Note before starting - although I'm not Chinese, I really like the Chinese mythology and culture, so the culture of all the worlds there will be (maybe apart from some tiny exceptions) will be Chinese. The MC is also Chinese if you didn't notice - that's why the starting people will all be 'implanted' with the Chinese language(let's pretend they do pls), culture, writing, etc. They will still develop some quirks based on their location and I might make some 'barbarian' cultures, but once again, it'll be mainly Chinese. If you want diverse cultures go read World Keeper(amazing free book :D), I'll be a basic bitch here by myself lmao

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As Meng Li finished looking mentally at the map of the world, he opened his eyes and smiled lightly. After being here for a few days, he was finally getting to the interesting part. And despite the system's repeated insistence that he was in fact spending large amounts of time cultivating or sleeping, it still felt like merely days to him. So, he may be here for years already, but spiritually, he was here for barely a few days.

As he opened his eyes, Meng Li once again saw the forest of Starry Leafed Oaks. It was his first summon, and accidentally he summoned enough to make a whole forest, but it turned out quite nice, because the sight was truly... Magnificent. Meng Li was still enchanted despite having already seen it.

Snapping himself out of the daze, he asked the system.

'Is there any way to teleport? I could go back to the control room and set the teleport point somewhere else, but there must be a more efficient way, isn't there?'

[Yes, there is. As all other commands, it's mentally controlled. You can also use the planet's model from before to mark the destination.]

As Meng Li read the system's answer, he realised that the planet model he used before as a map had indeed stayed in his consciousness. He had to admit that it was very useful tool, and now with the teleportation tool, he would be able to easily travel anywhere he wanted. Excited, he chose to teleport to the peak of the highest mountain. This time, the teleportation wasn't like the travel to the control room - in fact, it was far quicker. Before he even realised that he had been transported already, Meng Li felt a sharp pain in his lungs, and he was forced to cough violently. But when he took in another breath, he quickly realised that he was... suffocating? No, but he still wasn't getting enough oxygen, so he was slowly losing consciousness.

'If I really died here that would be the stupidest death in the history of ever...' he absent-mindedly thought, before getting himself together.

'Wait, I have to get back, or else I'll really die!' he freaked out.

Fortunately, the controls of the teleportation tool were really handy, and allowed him to choose a destination extremely easily. But in his panic, he didn't quite look where he was teleported... Which was a problem, because he ended up teleporting above an ocean. And while the saltwater getting in his eyes wasn't pleasant, it was certainly better than suffocating with full lungs. After calming down a bit, Meng Li determined where he was. He was near an island in the... Well, the islands along the equator, but not in the island paradise. Island hell, maybe? No, it's a bad name for tropical islands.

Once again getting himself together, Meng Li teleported to the nearest island. He quickly cleaned himself and dried himself with his qi. The robe he was wearing, although simple, was smooth and didn't get dirty at all - it was really nice. After drying himself, he thought about what he wanted to do. At the moment, he had a bucket list of sorts:

First, look at the crystals in the caves under the islands along the equator - he could do it right now.

Second, ask the system about summoning humans and summon them - preferably tribes. This could wait since it was likely to require quite a lot of effort.

Having decided to first look at the crystals and ask the system about them, Meng Li looked at the map. Fortunately, it turned out that the island he was currently on had one of such caves under it. While Meng Li could teleport, he decided to instead take a walk to the cave, and when he could no longer see anything interesting, he would teleport there.

Deciding, he turned towards the middle of the island and started walking. The robe he received from the system at the start included two linen shoes, made from a slightly different, sturdier material, which still protected his feet from any sharp objects, not like they would hurt him - the body at the Qi Foundation stage was in the beginning stages of reinforcement and even at the beginning stages, things such as thorns or brambles wouldn't even scratch the surface of his skin.

