《Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion》
Prologue: Rebel, Or Perish Like A Dog?
¡°To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens,¡± Qian Shanyi lectured, ¡°This principle lies at the heart of all orthodox cultivation.¡±
She looked around the sunlit lecture room, making sure her audience was following along. She was the only cultivator there, seated on a wide pillow in front of a low table holding her personal tea set. Two dozen students - most of them men, ranging from as young as ten to as old as forty - kneeled in front of her on smaller pillows, dressed in the gray robes of outer disciples. All of them were new to the sect, and she was supposed to teach them about the world of cultivation. A good third of them fidgeted, clearly unnerved at being in the same room as an actual cultivator. They would adjust quickly enough.
Out of all her duties in the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, this was the only one she found tolerable, as seeing a person learn always brought a smile to her face. Occasionally, someone even happened to ask a good question, letting her lecture about something outside of the narrow confines of what was prescribed by the sect Elders.
¡°When the father of modern cultivation Gu Lingtian rebelled against the Heavenly rule¡±, Qian Shanyi said, ¡°He sought justice for many, but instead of responding to his challenge, the Heavens barred their front doors. But there were twelve other ways into heaven, and he would seek out every one of them.¡±
She paused, bringing a cup of tea to her lips to take a sip.
¡°Only in one thing were the Heavens united with him: they would both rather see the world cracked in half than accept defeat¡±, she continued, ¡°To lock the first two gates, the deities made the suns set and never rise, and shattered the moons into a rain of stone and dust. Not giving up, Gu Lingtian traveled the world, from the northern oceans, to eastern jungles, and even dug deep into the earth, but all the paths spoken of in legend broke at his touch. In the south, he stared into a candle flame for seven weeks without blinking once, but when he comprehended its truth, Heavens extinguished all fire in the entire world lest he find his way in. In the west, he forged a gate out of the purest metals from the mines of Kunlun, but when it opened, everything within a dozen kilometers was obliterated by a fiery light. When he painted a bridge out of his familial love, Heavens erased his family, and made it so that he was an orphan all along. He studied the flows of the written word, gathered every Queqiao bird in the world, and even descended down into the Netherworld in desperation to force the demons to help, but everywhere he went, Heavens were a step ahead of him.¡±
The youngest disciples listened in rapt attention, while doubt filled the eyes of the older ones at the fanciful tales. They would learn to trust the wisdom of the youth, in time.
¡°Finally, he forged a personal invitation from the Heavenly Emperor, and for a brief moment, he stepped into Heaven - but immediately, he was thrown back down to Earth,¡± she continued, ¡°Twelve were the ways to enter Heaven, and they have barred them all. Then, in a rage, he took up his sword, and cut his own, thirteenth way inside. The blood and ichor flowed in rivers, and it is said that the sounds of slaughter drove all within a hundred li into madness, but after seven days, the Heavens have bowed to his demands.¡±
¡°How did he do that?¡± one of the older disciples asked her, ¡°How do you just¡cut a way into Heaven?¡±
¡°Nobody knows,¡± she shrugged, ¡°and any records of what occurred were wiped after the fact. If any remain, then perhaps only the libraries of the Imperial Palace hold them. Many have tried to find this answer, to various results. For example, it is said that all sword cultivation techniques trace their ancestry back to what he did back then - but how much stock to put into this, I could not say.¡±
¡°But why did he rebel?¡± asked the outer disciple who brought up the topic. She didn¡¯t remember his name. Li-something?
¡°Heavens demanded strict obedience to their unjust laws,¡± she responded, ¡°among them, they only allowed a select few ¡®pure¡¯ bloodlines to cultivate. Whenever anyone else would become a cultivator by chance, a heavenly tribulation would immediately strike them down. Only a lucky few could survive.¡±
She stretched her hand out, pointing to every outer disciple in the room in turn with her tea cup.
¡°You should be grateful,¡± she said, ¡°Gu Lingtian¡¯s rebellion is the only reason any of you may become cultivators at all, no matter how slim your future chances. Of course, the Heavens still bear a grudge. To this day, the heavenly tribulations of cultivators advancing in realm are much stronger than they have been in the past. But at least now, you get to try.¡±
¡°My parents always said that the will of the cultivators is the will of the Heavens,¡± a younger disciple piped up, ¡°They hold its power and this is why we should serve them.¡±
This one, she knew - Tan Lin, accepted into the sect barely a week ago. He came from a family out in the countryside, where the old ways still held purchase.
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¡°There are some perverted cultivators who still follow Heavenly commandments, yes,¡± she answered, ¡°as long as it does not break any laws, the empire allows it. The path of karma, they call it, and are called karmists in turn. Their tribulations are much easier than those of orthodox cultivators, which, in their eyes, justifies the practice.¡±
¡°Then why should we rebel against Heaven?¡±
¡°If you don¡¯t want to be a cultivator, then why are you here?¡±
¡°Of course I want to be a cultivator.¡±
¡°Then there you go. Heavens don¡¯t want you to be one.¡±
¡°I mean - ¡± Tan Lin stumbled, but regained his composure, ¡°I want to be a cultivator, but you said that these karmists follow Heavenly commandments, right? And if their cultivation is easier - why should we make things harder for ourselves?¡±
¡±Not everything that is easy is just.¡±
¡°Why wouldn¡¯t it be? It¡¯s just the way of the world. Don¡¯t they say that the big fish always eats the small fish?¡±
¡°It would have been easy for Gu Lingtian to give up at any point on his path, for he had to fail a dozen times before succeeding once. If he did, you would have been born a slave. Would you have preferred that?¡±
¡°But he only got his way because he was stronger than the heavens.¡±
¡°You think that if you are strong, then whatever you do is right?¡±
¡°I mean -¡±, he paused, then continued, ¡°yeah, I guess. Isn¡¯t this why cultivators cultivate?¡±
¡°Hmm, I see,¡± Qian Shanyi tapped her cheek theatrically, then stood up, ¡°well, why don¡¯t we see how this works? Go pick up the cleaning bucket near the door, hold it in your outstretched hands, and stand on your toes. Do this until the lesson is over.¡±
Several other disciples laughed. Tan Lin¡¯s face grew red with embarrassment.
¡°What?¡±
She leaped through the air, faster than the eyes of the mundane disciples could follow, unsheathing her sword on the way. Tan Lin¡¯s eyes widened all too late as she landed and pressed her sword to his neck, and he scrambled back, falling on the floor. She stepped after him, keeping the sword pressed against his skin just short of drawing blood. Some scattered exclamations resounded from the other disciples, but she ignored them.
¡°You argue?¡± she raised her eyebrows mockingly, ¡°I told you what to do. Go do it.¡±
Sweat poured down his forehead, his eyes flickering between the sword pressed against his neck and her face. She smirked.
¡°Well? Go on,¡± she said, bringing her sword away from his neck and sheathing it, and he scrambled back towards the doors, doing as he was told. She returned back to her seat and poured herself a new cup of tea.
¡°Tan Lin, why am I punishing you?¡± she asked, raising her voice to be heard clearly across the room.
He was quiet at first, and she threw a questioning glance in his direction. His face was rapidly going from shock, to fear, to embarrassment and then back.
¡°Because I asked too many questions?¡± he finally said.
¡°No, questions are good. The more of them, the better you will learn your lessons.¡±
¡°Because I argued?¡±
¡°I do not mind it when outer disciples argue with me.¡±
¡°Well, then I don¡¯t know.¡±
¡°There is no reason why I am punishing you,¡± she said, smiling, ¡°I simply felt like it, and had a sword, while you didn¡¯t. Doesn¡¯t this feel incredibly just?¡±
A couple more disciples laughed at that. She glanced through the student list, noting down their names.
¡°What do the rest of you think?¡± she asked, looking around the room, ¡°Does this feel just to you? Would you rebel, if this was your life, or perish like a dog?¡±
The discussion went on for a while, and she made herself another cup of tea. This was quite far from what the sect Elders wanted her to teach, but if they wanted her to speak of something different, they should have come down here themselves.
¡°But if to cultivate is to rebel against heavens,¡± one of the rare girls asked, ¡°then why do we have to follow the orders of our seniors in the sect without question? Isn¡¯t that contradictory?¡±
Because most cultivators are hypocrites at the best of times, she thought, but knew she couldn¡¯t say it out loud. That would be going too far.
¡°You follow the orders of your seniors because they have more experience than you,¡± she said, falling back on that common lie, ¡°if they tell you to do something, there is a good reason, and often it is that if you do things differently, you will die, without even being qualified to know what killed you. This is doubly true when you are working in one of our alchemical workshops, or in the herb gardens.¡±
The lesson moved on, back to discussing history. She ended it when she saw Tan Lin¡¯s hands start to give out from pain and exhaustion.
