Arrival.

The next morning there was no breakfast delivered, instead Collin practiced alchemy till an hour before noon when he left his villa. He decided he would head to the market and get some food before making his way to the docks to watch the trade ships arrive. The market was crammed full of people, hundreds of new stalls had appeared since the last time he was here.

While he was making his way through the crowd toward the food stalls, Collin was looking at the wares being sold at these new stalls. Weapons, armor, and spirit herbs and ores were common in these stalls, there were also those hawking rare family treasures and artifacts from ruined sects, or so they claimed.

Collin looked at all the items for sale around him as he waited in line to get some food. He watched as army of faceless servants wondered between the stalls, buying and selling wherever they went. Tomorrow most of these vendors would be replaced with foreign vendors. When that happened, the crowd would be many times larger, the amount of money that flowed between customer and vendor would be staggering. All of this would be topped off with an auction the night before the trade ships left the city.

After getting enough food for six people, Collin headed to the docks to watch the ships arrive. The docks were massive, and normally they seemed like they could hold the entire city with ease, but they were cramped with what Collin believed was half the city's population. Finding a spot on one of the upper walls near the entrance of the docks Collin began to wait with the rest of the people gathered.

The wait wasn't long before people started shouting and pointing to the horizon. A shiny silver dot could be seen, every minute that passed the tiny dot grew bigger and bigger. Half an hour later five silver bean shaped ships with golden array lines slowed to a crawl just outside the docks. The ships were one thousand feet long, three hundred feet tall and two hundred feet wide and if Collin held up one of the dried beans from his pantry their silhouettes would look the same.

The ships were lined up front to back as they made their way up the ramp from the ocean to the stone dock, the lead ship's rear started swinging ninety degrees, followed by the other ships till they were side by side twenty feet apart. The crowd began to roar as the bottom portion of the ships lowered themselves to the ground and the first of the crews could be seen.

The crowd started to disperse as large creates were starting to be off loaded, it wasn't that the people gathered weren't curious about the creates, but there where now half a dozen men in brown coats standing one hundred feet in the air staring at the crowd. To stand in the air like that, they were most likely Core Formation rank or higher, and being stared at by them was uncomfortable.

As Collin was leaving with the crowd, he gave a last look at the cultivators standing in the air. All they had to do was stand there and a crowd of over one hundred thousand people dispersed. This was a form of power that many young cultivators like Collin wanted to possess.

Leaving the docks with everyone else Collin's stomach wanted him to return home and eat the goodies that he bought earlier, but instead he headed to the bookstores in the market. The owners of the bookstores were going to be buying books for their shops over the next few days, so he decided to ask them to look out for alternative path cultivation books for him. He gave each of the store owners a list of the methods he had and put down a deposit of fifty spirit stones for any books they found that were different from the ones he had.

With any luck they would finds books that would be useful to Collin now or later. Even if they got books that weren't going to be helpful to his cultivation, they would still provide him with knowledge of different ways to cultivate. Collin had already read all the books of the various cultivation methods he had, and while he could understand the ways they were different from each other, he still didn't know why they worked the way they did. He knew he still had a lot to learn before everything made sense.

After restocking his supply of inscription materials, he would head to a shop he never went to before, to check out what they had for sale. It was a shop that sold treasure refining materials. Collin had been reading the books on treasure refining that he bought before he became a cultivator, and now that he was at the 5th layer of Qi Condensation, he could now at least try treasure refining.

A refining forge requires much more Qi than an alchemy cauldron to operate. Collin was able to practice alchemy just a few days after becoming a cultivator because his villa had an array designed for alchemy, but it didn't have one for treasure refining. His new villa had several arrays for both alchemy and treasure refining in the main house and one for each in the two smaller houses, but he wasn't in a hurry to move into his new villa just yet.

The first thing Collin noticed after entering the shop was the refining forges lined up along the outer walls of the shop. The ones closest to the door came up to his hips while the ones on the back wall were twelve feet tall and as wide as he was tall. Just looking at them gave a heavy feeling to Collin and after a few seconds of that feeling something popped into his mind, 'Nascent Soul'. They were refining forges meant for Nascent Soul treasure refiners to use, the number of Nascent Soul treasure refiners in Camis city could be counted on one hand.

If Collin sold everything he had while he was a young master and what he currently owned, he might be able to afford to buy one of those forges. But a naked homeless kid living in a refining forge might attract more attention than he wanted.

Taking his eyes off the massive forges Collin quickly spotted the shop clerk, a middle-aged man with short greying hair and an immaculately trimmed goatee. The man spoke in a calm authoritative voice as he asked Collin what he wished, ten minutes later he had gathered what he called the starter package and had given advice that would be helpful to any treasure refining beginner. The clerk also suggested that Collin join the Refiner's Guild as he collected one hundred and sixty-three spirit stones.

Collin wanted to join the Alchemist's Guild because it was a massive organization that even empires had to be careful of offending, while the Refiner's Guild along with the Inscriptionist's Guild are a loose collection of sperate guilds formed in various cities. If he joined either of the two guilds in Camis city, he would receive a 5% discount on materials, access to mentors, and could pay to read the books in their libraries. But if he moved to a different city, he would have to join that city's guilds.

He hoped that he would be able to take and pass the Alchemist's Guilds test within the next couple of months, after that he would decide if he wanted to join one or both of the other guilds. Collin already knew what the Inscriptionist's Guild test required and was 70% sure he could pass the first try. But if he were going to take the test, he would have to practice till he was sure he had a 90% chance of passing the test.

While Collin was thinking about the guilds and the tests they had, he arrived in front of the alchemy shop. It was time to check in with Valeria and get whatever hints she could give him for the final four pills that he needed to make.