Muchen declined the patriarch's invitation to stay for a meal. He knew well enough that he was a welcome guest when he showed up unannounced to deliver silver, but that he was hardly on close enough terms to share a meal. He still could have ignored the awkwardness and stayed if he was looking to build familiarity with the patriarch at all costs, but Muchen wasn't interested in such a close relationship. Ideally, he wanted to be on friendly terms with the villagers, but he wasn't looking to be everybody's friend.

Chuhua greeted them with enthusiasm when they arrived back on the mountain. "Did you buy the mountain?"

Muchen smiled. "Yes, though the deed won't be official for another week or two."

"That's great!" Chuhua said, clasping her hands together. "You're part of the village now!"

"Yes," Muchen said, "and soon we can start building up infrastructure."

Distilling spirits over a fire outdoors was all well and good for a proof of concept, but to support a serious level of production he'd need a more serious production facility. If nothing else, having a roof over their head would allow for better control of the temperature. They would also need a convenient place to store ingredients as well as the finished product.

Before all of that, though, Muchen needed to take care of the feelings of his future employees. Right now Yize and Chuhua were grateful for the help they'd received and excited by the novelty of his ideas. In order to keep them invested in his success over the long run, he needed to make sure that everybody's financial interests were tied together.

"Once the purchase goes through," Muchen said, "I can deed you the land that you're living on."

As much as they got along and planned to work together, he thought it had to be nerve wracking for the brother and sister for an outsider to swoop in and purchase the land they'd been living on for their whole lives. For his part, Muchen didn't need to monopolize the local area. As long as he had space for his business needs, there was no harm in giving up a bit of land to allay the fears of his key subordinates.

Yize took a moment to shake off his surprise. "That's very generous-"

"You can't!" Chuhua said, snapping at her brother.

"Why not?" Yize asked.

"We should all be on the same boat," Chuhua said, "not counting every copper."

"You're right," Yize said. "I was blinded by the idea of owning land and lost sight of what was important.

Muchen could see what they were getting at, even if he thought their fears were overblown. If he were an unscrupulous, domineering sort of boss then he would probably prefer subordinates who relied entirely on his goodwill. In that situation Yize wanting to own his own land would be a dangerous warning sign of independent thinking.

Of course, Muchen didn't have any intention of being that kind of boss. Setting aside all other considerations, just the effort required to micromanage alone was more work than he was willing to put in.

He cleared his throat, injecting himself into the conversation. "I think it's admirable to want to own your own land. In the end, I'm looking for subordinates, not sycophants or slaves."

Yize didn't respond right away, frowning as he thought things over. "Even so, I can't take something so valuable for nothing."

Muchen nodded. "Let's do it like this: measure the size of the property, and set the cost as a fraction based on what I paid for the mountain. Any time you like you can pay me that much and I'll deed it over to you."

Yize glanced at his sister before offering a relieved nod.

"Good," Muchen said. "Once we're in business, I'll be paying you a salary and a fraction of the profits. It won't be long before you can afford the land with silver to spare."

The Qianzhan Continent wasn't quite ready for the concept of stock options, but a basic incentive plan was easy enough for the locals to understand. Muchen wasn't worried that the brother and sister would take the first payment, buy their home, and quit their jobs. Once they had a taste of the silver they could earn by working for him, it wouldn't be so easy to settle back into a simple rural lifestyle.

ooOoo

Muchen would be covering the mountain in buildings, eventually. Considering the time of year, though, it was best to start with something modest but practical: building a house. While he appreciated Yize and Chuhua's hospitality, he didn't intend to live in their house forever. He had been living on the Qianzhan Continent as a guest for far too long. Now that he owned some land, he wanted a house to call his own.

He had grand plans for a future residence. Ideally he would like to build a house with multiple stories, out of brick or stone, large enough that he'd never feel the need to move. He'd also like to rig up some internal plumbing.

Unfortunately, he had to bow to reality. There wasn't much stone to be had in the local area, nor a stonemason to cut it into shape. Bricks would take months to assemble in any kind of quantity, assuming he could get them to fire properly in the face of the winter cold.

For now, they'd build a simple house out of rammed earth. If all went well and Muchen had the time and money to build the home of his dreams later on, he'd still be able to use it as a storage building.

It wasn't a task they could tackle alone. Fortunately, the men in the village were at loose ends during the winter. Muchen negotiated some modest compensation for the technical expert who supervised the process. The manual laborers were happy to help in exchange for a meal. They might not have been happy with it if Muchen had been doing the cooking, but as his role was limited to providing Chuhua with the money she needed to buy ingredients, it was a happy arrangement all around.

It took two weeks of hard work, but at the end of it Muchen was the proud owner of a house. Back on earth he would have thought of it as a one room shack, but here on the Qianzhan Continent... it was still a one room shack. At least it was a space all his own. After spending all these months as a guest in one place or the other, it was satisfying to settle down for the night to sleep in his own home, however modest.

Of course, it didn't just shelter him from the elements. Now that Muchen had a space all his own that he could use without worrying about anybody else's approval, he was free to carry out his electrical experiments.

ooOoo

One week later, half of the space inside the house was taken up by an assortment of electrical experiments. None had quite accomplished what he was looking for, but Muchen had high hopes for the next test. He gripped the crank handle jutting out of the disk in front of him. "Beginning on your mark."

Xinyi nodded. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead."

Muchen began turning the handle without any further ceremony. The wooden disk turned along with his efforts. The magnets lining its rim—each attached with alternating polarity to its neighbor—whipped around with the motion, passing between a pair of copper blocks. Initially, the only real indication that he was accomplishing anything came from the additional resistance Muchen was feeling.