¡°Tan Lin, you are free from your duties for the rest of the day,¡± she said, packing up her tea set into it¡¯s lacquered wooden box, ¡°Feel free to visit the outer sect library to relax. Those of you who have laughed at Tan Lin, you have double shifts for the next three weeks as punishment. Maybe that will make the actual lesson stick.¡±
Chapter 1: Cure Melon Head With A Pile Of Riches
¡°Ugh¡what the fuck happened to me,¡± Qian Shanyi groaned, blearily opening one of her eyes. The other one was glued shut by blood.
Her entire body was throbbing with pain. As her blurry vision slowly came into focus, she saw a bright blue sky. Fighting through the pain, she turned her head to the side, trying to take a look at herself.
She was lying in a field of grass and flowers. Her entire body, from top to bottom, was covered in cuts and bruises, with her robes cut into shreds. Blood pooled in the grass around her, and stuck to her skin as she tried to sit up. Her head throbbed, and she took a moment to massage her temples.
She ran her hands over her body, checking herself over. Her face was swollen like a melon, bad enough that her second eye would not open even after she chipped the dried blood off it, but at least it was whole. It was hard to tell where bruises ended and flesh began, but at least everything was still attached. As she touched her left leg, the pain spiked, and she winced.
¡°Fuck¡I think it¡¯s broken,¡± she whispered. ¡°How did I end up like this?¡±
She tried to cast her memories back to yesterday, and felt her head throb again. Even her memories hurt.
¡°Memory¡¯s fucked¡¡± she groaned, shutting her eyes in concentration, and trying to breathe deeply. Her whole body told her she should just lie back down and fall asleep.
She ground her teeth. ¡°No. Fuck you. Fuck me. I need to get out of here before whoever beat me halfway to death comes back to finish their job.¡±
She tried to put her healthy leg under her to stand up, and instead tipped over into the grass. She cried out as the pain spiked again, then scowled, and started trying to push herself back up again. Her head throbbed as she tried to recall where she was or who might have fought her.
As she waited for the pain to recede a bit, she looked down on her body again.
Looking at her shredded robes, she felt a twinge of regret: she had saved for a good five months to buy them. As she ran her hands through the fabric, she noticed that she was wearing a belt with a silver buckle, that was still intact. There was an empty sheath for her sword on the left side, and her money pouch on the right.
She opened the pouch to look through it for hints. Inside were a couple low-grade spirit stones, some silver coins, a set of keys and her sect seal. None of it jogged any of her memories.
She tried to slowly stand up again, and almost managed it, but lost her balance at the last moment as her broken leg gave out from under her. She rolled on the grass, screaming in pain.
¡°Damn the fucking gods!¡± she screamed, squeezing her eyes shut, ¡°Fucking leg¡How can I get anywhere with a broken leg?¡±
Use your spiritual energy to realign the bones, then put a splint on the leg. A memory floated from the depths of her consciousness, of herself a good half a decade back lecturing a younger disciple, their face full of tears, about this exact problem.
She closed her eyes again and burst into laughter. Moron. How could you forget something this basic? You are a cultivator, so cultivate. She laid on the grass, and tried to focus, letting her breathing stabilize.
After a while, she got it. She focused on a point somewhere in her stomach, and felt her awareness expand, flooding throughout her body. She felt her blood flowing through her veins, and saw a second set of veins, filled with a different fluid - or perhaps a gas - spreading throughout her body. They shone in her awareness like the sun.
These are your meridians, filled with spiritual energy. Another memory came, this time of her teacher instructing her how to cultivate for the first time. She was so full of hope back then.
Instinctively, she ordered the spiritual energy in her body to move, and it did, heading towards her leg. It surrounded her bones, and she felt the break clearly, as if she was touching it with her fingers, and pushed on the bones to re-align them. The bone fragments snapped into place, and Qian Shanyi arched her back from the pain, but in her mind, she was laughing. Progress. She opened her eyes.
¡°Alright, Shanyi,¡± she sighed, ¡°It¡¯s time to get up.¡±
She put her legs under herself, and shakily stood up. Her legs felt weak, and as she rose up, for a moment her vision blacked out due to the lack of blood. Spiritual energy was circulating through her leg, holding the fragmented bone in shape, slowly draining her reserves in the process, and she knew instinctively that she could sustain this for several hours.
She smiled. She was exhausted, her stomach rumbled in hunger, her lips were dry and chapped from thirst, every single movement brought her agony and she had to fight to lift her arms, but she was standing. From this higher vantage point, she could see that the field of grass and flowers stretched out for another twenty meters, before cutting off. All she could see was more blue sky - was she near a cliff?
She also saw her familiar sword laying out on the grass not far away from her. She smiled, walked over to it, and slid it into her sword sheath, immediately feeling safer as her hand laid down on the pommel.
Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain in her heart, and doubled over. The spiritual energy in her body went haywire, and the bone in her leg split apart again. She toppled onto the grass, gasping for air. Her heart was hammering in her chest as if she had just ran away from a pride of lions.
¡°Fuck me, what the hell was that?¡± she gasped, trying to bring her breathing and heartbeat under control. She felt a sense of dread settle over her. Was she going to die here?
She shook her head to clear it, and slowly, started putting her leg back together.
As she got up off the ground for the third time, she turned away from the cliff, and stumbled backwards in shock.
In front of her were several piles of treasures, towering over her head. Swords, decorated wooden boxes, armor, clothing, bricks of metal, hundreds of monster cores, heavenly materials and earthly treasures, everything was piled together and on top of each other. Spiritual energy was wafting off the piles in waves, dense enough to make the air shimmer faintly. Here and there, she could see bursts of flame and blocks of ice, where fire-type and water-type spiritual energy reached critical concentration. In Qian Shanyi¡¯s normal condition, it would have been impossible to miss.
¡°Who beats someone up and then leaves them alone in their treasury?¡± Qian Shanyi scratched her head.
It was not just a treasury, and she wasn¡¯t on top of any mountain. She was inside of an actual world fragment.
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Remembering the first aid lessons she herself taught, she put a crude splint on her leg, fashioned out of her sword sheath, her belt, and the remains of her robes. The air of the world fragment felt cool on her naked skin, but she decided to save the modesty for when she was in a good fighting shape.
World fragments had many names: secret realms, demiplanes, hidden worlds, extradimensional spaces, and so on. Regardless of their name and type, all of them were incredibly rare and valuable. This particular fragment was a sphere mere thirty meters in radius. This might not have seemed like much: a piece of land that large could, at most, fit a small building. But the value of a world fragment mostly came not from their size, but rather, from their isolation and their innate production of spiritual energy.
Spiritual energy was required for every aspect of cultivation. All cultivators would absorb it in order to strengthen their bodies and souls, and would expend it to execute various techniques. Refiners, alchemists and talisman experts used it to produce magical items, spirit beast trainers imbued it into their pets, and ghost cultivators required it to prolong their lives: in short, without spiritual energy, you could not cultivate.
In most of the world, spiritual energy was very diffuse. Because of this, most cultivators had to consume expensive spirit stones in order to supplement their natural spiritual energy absorption. But within the world fragments, the spiritual energy would be tens or even hundreds of times denser than the rest of the world.
As a result, practicing within a world fragment would grant ten times the results for one tenth the effort. Even though many world fragments were very small and filled with hidden dangers, cultivators and sects would fight tooth and nail for every one of them.
Even the world fragments that were too impractical for cultivation held great value because of their isolation. If the entrance into the world fragment was closed, entering would be almost impossible. No amount of heavenly and earthly treasures spent on security could compare to a world fragment when it came to keeping your secrets and treasures safe. Some could even be turned into storage treasures like cosmic rings that a cultivator could bring with them wherever they went.
This isolation made world fragments perfect for creating specialized environments: anything that happened inside would not affect the outside world, and vice-versa. This could not be replicated by any amount of protective formations. Because of this, world fragments would tend to be densely packed with practice equipment, refining workshops, treasuries, secret libraries, and so on. Of course, not even one sect in a hundred could brag about owning a world fragment large and safe enough to fit a person.
Which made the situation Qian Shanyi found herself in all the stranger. This world fragment was clearly safe and enormous, but there were no buildings, no efficient use of space, no refining facilities, no cultivators in closed door cultivation. All that was here were the treasures in the middle, literally piled together without any organization, making it impossible to find anything specific and no doubt ruining many of the items due to the variations in temperature and spiritual energy.
