Thunk!

  Huo Xiangn was busy working at the forge behind his bcksmith shop as usual when he suddenly heard a loud noise a few feet to his left.

  He looked over and was shocked to find a stone block taller than he was that had somehow suddenly appeared in his forge. He looked around the forge in confusion, but didn't discover anything else unusual. Eventually, he hefted his hammer and cautiously moved closer to inspect the stone, only to find that a message had been carved in it.

  [Does your shop offer custom orders? I would like to pce a rge one.]

  [Speak your answer to the stone.]

  After looking around once more in confusion, Huo Xiangn loudly called out in an uncertain voice, "Yeah, we can handle any order you got!"

  Thunk!

  The stone sb vanished, only to be instantly repced with a new one. The second sb contained a very long list of items. A stone pedestal also popped into existence next to the sb, topped with many small, thin stone sheets with diagrams etched on them.

  [150 rakes][150 shovels][150 trowels]...[10 anvils][25 cooking pots][6,000 needles]

  [Diagrams containing the specifications of each item are on the pedestal.]

  While Huo Xiangn had initially been confused about the situation, as soon as he saw the second batch of stone objects appear out of nowhere, he started sweating like mad. He instantly realized that he was dealing with a powerful immortal.

  After looking over the list and checking the diagrams, he was even more confused than before.

  'Why would an immortal need me to forge all of this?'

  However, what immortals wanted and why they wanted it was obviously none of his business. He quickly came up with some estimates.

  "Senior," he spoke loudly with a bow, "if I bring in a few extra hands and outsource some of the items to a couple of bcksmith shops I trust, your order can be completed within four months. Between material and bor costs, it'll cost roughly two hundred gold."

  Thunk!

  A third stone sb arrived in pce of the second.

  [I will return in four months to collect the items.]

  [Check the wooden box in the corner for your payment.]

  "Yes, senior!"

  Huo Xiangn turned around and discovered a huge wooden chest up against the wall that hadn't been there before. He quickly walked over and opened it, only to find that it was filled to the top with what had to be far more than two hundred gold coins.

  "Senior!" he called out. However, when he turned around, all he saw were the small stone sheets covered in diagrams along with a few new stone sheets containing copies of the list of requested items. The massive stone sb was gone, as was the hidden senior.

  ~-o-O-o-~

  "I really need to figure out a better way to handle communication from in here," Fu Anwen spoke gently while cuddling Queen Fluffytail.

  The bcksmith had handled the situation better than any of the other shop owners. One woman earlier had immediately run away screaming as soon as she'd witnessed a rge stone appear out of nowhere in her shop, while a few others had turned out to be illiterate, which had wasted quite a bit of time.

  The bcksmith was the fifth shop that Fu Anwen had successfully done business with since arriving in Valiant City. From the other four, he had purchased necessities for his house, some ready made clothes for his future disciples and their teachers, a few varieties of seeds he hadn't found before, and assorted basic supplies needed to get his new sect up and running.

  He had also pced rge orders with two other shops to purchase all of the clothing, bnkets, pillows, mattresses, and so on that he'd need for his sect.

  If possible, Fu Anwen would have preferred to make all of these items himself. Ever since he'd first visited the library, he had wanted to devote some time to mastering each of the crafts he'd read about. While he still pnned to do that, it would take far more time than he had avaible for now.

  While he only needed to exert the tiniest bit of mental effort to slice a few trees into a mountain of boards, bowls, chopsticks, and boxes within moments, most crafting wasn't nearly that simple. Making his own paper, for example, was a process that required tremendous amounts of time. There was nothing he could do to shorten or skip the slowest steps, some of which could even take multiple months to complete.

  For now, at least, buying these hard-to-craft items instead of making them himself couldn't be avoided. In the future, however, he would make sure that both he and the members of his various sects would handle any necessary crafting themselves.

  While Fu Anwen was wrapping up his shopping, a small printing operation was underway within his inner space. An assembly line of intricately carved woodcuts containing farming-reted text and pictures were rapidly stamping down over and over again.

  Newly inked sheets of paper would blink away and get set into the space to dry. Hundreds of recently printed pages were already floating throughout the space.

  He tried not to think about how much the paper and ink had cost him. While he'd initially thought that his thousands of gold coins would st a lifetime, they wouldn't even st two years if he didn't slow down his spending.

  Once the pages were assembled into a book, the first ten copies of Fu Anwen's Farming Sect's introductory books would be complete. Introduction to Farming, A Farmer's Guide to Common Crops, and Basic Physical Exercises Every Farmer Should Know would be the first three books given to every new member of the sect.

  Fu Anwen had long distilled the relevant information he'd learned at the Royal Library and Technique Pavilion down to its purest essence, then split it into sections that would be taught to children of the appropriate age.

  Once a disciple's body had matured sufficiently and they had proven their character, they would receive the introductory martial arts books. By that time, each disciple's personal collection would include dozens of books full of farming techniques, descriptions of various crops, basic herbology, basic medical techniques, basic cooking techniques, and more.

  At least for the earliest batches of disciples, every member of the Farming Sect needed to become self-sufficient and extremely knowledgeable. He would be relying on the first experts the sect raised to disperse throughout the Fu Kingdom and create their own branches of the Farming Sect.

  As for Fu Anwen's goal for the Farming Sect, if he'd lived in another kingdom, he would have pledged something like, "Within one hundred years, there will be no more starvation within the Fu Kingdom!"

