Civilization Chronicles: Rise of the Divine Creator

Lucas and Pauline clearly had a very different definition of the word ’reasonable’, as when he stated his near-term goal, the always noble, dignified, and composed Great Elder did a full spit-take and began coughing uncontrollably.

A 30,000-square-metres space where the World Qi was 10 times denser than the surrounding average?

What kind of concept was that?

Was Lucas trying to create a vault where Spirit Crystals could be recharged in just a couple of months? Was he trying to create the ultimate cultivation paradise?

Because that’s what it sounded like to Pauline!

She couldn’t even imagine what having an environment like that would mean for the Balfour Family, the Rockwell Kingdom, or even the Blue Sky Continent as a whole.

Specially designed rooms which made use of advanced Spirit Arrays to gather and concentrate World Qi already existed. These were generally referred to as cultivation chambers and were extraordinarily expensive not only because of the materials involved in their construction, but also because building them required Grade 3 Spirit Professionals.

There was only a dozen or so true cultivation chambers in the entire Rockwell Kingdom, with the Balfour Family owning just 2 of them.

These two chambers had each cost the Balfour Family over a million Low-Grade Spirit Crystals to install, were less than 50 square metres in size, and were only capable of increasing the World Qi density inside by 100%.

The Royal Family had the best cultivation chamber in the kingdom, the one reserved exclusively for the ruling monarch’s use, but even that one could only improve World Qi density by about 150%, and it had been more than 10 times as expensive for the Rockwells to build!

What’s more, although Initiates could generally use these cultivation chambers continuously, Adepts couldn’t!

The demands an Adept-level Cultivator had for World Qi was so great, that the World Qi Gathering Arrays of these low-grade cultivation chambers simply couldn’t keep up.

For example, if Pauline cultivated inside the Balfour Family’s Misty City cultivation chamber without stopping to eat, sleep, or do anything else, she would completely exhaust the accumulated World Qi inside in just 12 days.

Celestina could do the same in less than 3 days.

Once the extra World Qi inside this cultivation chamber was fully drained, it would take at least a month before it recovered to its original peak.

Better cultivation chambers obviously existed out there, especially in the Large-Sized Nations and the Rising Sun Empire, but Pauline doubted any of them could increase the World Qi density by 10-fold over such a massive area.

In other words, Lucas’ ’reasonable starting point’ was actually a construct that, forget the local nobles and royals, even the Imperial Family itself would covet!

As Pauline was in the midst of her coughing-fit, she felt a small hand gently patting her back as a young, innocent voice asked her, ”Are you feeling alright, Great Elder?”

Mid-cough, Pauline turned her head and glared at the criminal responsible for making her show such an unsightly appearance.

This actually wasn’t the first time Lucas had received a glare like this; in fact, it happened rather frequently when his common sense didn’t quite match with the common sense of the world around him.

What followed next was normally a verbal rebuke, or a physical one, so Lucas unconsciously began raising his guard, preparing to defend his head from an anger filled fist.

Fortunately for him, Pauline was a bit less violent than her mother, or perhaps she just hadn’t been exasperated enough times by Lucas yet to immediately resort to violence; whatever the case, the Great Elder opted for the former option as she snapped, ”Reasonable? Reasonable?! That’s what you consider a starting point? What next? Do you want to turn an entire city into a cultivation paradise? Or perhaps you’d like to increase the density of World Qi across the entire Rockwell Kingdom by 10-fold! Why stop there, in fact? Why not increase the entire world’s World Qi density by 100 times!”

Averting his eyes, Lucas scratched just scratched his cheek awkwardly and kept silent.

There was no way now that he was going to tell Pauline Balfour that dramatically increasing the Servist’s World Qi density actually was his end goal, and that he had a plan to do just that.

A crazy, far-out, basically impossible plan, but a plan none-the-less.

It took another minute or two for Pauline to recover, and when she did, she couldn’t help letting out a long sigh, shaking her head, and asking, ”Just how big of a... solar collection array, was it, would you need to build in order to accomplish your ’reasonable’ goal?”

Pursing his lips, Lucas hesitated for a moment to respond.

He had already done this calculation, based on some rough estimates he had been able to make from the simple setup he was currently working with.

There were a lot of assumptions he had made along the way, but Lucas had basically determined that sunlight was responsible for delivering almost all of the world’s ambient World Qi, similar to how solar radiation was responsible for the vast majority of the heat at the planet’s surface.

Lucas knew this wasn’t totally true, but he figured it was close enough to make some rough estimates.

Knowledge about how much heat made it to the surface in the form of sunlight, as well as how much was absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere was contained somewhere in Lucas’ inherited memories, but that kind of specific, granular information was still quite vague. Fortunately, these numbers didn’t matter all that much to him at the moment.

For his current setup, Lucas was using 16 mirrors, each with an area of 0.25 square metres. In other words, 4 square metres of mirror reflecting sunlight to a roughly 3-square-metre pool of water.

If each square metre of surface received 1 unit of World Qi, that meant that if the system worked perfectly, the total World Qi density right at the surface of the pool should have been 7 units, or 233% of normal.