Someone was clearly using this world fragment, but the way they were using it made no sense. It was an unimaginable waste of resources.
Qian Shanyi sighed. She finished her trip around the border of the world fragment, and knelt down next to one of the piles of treasures, where she saw a small stream of water running off a Blue Tear Stone. Some water-type heavenly materials and earthly treasures would create water near themselves when exposed to spiritual energy, and Blue Tear Stone was one of them. The water was cold, and felt good on her chapped lips as she cupped her hands under the stream to drink.
Her headache went down somewhat, but she still felt doom over her head. She couldn¡¯t find the exit - that probably meant it was closed. She would need to wait until the owner came to visit, and then sneak past them, bargain with them, or try to fight them for her freedom.
¡°Given how badly they beat me up last time, that¡¯s not going to end up great,¡± Qian Shanyi sighed, washing her face of blood. The rest of her body would need a proper bath, but at least she could clear up her eyes.
She stared at her reflection in the water gathered in her hands, and grit her teeth. ¡°If I can deal with them, then I will deal. But if I can¡¯t deal, then I will fight them! And if I can¡¯t fight them, then I will die fighting them. To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens, what kind of cultivator would I be if I didn¡¯t even rebel against my jailors?¡±
She looked back at the pile of treasure in front of her.
¡°You know what, fuck whomever put me in here,¡± she scowled, ¡°There are bound to be medical pills here. I am taking them as recompense. I will need all the strength I can get to punch them in their face.¡±
Her annoyance at the sheer waste only grew as she worked her way through the piles.
Initially, she was sure she could find some medical pills among the treasures. She was kind of correct. In fact, she already found a dozen cases of pills, and put them aside. The only problem was that she couldn¡¯t identify any of the pills.
Despite her sect¡¯s focus, she wasn¡¯t an alchemist - the Elders were adamantly against her learning the practice. As a result, she didn¡¯t know any techniques to appraise medicines: the only thing she could do was sense the raw quantity of spiritual energy within the pills, and try to recognise their appearance. What she was looking for was basic medical pills that could accelerate the healing processes of her body, but what she was finding looked incredibly specialized, with massive quantities of stored spiritual energy.
It was entirely possible that some of the pills she found could instantly cure her: she just couldn¡¯t guess which ones, and taking pills randomly would be suicide.
For now, she focused on sorting the mess into several piles: pills and pastes, weaponry, armor and clothing, refining materials, talismans, books and scrolls, food and drink, and so on. Her arms felt like falling off, but she pushed through. She would keep sorting even if she had to do it with her teeth.
Of course, all of it was incredibly opulent. She could identify some things, like Ice Crystal Bars, bricks of Igneocopper, and so on, but most of it was beyond her knowledge.
Her robes were turned into a leg splint, so she put on an elegant red daoist robe she found that fit her well, with an embroidered motif of mountains in a golden thread. She was pretty sure that it was made from actual Silvered Devil Moth Silk: a heavenly refining material that would repel spiritual energy of all forms. Weaker enemy techniques would simply slide off it, and formations inscribed on the inside of the robes would keep her safe from open fires and lightning. It was more expensive by far than anything else she has owned in her life, and yet there were a good half a dozen similar robes in the pile.
Besides the robes, there was an entire spool of this silk, hundreds of meters of it.
As some parts of the pile were frozen solid from contact with very active water-type heavenly materials and earthly treasures, Qian Shanyi took a second robe, wrapped it around a fire-type treasure, and moved it around the ice to melt it.
¡°This is probably the single most expensive portable heater in the city,¡° Qian Shanyi smiled wryly.
There was no sun in the skies of the world fragment - its entire spherical border emitted diffuse light, similar to that of a bright summer day - but Shanyi felt that it took her most of the day to crudely sort through the pile. Having to stop at times to let her aching body rest surely didn¡¯t help.
At the very bottom of the pile her eyes fell on a small black bottle, with a picture of a smiling uncle on the label. She clutched it, and raised it into the air, her eyes flashing triumphantly.
¡°Big Mo¡¯s healing tablets! Finally, something familiar,¡± she smiled, taking one of the tablets out of the bottle of pills. She picked up a bottle of spirit wine from her pile of food, swallowed the tablet and downed it with a swig straight from the bottle. She felt absolutely drained and wanted to go straight to sleep, but there was one last thing she had to do.
Big Mo¡¯s healing tablets were a famous brand of medicines produced by the Three Mountains sect, and distributed so widely across the cultivation world that practically everybody knew their uses. Unlike the more precise pills, they accelerated the body¡¯s overall natural recovery speed. This acceleration was not that strong, and would become irrelevant after reaching the foundation establishment stage, but could allow a refinement stage cultivator to recover from injuries in weeks instead of months.
For the best effect, Big Mo¡¯s tablets had to be supplemented by circulating your spiritual energy as the tablet dissolved. Qian Shanyi sat in a lotus position, and threw her senses inwards, circulating her spiritual energy throughout her body, making it pass through her stomach where the pill was slowly dissolving. She did her best to ignore the hunger pangs.
Suddenly, she felt her spiritual energy go out of control. A stabbing pain shot through her heart, her heartbeat accelerating. She cried as her back arched in pain, and lost consciousness.
Blood dripped from her mouth as she laid there on the grass, amid treasures fit for kings.
Chapter 2: Cultivate A Clock Through Heartbreak
Qian Shanyi¡¯s uneasy sleep was plagued with nightmares. She woke up with a start, hacking cough racking her lungs as she spit out coagulated blood. Her heart was still beating quickly in her chest, slowly slowing down. She rubbed her face and got up, not feeling like she had rested at all. Her body did feel somewhat better, and the swelling in her face went down enough that she managed to open her second eye.
¡°What the hell is wrong with my body,¡± she sighed. ¡°I hope I am healing faster than it is falling apart.¡±
Her stomach rumbled, and she headed over to what little food she had stored. Her aching, healing body desperately needed calories. When she was sorting the pile yesterday, she put a small water-type metal brick wrapped in silvered devil moth silk in the middle of her storage, keeping it cool and safe from spoilage.
Qian Shanyi looked over her stores of nutrition. She had plenty to drink in the form of spirit wine: a very expensive drink made from specially treated spiritual grapes. It contained trace amounts of spiritual energy, and would even slightly improve the constitution of cultivators who drank it. No celebration in the cultivation world was complete without it.
Qian Shanyi uncorked the bottle she used yesterday and took a sip. The label on the bottle helpfully informed her this vintage was a good hundred years old, well on the far end of spirit wine ages. It tasted like liquid bliss. There were two full crates of the stuff here: solid wooden constructions, filled with straw and tied together with rope. Each of them fit fifteen bottles, so she would have enough to drink for quite a while.
Yesterday the idea of drinking nothing but spirit wine would have made Qian Shanyi laugh, but she was starting to adapt to the casual wealth on display around her.
In terms of actual food, her supplies were certainly lacking. There was a box of candy, which she finished off immediately; it barely made her feel better. Aside from that, there were spirit plants she could cook in a pinch, and an egg larger than her head of unknown origins.
The problem was that Qian Shanyi could feel spiritual energy inside the plants and the egg, denser than the spiritual energy within Qian Shanyi¡¯s own body. Without careful preparation, these ingredients could be as dangerous as unknown medical pills. If her realm was higher, she could simply overpower the side effects of eating the dishes, but she had only reached the middle level of the refinement stage. It would take her many months to progress to a higher realm. A professional immortal chef could have prepared the dishes and carefully reduced the density of spiritual energy within the ingredients to an acceptable level, but she had never learned those techniques.
¡°Starving on top of a mountain of wealth¡¡±, Qian Shanyi sighed. She¡¯d figure out what to do with food later. For now, she needed a clock.
To accelerate recovery, Big Mo¡¯s tablets were supposed to be taken once every eight hours. Taking them more often would, over time, mildly poison the organism. Given Qian Shanyi¡¯s condition, she really needed to be careful with those eight hour time windows. There was just one problem: she had no way to measure time. The feeling of doom was stronger today: she knew that if she waited for the owner of the world fragment to let her out, she would be dead.
This meant she had to build a clock.
She went over to where the weapons were stored, and picked up a metal shield. With its concave shape, it could serve as a very large pan. She built a small circle out of several Ice Crystal Bars and put the shield on top, poured the rest of her wine into it, and settled in to wait.
Natural spiritual energy had no particular type, but it could be ¡°polarized¡±, acquiring special properties. There were five main ¡°types¡± or ¡°polarities¡± of spiritual energy: fire, earth, metal, water and wood. Some heavenly materials and earthly treasures could polarize spiritual energy on contact, and thus were also said to have a corresponding ¡°type¡± or ¡°affinity¡±.