After a few minutes of walking, Meng Li finally reached the denser forest. The beach was unusually long, and it was hard to walk across, but the plus was that he had time to admire the scenery of the island. The skyline was formed by two peaks - one was slightly taller, and it was the one further ahead. The sunlight streaming from behind his back created a majestic shadow of the smaller mountain on the slope of the bigger one, giving the viewer a sense of scale. The view made Meng Li smile - the ability to shape the world at will gave him the means to create such scenic landscapes, but the spectacles created by nature were still the ones which always managed to stun him. He was always an artist at heart - and while he did not have the ability to communicate the beauty of his imagination through neither writing nor art, he was left unable to show anyone his ideas. Now that he had this power, the whole world would be his canvas!

With such an uplifting thought, Meng Li managed to walk all the way to the cave entrance in what felt like minutes. The cave entrance was located behind a few bushes - it wasn't necessarily hidden, but if one wasn't looking carefully, they might miss it. Behind the bushes was a pitch black cave. Meng Li created a source of light using his qi and continued to walk into the cave. But what he saw disappointed him - the cave was narrow, and besides a few patches of moss and tiny mushrooms, there wasn't much to see. After walking for a few dozen minutes in such a bland environment, Meng Li simply decided to teleport directly to where the crystals were.

When he teleported, he immediately felt a difference. First, his ears felt stuffed, but once he swallowed once, they were back to normal. Secondly, although before he summoned a light source using his qi, he could still see some light from behind him with his superior senses - but now, he was in pitch darkness. The only source of light in this cave was his summoned ball of light. After walking forwards just a few more steps, he saw a surreal sight - a water surface just an arm's reach away. But the weird thing about this surface was the fact that it was not horizontal - it was, in fact, vertical, like a barrier was preventing the water from flowing. And there was a barrier - the repelling field of the crystals in the walls. The surface of the water curtain was also not smooth - it was irregular. After all, there were many sources of repelling force, and although the water was stopped from flowing in the end, the change would not be immediate. But although the water curtain was irregular, it was by no means moving - it was perfectly still, without any ripples.

Meng Li was entranced by the sight, and he snapped out only after a few seconds. As he did, he couldn't help but touch the water curtain and see the ripples. But to his surprise, the moment his fingered entered, it was immediately subjected to extreme pressure. The pressure itself couldn't compare to the one he used to break through from the Qi Sea Realm, but it was still enough to surprise him into retracting his finger. As he stirred the curtain, a few ripples travelled on the irregular surface. It was an alien sight - a ripple spreading on this surface could collide with itself due to the weird structure. The ripples quickly subsided and the curtain was once again not moving.

After playing with it for a few minutes, Meng Li turned his attention to the crystals embedded in the walls. Some of the crystals' were sticking out of the wall - the crystals themselves weren't big, and the size of the crystal clumps themselves were due to the fact that they clumped together.

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'System, what are those crystals?' After experimenting on the crystals by himself, Meng Li couldn't help but ask the system.

[These are anti-water crystals. They repel water.]

'Anti-water crystals? That implies the existence of normal water crystals.' Meng Li asked the system, puzzled.

[Yes. There are two types of crystals for each element - for example, for water, there exist anti-water crystals, which when supplied with qi will repel water, and water crystals, which when supplied with qi, will produce water. Most of the common crystals exist within their normal habitat, while the anti-crystals are mostly random in regards to where they exist. The islands in this archipelago seem to be a mine for anti-water crystal, they're just scattered around. The ones here are so clumped up probably because the rushing water pushed them back until the repelling force was strong enough to stop it. Also, some more exotic elements, like space, light, or darkness, are more, exist in rather... Unusual spots.]

This was a lot of information to take in at once. The good news was that he finally knew what these are. And it seemed like they worked using the qi existing naturally in the world - he wondered how stronger the effect would be if it was fuelled by a cultivator, but this was not the time or place to find out. After all, the equilibrium between the ocean's water and the anti-water crystals was... delicate from the looks of things. Suddenly, the cave felt much more dangerous to Meng Li. He quickly decided to teleport out of there.

