest wisp of natural energy, an entire world crawled with people. Millions - no billions - of people now lived on this tiny speck of a planet and not one a cultivator, not one with access to real power. Yet he could feel people who soared through the skies, ones who covered the ground at astonishing speed, had conversations with people hundreds or thousands of miles apart. He saw their weapons, each with a surprising amount of power despite their lack of any real physical prowess.

He saw a world of wonder and madness.

It also occurred to him very quickly that his formation was still releasing natural energy of exceedingly high density and purity. Unlike before, however, it was no longer being contained in his relatively tiny formation. Instead, it was released into the world, spreading out only to be recaptured by his formation. Some quick mental calculations showed that the formation would continue to absorb the energy, but it would spread regardless as the formation failed to absorb the energy at the same rate it spread. In a hundred years the energy density would surpass other low tier realms. If he left formation active, the world would quickly pass into mid-tier in terms of energy density.

He very much doubted the civilization on the surface would survive such a drastic change in circumstance. Even without outside interference, which would undoubtedly come when the change was discovered, mid-tier worlds gave birth to spiritual beasts far stronger than anything these people could possibly handle.

Zhao Gang was faced with a choice. He could disable or destroy the formation, which would allow the world to return to its natural state, albeit with slightly higher natural energy, or he could leave the formation and allow the energy to accumulate and find its own balance somewhere in the middle tiers of energy density. If he chose the first option, he would be free to leave the world very quickly, within months, but the people here would have suffered greatly from his visit and gained little or nothing. If he left the formation active, however, he would have another choice – leave the world to its fate or intervene on its behalf.

For a cultivator on his level karma was incredibly important. No one who reached his exalted status did so while ignoring the bonds karma lay upon them. To do so would eventually cripple their path to even higher levels of power. And despite his recent transcendence, Zhao Gang could feel that his path as a cultivator was not over. If he chose, he could seek still loftier heights. To do so with karma weighing on him, however, would be impossible.

Looking at the damage his breakthrough had caused the world above, Zhao Gang sighed. He had sown much karma here, despite his supposed care. Never would he have expected a world starved of natural energy so completely would thrive so well. Everything he knew said it was impossible, yet here it was in front of him, the paradox made real. If anything, the average peasant lived lives many times better than the average peasant in other realms. Even in the higher heavens, where the lowest peasant equated to heaven-shattering powers in the lower tier realms, the standard of living was not so high.

His choice loomed before him. Would he shut down his formation and act to preserve this unique and bountiful world as it was? Or would he leave it and seek to guide it into a new place within the wider scope of the planes of existence? As he pondered the thought he sank into meditation, seeking to learn all he could of the world above him. Once again what he learned shook his fundamental views of life. These people knew sacred mysteries that only high-level experts ever discovered! They not only knew them but took them for granted, taught them to their children! Their level of understanding regarding the order of the universe was deeper and more detailed than anything the average cultivator could conceive. As he learned their language and read their books, studied their sciences, he had to confess that he was baffled. Their approach to math was so convoluted and counter-intuitive that he couldn’t help but doubt their very sanity, yet they used it to successfully predict, with absolute accuracy, phenomena that he was even now only vaguely aware existed! Their periodic table of elements alone, while incomplete, filled gaps in his knowledge and enlightened him in a way that he hadn’t experienced for tens of thousands of years.

He shook his head. What a fool he was, to have assumed that he was learned, to assume that he had mastered the secrets of creation. These people, these powerless mortals, had discovered and defined the world in a way that threatened to steal the strength from his soul.

This world was a treasure to which no heavenly treasure could compare. He could not see it destroyed. In fact, when he once again had young disciples he intended to bring them here, to raise them amid such wonders. Their education here would surpass anything that could be found anywhere else in creation. Cultivation techniques? Movement Arts? Weapon Styles? All of that failed in comparison to the number of insights this world could offer a young mind.

For the first time, Zhao Gang found himself seriously considering founding a sect of his own. He would base it on this world, claiming it in its entirety. He would make it impossible for outsiders to travel here. He would raise this world up and let it produce cultivators of such brilliance that the heavens themselves would tremble.

If he was to succeed, he would need to act fairly quickly. If his calculations were anywhere close to accurate he had roughly twenty years before the natural energy reached a saturation level high enough to garner attention. When that happened he would need to be prepared.

Mind whirling with plans and possibilities, Zhao Gang left his cave for the first time in nearly four thousand years.