The different polarities of spiritual energy had a variety of properties, but what Qian Shanyi was interested in was the ability of water and fire types to change the temperature of the environment. Water-type spiritual energy would reduce the temperature, while fire-type spiritual energy would increase it.
With the shield surrounded by water-type spiritual energy, the wine quickly froze. Qian Shanyi waited until it was completely frozen, and then broke it apart into smaller chunks with her sword, putting it aside. She only needed an empty bottle, but she wasn¡¯t about to waste the wine.
Now that she had a bottle, she went back to the wine crates. She untied the rope holding the crate¡¯s lid in place, and carefully frayed the rope until she managed to pull out a long thin thread. Then she went over to the spool of Silvered Devil Moth Silk, cut off a small square of material, and put it on top of the neck of the bottle, tying it down with the thread to seal it around the bottle neck. The silk felt taught when she tested it with her finger. Finally, she took her sword and carefully sawed at the bottom of the bottle, breaking it off.
Fundamentally, a water clock was a very simple construction. All you needed was a basin of water that would leak out at a set rate. The level of water in that basin would tell you the time.
This bottle of hers would serve as that exact basin. Water would seep through the silk, and drip out. All she needed was measure out how quickly the dripping happened, and mark the bottle accordingly.
First, she needed water. She built a second circle out of Igneocopper bars, put the shield on top, and put a Blue Tear Stone on top of the shield.
Some treasures reacted to spiritual energy in ways besides changing its polarity: it was common for fire-type treasures to burst into flames or create lightning around them. When it came to water-type treasures like Blue Tear Stone, they would consume spiritual energy to create water out of the air. Combined with the drop in temperature from being surrounded by water-type spiritual energy, this water tended to freeze into a block of ice surrounding the stone.
Fire-type Igneocopper bricks kept the shield hot, and Blue Tear Stone leaked pure water. While she was waiting for enough of the water to gather, Qian Shanyi went over to the wine crates. She took all the bottles out of one of the crates, put the crate on the side, and drew a circle on the top side of the crate, using her wine bottle as a stencil. She then cut out a slightly narrower opening through the side of the crate. When the bottle was put inside, it would stand vertically.
After enough water gathered, she carefully poured the water into the open side of the water bottle. The bottle filled up, and started dripping through the silk. The drops seemed to fall too quickly for Qian Shanyi¡¯s tastes: she poured the water back into the shield and added several more layers of silk to the top of the bottle, before trying again. This time, the rate was just right: about one drop every three breaths.
The last thing left to do was to graduate the clock by marking various levels of water on its side to track time. Eyeballing it, the bottle should take many hours to drip out: Qian Shanyi just needed to know exactly how many. Fortunately, she already had a measure of time.
Back in the sect, she practiced her cultivation technique, Seven Flowers Bloom, for many hours every day. To keep track of the time, she used to count how many times she could finish the standard set of moves between two sounds of the sect gong. After many years of practice, her moves were precise down to a millimeter, and the count was sixty-seven times every time. The gong was rung once every two hours: this meant that her standard practice moves took exactly one hundred and seven point four seconds.
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Of course, she wasn¡¯t about to practice until the entire bottle was empty: with how her body was right now, she would probably faint from the pain after less than an hour. Instead, she took the piece of wood she cut out of the wine crate and slowly hollowed it out, turning it into a little cup. She would mark the bottle before and after this cup was filled, and then repeatedly pour out the same amount of water out of the bottle, marking the level of water each time. If one cup took twenty minutes to leak out, and there were sixty cups in the bottle, then the entire bottle should take twenty hours.
Qian Shanyi topped off the bottle with water, marked the water level, put the cup under the water drops, and started moving through the steps of Seven Flowers Bloom. It was an elegant and refined cultivation technique, based on an ancient dance. She felt spiritual energy within her body circulate through her meridians, flowing into her sword through her arms. As her sword sliced through the air, small illusions of flowers were left in its wake. The more spiritual energy circulated throughout her body, the more energy it pulled out of the air and into her body through the fourty thousand energy pores on her skin, constantly strengthening her constitution.
For some reason, she felt stilted and bitter as she practiced. Just minutes ago, she was feeling excited about cultivating - it¡¯s not every day that you get to practice inside of a secret realm! But something about the Seven Flowers Bloom put her on edge. Her memory stirred¡
Qian Shanyi was practicing in the sect¡¯s moonlit gardens when Elder Striding Phoenix came to see her. He sat down on a nearby bench, and leaned on his walking stick.
¡°It¡¯s getting late, Ah Shanyi,¡± he said, ¡°you should go to sleep.¡±
¡°There is a bit more spiritual energy in the gardens at night, teacher,¡± she responded, her words curt, timed to her rhythmic breaths. ¡°When other cultivators do not draw it out. It is not much, but every little bit counts.¡±
Elder Striding Phoenix sighed. ¡°You are pushing yourself too much.¡±
¡°I want to become a sect Elder,¡± she responded, flicking sweat out of her eyes with a burst of spiritual energy. ¡°I want to slay devils and serve justice. Weaklings do not become elders.¡±
Elder Striding Phoenix sighed again, and leaned forwards. ¡°Ah Shanyi, again you bring this dream up? I told you this already, women do not become elders in our sect.¡±
¡°Then I will have to be the first one.¡±
¡°The other Elders would never agree. Besides, our sect is small: we don¡¯t even have any good cultivation techniques for women. Your Seven Flowers Bloom is already the best that we have, but it¡¯s incomplete, and doesn¡¯t fit your spiritual energy affinity. You will have to work twice as hard for half the results - why bother? You are one of the finest jade beauties in the city. You could easily find a good husband. Why fight against the current?¡±
Qian Shanyi ground her teeth. ¡°To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! Even if the only thing left of me was my teeth, I would still leap and bite the heavens on the ass rather than give up on my dreams. If my technique is inadequate, then I will find a better one. If I can¡¯t find it, I will buy it, and if I can¡¯t buy it, then I can only work even harder. Whenever there is a problem, there is always a solution if you look hard enough!¡±
Elder Striding Phoenix shook his head. ¡°I just don¡¯t want to see you hurt yourself.¡±
Qian Shanyi was jerked out of her memory by the same sharp pain in her heart. It was the worst one yet: radiating all the way through her lungs, as if someone rammed a flying sword through her body. She fell on her knees, breathing rapidly. Her heart was thumping in her chest, beating faster than a spooked doe dashing through a forest. She knew: she was about to die.
¡°How did my health get worse? Something is wrong,¡± she breathed out, clutching her heart, ¡°This sense of doom¡ Was I poisoned?¡±
Slowly, her heart rate slowed and her breathing stabilized. She got off the ground, her legs still shaking, and looked around the world fragment, searching for something that could explain her condition.
¡°No, this isn¡¯t a poison,¡± she thought, shaking her head. ¡°Rapid heart rate, sense of doom, nightmares when I slept¡ And the symptoms get worse when I rapidly circulate my spiritual energy. I should have thought of this earlier: I must be suffering from feng shui deviation.¡±
¡°But why would there be inauspicious feng shui here?¡± she wondered. ¡°Perhaps this is a treasury of demonic cultivators?¡±
She swept her eyes over the treasury. She had never met a demonic cultivator, but she heard the stories, and looked for the usual signs: dripping blood, bones, wailing ghosts, and so on. She found nothing. Instead, her gaze fell on the pile of refining treasures, and her eyes widened in realization.
¡°The destructive cycle!¡±
Besides polarization, most heavenly materials and earthly treasures also naturally attracted pure spiritual energy: pure energy would flow in, and polarized energy would flow out. Once the energy was polarized, its behavior changed: instead of being attracted equally to all types of heavenly materials and earthly treasures, it started to follow the productive and destructive cycles of feng shui.
Productive cycle went from fire to earth, then to metal, then to water, then to wood, and finally looped back around to fire. Polarized spiritual energy would be attracted to the heavenly materials and earthly treasures of the next type on the productive cycle, and re-polarized on contact. For example, fire-type spiritual energy would be attracted to earth-type treasures, and become earth-type spiritual energy. Each re-polarisation would somewhat improve the quality of the spiritual energy, and make the environment more auspicious.
Destructive cycle went from fire to metal, then to wood, then to earth, then to water, and finally looped back around to fire. Polarized spiritual energy would be similarly attracted to the next step on the destructive cycle, and re-polarized on contact, with each re-polarisation worsening the overall quality of spiritual energy and making the environment less auspicious. Destructive cycle was somewhat stronger than the productive cycle: if spiritual energy had a choice where to flow, it would choose to flow according to the destructive cycle.