As he checked the summoning tab, Meng Li found that the crystals were always there - he simply never found them. They were also quite cheap, provided he was trying to summon low-quality ones. It seemed that the better the quality, the more the crystals could produce and the more efficient they were... He even found something named 'the core of a star', which was a gigantic clump of fire crystals, and he guessed that the purpose of them was to create a huge amount of fire and... create an artificial star. It was an eye-opening experience, but Meng Li simply summoned a few small low-grade crystals to test things out. He summoned a water crystal, an anti-water crystal, a fire crystal, an anti-fire crystal, an earth crystal, an anti-earth crystal, an air crystal and finally, an anti-air crystal. He thought about summoning the more exotic elements but decided not to.

All the non-anti-crystals worked as he expected. When left alone, they produced a small amount of their respective element with the ambient qi. The water crystal got slightly wet, the fire crystal got a bit hot, and the earth crystal seemed like it grew a thin layer of dust and the air crystal produced a small breeze, although it was extremely weak. When supplying qi, he got a surprise when he tried to pour qi into a water crystal - he poured what he thought was a small amount of qi into the crystal, and the next second, he felt as though a water pump exploded in his palm. The crystal exploded from the amount of qi he supplied, drenching him completely in water. Fortunately, it was clear water, so he simply dried himself off before proceeding with the experiments. The fire crystal, when pumped with a smaller amount of qi, produced a tiny flame. It was quite fun to play with, like a hand-held stove burner, but Meng Li found that the fire did, in fact, burn him. It didn't do anything, but he could tell that if a small child got their hands on something like it, it would be quite dangerous. earth crystal was quite weird - when he poured qi into it, it created... A stronger shell. If the shell didn't chip slightly when he threw it on the ground thinking it wasn't working, he would've thought it was useless. But on closer inspection, he found that it did, in fact, grow a bit. He couldn't really think of an use, but when he decided to blow it up by overflowing it with qi, he found himself buried in a pile of dust. Some of it got into his mouth and his nose and it didn't feel good. Meng Li had a dry cough for the rest of the day. When he poured qi into an air crystal, a slightly stronger gust of wind came out. He reckoned that if he tried to overflow it, it would feel like a bomb shockwave, but since he had no desire to have a bomb blow up in his face, he decided not to test his theory.

After finishing with the normal crystals, he decided to test the anti-crystals. The water one worked like he expected it to - it repelled water. In face, every crystal did like he expected it to, apart from fire - instead of repelling fire, it directly extinguished it.

'Well, fire need a fuel, so when it's repelled, the fuel stays behind, so it's extinguished... Right?' Meng Li thought, but he quickly returned to the more interesting crystals.

The anti-air crystal, as he expected, created a vacuum around it. It was tiny when fuelled by the ambient qi, but when fuelled by a cultivator, the vacuum grew to around the size of his fist, while the crystal was small enough to be hidden inside such a fist. What interested him the most however, were the anti-water and the anti-earth crystals. When he summoned the anti-earth crystal and lay it on the ground next to him, he already noticed one peculiar attribute - it floated. After all, it repelled earth - and since it couldn't compress the earth under it with it's weight, it floated. When he held it in his hand while sitting, he didn't feel anything since the repelling field was far too small. But upon pouring qi into it, his hand shot up. The repelling strength wasn't enough to lift him, but when he completely relaxed his arm, it was enough to lift it above his shoulder. The water crystal worked the same with water - it floated above it, and if released under water, it would shoot to the surface.

After seeing the reactions, Meng Li had thoughts of making a flying shuttle - despite being able to fly, he was still using his own energy - if he could make a hoverboard...

Meng Li allowed himself to think idly for a few minutes, but quickly shook his head and focused. After all, now he had the ability to summon humans!

Meng Li couldn't help but smile at the thought.