The group wasn’t completely convinced, but they soon left after viewing the strange contraption and the group went to visit the Palace of Prosperity. Sage cleaned himself up and Wan Ling recovered her face when she greeted the group at their business. She made a good show of showing off all the luxuries and impressed the Peak Masters.

On the other hand, Sage returned to his research and finally convinced the Sect to sell him rights for a large piece of land. While he could do the project within the Universe Ring he wanted to repay the Sect for taking him in so many years ago and benefit them. In addition, he would need the support of their materials and craftsman. If he could inspire enough of them with the possibilities of mechanical science then they would surely take over and advance it without him. It wasn’t like he was a mechanical engineer after all, but with enough of the basics, experts with surely emerge.

Using the land, he built a factory. He wasn’t aiming to produce anything in specific, but merely to share some modern manufacturing methods. In the Holy Flame Sect everything was handcrafted by individual professionals. With a few more years of study, and help from other Blacksmiths, he found a way to reinforce basic Spirit Steel to a level where he could build a Steam Engine that wouldn’t explode. Using the Steam Engine he powered large conveyor belts and introduced the Sect to the concept of mass production. Of course, at first it didn’t really mean anything.

Most magical weapons and devices could only be created in two steps. The smithing, and the inlaying of the array symbols. Usually, this was done by one person because they would be intimately familiar with the item as they forged it and it gave them better chances of successfully inlaying the array symbols. It was only broken up into pieces to produce large numbers of simple devices. One Blacksmith would go from forge to forge inlaying array symbols on their apprentices arrows or spearheads. Sage altered this thought process by building large automatic hammers, huge crucibles, immense forges, and metal casts.

Preparing the materials in massive quantity ensured a more uniform result. Then it could be poured into identical casts and traveled down a conveyor belt. As it was cooling, different smiths would only apply a single array symbol. While the arrays had to be much simpler for this method, each smith became an expert at applying that single symbol and could work much faster. When the item cooled more it was removed from the mold and a few other smiths used automatic hammers to do the detailed forging with much better control. Then the most skilled smiths would do the final step of connecting the array symbols into functioning Array Formations within the devices.

The years flew by and Sage let the Sect take over the manufacturing operations. He was given a cut of all profits from the operations and he left them further ideas on how to improve the process, along with many design ideas for the ‘Steam Carriages’ and other uses for engines. He let them handle the implementation while focusing his own attention on his other research. That is, after he helped Peak Master Lupeng set up another couple factories to build secret weapons for the Sect.

A lone figure sat cross legged on top of a large metal pillar. Up high above were thick black clouds, roiling and rumbling. Flashes of electric light sparked through the clouds and bounced against what seemed to be an invisible wall just beneath the clouds. After a few minutes the metal pillar made a chiming sound and then the lightning above started to pour down. A sea of lightning bolts crashed down, they struck the person on the metal pillar as well as the hundreds of other pillars in the area.

The metal pillars were arranged in a mysterious formation with pillars of nine different heights. The taller pillars were surrounded by smaller pillars and served to collect the lightning so that less of the bolts struck the shorter pillars. There were a few other people scattered around the area, each of them being struck by lightning bolts. After a few minutes of falling lightning the invisible wall appeared once more to block the clouds.

The cross legged figure sitting on this pillar took a few minutes to recover before standing up and leaping off the pillar that was marked with the number ‘5’. Then he ran to the east and up to a large door. He touched his hand to the middle of the door and it slid open to the side. Passing through, the door closed behind him and he sat down again to finish recovering. He was in a large hall and the door behind him read ‘Thunder Tempering’. It was one of the eleven different levels in the Sunfire Pagoda. While it was said that there were nine floors for each of the eleven types of training, in practice many of the eleven types were grouped into a single huge floor.

Lightning Tempering had different heights of pillars to indicate the different ‘floors’. The Pressure Lake was similar, it was just a huge lake. Descending into the lake the outer edge flattened at nine obvious levels. To face the highest pressure you would simply swim to the center and dive to the very bottom. Others would just meditate on the corresponding depth.

With his abundance of contribution points, Sage had been able to spend the last few years working his way through the many levels of the Sunfire Pagoda. Most people in the sect would only spend their points on the levels that matched up the best with their training. Fire users would do heat tempering, Water users would do cold tempering, speed focused fighters would train in the wind tempest, and so forth. Rarely would anyone have the points to waste for training on every level. Even rarer were the people that could handle the varied body refining levels. Heat, Cold, Lightning, and Gravity. The number of body refining cultivators in the Holy Flame Sect were always a low number, and the only reason Sage could handle it was his non-human body.

The years of training and abundance of pills and resources to strengthen his body was also the reason that he could handle the body refining levels at a whole floor higher than his rank should allow. The only level he’d stayed out of was the one he spent the most time at in the past. The eleventh type of floor, Qi Training. A rank 4 cultivator had a maximum lifespan of nearly two thousand years. As Sage hadn’t even hit the century mark, he wasn’t short on time. As such, he followed Tao Ba’s advice and did not train his cultivation directly anymore.

The heavenly treasures in his dantian were filling up his dantian on their own, slowly building layer after layer of energy around themselves. Tao Ba told him that if he rushed the process his foundation would be weaker and his core would not be as dense or powerful in the future. While disappointing that he had to wait, Sage had plenty enough to do. He had a huge library to study, many topics of research and, after some thought, plenty of body tempering to do.

He’d never really focused on battling up close and personal, preferring to use his tricks and insects, but having a powerful body would make it that much harder to harm him. It was quite commonly known the best way to defeat a pet was to the kill the master. The methods tamers used to control their pets varied, but the majority of them freed the pets when the owner died. Some even killed the pets at the same time. There were a few rare types of tamers that when killed, their pets grew enraged and more powerful than before. Thankfully, most of these tamers were members of specific Sects, and so most people would know in advance about this danger.