Auspicious environments would bring luck, make your wounds heal faster, improve the effectiveness of your cultivation, and bring dozens of other benefits. Inauspicious environments would do the opposite. Sufficiently inauspicious environments would even cause ¡°feng shui deviation¡±: a condition that would cause the spiritual energy within the bodies of cultivators to go haywire. It would cause an impending sense of doom, rapid heartbeat, nightmares, and in the worst cases, sudden death from a heart explosion.
Normally, there was no need for a cultivator like Qian Shanyi to worry about the feng shui cycles. She was only in the middle of the refinement stage - in terms of cultivation, she was still at the start of the road. All cultivators like her had to worry about was practicing: her sect would employ geomancy to construct their buildings in accordance with the principles of feng shui, ensuring the entire territory of the sect remained auspicious, and would carefully control what kind of artifacts they would own. The vast majority of them would train with weapons that had no particular affinity, and so were safe to handle regardless of the environment. Even if, by luck, they happened to get their hands on a couple of items with affinity to particular types of spiritual energy, the chance of the combination being inauspicious was only one in five, and their sect Elders would quickly notice the problem. And even if, despite all the precautions, their Sect missed the problem, the concentration of spiritual energy was very low in most of the world, and so the effects of feng shui deviation would not be very pronounced.
The only case where feng shui deviation due to the destructive cycle would become a serious problem was if they happened to enter an environment with a massive amount of spiritual energy where all sorts of treasures were placed together haphazardly, but what were the chances of that?
¡°What do I do?¡± Qian Shanyi rubbed her face in despair. ¡°If I don¡¯t do something, I might just die the next time I go to sleep.¡±
She got up and walked over to the pile of refinement materials, looking it over.
¡°I guess I could bury the treasures,¡± she sighed, ¡°the earth should block the spiritual energy from circulating for a while. But eventually the spiritual energy will saturate the ground, and then I will be back to my original problem.¡±
Qian Shanyi scowled, shaking her fist at the sky.
¡°Damn it, what kind of moron stores their riches like this?!¡±
Chapter 3: Shovel Dirt To Save Your Life
First, Qian Shanyi decided to do some tests. She wanted to find out how much the earth would block spiritual energy, and for how long.
She limped over to the pile of weapons, keeping her leg bone in one place with her spiritual energy, and picked out a sword that was as wide as her head. It would make for a good shovel.
Walking over to the very edge of the world fragment, she quickly dug out a row of identical deep holes, and dropped a single Ice Crystal Bar in the first one. The temperature in the hole quickly dropped. She waited until the air temperature stabilized, took the Ice Crystal Bar out of the hole, and dropped it together with the wood-type Spiritwood log into the next hole over. The temperature of the second hole barely changed, and it emitted plenty of wood-type spiritual energy.
Her ability to sense spiritual energy wasn¡¯t very precise: at best, she could distinguish spiritual energy flows about a foot across, as well as get a feel for the total amount and type of the energy. But that was enough to tell what was happening: pure spiritual energy in the air dove into the hole, and turned into wood- and water- type spiritual energy. The water-type spiritual energy immediately headed directly towards the Spiritwood log, and turned into more wood-type spiritual energy, barely having any time to affect the environment.
Next, she moved the two treasures into two separate, adjacent holes. The water-type spiritual energy emanated from the hole on the left, formed a little cloud, and then gathered into a stream heading into the hole on the right, where it turned into wood-type spiritual energy, before shooting off towards the center of the world fragment. In mere moments, the flow had reached equilibrium.
She glanced back towards the center of the world fragment. There were plenty of fire-type treasures there, yet the water-type spiritual energy did not head towards them. The destructive cycle of feng shui was generally stronger than the creative cycle, but the distance also played a role.
Finally, Qian Shanyi pushed the earth back into the hole with the Spiritwood log, burying it. The stream of wood-type spiritual energy vanished under the ground, while the flow of water-type spiritual energy was immediately disrupted. In moments, it reformed, now heading towards the center of the world fragment. She felt around the inside of the open hole: the walls were quickly cooling down.
After several minutes, the flow changed once again. Water-type spiritual energy coming out of the hole cut down by half, and when Qian Shanyi poked around the hole with her hand, she felt that the wall in the direction of the Spiritwood log was now much colder than the others. Sure enough, the spiritual energy suffused the earth, and was piercing through it to head directly towards the closest spiritual energy sink.
In general, spiritual energy would take the easiest and shortest path to head towards its target. That the flow split in half probably meant passing through a foot of earth was about as hard as passing through thirty meters of air.
Qian Shanyi sighed, and rubbed her tired eyes. If several minutes was all it took to suffuse a foot of earth, then burying the treasures will do nothing. She needed a better plan.
She sat down to think, and her hungry stomach grumbled again. She closed her eyes, and forcibly pushed her hunger out of her mind. Even if she was going to cook that damnable demon beast egg, she was not about to do it before solving the problem with feng shui. With her luck down in the gutters, she would explode for sure.
She needed to somehow isolate the treasures from one another. Perhaps she could wrap them up in Silvered Devil Moth Silk? No, there was no way for her to get a solid seal, and as long as there was even the tiniest gap, the spiritual energy would find it and leak through.
Suddenly, she frowned. Perhaps she was approaching this from the wrong direction. If she couldn¡¯t work against the spiritual energy, maybe she should work with it.
Corners of Qian Shanyi¡¯s mouth twitched downwards. This would be so much digging on a hungry stomach.
¡°Well, nothing to it,¡± she sighed, and got up. ¡°There are no easy or clean paths on the road of cultivation. Even a mere carp does not take breaks as it leaps through the dragon gate on its path of ascension. Digging this ditch will be the next step on my path to immortality!¡±
Qian Shanyi leaned on her shovel-sword, wiping sweat off her brow.
Her back hurt. In retrospect, the giant sword made for a terrible shovel, but she had nothing better to replace it with. Her broken leg also started to whine. She was keeping it in one piece with her spiritual energy, but whenever she put her weight on it, the bone fragments would shift against one another by a hair, sending spikes of pain into her mind.
On a more positive note, the spiritual energy recirculation ditch was finally complete.
The ditch was made out of two concentric circles of holes, going around the center of the world fragment, with the smaller being a bit under twenty meters in diameter, and the larger being a bit over. Each circle contained ten holes, positioned equidistantly along the circumference. Straight, narrow trenches zig-zagged between the holes, connecting each hole on either of the circles with two holes on the other one in an alternating pattern.
Before digging the ditch, she made a giant compass by completely fraying the wine crate rope, tying it into a twenty-meter long thread, and attaching it to one of the spare swords. She did her best to sketch the design of the ditch on the ground, making sure to keep everything as symmetric and equidistant as she could. She wasn¡¯t sure this level of precision would be necessary, but her life depended on this working out perfectly.
She settled on twenty holes after careful consideration. With five holes, she was worried that the severe concentration of spiritual energy in any one node would lead to problems - for example, the fire node might turn into a massive column of fire. With ten holes, the angles between the adjacent trenches would not be sharp enough, and spiritual energy could slip through some of the nodes entirely. Fifteen holes could not be symmetrically arranged in two concentric circles: this meant twenty holes was the way to go.
She didn¡¯t know if she had just invented something new, or if the largest sects around had something similar. Luminous Lotus Pavilion certainly did not: her sect had six storage rooms scattered around their compound, but the materials stored weren¡¯t of high enough quality to really cause feng shui problems. This was only a problem that could be caused by massive wealth in the first place.
Now that the spiritual energy recirculation ditch was complete, she just needed to test it.
She frowned. Spiritual energy recirculation ditch was kind of a mouthful. She needed a shorter name.
¡°Hmm. It is going to circulate spiritual energy¡ Energy circulator? Cyclo-energy?¡± she mumbled to herself, ¡°No, that sounds awkward. How about this: one of the other names for spiritual energy is chi, and in the language of the ancient era, ¡®tron¡¯ means instrument. Chi-cycle-tron, chiclotron, this sounds about right.¡±
Enough linguistics, it was time for testing. She gathered all the heavenly materials and earthly treasures, divided them by type, and then did her best to split each type into four equal groups. Each group went into its own pre-determined hole in the ditch in accordance with the production cycle of feng shui.
