My Portable Spirit Farm: Rise of the Humble Servant

Once he finalized his plan, Chen Ping moved. He was a man of pragmatic action, not hesitation.

Sending his consciousness inward, he manifested within the Jade Pendant space and stepped onto the rich Black Earth. The Sunfire Grass and Amethyst Flower stalks were growing with terrifying vigor. A faint, pulsating spiritual light flowed across their broad leaves.

In the outside world, herbs of this caliber would boast over three centuries of medicinal potency. He could only wonder what grade of Foundation Establishment Pill such premium main ingredients could produce.

Nearby, a cluster of True Essence Fruit hung heavy on their branches. Eighteen fruits gleamed with a deep golden luster, indicating a medicinal age of roughly one hundred and ten years.

I could wait for them to age further, Chen Ping thought, but time is a luxury I no longer possess.

He had deliberately spared these eighteen fruits; the rest had been harvested purely for their seeds. At this rate of cultivation, he would have an inexhaustible supply of True Essence Fruit within five years.

Chen Ping’s gaze hardened. The alchemy recipes he now sought often required main ingredients aged a thousand, sometimes two thousand years. Even with the Jade Pendant’s fifty-fold temporal acceleration, a single stalk would take two or three decades of real-world time to mature.

Total alchemy independence was still a century away. He urgently needed to upgrade the Jade Pendant again to push the temporal dilation further.

Gingerly, he harvested the eighteen True Essence Fruits, balancing the yield with precise measures of Sunfire Grass and Amethyst Flowers.

Ingredients prepped, Chen Ping summoned the third-tier Top Grade Alchemy Furnace he had looted from Old Ghost Han’s cave. The bronze vessel was ancient and unadorned, resting on three stout legs and flanked by two heavy handles. Intricate flame arrays were carved deep into its surface.

The moment he fed Qi into the matrix, a pure spiritual fire ignited within the belly of the furnace. The temperature control was flawless—vastly superior to the crude, volatile flames he typically condensed himself using his True Essence.

Innate fire was the undisputed king of alchemy, but such worldly treasures were vanishingly rare. Divine ability fire was a close second, yet equally out of Chen Ping’s reach. This furnace’s built-in True Essence conversion array neatly bypassed his limitations. It was a staggering upgrade.

The Foundation Establishment Pill was the undisputed pinnacle of second-tier elixirs, notorious for its brutal failure rate. The sheer scarcity of the main ingredients meant most second-tier Alchemists never got enough practice to master the recipe; merely mentioning it made them pale.

But Chen Ping was not a standard Alchemist. He possessed an ironclad foundation, an overwhelmingly powerful Divine Sense, and now, a premium furnace. Add in the sheer age and potency of his Jade Pendant herbs, and his confidence swelled.

Once, his success rate for this pill hovered around a pathetic ten or twenty percent. Today? He estimated a clean fifty percent yield.

He exhaled slowly, purging all stray thoughts, and sank into a state of absolute focus. Relying on muscle memory and past failures, he fed the ingredients into the roaring furnace one by one. His Divine Sense blanketed the bronze vessel, micro-adjusting the thermal arrays and feeling the violent chemical fusion of the medicinal liquids within.

A dense, intoxicating fragrance flooded the cave abode—sometimes thick and cloying like honey, other times sharp and clean like winter orchids. Every time the furnace lid popped, violent waves of True Essence washed over him, accompanied by the high-pitched hum of newborn pills stabilizing.

It was an agonizing drain on his stamina. After every third or fourth batch, Chen Ping was forced to halt and meditate, wringing every drop of Qi from the ambient air to ensure he was at peak condition for the next cycle.

Three days vanished in a blur of fire and sweat.

As the final batch cooled, Chen Ping slumped back, wiping soot from his brow. Exhaustion chewed at his bones, but a fierce, undeniable satisfaction burned in his chest.

Eighteen batches. Ten successes. And every successful pull yielded at least three pills!

If word of that success rate leaked, even veteran third-tier Alchemists would choke on their spit.

He gingerly lined up the jade bottles, counting the perfectly round, lustrous elixirs inside.

One Low-grade. Twenty-four Middle Grade. Ten High-grade!

Thirty-five Foundation Establishment Pills in total.

A shame there are no Top Grade, Chen Ping mused, feeling a twinge of perfectionist regret. The herbs needed another century, and my flame control isn’t flawless yet.

A Low-grade pill boosted a cultivator’s Foundation Establishment odds by fifty percent. Middle Grade offered sixty, and High-grade pushed it to seventy. A Top Grade pill secured an eighty percent chance, while the mythical Supreme Grade guaranteed absolute success.

