Chapter 33

The next morning we quickly left the city. Everything at the gates appeared to be the same as when we entered the city, which probably meant that nobody knew the city lord’s son was missing. Hopefully it would be quite a bit longer until they realized.

Before leaving the city we had purchased a second horse. That way elder Yui could ride alongside me. The hope was that the bandits would detect his level and avoid us. It meant less bounties, but we would make better time getting away from the city.

“I’ve been wondering. Do you know where the energy that cultivators use comes from?” Elder Yui asked me.

I couldn’t help but give him a quizzical look. “The common answer is that they absorb the energy from heaven and earth. Although really it’s just the energy from outside their body.” I answered.

“Then why don’t we run out of energy? Surely we would absorb all of it eventually?” Elder Yui countered.

“Energy is like slow moving water. As energy is absorbed it moves and fills the areas that are low on energy. Although if enough energy is absorbed in any one area it will temporarily run out. Which is why the meditation chambers charge an additional amount for absorbing more energy.” I said.

“That is what I thought. But then I tried cultivating inside your universe. I used up quite a bit of energy, but within a day it had recovered back to its peak. Where did that energy come from?” Elder Yui asked.

“Maybe some of the life energy was converted into the energy you absorbed?” I said feeling unsure of the answer. With a frown I asked the tutorial.

The reply I got back shocked me. Cultivation energy was a byproduct of life and death energy breaking down in an environment that was low on cultivation energy. Scientifically it was similar to radioactive decay. Once the amount of cultivation energy reached a certain level the life or death energy would stop decaying.

That led to a series of other questions. First was about how much of an impact this would have on my universes. If life and death energy decayed quickly it could result in my universes shrinking quickly. Fortunately the answer was that the decay rate was extremely slow. I would probably see a small amount of energy loss, but I’d have to run a universe out of energy every day for thousands of years before the life and death energy was all used up. Which would be impossible since the cultivator would be giving off more life energy the entire time.

My next few questions were geared towards figuring out if there was a way to increase the energy density of my universes. In theory all I’d need to do was increase the rate that life and death energy decayed in those universes. Unfortunately I was quickly disappointed by the answers I received.

In the normal world life and death energy didn’t move around quickly. When it did it always spread out from high energy areas into low energy areas. That could take decades or even centuries though. So the more living things that lived and died in an area, the more life and death energy could be found in that area. Which also meant that there would be a higher density of cultivation energy.

The problem for my universes was that when I created them the energy was already spread out. I had also setup the universes to use any energy generated to expand. Although my universes were so small that turning that off wouldn’t have an impact. Any life or death energy released would quickly spread to the entire area of the universe.

All of this did explain what the energy veins were. They were simply locations where a large amount of life or death energy had been released at some point in the past. Possibly an extra powerful cultivator or beast had died there, or it could have even been the location of a battlefield in the past. Humans found them and simply by living in those locations they often maintained, or even improved, the energy density of that area.

Eventually I did hit on one way I could use this knowledge. I could create a fourth tiny universe and turn it into something like the meditation rooms in the city. I could easily far exceed the energy density of those meditation rooms. It would just take a ton of energy.

Of course this meant I’d eventually have to make a few additional universes. For one thing I was sure I would want multiple different density meditation universes. Second, there was no reason for humans to live in such an energy dense environment. So I could create a low energy universe for the survivors of clan Ashton to live in, and they could use the meditation universe when they cultivated. The dryads absorbed energy passively, so I’d have to keep the energy density high in the dryad universe.

“This could solve a few different issues.” Elder Yui said once I told him.

“How so?” I asked.

“You can sell time in a meditation universe to high level wizards. They get to meditate in a high density environment, and we get paid. Depending on their level we can also get a bunch of life energy.” Elder Yui explained.

“How would I get them into the meditation universe?” I said wondering how I could convince anyone that a meditation universe without any doors was a normal meditation room.

“You’re already pretending to have a teleportation ability. You can tell them that you are teleporting them into a special meditation room at one of the central cities. Convincing the first customer may be hard since they have to trust you to safely teleport them. After that it should be easy though.” Elder Yui said.

“That could work. But I’m going to need a lot of energy to be able to match the same energy density of even a meditation room in the city we just left, let alone a meditation room in a central city. How dense is the energy in the central cities?” I asked.

“The poorest sections of an average central city has nearly ten times the energy density of your universes. The higher the energy density the more difficult it is to raise though. Meditation rooms rarely reach over thirty times higher, and those are often reserved for the central clans. I’d expect the meditation rooms we will be competing with will have around twenty times the energy density.” Elder Yui said.

“How am I supposed to compete with that? Reaching twenty times energy density will take four hundred times as much energy. Assuming that I can fit a person inside fifty thousand cubic inches that will be nearly three times the total energy I have collected.” I said.

“There should be better opportunities to collect energy as we get closer to the central cities. The average cultivator will be a higher level. The average peasant will be high fifth or low sixth level cultivators, and the guards will nearly all be seventh level cultivators. The main fighters of the clans will all be level eight cultivators. Many of them will have reached the peak of level eight.” Elder Yui explained.

My memories backed up what elder Yui was saying. Reaching level nine took more than just gathering enough energy. It took a deeper understanding of cultivation. Most level eight cultivators would never managed to breach this barrier.

“I think we are far enough from the walls that the guards can’t see us. We should hurry and get further from the city.” Elder Yui said after the conversation had lulled for a bit. Elder Yui’s horse broke into a canter.

The rest of the day was spent mostly pushing the horses with a few short breaks. It was a perfect example of one of the benefits of riding magical beasts, a normal horse never would have been able to canter for most of a day. Of course I wasn’t as physically fit as our horses, which meant I was totally exhausted by the time we stopped for the night. I found myself almost wishing that some bandits had attacked us.