The idea behind the chiclotron was very simple. Each node - that is to say, a hole in the ground - would contain heavenly materials and earthly treasures of a particular type. Pure spiritual energy would enter the node from the top and become polarized. From there, it would head down a straight trench to an adjacent node of the next type on the productive cycle of feng shui. For example, an earth node would be linked to a metal node and a fire node by a pair of trenches. In accordance with the principles of feng shui, earth-type spiritual energy would follow the trench towards the metal node, and become re-polarized. From there, it would flow to a water node, and so on around the circle. Because of the zig-zag nature of the trenches, the energy should never have a direct line towards the nodes housing the materials in accordance with the destruction cycle, avoiding inauspicious feng shui. As a result of the recirculation of spiritual energy around the chiclotron, the auspiciousness of the environment and the quality of spiritual energy should continuously increase.
Well, that was the theory. The practice was that the chiclotron didn¡¯t fucking work. Spiritual energy spilled over the lip of the structure, avoiding the trenches entirely, and then exclusively followed the destructive cycle of feng shui.
Qian Shanyi sighed. The destructive cycle was stronger, after all, and the distance between the conflicting nodes was only marginally larger than between the compatible ones.
She had kind of expected that, but hoped she would be wrong. The fix to this problem was simple: cover the trench. But that would mean even more shoveling dirt with her poor, innocent, exhausted back muscles¡
First, she took out the spool of Silvered Devil Moth Silk, and cut it into long sections covering the trenches, and stuck them in place by shoveling dirt on top. The nodes followed suit, covered by large square cuts of silk, similarly kept in place with dirt.
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Silvered Devil Moth Silk was impermeable to spiritual energy of this density: with it covering the trenches, spiritual energy could no longer escape directly upwards. This left two paths: flowing through the air in the trench towards a compatible node, or trying to reach a conflicting node directly through many meters of earth. Spiritual energy always took the easiest path, so Qian Shanyi hoped this would solve her problem.
She waited anxiously, observing the flow of spiritual energy above the chiclotron. Some polarized spiritual energy seeped through the earth around the nodes, but these minor losses were inevitable. It should mix with the pure spiritual energy around the world fragment, and wouldn¡¯t present any harm.
After a while, she breathed a sigh of relief. The spiritual energy didn¡¯t blow the lid off the chiclotron, and there didn¡¯t seem to be any major leaks either. It was finally working as intended.
Her brushes with death and all the digging exhausted her to the bone. On top of that, forcibly keeping her broken leg in one piece through all this labor was starting to drain her reserves of spiritual energy. She barely had the strength to gather the assorted clothes from the treasury into a makeshift bed, take another Big Mo¡¯s Healing Tablet and tie a loose cloak around her eyes to block off the ever-present light, before falling asleep.
The clock will wait until tomorrow.
Qian Shanyi blew gently on her bowl of noodle soup. It wasn¡¯t often that she had the time and money to go to the Northern Sky Salmon restaurant, and she wanted to savor it. Maybe it would be worth it to give into her teacher¡¯s nagging and learn immortal chef techniques, if she could make soup like this for herself. She hummed a tune, and prepared to dig in.
Annoying laughter came from behind her, and she felt someone¡¯s hand land on her shoulder. She pushed the hand off and turned around, coming face to face with a trio of drunks.
From how the spiritual energy flowed around them, she could feel that all of them were cultivators. The ones in the back wore the black robes of the inner disciples of the Black Mountain sect, though by the quantity of spiritual energy in their body she guessed they must have only barely entered the refinement stage. She immediately put them out of her mind as not worth her time or attention.
The one who put his hand on her shoulder was a lot stronger: somewhere near the high level of the refinement stage. If he wasn¡¯t quite as drunk he might have passed for a scholar, with his flowing white robes and long black hair tied into a complex shape.
Despite his high cultivation, his robes were not ones of a sect: was he a loose cultivator? He looked younger than Qian Shanyi, and she felt a twinge of jealousy. She had only managed to reach the middle level of the refinement stage after working herself ragged, yet he was already ahead of her. What kind of monstrous talent was he?
All three were drunk, but the scholar in front was the worst of the lot, barely managing to stand straight. His face exuded unbelievable arrogance.
¡°Do I know you?¡± she said, giving them a cold stare.
One of the two in the back laughed. ¡°Jade beauty, maybe we should get to know one another.¡±
¡°Not interested,¡± she said, making her glare colder still.
¡°Oh, sorry,¡± the scholar in front tried to take a step back, but lost his footing and stumbled forwards. His hand brushed against Qian Shanyi¡¯s bowl of soup, sending it flying.
No, not my soup!
The soup bowl, its trajectory set by the cruel force of gravity, fell directly onto her knees, spilling all over her robes - her best set of robes - with not even a drop missing her body.
She leaped up off her bench, her face enraged, and grabbed the drunken scholar by the collar.
¡°Asshole, do you watch where you step?!¡± she scowled.
¡°Oh, I stumbled.¡± the scholar slurred out. She couldn¡¯t tell if he was naturally calm or simply too drunk to care. The other patrons in the restaurant were looking in their direction now.
¡°You ruined my robes! And my soup!¡±
¡°Did I?¡±
¡°Yes.¡± she ground her teeth. She hated dealing with drunks. ¡°Now apologize, pay me for new robes, and two bowls of soup.¡±
¡°Oh. But I don¡¯t have any money.¡±
¡°You liar!¡± She snapped out, relaxing her hands a fraction in shock at the blatant falsehood. ¡°If you didn¡¯t have money how would they let you through the doors?¡±
He shrugged, and smiled lazily. ¡°Luck, I guess.¡±
Qian Shanyi closed her eyes and stabilized her breathing. She felt humiliated, but there was no use getting angry - she wasn¡¯t about to start a fight in public. The only thing she could do was ask a waiter for his name, go back to her sect, and then send him a bill for her robes later.
¡°Penniless bastard.¡± she shoved the drunk scholar back, and he fell down on his ass. ¡°If you don¡¯t have money, what did you forget here? Why don¡¯t you flee from the city into the forest where you belong.¡±
Something clicked in the face of the drunk scholar, and he flew into a rage, a mass of spiritual energy suddenly pouring out of his body.
¡°What are you going to do, fight me while drunk?¡± she laughed in surprise. ¡°In public? In the middle of the best restaurant in the city? The chef will put your head on the menu for disturbing the guests. Don¡¯t court death, calm down.¡±
Then he beat her black and blue. It wasn¡¯t even a contest, the bastard was far too strong. Blissful unconsciousness overtook her when her leg broke.
Qian Shanyi awoke shivering from the cold. Her face scowled, remembering her dream.
Soup?! This bastard beat me half to death because he couldn¡¯t apologize over spilling a bowl of soup?!
She got up off the ground. There was no going back to sleep now: the air might cool her skin, but righteous anger kept her soul scalding hot. She didn¡¯t recognize his face at the time, but now, in retrospect, she knew the man. It was Wang Yonghao, loose cultivator who rolled into town to much excitement a couple days back, just in time for the annual Four Spirits tournament. They said he won it handily, pulling out an unheard technique after technique to counter every secret art of his opponents, even the ones they have never used in public before today. Rumors were split between calling him a cultivation genius and a fraud who rigged the games.
¡°Wang Yonghao, you will pay for this,¡± she growled, casting her gaze around the world fragment. ¡°Now why the hell is it so damn cold?¡±
The grass and flowers around her were covered with a light dusting of ice, glittering like morning dew. She felt the air around herself, thick with metal and water-type spiritual energy.
¡°The chiclotron must have broken¡¡± she sighed.
At least the sense of doom was finally gone: the feng shui must have improved quite a bit.
She shivered as she limped her way over to one of the water nodes on the chiclotron. Sure enough, water-type spiritual energy was seeping freely from the top. The earth on top of the node was frozen solid, and she couldn¡¯t manage to pull the sheet of the Silvered Devil Moth Silk aside to look inside the node.
She had to stop this overproduction before the temperatures dropped even further. Cultivators were more resistant to temperature fluctuations, but by no means immune.
In the next node over, a much greater amount of metal-type spiritual energy was gushing into the air. Qian Shanyi pulled the cover aside, and a column of metal-type energy burst out with a draft of air. She looked inside: everything seemed to be exactly as she had left it. A thick stream of earth spiritual energy flowed in from the left, was converted into metal spiritual energy, and gushed out of the top. Very little of it went to the right, towards the water node.
Something must have blocked it. Did the trench collapse? The cover on top seemed fine though.
She had to look at the water node, but its cover was frozen to the ground. She thought about cutting it free with her sword, but she was worried of damaging the silk. Besides, there was a better option.
She headed over to a fire node, and frowned. All around it, the grass was yellowed as if in drought, and the ground underneath it was cracked and dry. The air above the node was shimmering with heat, unlike the rest of the world fragment.
