He was not able to pay any attention to the next two classes but the passage of time helped him come out of his shocked state.
The Lunch time came and as most of his classmates left, he sat in his seat and ate from the lunch box Lily had prepared for him and thought about his situation.
And it was then that he realized that despite how dangerous the situation had become for him now, he wasn't as disappointed or scared as he should have been.
True, Nie Li might have been a safety blanket for him but it wasn't as if he would not be able to achieve anything without that arrogant ass.
Plus, without Nie Li, the Demon Beast Horde attacked the city in two years instead of the few months that happened in the Canon because of all the attention that Nie Li brought to the city with his inventions.
Without Nie Li, he would have more time to increase his cultivation. Plus, all the resources that Nie Li took for himself, like the Shadow Devil, the Abstruse Gemstone, the Nightmare Demon Pot and other such treasures would belong to him instead.
Then he froze as he suddenly realized that since this was the first time line, the Temporal Demon Spirit Book must still be in the Desert Palace in the Endless Desert.
When Nie Li found the book, it's time related powers allowed him to stay inside the stationary space-time realm within it for hundreds of years, training and reading millions of books.
This was the reason why his knowledge of Inscription patterns, Alchemy and Cultivation Methods was so vast in the first place.
If he got his hands on that book then… huhuhuhuhu.
He barely managed to stop himself from cackling madly from his good fortune.
Yes, without Nie Li, the future is pretty much a blank but he had his own set of powers and he wasn't about to stop because of his fear of some Demon Lord or the Dark Guild.
He took a deep breath, feeling better about the situation already and then he took out a Soul Crystal from his spatial ring.
He channeled his soul force inside it and then face faulted when he realized that his soul force had risen from 2 to a measly 3.
His heart ached as he realized that two days of sporadic cultivation by his 2 clones only managed to increase by soul force by 1.
Which meant that if they had cultivated properly without any distractions then they would have probably increased his soul force by 2.
With some simple maths calculation, he realized that if he put his Clones to the task then each one of his clone would increased his Soul Force by 0.5 each day.
And that was when they were role playing as a Cultivating expert that gave them a huge advantage over normal students.
14-16 hours of intense cultivation each day for 0.5 increase in soul force. He could now understand why many of the students never went past Bronze Rank in the entire lives.
With his cultivation rate, if had 10 clones then his soul force would rise by 5 each day. And if he had 100 clones then his Soul force would raise by 50 each day.
That seemed all good and dandy until you remember that in order to raise the cultivation level, the requirement soul force in increased by 10 times per level.
A Bronze rank requires 100 soul force to gain a level. A Silver rank requires 1,000 soul force. A Gold rank requires 10,000 soul force. A Black Gold rank requires 100,000 soul force and the Legend rank requires 1,000,000 soul force.
So even if he had a thousand clones, it would take him over 6 years to reach 1 star Legend Rank.
And he would have to wait for 3 years to even gain a thousand clones.
Yep. This is not going to work.
If he wanted to cultivate at a faster rate, then he needed to change his method.
Instead of relying on his clones to do all the work, he needed to do what Nie Li did. Which was basically finding a better Cultivation Technique, find better Alchemy Pills to increase his cultivation rate and so on.
Hell, even the Abstruse gemstone found in the Emperor Ming's tomb alone would raise his Cultivation speed by at least three times. And with the Universal Replicator, he would be able to give an Abstruse gemstone to all his clones.
Fuck yeah, this was what he was talking about.
He went to the bathroom and brought out the newly born Clone 3 and told it to take his place while he entered the mirror world and left the school before coming out of a mirror in an empty alley.
He walked through the city until he came to an Alchemist shop.
He entered the shop and was warmly welcome in by a young lady.
The shop was filled with Alchemy items like pills, bottles, cauldrons, various kinds of alchemy ingredients and so on. All the walls in the room had a lamp that illuminated the entire shop which smelled of various herbs and other things that he couldn't recognize with his untrained sense of smell.
"Hello Young master. How may I help you today?" the young lady behind the desk asked.
"I want Alchemy pill that would help me increase my cultivation rate." He said.
The woman nodded before she went to the pill section and brought out a few for his selection.
"We have a few options for you right here." She said as she displayed the pills to him. "This here is Soul Assembling Pill. Our best work so far. It will allow you to increase the rate of your cultivation by 4 times. Each pill costs 6000 demon spirit coins but a bottle of it containing 10 pills cost 50,000 demon spirit coins."
Then she went on to showcase the other pills which were slightly cheaper but were not as effective.
He remembered Nie Li giving the formula of the Soul Nurturing, Soul Concentrating and Soul Temper pills to the Alchemy Association that were ten times, hundred times and a thousand times more powerful than the Soul Assembly pill.
Those pills led to the revitalization of the Alchemy Association and was the main reason why it went from it's stagnating place to the place where it became just as important and powerful as the Snow Wind Family which had a Legend rank cultivator and the City Lord in it.
No wonder the President and the sexy Director of the Alchemist Association treated Nie Li like a rare treasure.
"What other pills do you have?" he asked even as he pulled out 6 cards of 10,000 from his spatial ring and passed it on to the woman. 10,000 more as tip.
The woman gave him a wide smile before she enthusiastically started to show him the other pills that she had in the shop.
By the end of it, he had bought a bottle of Body Refining Pill that was used by Fighters to increase the rate of strength cultivation, a bottle of Recovery Pills that increased the rate of healing injuries and removed the impurities left behind in the body from the other pills and a few Enhancing pills.
Each bottle easily cost over tens of thousands of Demons Spirit coins.
A commoner family was only able to earn 2,000-3,000 Demon Spirit coins in a year. Buying even a single pill like this would be a dream come true for them.
Such a thing can only be bought by the three major, the 14 Noble and the other Aristocrat houses under them. No wonder the commoners were left behind by the nobles when it came to cultivation when they have access to so many resources that the commoners could never even dream of having.
After buying the pills, he returned to his school through the mirror world where he swapped with Clone 3.
He handed the pills to Clone 3 and sent it to the Pocket Dimension where it ate the pills and started cultivating while Shen Yin clone 2 started to use the Universal Replicator to make more of such pills to be used in the future.
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