“Hm… should I take a break? I have made some progress but it’s not going as fast as I had hoped for.”

Zhang Dong looked at his palm where a tiny little dot of dark brownish energy was bouncing around. This little dot contained the combined energies of fire, wind, and lightning. He was able to combine these three elements without them rejecting themselves but there was something missing. The dark color of this combination made him worry as he expected it to go in the opposite direction.

“But maybe I’m going in the right direction? Would the element of origin be pure black or pure white?”

If he identified the elements as colors then putting them all together would produce a darkened color from all the combined saturation. However, what he was trying to find out was a combined energy that all of these elements had in common. If he looked at it from that angle the color should have been getting brighter.

“It should be like an empty canvas that is easy to draw on and not a black patch that needs to be sieved through.”

This made sense to him as otherwise, the practitioner would have to siphon their element from this dark energy while also blocking out all the other ones. How would they do this without generating all of the other elements in the first place? It made more sense for the point of origin to be simpler than harder. Probably after finding this original element, he would be able to fashion it into all of them at once instead.

“This doesn’t mean that it was all for nothing, finding out what all of these elements have in common and how they fuse with each other should give me some insight.”

If he imagined all the basic elements like fire and water to be a part of a chain, then what he was looking for was the big one in the middle that all these elements were connected to. By bonding them with each other he was coming closer to understanding their base which he was looking for.

“Would be easier if I absorbed the water and wood element…”

His progress was slowly ramping up but there were many questions that he needed to answer. First of all his elemental Dao was also limited, at the moment he knew two of the basic elements which were fire and wind. Water was close to him but he hadn’t trouly mastered this part yet.

Then there were more advanced elements like holy, darkness, and lightning that didn’t necessarily connect to the base four. However, if there existed an origin energy that connected all of them, there was a possibility to use them for his research. His only hope was that he would be undisturbed in his secluded cultivation for at least a bit more until he got all the bugs sorted out.

“Bob, run a few more simulations for this and try finding something that binds these three elements.”

“Affirmative.”

Luckily for him, he was not alone in this endeavor. With the help of Bob’s computing power, he was able to run various simulations without having to do it himself. His Ai was integrated into his very being, his soul that had become massive. With all this computing power he would be able to shave off hundreds of years of bumbling around on his own. It would make up for the loss in longevity that was being blocked by the world’s rules. Otherwise, if he was able to reach the age of ten thousand, then it might have been possible to do it the long way.

“Should I take a break and check up on the kids?”

The spot that he decided to cultivate in was the dimensional regalia. He had hopes in the immortal treasure to shield him from the overseer. This meant that he could freely leave this place and get back to the sect. Sometimes he would take walks through the city to get his mind off things. When in a disguise he could listen in to some rumors going through the world without them being filtered by others.

People tended to hide their true selves whenever a person of power was next to them. He was the Patriarch of a great sect, the whole city would come to a halt if they spotted him taking a walk. His status was that of a King or an Emperor. Considering that the regions were so huge, he owned more land than the planet from which he originated.

“They seem to be doing fine at least, probably better not to interrupt their training…”

Instead of going out to see them, he decided to just take a peek through one of the monitor screens. His children were growing fast and his son was approaching the age of seven. His daughter that was around ten was also becoming an even bigger troublemaker. At this very moment, she was terrorizing the teenage disciples in a training facility. Her strength was above any child of her age and it was clear to everyone that she was a prodigy.

It brought a small smirk onto his face to see his own flesh and blood jumping around the stage. The others weren’t even holding back as she was just too skillful to be caught by any attacks. Her fighting style was very similar to her mother’s but it also integrated some of his own skills. She was trained by one of his own disciples that were trained in the Dao of Lightning. It seemed that she would combine this with wind energies that she also had a good affinity for.

His son on the other hand was good at fire energy just like Huo Qiang and also lightning. It was a strange combination as he didn’t really have that fiery attitude that practitioners of the Dao of fire usually had. After going through some of his training sessions he could see that he was prone to overworking himself. It was as if he loved seeing himself progress to the new stage, it brought him joy to win little battles, even if he didn’t show it on the outside.

“Everyone seems to be doing fine… Hm… That’s odd, where did that old fart go, wasn’t he supposed to be performing the grand elder duties?”

While glancing through the many screens he noticed that one of his family members was missing. Zhang Jin, who was supposed to act as a decision-maker, wasn't there. Liena, just like him, was doing some closed-door training. Even though his grandfather wasn’t the strongest out there he usually was able to make the right decision. He had one fault though, whenever a new pretty face appeared from somewhere his IQ would plummet.

“Did some new beauty appear somewhere in the empire? I told him not to use the sect teleportation gates for things like those.”

Zhang Dong quickly started going through the various screens before him. Thanks to the system that he implemented in the sect he could know everything that the people in his factions did. Things had to be logged and it was very easy for him to identify teleportation gate usage.

“He used the golden cruiser and jumped through the main gate, this is odd…”

He knew that his grandfather was a hornball but he wouldn’t go through the official gate to seek out a new lover. This had to be some kind of official mission that he decided to carry out. There weren’t many things that could force him out of the city.

“He traveled to the outermost gate…”

After checking where Zhang Jin teleported to he started getting a bad feeling about it. The gate he used was the closest to the central region. Their sect was steadily expanding its influence but building all those large structures came at a big cost. It was possible to use the old gates that other sects built but some of them weren’t up to their standards. Most weren’t large enough to let ships sail through them and were not power efficient in the slightest. The ones that his sect was using were much safer and also allowed him to track everything through his faction system.

“He probably had a good reason for not informing me about it … but not like I have to.”

“Hey Bob, bring up the mission records, they should be somewhere inside of the database.”

Zhang Dong liked to keep a watch over all of the dealings inside his sect. This also meant that he set up everything so that he could take a peek at everything if he wanted to. Bob was integrated into the system and could be used as a search tool. All of the mission data would be infused into the system and kept for storage, similar to a big library just without any books. Instead, they used items similar to communication jades that were able to use storage that cultivators could use.

“Lesser angle units were destroyed?”

He quickly looked through his autonomous army logs to confirm the mission claim. It wasn’t unusual for some of the core formation-level puppets to be destroyed. They were not invincible and he also didn’t want to scare the populace by having the stronger ones flying around everywhere.

Peace gained through an iron fist was not something he was aiming for. They were mostly there to be helpful and diffuse the situation, not murder anyone in sight who performed a crime. After confirming that the two units were destroyed in the battle and their location he concluded what his grandfather was aiming for.

“Well, it wasn’t a bad decision if the Long Clan is involv…!?”

“ALERT! ALERT! The health of a family member is critically low. Activating safety measures.”

“Huh?”

At first, he wanted to praise his grandfather for not involving him in a bothersome trip like this. Before he could close the window a red one appeared before his face. There was an alert option in his system window that could notify him if certain terms were met. This one for instance would instantly trigger if one of his family members was low on health.

“It’s gramps? What is happening there?”

Without thinking much about it he pointed his finger at the red screen before him. He was sure to rig it like this so that he could teleport to the injured family member that was under attack. With one click his body started glowing blue before vanishing within one second he was brought to where Zhang Jin had gone to.

When he appeared on the other side it was hard to not see the glowing pillar of lightning surrounding his grandfather. His body was bruised and he was out cold. The safety measure of his system had been activated to create this effect and push everyone in the vicinity to the sides. His eyes started darting around to find the perpetrator of this act. There was a lot that he could stomach but hurting his family was not one of them.