As she carefully pulled the cover aside, the soil suddenly gave in under her feet. She was on guard, and leaped aside. A burst of fire came from within the node, before the heavenly materials and earthly treasures inside were buried by the earth. She carefully came closer, and saw that the soil inside the node was sandy and completely dry: the high temperature of the fire-type spiritual energy must have brought all moisture out of the earth.
¡°I¡¯ll need to think of something to strengthen the trench later¡¡± she sighed, and started excavating the treasures. At least she was no longer cold. The treasures themselves were red hot, so she had to flick them out of the hole with a quick move of her shovel-sword, and then slowly golf them over to the water node.
Steam poured off from the frozen earth as the temperature fluxes fought one another. Slowly, the earth began to unthaw, and Qian Shanyi managed to pull the silk cover aside to look into the water node.
The node was completely filled with ice.
She frowned, and sat down to think.
Some water-type treasures, like the Blue Tear Stone, produced water or ice when exposed to spiritual energy, but she was very careful to put them at the bottom of the node, below all other treasures, where the ice growth would not block the flow of spiritual energy. Besides, this water production fell off with distance, and so the ice growth slowed down rapidly with time. Something like the Blue Tear Stone would at most be covered by ten or twenty centimeters of ice even after decades of growth. But here, the entire node was filled with ice.
Finally, an idea appeared in her head. The fire node had dried the earth surrounding it, but where did all that moisture go? Most of it must have gone into the chiclotron trenches, raising the humidity of the air. Then, in the water nodes, all this humidity froze out of the air, forming ice. This ice made it harder for the metal-type spiritual energy to get to the water node until eventually, it became easier for it to burst through the earth around the silk cover on top of the node: this was why the air was thick with metal spiritual energy. A similar problem happened at the water node: as the ice grew, the difference in difficulty between seeping from under the node cover and heading down the trench became smaller, and more and more water-type energy started to escape into the air. This dropped the overall air temperature in the world fragment, leading to a runaway icing effect. Fire-type spiritual energy, being locked within its trenches and steadily converting into earth-type spiritual energy, could not balance out the temperatures.
Qian Shanyi rubbed her face. This wasn¡¯t a problem when all the treasures were piled together, because the spiritual energy would constantly turn from one type to another, with about equal amounts of fire- and water-type spiritual energy present in the air at any given time, keeping the temperatures constant.
¡°Nothing here goes right,¡± she sighed. ¡°At this rate, I¡¯ll need to add freezing to death to the list of my problems.¡±
Chapter 4: Read The Dao With Drunken Eyes
Her first priority was to melt the ice.
Qian Shanyi placed all the treasures from the four fire nodes on top of the frozen water nodes. The fire treasures heated up as the abundant water-type spiritual energy in the air surged into them, and sank into the ice, releasing clouds of steam. As the water-type spiritual energy in the air was turned into fire-type, the temperature in the world fragment slowly started to go up.
Of course, this process massively worsened the local feng shui, but this was a temporary sacrifice.
While she waited for all the ice to melt, she started to dig out new trenches. The chiclotron would only require a small modification to deal with the icing problem: by moving the fire and water nodes close together, they should balance out each other¡¯s temperatures.
The physical labor kept her warm, though the hungry void in her stomach reminded her that at this point, she was burning her own body to move.
She dug the new holes in pairs, with only a foot and a half in between them, and connected them to the corresponding earth, metal and wood nodes. To make sure the spiritual energy wouldn¡¯t flow directly through the shared wall, she cut off large sections from the spool of Silvered Devil Moth Silk, and used them to line the walls of the new nodes.
By the time she finished digging, the ice had already melted, and the treasures were submerged in a pool of tepid, muddy water. Qian Shanyi stripped down, and took the opportunity to wash herself off encrusted blood as she waded through the water to get the treasures out. She didn¡¯t think her overall cleanliness improved as a result, but at least her hair wasn¡¯t encrusted into a single solid block of dried blood.
Once the fire and water treasures were moved into their new holes, and new covers were installed over the entire system, the new chiclotron was finally complete. She rested down on the grass, her shovel sword stabbed into the ground on one side, and drank spirit wine. Her robe laid on the grass nearby: she figured she would wait for herself to dry off before putting it back on.
Wine was a terrible source of calories. It barely contained any nutrition, and on top of that, drinking on an empty stomach would harm your body. Unfortunately, it was either the wine, starving, or trying her chances by eating the monster egg. Given how her luck was as of late, she wanted to put that off for as long as possible.
As she finished the bottle, she realized she forgot to take her medicine after she woke up. She closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead. She really should finish that clock.
¡°Well, nothing to it,¡± she mumbled, ¡°I am a cultivator. If I can¡¯t even practice while drunk, how could I expect to reach the heavens?¡±
She got up off the ground, and stumbled over to where her makeshift clock was, popping another Big Mo¡¯s tablet on the way. Her head buzzed: she hadn¡¯t eaten anything in a couple days, and the spirit wine was quite strong. At least it kept the pain in her body at bay.
She set the clock up again, put a ladle under it, and started practicing to time how long it took to fill it. As spiritual energy circulated through her body, her head cleared up a bit, and she felt much better.
It took just shy of seven rounds of practice to fill the ladle up. This meant it took about twelve and a half minutes: a nice fifth of an hour per ladle. Qian Shanyi stopped, and picked up the bottle. She poured the water out of the ladle, then carefully re-filled it from the bottle, and marked the new level of water with her sword. A neat row of sixty marks soon appeared on the bottle¡¯s side: if her math was right, it should fully drain in about twelve and a half hours.
Qian Shanyi put the bottle back in its stand, went over to her makeshift bed and flopped down on it. As her eyes slowly closed, she smiled. Despite the universe¡¯s best attempts to kill her, she wasn¡¯t going to die today.
She fell asleep and slept for twelve hours straight.
When Qian Shanyi woke up, she felt a lot better. Good feng shui of the world fragment, rich spiritual energy in the air, and medicine in her belly all combined to accelerate her healing beyond what was normally possible. Her entire body was still bruised and sore, but the skin had already started to heal up, and the swelling almost completely went away.
Before getting up, she carefully channeled spiritual energy into her leg. Her shin had also started to heal, bone fragments joining together in a couple spots. She knew that the fracture planes would instantly shear again if she pushed on them with even a single finger, but the progress was encouraging. She pushed more spiritual energy into the bone, pulled all the loose fragments into place, and quickly changed her splint.
She finally got up from her bed, stretched, and headed towards her clock. When she got there, she saw that the bottle was a bit more than halfway empty: by the marks, this meant she slept for about seven and a half hours.
She frowned. It definitely felt longer.
As she stared at the clock in thought, she noticed that it was dripping slower.
It only took her a moment to realize her mistake. The lower the level of water in the bottle, the lower the dripping speed: this meant that her clever idea of graduating the entire bottle by using a cup was completely wrong.
She sighed. Well, it¡¯s not like she had something better to do.
She quickly built another water clock out of the second wine crate and put the two side by side. Her idea was simple: first, she would use her practice to mark the second clock explicitly - In her current state, she could perhaps last for about an hour. Then, once she got too tired to cultivate, she could use the second clock to time the first clock, marking it all the way down the side by refilling the second clock when it ran out of markings.
Before beginning her practice, she took another medical pill, and drank a bottle of spirit wine. If she was going to regain the calories she lost digging ditches, she would need to drink more than one bottle per day, and at least practicing should keep her head clearer.
As she moved through the stances of the Seven Flowers Bloom, her sword cut through the air with a swish. Dense spiritual energy was attracted to her body, and sucked inside through the 40 000 spiritual pores on her skin. As the spiritual energy circulated through her body, she felt her constitution slowly improving.
It seemed that she had overestimated herself: after a mere forty minutes, her limbs gave in to exhaustion, and she only barely avoided collapsing. Shaking her head, she slowly sat down on the ground, and turned her senses inwards.
The bodies of cultivators in the refinement stage were not fundamentally different from the bodies of regular people. They still relied on their muscles and bones to move around, and their organs still functioned in much the same way. Of course, every aspect of their body was continually strengthened and improved by spiritual energy, but the basic structure remained the same.
Spiritual energy circulated around the cultivator¡¯s body and soul through a complex network of channels called ¡°meridians¡±. This meridian network was as complex as the network of blood vessels pumping blood around your body, and for many of the same reasons. Where blood vessels had arteries and veins that branched off into capillaries, the meridian network had primary meridians that branched off into secondary and minor meridians.
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The body and soul contained separate meridian networks: for example, the body had twelve primary meridians, while the soul had only eight. These two networks connected to one another at various points, allowing the spiritual energy to freely flow between them.