  However, from what he'd read, there didn't seem to be much, if any, starvation occurring in the Fu Kingdom. His father seemed to be doing an excellent job taking care of the kingdom's inhabitants.

  But the food the common people ate? That swill was essentially garbage, barely fit for human consumption. Eating it was hardly an upgrade from starvation, at least as far as Fu Anwen could tell.

  With that in mind, he pledged, "Within one hundred years, everyone in the Fu Kingdom will eat delicious spiritual food!"

  ~-o-O-o-~

  In the background, pages continued being printed, and a number of buildings made of stone and wood were quickly being pieced together. A stack of dozens of formations was floating in the air, ready to be pced under the new buildings and farmnd.

  Fu Anwen's gem supply had completely run out after constructing the formations. Unless he devoted some time to searching underground to restock on gems, his formation-building days were over.

  The rgest of these new buildings were shared homes where a teacher and small number of disciples would live. The bottom floor of each house had a rge bedroom for the teacher, a shared bedroom for the young disciples, a common room, and some storage closets. The top floor contained a cssroom with desks and chairs along with a small library.

  Fu Anwen's brain was filled with books optimized from the thousands of books he'd read, most notably the one containing the results of hundreds of years of Fu Tianchen's research. A small portion of these books would be used to fill each house's library, but only the first two libraries would be stocked with books made from purchased materials. Paper and ink were simply too expensive, especially considering the massive quantity of books that would eventually be needed.

  The slightly smaller buildings were a shared dining hall for the sect and private bathhouses for each house's inhabitants. The bathhouses utilized a combined Heating and Purification Formation to keep the water comfortably warm and clean. In addition, there were a few storage sheds and outhouses.

  The dining hall was small for now, but it would eventually be repced with a much rger one after the sect recruited a rge enough number of disciples.

  The houses themselves were simple to build, and most of the items needed to furnish them had already been ordered, but only two of them would actually be lived in once the time came for the Farming Sect to officially open its doors.

  While he'd prefer to have a bustling sect with hundreds of disciples from day one, there simply weren't enough formations and books to go around.

  One could argue that the bathhouse didn't technically need Heating and Water Purifying Formations to keep it clean and comfortable or a Veiling Formation to block the eyes of peepers, or that the main house could get away without having a Perfect Temperature Formation, but what kind of cut-rate sect would force its disciples to suffer like that?

  Actually, since Fu Anwen was likely one of only a few people capable of using formations in the entire Fu Kingdom, it seemed probable that every other sect's disciples were being forced to suffer at least that badly.

  But what did those shabby sects have to do with his Farming Sect? He wasn't aiming to simply match the level of those other sects. His sect was destined to be the best, so his disciples also deserved the best!

  That was why, until the gem supply problem could be resolved, the Farming Sect would only open with two houses.

  The good news on that front was that Fu Anwen already had everything he needed for those two houses, with the exception of the books. All he needed to do was head back to the location he'd chosen for the sect near Big Tree Vilge and set up the houses and formations. By the time the formations had absorbed enough spiritual energy to activate, the first batch of books would also be ready.

  Within two days at the test, it would finally be time for the Farming Sect to start recruiting disciples!

  ~-o-O-o-~

  After a quick round of fruitless exploration underground, Fu Anwen blinked back to his new house just outside of Big Tree Vilge.

  Pots, pans, dishes, bnkets, pillows, and everything else the house had previously been cking started popping into pce at lightning speed. Once he finished blinking out the st of the newly purchased supplies, he also blinked out of his space and started running through the house wildly.

  While Fu Anwen could experience everything around him even more clearly with his ability than he could by seeing and touching with his eyes and hands, what he sensed with his ability somehow felt less real. There was just something special about experiencing life in person that his ability couldn't repce.

  He quickly ran through each room of his fully furnished home, carefully evaluating how each piece of furniture and decoration looked as he went. Once he reached his bedroom, he climbed up the tiny steps leading up to his massive bed, which was perfectly sized for a seven-foot-tall man, before ying down comfortably with a huge smile on his face.

  "It's perfect!"

  Aside from the wood still being unstained and the walls having a few empty spots that would eventually be filled by his paintings, this was the ideal house he'd imagined building from the start.

  That wasn't to say that it would be ideal for anyone else, however, since he'd designed the house with his blinking ability in mind. This was a three-story house with a basement level, but there were no stairs connecting the different floors. While he'd initially wanted to add stairs, his height made climbing them grueling and inconvenient.

  The ck of stairs wasn't an issue for Fu Anwen, since he didn't pn to invite any visitors to his house, at least until he felt safe revealing his strange abilities to others.

  After rexing in bed for a few minutes, he blinked back into his space. As much as he wanted to spend the rest of the day in his new home, it wasn't time yet. He still had a few more things to do before he could finally live on his own.

  Before heading back to the house in the vilge where his mother and aunties lived, he blinked over to the location he'd chosen as the birthpce of the Farming Sect. In actuality, it was only a stone's throw from his house, but his house and the sect were going to be completely separated by formations.

  For now, he only pced some formations underground and collected any trees that were growing where the first batch of buildings and farms would be. By the time the formations activated, the buildings would be fully constructed in his space and the first batch of books would be printed and bound.

  With his work done, Fu Anwen headed to Big Tree Vilge to have an important conversation with his mother. This was the final, and most important, step in his pn to acquire freedom.

  Today, he was going to become an immortal's disciple.