The old sect master hovered in mid-air, robes fluttering in the high mountain wind, his jaw ck as he stared down at the transformed peak.
Li Qingxue floated beside him. "It is still Thousand Herb Peak, Master. Only... improved."
Improved? The word felt like mockery. Where once a humble wooden hall had stood -three stories of weathered timber, roof tiles cracked by centuries of rain and snow -now rose a forest of towering structures.
Twenty buildings at least, each fifty stories high, their walls gleaming with metal and polished stone and something smooth and transparent like frozen water.
No thatch. No carved beams. No familiar scent of aged pine and herbal smoke. Just cold, hard lines that screamed of foreign craft.
"These materials," he rasped, pointing a trembling finger. "Wood has always served us. It breathes with the mountain. These... these things are metal and stone and....... whatever that clear substance is. They feel wrong. Cold. Dead."
Li Qingxue''s voice stayed gentle. "They are fireproof, Master. A single spark once burned half the old herb halls to ash in the Great Fire. You surely remember how many times the buildings burned back then—we would rebuild them, and they would burn again. This time, Jun Jiu designed these walls to never burn again. Even if a Nascent Soul cultivator unleashed heaven-fire here, the buildings would stand."
The old master''s eyes widened further. Fireproof? The very idea was sphemous to every tradition he knew.
Before he could protest, Li Qingxue gestured downward. “Shall we go inside? The production lines are running now. You will understand better once you see."
They descended together,nding on a wide tform of smooth gray stone that felt unnaturally warm beneath their sandals. A pair of massive metal doors-taller than three men-slid open with a soft hiss, revealing a brightly lit hall that stretched farther than the eye could track.
The old master stepped inside and froze mid-stride.
Gone were the rows of wooden tables where disciples once sat for hours, pounding herbs with stone mortars, mixing by hand, chanting formation spells with every pill. Instead, the space hummed with machines. Sleek ck and silver contraptions moved in perfect rhythm-arms of metal spinning, tubes glowing with soft blue light, conveyor belts carrying trays of fresh herbs straight from the outer gardens. The air smelled clean, sharp, almost clinical.
"What sorcery is this?" he shocked beyond believe.
"Not sorcery," Li Qingxue said, walking beside him. "Jun Jiu calls it automation. Every step that once took a hundred hands now happens here, faster and cleaner. Healing pills. Strength pills. Bone-mending pills. Even the simple food pills that disciples used to eat during closed-door training. All of them are made by machine now."
A nearby line caught his eye. Fresh spirit ginseng roots still dripping with morning dew—rode a belt into a sealed chamber. Inside, des shed, liquids bubbled, and glowing runes red in perfect sequence. Secondster, finished golden pills rolled out the other side, each one identical, each one radiating pure medicinal qi.
Li Qingxue pointed to a small worker standing at a control panel, palms pressed to a formation te. "Only a few disciples are needed now. They simply channel their spiritual energy into the final infusion step. Everything else is handled by the machines."
The old master watched, stunned, as tray after tray of perfect pills emerged. "How much is the production now? It seems a lot.”
The old master remembered that if he pushed the thousand herb peak elders to create this many pills, the next day all the disciples would already be protesting and running away. But with this machine they could keep up production. And it was all automatic-he barely saw any disciples here.
Li Qingxue exined. "In the old days... one year ofbor by the entire herb hall might produce one hundred thousand pills. And half would lose potency before the year was out."
"Now the same number is made in ten days. And the packaging is different too." She lifted a small bottle from a finished tray and handed it to him.
It was not the familiar y or ss vial sealed with wax and string. This one was wrapped in a thin, silvery material that felt cool and impossibly light. When he poured a pill into his palm, the spiritual energy inside it felt as vibrant as the day it was born.
"Refined spirit-jade foil and qi-locking barrier films," Li Qingxue exined. “Jun Jiu says the old bottles let the medicinal qi leak away. After one or two years, half the efficacy would be gone. After five years, three-quarters lost. These new packages hold the energy almost perfectly. Ten full years, and the pill loses barely ten percent of its power."
The old master turned the bottle over in his hands again and again, as if it might vanish if he blinked. His mind reeled. Hand-made coconut pillsborious, sacred, passed down through generations—had been reced by this... this factory of steel and light.
He walked deeper into theplex, Li Qingxue at his side. Each new hall showed another miracle. One floor produced Qi Condensation pills at a rate that would have made the old sect weep with joy. Another floor sealed emergency healing kits that could save a dying Core Formation elder in minutes. Workers-only a handful moved with calm precision, their only task to add the final touch of human qi where the machines could not.
Everywhere he looked, the old ways of Xia had been overwritten by something straight out of Prussian legend: endless production, perfect uniformity, ruthless efficiency. The very air hummed with the quiet power of it all.
The old master stopped in the center of thergest hall, surrounded by the ceaseless rhythm of machines, and slowly sank to his knees on the spotless floor. His hands pressed against the cool stone as if he needed to feel something solid.
“Qingxue...” His voice cracked. "We spent centuries grinding herbs by hand, praying that a single batch would not fail. We lost entire harvests to fire, to mold, to simple human error. And now... this."
Li Qingxue knelt beside him, cing a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Jun Jiu said the old way was honorable," she said softly. "But the new way keeps more disciples alive, lets more of them reach higher realms, and protects the sect far better than fear and scarcity ever could."