The market prices reflected those brutal odds. A Low-grade pill commanded roughly fifty thousand Spirit Stones. Middle Grade went for seventy thousand. High-grade breached the hundred-thousand mark. Top Grade pills could easily fetch a hundred and fifty thousand, but they were so scarce that money rarely bought them.

Thirty-five pills. Ten of them High-grade.

The sheer volume of wealth sitting in those cheap jade bottles was enough to make a Violet Palace realm expert commit murder. It was enough capital to single-handedly fund a minor aristocratic family or a regional Sect branch for generations.

Chen Ping meticulously cataloged and sealed the bottles. Stepping out of his cave abode, he offered his parents a brief greeting, citing business at the main peak, and summoned his flying sword. He rode a streak of light directly toward the Headmaster’s Hall atop Green Cloud Peak.

After a brief wait in a bureaucratic antechamber, a duty disciple respectfully ushered him into a private reception room. Moments later, Headmaster Li Lingfeng arrived from his Secluded Cultivation in the Back Mountain.

Li Lingfeng moved with the unhurried grace of an accomplished scholar, a warm, perfectly practiced smile gracing his features. “Elder Chen, what a rare pleasure. What brings you to my hall today? Please, sit.”

Maintaining his refined, welcoming persona, Li Lingfeng personally steeped a pot of premium Misty Cloud Spirit Tea. The rich, soothing aroma immediately filled the room, cutting through the sterile Sect bureaucracy.

They exchanged standard pleasantries, discussing minor Sect logistics and the upcoming installation of a Qi-gathering Formation for Chen Ping’s peak.

Then, Li Lingfeng smoothly pivoted to politics.

“Things have been quiet overall,” the Headmaster noted, swirling his tea. “Though the rivalry between the Juniors of the Li and Bai families has grown somewhat… spirited. The Bai clan has produced several exceptional seedlings lately. They work hard, and their Elders spare no expense in guiding them. The Li family, conversely, is struggling with succession. The younger generation has high aspirations, but their foundations are hollow.”

He let out a soft, meticulously crafted sigh. “I do not care which family holds more sway. My concern is monopoly. If one family grows too dominant and the checks and balances fail, the Sect rots from the inside out. Balance is the bedrock of steady progress. Wouldn’t you agree, Elder Chen?”

Chen Ping sipped his tea in silence. He wasn’t stupid. Half of this was an old man venting, but the other half was a calculated probe—an attempt to gauge Chen Ping’s allegiance or draw him into the Headmaster’s faction.

Chen Ping couldn’t care less about their factional squabbles. He was a pragmatic survivor. Whoever sat on the iron throne of the Sect was irrelevant, so long as they didn’t disrupt his cultivation or threaten his resource supply. Green Mountain Peak was a quiet, isolated corner of the world, and he fully intended to keep it that way.

Seeing Chen Ping offer nothing but silence, Li Lingfeng chuckled, seamlessly abandoning the probe. He shifted to business. “I assume you didn’t come to my hall simply to share tea, Elder Chen? You are a man of focus.”

Chen Ping set his teacup down. No more dancing. “I do have a proposition for the Headmaster. Some time ago, whilst exploring a secret realm, this Junior stumbled upon a cache of pills by pure Fated Chance. I have no personal use for them and wish to liquidate the asset directly to the Sect. Would the Headmaster be willing to facilitate the transaction?”

He layered heavy emphasis on Fated Chance.

Li Lingfeng’s eyes gleamed with professional curiosity, but he maintained his polite restraint. Every cultivator who survived long enough had their secrets. Li Lingfeng himself wouldn’t have reached the Violet Palace realm without stumbling across a few hidden inheritances.

“Oh?” Li Lingfeng smiled warmly, the picture of an accommodating CEO. “What classification of pill, and in what quantity? If the Sect requires them, we can certainly offer a fair market price.”

Inwardly, the Headmaster began running a rapid cost-benefit analysis. If they are high-tier pills, perhaps a batch of three or four, I could quietly funnel them to the Li family to ease the pressure on our younger generation.

Then, Chen Ping spoke in a perfectly flat, conversational tone.

“Foundation Establishment Pills. Thirty-five of them.”

“Pfft—!”

Li Lingfeng violently choked, spraying scalding premium tea across his pristine mahogany desk. The refined, untouchable scholar persona instantly shattered, replaced by the horrified, wide-eyed expression of a man who had just been bludgeoned over the head with the GDP of a small nation.