He'd learned through painstaking experience what it felt like when the disk was turning freely. If he was putting in extra effort, then logically the energy had to be going somewhere. If his memories of high school science classes were correct, that energy should have taken the form of an electrical current, running through the copper wires attached to each block.

Muchen kept an eye on the wires as he kept turning the crank at a steady pace. This wasn't the most glorious use of cultivation-derived strength, but at least he could keep doing this for hours if he had to.

They were far from the electrical grid that Muchen had envisioned for his future cultivating environment. There was only a single copper wire extending from each block of copper, each making a half circle roughly a couple feet in diameter. Each wire terminated in a copper bead. The two beads had been carefully positioned so that they were nearly touching.

Muchen stared at the two beads and bore down, cranking harder. He was rewarded a moment later with a sharp crackling noise as a spark of electricity leapt from one bead to the other.

It was good to have the visual confirmation that he was generating electricity. The experiment wasn't done yet, though. Muchen continued to keep the disk moving, resulting in a rapid fire series of sparks jumping across the gap. He made a note to himself to figure out some way to measure the time precisely as he wondered how long it would be before Xinyi said anything.

The point of this experiment wasn't just to generate electricity. It was to see if keeping an electrical current going would be enough to influence the local spiritual energy

He was starting to feel the strain in his shoulder when she finally spoke up.

"It's working."

"Where?" Muchen asked.

"All along the copper," she said. "More so where the lightning is."

Muchen nodded. It would have been nice if he'd had some modern measuring equipment. He'd love to know if the electrical current was being drained somehow, or if spiritual qi changed its state without affecting the current. Either way, it suggested some interesting things about the local laws of physics.

Of course, in a world where people could ascend to immortality by means of structured meditation, he shouldn't be too shocked to see the laws of thermodynamics thrown out the window. He just would have liked to have his hands on some tools that would let him know what was going on.

And as long as he was wishing for modern equipment, it would be pretty handy if he could whistle up a rifle and an unlimited supply of ammunition. It might not be much use against high level cultivators, but it would sure be a big help against bandits.

Unfortunately, all of his wishing had yet to scare up any modern goodies. Instead he was going to have to make do with whatever measuring equipment he could put together. To be honest, having Xinyi around to observe the changes in spiritual energy was already a big advantage when it came to scientific investigation.

Muchen gritted his teeth and kept the disk moving. "Any change inside the circle?"

In order to cultivate the Storm Dragon scripture, one needed an environment in which all of the local spiritual energy had been converted to the lightning aspect. It was good to know that an electrical current would have an effect on nearby spiritual energy, but Muchen didn't want to have to electrocute himself in order to cultivate.

"In the middle? No," Xinyi said, shaking her head. She narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. "There's some change, but it only extends a short distance from the copper."

"How short?" Muchen asked. Nothing involving spiritual energy was an exact science, but he wanted to build up an accurate picture of what was going on, at least as much as he could.

"The width of the wire," Xinyi said. "Perhaps a bit further."

Muchen put in more effort, getting the disk moving faster. For a moment the only sound in the room was his heavy breathing and the crackle of electricity.

"That's got it a bit further," Xinyi said. "Not much, though."

Muchen brought his efforts to a halt. The silence in the room felt more pronounced as the spark gap fell quiet.

He shook out his arm. Turning human effort into electricity was obviously a dead end. When he'd first started his experiments, he'd harbored dreams of meditating while Yize worked away on an electricity-generating exercise bike. Now, it was clear that no amount of pedaling would be enough.

Well, maybe if Xinyi were willing to pitch in, but he wasn't going to bother asking what she would think of that idea.

He was disappointed that the effect of the current had been so limited. While it was good to know that electricity moving through a wire would change the nature of nearby spiritual energy, that alone wouldn't be nearly enough to execute the Storm Dragon scripture. In order to use the technique they'd purloined from the Long family, they needed something with a larger area of effect.

"How far did the change spread out from the spark?" Muchen asked.

In response, Xinyi held up her hands, palms facing each other. They were separated by roughly the length of her forearm.

"That's something, at least," Muchen said.

If a lightning strike could convert the spiritual energy of a large area, there had to be some kind of mechanism letting it work at a distance. He had a feeling that the root of the issue had to do with electromagnetic waves. He didn't understand what was happening on any deeper level than just slapping a label on it, though. He dimly recalled that light was also an electromagnetic wave, but obviously sunlight hadn't been converting the world's spiritual energy all to the lightning aspect.

There was something going on that went deeper than physical phenomena. It probably wasn't something he'd be able to decipher in his lifetime, but that was all right. He didn't need perfect understanding of what was going on when all he needed to do was turn the situation to his advantage.

Lightning could affect a large area. His spark generator affected a small area, which made sense. It was, in the end, a lightning bolt rendered in miniature. If he needed to affect a medium sized area, he just needed to make bigger sparks. Or make more of them. Meditating might be tricky with twenty spark gaps firing off all the time, but learning to overcome that obstacle would build character. Probably.

Providing power for that kind of dramatic electrical display was going to take some preparation. Obviously Muchen wasn't going to be able to provide enough mechanical energy on his own. Huichen might be able to do a little better if he could convince the mule to walk in circles for hours on end, but the ideal solution would be to set muscle power to the side entirely. He had that river just sitting there at the back of the mountain right now, flowing right along without doing any useful work.

Changing that wasn't something Muchen could do on his own, but the Qianzhan Continent already had waterwheels dotting the countryside. All that he needed to do was dip into his silver stockpile and invite a craftsman over from Jiliu City to build a water mill. Muchen would just have to step in and modify the final step, changing out the millstone for an electrical generator.

After all, he didn't need to grind grain, but mortality.