"Master, you should try each of these pills," Li Qingxue said, offering him an assortment of pills. The old sect master had always personally checked the quality before selling any product in the past.
When he ate the alignment pill, the strengthening pill, and many other pills-one of each of the twenty-five kinds—the more he consumed them, the more his tears fell.
Even the pills created by the machine were two to five times better than those hand- made by the best disciples.
Li Qingxue then showed him the sheet listing the cost of each pill and the resulting profit.
The old master was shocked. He had assumed that pills two or five times more potent woulde with much higher costs. But in truth, they now cost only about thirty to fifty percent of the normal price. As a result, her profit was astonishingly high.
Faster to produce, cheaper, and significantly more potent — all while generating extremely high profits.
Nothing beats the power of capitalism and industrialization.
The old master stared at the endless line of glowing pills marching past him like a silver river.
For the first time in his long life, he did not know whether tough, to cry, or to run back to his cave and pretend none of this had ever happened.
Everything he had been doing until now looked like a failure in the face of all this.
All he could manage was a broken whisper:
"Show me the rest, Qingxue. I... I need to see everything."
Li Qingxue bowed once, her expression soft with understanding. "As you wish, Master. The rare herb gardens are the heart of it all. Follow me."
They rose into the sky again, streaking northward over the transformed mountain range. The old sect master''s heart still hammered from the medicine halls, but nothing could have prepared him for whaty ahead.
Ten years ago, the rare herb gardens
had been a modest terraced
slope-ngrger than three rice paddies where disciples knelt in the mud for hours, coaxing delicate spiritual fruits and ancient spirit nts to grow under careful hand-tended formations Now, as they crested the final ridge, the old master''s eyes bulged so wide they threatened to leave their sockets.
Below them stretched an ocean of green and gold.
The gardens were not gardens anymore.
They were a vast, living sea of cultivation treasures that covered the entire valley
and spilled across three neighboring mountains-easily a hundred times the size of
the old plots.
Endless rows of glowing spiritual
fruits hung heavy on engineered trees. Rare thousand-year blood lotus bloomed in crystal ponds the size ofkes. Angient violet moon ginseng, once so scarce that finding even one stalk was cause for sect-wide celebration, grew in neat, regimented fields that stretched to the horizon.
And every single nt was tended by machines.
Hundreds of sleek white drones hummed through the air like mechanical butterflies, their arms extending with surgical precision.
Some sprayed shimmering nutrient mists, others gently pruned leaves with beams of soft light, whilerger harvest drones drifted low, plucking ripe fruits and depositing them into hovering collection baskets. Artificial intelligence—Jun Jiu''s invisible guiding hand-controlled every movement.
Soil moisture, spiritual qi density, sunlight angle, even the exact second a fruit reached perfect ripeness... all of it calcted and executed without a single human finger touching the earth.
The old master''s mouth fell open in a silent, stunned O. He could not speak. He could barely breathe.
Li Qingxue hovered beside him. "The drones handle seeding, watering, growth monitoring, and harvesting. They work day and night, never tiring, never making mistakes. The entire process is closed-loop and perfect. What once took a hundred disciples working for months can now be done by these machines in days."
She pointed to a cluster of particrly radiant nts-seven-colored spirit orchids, so rare that even the old scrolls imed they bloomed only once every three centuries. A small group of disciples stood at the edge of the plot, palms pressed lightly to formation pirs, gently channeling their qi into the air. "Only for the most delicate and spiritually sensitive herbs do we still need human touch,” Li Qingxue exined. "The disciples rotate in shifts. Their only duty is to infuse pure qi at the final growth stage. Everything else... the machines do." The old master''s hands trembled as he stared at the impossible expanse. In his youth, the sect had been forced to ration evenmon spirit grass. Elders had died protecting a single patch of rare herbs from beast attacks.
Now entire mountainsides of the rarest treasures in existence swayed gently in the breeze, guarded not by sword formations or blood oaths, but by silent, tireless drones.
He had dreamed of abundance like this in his most fevered meditations-visions of
a sect so rich in spiritual medicine that every disciple could cultivate without fear of
scarcity.
But those had been dreams. Fantasies. The kind of wild hope an old man allowed himself only in the quiet hours before dawn.
This... this was real.
A single harvest drone floated past them, its basket overflowing with luminous golden fruits that pulsed with dense medicinal qi. The old master reached out instinctively, fingers brushing the cool metal of the drone''s shell as it passed. It felt solid. Real. Not an illusion.
His voice finally broke free, cracked and awed. “Qingxue... this valley... these mountains... all of it..."
"Yes, Master," she said quietly. “Hundreds timesrger. And the yield is a thousand times greater than ten years ago. Jun Jiu mapped the spiritual veins of the entire région. He adjusted the soil the formations, even the weather patterns with climate arrays. The
nts grow stronger, faster, purer than anything our ancestors could have imagined."
The old sect master''s knees buckled in mid-air. He would have fallen if Li Qingxue
had not gently caught his arm. Tears—actual tears—glistened at the corners of his weathered eyes.
In two thousand years of Wudang history, no sect master had ever witnessed such a
sight.
He had expected ruin when he emerged from seclusion. Instead, he had found a paradise no ancestor had dared to dream of.
His lips moved soundlessly for a long moment before he managed a broken
whisper: "Take me closer, Qingxue. Let me... touch one of the fruits. I need to feel it with my
own hands... or I fear my old heart will convince me this is nothing but a dying man''s final delusion."