BCJch37

His workshop still had a new building smell and a great view of the surrounding lands. A chicken, the size of an ostrich, clucked happily in a nearby box nest, happy as the pigs in feces in a nearby pin. Despite their odd looks, Silas’s few servants looked happy enough.

Spring wasn’t in full swing, but the snow had melted, overfilling the lake, forcing the levy to be built up higher to prevent flooding, and the ground had dried enough to be moist. It was in the magic twilight between soggy and dry that made plowing it so effective. Manure was gathered and processed with several potions to maximize fertility, while plots were separated with crop rotation in mind. After the massive life-taking blizzard, they had an early spring, so Silas decided to put a pin in hunting down vampires to plow and plant.

He had already slipped into town, reported the Douglass family dead, and made a stake on their farm before fencing it all in. Silas had the Lazarus pit expanded and raised some corpse puppets to raise more corpse puppets. They were programmed to cultivate and progressively do a better job at the task. Silas still performed the final programming and put a bount by the name of Timothy Preston in charge of it. The man was a nice individual who liked to wear a beaver pelt hat and comb his fabulous mustache.

What bodies he recovered from the Douglass raid were made into corpse puppets and put to work on various farm projects. Silas could have held back to save people from their mind control, but he believed the only moral way to wage war was to end it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, when he tracked down the vampire, it had already left with its fellows to parts unknown.

It was plowing season, and he planned to use telekinesis to get the job done. There were numerous reasons why he wanted to do it himself. Silas wanted to gain more Dao, train his telekinesis, get a feel for his new lands, inspect the animals on his farm, slay any demon beasts that might have gotten into the fence, keep an eye on the vampires preparing a show, and plan his next cultivation move.

Silas failed to get the Dao of hunger or blood from Sandra, but he could condense tiny stones that carried those Dao from her blood. A pill to enhance his chances of gaining those Dao was still in the works; he experimented with an alchemist’s perspective off and on. As a formations specialist, he had some of the materials he needed to build something to improve his cultivation.

He had a habit, on occasion, of looking at things from his different specialties and understanding. So, for example, as an alchemist, he saw problems differently from a formation specialist or spirit farmer.

All the animals on his farm have transformed, thanks in no small part to adding crushed spirit stones to their food for a little oomph. He also gave them water from the lake flush with spirit liquid and occasionally gave the chickens crushed fish bones to up their calcium levels. He didn’t want their eggs to break on the ground or inside the bird.

His methods and approaches changed with the situation; as an alchemist, he would give the bird a pill or potion to improve their calcium. In the headspace of a formations specialist, he would naturally make a formation to draw calcium to the chickens' food. When the thought from the perspective of a spirit farmer, the answer was ground-up fishbones mixed in their feed.

When growing stronger through cultivation, the alchemist or the formations specialist often took the lead in his mind. Of course, he could bleed the vampires dry and make potions from their blood to take on the Dao of hunger and blood for himself, but he had another option. In the headspace of a formations specialist, he carved a small bone chassis for his Dao Eye and filled the fractals with vampire blood. Then, after some tinkering and failed experiments, he added powdered ivory. He added shaved never melt ice to the mix. He felt his connection to the cold link to the device along with his Dao stone to the ivory.

The formations came to life, and it was time to test his creation. Silas had a glove made with mirrored symbols connecting to the chassis. Silas used the same mixture to make the connection perfect. His first model of the vampire glove treasure alpha version was complete. He placed his will upon it, binding the treasure to himself.

In theory, the treasure should be able to cultivate by absorbing blood from those Silas defeated. As he absorbed blood, the glove would grow stronger, and as it did, so, too, would Silas. He left room on the glove to add more formations later as needed. The formations on the glove glowed silver to his spirit sense.

He took the glove off and placed it in a box when Aoife entered his workshop without permission. Silas sucked in a breath before taking out his pipe. His teeth were stained from the tobacco, no matter how much he brushed them.

“I need thou to make love to me like a savage girl after a raid. After the latest rendition of Romeo and Juliet, I was so moved by their wanton teen lust and early death I need to be ravaged.” Silas picked up the bone gauntlet he was working on and slowly sanded it with telekinesis. It was one of his edgier takes on body armor, and he was satisfied by how it turned out. Chepi had worn him down into making a headdress. So, he decided to go all out with bones and feathers and gave it an armor motif.

He had clear rules about disturbing him in his workshop that Aoife knew applied to her. Bount or not, she would be punished for disturbing him. Silas took a wooden paddle from its hanger, and she bit her bottom lip and shook her rear at him. The shapely blue-eyed redhead had come before to disturb him, and it had become a ritual.

Aoife hiked up her skirt to show off her bronze behind and looked back with crescent eyes knowing what was coming. Her little pink pussy glistened under the workshop’s lights. Silas felt his mind go numb with the desire he couldn’t stop or escape. There was a reason why his girls were forbidden to enter his workshop.

Silas had finally begun making progress.

He smacked her ass with the paddle, but the red marks healed before the next strike. Silas knew the paddle would break before she did and stopped after two licks. Dealing out punishment wasn’t what he liked to do, but he couldn’t let her get away with no reprisal for her actions. Silas didn’t like punishing her, and his teenage hormones were going to his head.

