Capítulo 152: Chapter 150 - Building a Home
Over the next several days, Zhang Bai led the group in renovating the villa they'd purchased. Whoever had designed the place originally had clearly intended to establish a large family or a small clan in this place overlooking much of Lantern City. The entire villa was ringed with a stone wall one hundred meters wide by one hundred and fifty meters long and five meters high. The height of that wall, however, varied as it stretched back from the narrow road in front of the villa. The center of the villa was home to a wide staircase that allowed residents to move easily from one terraced level of the villa to the next, while a winding garden path along either side of the staircase allowed for a more meandering walk up the slope of the villa.
At the top of the villa, a grand residence had been built, three stories tall with lavish halls for entertaining and dining and enough rooms to house several generations of a family. On the terrace levels further down, six individual courtyards had been built, each of which could comfortably house a family of ten to twelve. Clearly, the person who had designed the layout of these courtyards had intended for them to be occupied by men who kept at least one or two concubines in addition to their actual wife, with room for several children to grow up under the watchful eyes of their families.
The lowest level of the villa held a number of less ornate buildings that prioritized function over elegance and refinement. A squat two-story building held dormitory-style rooms for household staff and servants while the opposite side held a receiving hall attached to a stable with room for numerous horses and carriages.
While a third of the space within the villa had been dedicated to gardens that had become overgrown and in some cases choked with weeds, the rest of it provided far more living space than the group of young cultivators could ever make use of in their short stay in Lantern City. Moreover, the villa's distance from the center of activity in Lantern City meant that few people who did need so much living space were willing to purchase it. As a result, the villa had lain abandoned and unmaintained through three winters, with autumn storms, warm springs, and warmer summers taking their toll on the buildings. Few buildings had escaped broken roof tiles and every building suffered from a combination of water damage and the invasive growth of moss and vines.
"Bai, how much of this are you planning to renovate?" Ao Wen asked when they completed their survey of the villa.
"All of it really," Zhang Bai said. "Not that we'll need all of it necessarily," he added. "But I feel like it would be a drain on all of us if we allowed ourselves to live somewhere that was half crumbling around us. Besides, it'll be easier to sell when we're done with it if we repair it all. Most of the work won't even be expensive since it can be completed by mortals who work for gold and silver. The expensive parts will be the places we have to install formations or other elements to aid our cultivation."
"I have a selfish request," Ao Wen said, looking over the vast villa. "I'd like to wall off the lowest level from the courtyards above. We can renovate the staff quarters first, it'll be convenient if the people working here have a place to stay and we should prioritize them since we'll be asking so much of them in the days to come. The other building though, the welcome hall with all the guest rooms and the stables, I want to claim that one for myself," she said firmly.
"Are you planning to repurpose it for your alchemy?" Feng Xi asked, trying to imagine why Ao Wen would need such a large space just for alchemy.
"Yes, but more than that," Ao Wen explained. "We don't need much money to renovate this place but we do need money for our cultivation. I need to replace my saber, Xi could benefit from not only a superior bow constructed of Darkwood but arrows that suit her techniques as well. Jin will doubtless need to pay fees to local experts in Light energy if he wants to learn how to enhance his techniques in this place of Darkness and Bai will need to spend almost as much as I will on alchemy to practice constructing formation cores and providing energy to the formations he's building here," she explained. "I know we're all eager to venture into the Darkwood to take up the hunting missions posted by the Association of Loose Cultivators but to fund everything, I need to offer what alchemy services I can. Since I promised not to set up a shop to sell elixirs, that means I need to operate a clinic where I can provide treatments for cultivation ailments. I was also inspired by Alchemist Ma's greenhouse. There are some herbs that I can grow outside but in the winter, I'll mostly be relying on indoor growing with special lanterns."
"I see," Zhang Bai said with a nod. "So you want to wall off the first level because it will be open to outsiders. I think that's a good idea. Do you need any formations for your clinic?"
"I can use several," Ao Wen admitted readily. "I don't know if they're within your grasp though, and I have no desire to hire someone to place formations that you can't. I'd prefer it if you place the ones you can, and then, if the others are ones you feel you can learn, we'll add them as you go."