“If thou will not punish me, then tell me what art thou working on?” Aoife asked.

She used her sexual appeal to fish for information and inform the others later. Of his minions, only Dotty knew everything. Thanks to her telepathic communication, the majestic spirit beast knew how to keep a secret and couldn’t be overheard.

He debated whether the glove was important enough to leak before it was ready. The formations specialist should be working on a flying machine to use his spirit rings to give transportation chains a leg up in the new world. Traveling anywhere and delivering flour, meat, and other commodities in hours would make him beyond wealthy. Any formations specialist in his position would be on that and leave everything else to the wayside.

Silas put down the paddle, smacked Aoife’s ass with his hand, and squeezed it to get a good feel of the soft, firm bottom. He brushed his fingers between her cheeks to feel the nice warm sensation of a beautiful immortal woman’s behind. Complicated thoughts of formulas to position the complicated fractals of formations escaped him as they fled to the background of his mind as he focused on sensation.

Aoife grabbed his hand, gently pulled it away, then placed it on her breasts. She knew what she was doing, and he could tell it was a trick the bount wasn’t afraid to use.

When he focused and broke contact with her, his mind was slow to return to its normal temperament. It was the teenage hormones his mind was filled with; no matter how much sex he had at night, he was a teenager. Silas would be controlled by his sex drive until he started mind cultivation or reached 30. By his cultivation rate, it might not even be by that point.

“What do thou know of vampires?” Silas asked.

“Tis a term that can apply to many different creatures, apparently. Did thou know we bounts inflated the term due to early dalliances?” Aoife said.

Her crescent eyes narrowed at him, and he admired her beauty and the ruffles of her blue dress that matched her eyes and contrasted well with her red hair. He wanted to string his hands through it, strip the garment off, and ravage her in his workshop. Doing so felt taboo to him, and if his formations teacher ever got word of the action, he would be reprimanded. Her dark skin inherited by her Chinese mother, gave Aoife such an exotic look.

Aoife was also extremely wealthy and a silent landowner in China for nearly a thousand years. A plan had been formed to create a flying device and use his compass to map out the new world and then create a lane between her property and his for transport and trade between them. Once it was established, they could widen the lane to include other settlements, drastically increasing their trade and wealth. Flight and near-infinite storage space would change the world as surely as spiritual energy.

“Did Eugene capture a bunch of village girls?” Silas asked.

His red-headed woman covered her mouth, and her eyes narrowed mischievously. “A lady doesn’t gossip about the business of their seniors. Methinks he made the act fashionable, and the others couldn’t resist plowing young fertile fields even without seed to plant. If thou will not spread, it around big sis Yoshino made an African tour to the scandal of many.”

Aoife held up his white bone glove and looked it over. “Mayhap it is a farm implement of some kind, or is this the method of flight. I expected more feathers.” Aoife said.

She was digging for information and joking to put his guard down, and it worked.

“What do thou know of cultivation?” Silas asked.

“I have read the latest rendition of the mess thou call a textbook. After that mad blonde Shinigami refined it, I noticed some pieces missing from the original text. While the new book was excellent for building a foundation, the missing information was troublesome. To my disappointment, some parts would be good to know at certain intervals but were missing.” Aoife said.

Missing pieces didn’t matter; Silas was the source, even if Urahara wanted to censor information. After studying the text, Silas got the idea. But her concerns were misplaced. Urahara already went over the edited materials with Silas and had some people in the academy putting together supplementary materials specialized in the information cut out. To put it bluntly, they were separating the information into levels of advancement and making miraculous time. Silas wouldn’t be able to do what they did even with a few decades.

“Those texts will be separated into different texts to not overburden new students with superfluous information. Cultivation is complicated enough without going on tangents between learning how to distribute spirit energy to veins, arteries, and capillaries before preparing to cultivate the heart. Did thou know I listed the exercises with animal hearts several hundred pages after the initial exercise? I covered foundation establishment and core establishment techniques before that.” Silas said.

She stared at him with her deep blue eyes before snorting. Aoife turned the glove around a few times before laying it on his desk. “I know some of the basics of formations and learned most of the fractal sets, but these make no sense. All the rules I have learned art broken with this contraption. Why is there a mirror talisman with no paper placed on a knuckle?” Aoife asked.

“To mirror the effect of the chassis onto the glove without compromising space or damaging the fractals, I placed a mirror talisman formation on the knuckle. I didn’t use paper because I know the algorithms to bypass the need. Talismans art to save time when creating formations in my workshop. I have time to spare.” Silas said.

She crossed her arms and glared at the glove-like it offended her. “What about the interference weakness mirror talisman arrays possess? There art anecdotes about thou finding entries into powerful formations because of them.” Aoife said.

He had the same issues about them and included all the security he could. At his current cultivation, mirror formations were the only way to do complicated effects on small items. It was fine because, besides the Shinigami, his group was the only one with the knowledge to use the weakness.

Before he collected his thoughts for a reprisal, he sensed someone spiritually powerful enter his spirit sense range along with hundreds of spiritually weak people.