"Sometimes I forget that you kept company with Formation Masters when you were Cong Daiyu," Zhang Bai said with a shake of his head. "I assume you'll want an Alarm and Ward formation to keep patients out of areas of the clinic they shouldn't go, and that you'll want an Isolation formation for your concocting lab to keep noise from disrupting you. The first one I've been practicing because it's useful everywhere and the second one I can at least manage a lesser version of. What else did you have in mind?"
"In the sect, we used an Energy Gathering formation in our herb gardens," Ao Wen explained. "We combined that with a Rapid Growth formation to increase our yields and reduce the time it took to grow herbs between harvests. I could also use a number of Attunement formations in the garden to create sections of the garden that are rich in the appropriate types of energy. The ingredients used in my Dragons' Tongue Firebreath Elixir, for example, grow best when nurtured near a source of fire energy. There are others, but I think that over-investing in formations when we don't intend to stay long is not to our benefit."
"What if we did stay longer," Feng Xi asked suddenly. "I know you want to go to Red Moon City and the mainland as soon as possible, but what if we stayed through the spring or even the summer? As long as our training isn't being impaired and we're all progressing, is there any real rush to go to Red Moon City?"
"I never really thought about it," Ao Wen said, stepping back from the decisions she'd made after her mother had declared her dead to the Ao family to think about what it would be like to have a longer stay in Lantern City. Feng Xi was right that they could leave in summer or early autumn and still make it to Red Moon City in plenty of time. If she established a reputation for herself here as an alchemist, it wouldn't matter whether she had a Novice badge she could display or not, and if she truly needed it, she could hire a fast carriage for a trip to Red Moon City to take the exam and then return. If she earned enough spirit crystals here during the winter, she could even afford to use a visit to Redmoon City at the beginning of spring to purchase supplies that weren't available here and then return. If they relocated to Red Moon City at the beginning of spring, they'd just have to go through another round of finding a place to stay where they could train and it would be even more expensive there than it was here. She didn't want to leave the peninsula for the mainland until at least two of them had broken through to the third stage so did it matter whether they trained here or in Red Moon? Maybe, but again, Xi made a good point that they could leave as soon as they outgrew Lantern City's ability to support their growth.
"Xi, you make a really good point," Ao Wen finally said. "I'm not sure about it and I think we should all consider it over the winter while we train. Once we've been here for a moon or two we can make a decision about what comes next, but for now, let's make decisions in a way that assumes we might choose to stay longer and avoid closing any doors on the assumption that we'll be leaving when the snow melts."
"In that case, I have a few ideas of my own," Feng Xi said. "Wen, you and Bai can take charge of the front of the villa first. Jin," she continued, startling the young Soldier who had assumed he'd mostly provide physical labor while others did the planning. "I may not be a Gardener like my mother, but I learned a lot from her. You have much sharper senses than I do. I'd like your help hunting down anything that might have built nests or burrows in the gardens here so we can start getting the landscaping under control. If the front of the villa is for visitors and the public, the back of the villa should be a restful retreat for all of us."
"Xi, while you're at it," Ao Wen said as an idea occurred to her. "Pick one of the six courtyards that's in the worst shape to be demolished. I know you need a long open space to practice archery, but we should also give ourselves a small dueling arena for everyone to practice fighting," she said. No sooner had she said it than her eyes became a little distant, staring into two different pasts. "You know, for a moment, I wondered what it would be like if we built a small sect here. It's years too soon to think about that, but for just a moment, I could almost see a few dozen disciples coming to us for lessons in sword, saber, archery, music, formations, alchemy… It's not a bad dream for someday."
"Someday," Zhang Bai agreed with a nod. "Not here, but when we find a place and we're strong enough to become teachers for others, it's not a bad dream at all."
REFLEXIONES DE LOS CREADORES 
JustJae
JustJae Thank you everyone for all the support! If you’re enjoying this, please check out my other work ‘Unparalleled Artist Unlikely Hero’, set thousands of years earlier in the same world and following Wu Ling the disciple of one of Ao Wen’s previous incarnations!
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