The meridian network of regular people was filled with impurities, preventing the flow of spiritual energy, and all connection points between their body and soul were similarly blocked. Spiritual energy could clear these blockages, but until enough of them were gone, it could not circulate through the meridians in the first place. Only once some of them were dislodged by luck could a regular person step on the path of cultivation.
Cultivation techniques, when practiced by a cultivator, would forcibly circulate spiritual energy through their network of meridians at great speed, eroding and removing impurities, strengthening and expanding the meridians, refining their body and soul, building muscles and fortifying bones. This is why the first realm of cultivation was called the ¡°refinement stage¡±. A cultivator in this stage was refining their body, soul and the meridian network in much the same way that a refiner refined weapons or armor.
As Qian Shanyi looked over her meridian network, she was very impressed. Spiritual energy in this world fragment was much denser than what she was used to, and its quality greatly improved after she resolved the feng shui problems. This one hour of cultivation cleansed her meridians better than a good week of practice back at the sect.
She wished she could push herself more and keep cleansing her meridians, but her current body just could not take it. If she tried, she might hurt herself.
For a moment, she wondered if she even wanted to get out of this world fragment, if the benefits of cultivating here were this good.
Well. She would starve to death if she didn¡¯t, but aside from that¡
She slowly opened her eyes. She had a full day of keeping watch on the clocks ahead of her, with nothing else to do.
She couldn¡¯t wait for her body to fully heal up.
It took less than a minute for her to get thoroughly bored of watching the water drip. Instead, she brought over the books and scrolls from the treasure pile, and decided to review them. From the titles, she was guessing that they recorded cultivation techniques.
Techniques and cultivation laws were some of the most closely kept secrets in cultivation. Even a single good combat technique could massively increase the power or versatility of a cultivator, and conversely, knowing the details of the techniques of your enemies would grant you a significant edge in a confrontation. Of course, not all techniques were related to combat: many of them were dedicated towards growing spiritual plants or rearing demon beasts, refining artifacts, establishing defensive formations, or helping cultivators advance to a new realm. These were often known as ¡°money-making techniques¡±, as even a single one could bring a sect from obscurity to the heights of wealth and power.
All together, there were four books and seven scrolls. She hoped that among them there would be a legendary sword technique, or an energy recirculation technique suited towards her cultivation. If not that, she could settle for a good money-maker technique, and hope to simply purchase combat techniques later on.
One of the books and three of the scrolls were in languages she didn¡¯t understand, so she put them aside. The others were written in a somewhat archaic dialect, but were still understandable.
She decided to go through the books first.
First one she picked up was shaped like a brick - only the size of her palm, but very thick, written in tiny characters. Its cover was a brilliant red, with gold lettering pronouncing it as ¡°Dao of the Clashing Wings of the Vermilion Bird¡±. As Qian Shanyi skimmed it, she quickly realized it was a full set of fire-type cultivation techniques that could take a cultivator all the way to the golden core realm. She did not have the skills needed to evaluate the quality of the work, but the spiritual energy circulation diagrams certainly seemed very impressive - much more complex than those of her own Seven Flowers Bloom.
She wouldn¡¯t have been surprised if you could establish a minor sect on the power of this one cultivation law alone. Unfortunately, as she had Metal affinity, it was entirely useless to her, as it was all based on recirculating fire-type spiritual energy.
Among the many different types of cultivation techniques, the single most important one for every cultivator was a spiritual energy recirculation technique.
Spiritual energy was fundamental to cultivation - without it, even the smallest demon beast moth would struggle to lift its wings. In order to utilize spiritual energy, cultivators had to collect it within their bodies, circulate it through their meridians, and then expel it through the 40 000 pores on their skin in special patterns. Human souls could do this instinctively, but only in a crude way, and so special techniques were developed to make the process more efficient.
The quality of the spiritual energy recirculation technique would determine how much spiritual energy a cultivator could absorb, store, and use, and how quickly they could bring it to bear - in other words, it would indirectly influence pretty much every aspect of their power. On top of that, the primary spiritual energy recirculation technique practiced by a cultivator would also determine what other techniques they could learn, as regular techniques tended to require different, often mutually incompatible, parts of the meridian network to be strengthened.
Of course, raw quality was not everything, as the spiritual energy recirculation technique also had to be suited for the constitution of the cultivator, and the type of spiritual energy within their body. Qian Shanyi had a Yin and Metal constitution - this meant that any spiritual energy entering her body would quickly become converted into metal- and yin- type spiritual energy, and the recirculation technique best suited for her would have the exact same type.
Second best would be a modified earth- or water-type technique. Spiritual energy produced as part of the operation of these techniques could not be recirculated by her body directly, but there were ways to modify them by relying on the productive cycle of feng shui, and allow her to partly utilize these techniques without permanent harm to her body. Of course, this would come at a severe cost in efficiency and energy usage.
Third best would be a ¡°pure Yin¡± technique like Seven Flowers Bloom. It operated with pure spiritual energy, and so could be safely practiced by any female cultivator, but the drop in efficiency would be greater still. Unfortunately, it was also the only Yin-type technique possessed by her sect, and so Qian Shanyi couldn¡¯t practice anything else.
The single worst type of technique for her to practice would be a fire-type one, as the destructive feng shui interaction between the fire-type spiritual energy and her own constitution would slowly boil her from the inside out.
Qian Shanyi put the useless fire book aside and picked up the next one. It was titled ¡°Seventeen Classifications of Essential Medical Herbs¡±, and seemed to be an advanced treaty on the alchemical properties of plants. Since her alchemical knowledge remained firmly in the realm of administering medicine and first aid, it was well beyond her station.
The last book was yet another cultivation law - Jade Diamond Muscle Refining Law, suited for body fundamentalist cultivators. Even if she wanted to practice it, the introduction in the book was adamant that a careful regime of drugs and training had to be followed from the age of ten in order to properly prepare the body for the practice: without it, she would have very high chances of dying.
Qian Shanyi rubbed her forehead, and went to get another bottle of spirit wine. She was really hoping that she could find a good cultivation law, or at least a spiritual energy circulation technique of the metal element, but it seemed that luck was still firmly against her.
Having read over the books, she moved onto the scrolls.
The first one was an unnamed fire-type movement technique which condensed swarms of fiery dragonflies under the feet of a cultivator, allowing them to walk on air before the building foundation realm. She decided to call it the Scarlet Dragonfly technique. Being able to fly, even with limitations, was an incredible boon in combat, and her heart ached because she could never practice it.
Second scroll contained a blueprint for a powerful wood-type protective talisman. Her heart ached again: even if she knew how to inscribe talismans, her metal constitution would prevent her from infusing it with spiritual energy.
Third scroll was a sword technique called Honk of the Solar Goose. It was a rare Yang-type technique, and required a soul-bound flying sword on top of that. Both of which made it impossible to practice for Qian Shanyi.
Final scroll was titled Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes. It was merely a minor, untyped technique that could create various colored powders out of the air and apply them to your body, as well as produce some impressive background lights and sounds on command. The scroll gave an example of creating a flash of lightning and a roar of thunder any time you laughed.
Despite an oppressive name, it was essentially just magical makeup. It even said ¡°Perfect for ice cold jade beauties!¡± right under the title.
Qian Shanyi flopped down on the ground, smashing her fist into the earth in frustration. The force of the impact sent the grass flying away, leaving a small pit behind.
¡°Damn it! I just want a terrifying sword technique that could split the heavens apart,¡± she groaned. ¡°Is this truly too much to ask?¡±
Chapter 5: Trip On Eggs And Climb To Heaven
Qian Shanyi spent the days cultivating and trying to plan her escape. All the spirit wine she was drinking made planning slow. On the other hand, she had nothing but time.
Two days after she started tracking time, she gave in and learned Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes out of sheer boredom. She knew that it was just the sort of technique her teacher would have wanted her to learn ¡°to find a good husband¡±, and this fact annoyed her to no end.
The fact that it was incredibly easy to learn annoyed her even more.
As time passed, she noticed that the world fragment¡¯s temperature and humidity had risen. It didn¡¯t take her long to figure out why: it was all down to the chiclotron.
When she moved the water and fire nodes together, the temperatures of the two nodes balanced one another just like she planned, but she didn¡¯t think about the trenches leading out of the nodes. These trenches were filled with water- and fire- spiritual energy, which of course affected the temperature of the air within them and the surrounding ground. Previously, all trenches had the same length, but as the result of the moved nodes, fire trenches ended up being about twice as long as the water trenches. The effect wasn¡¯t anywhere near as strong as when the nodes were separated, but the temperature still steadily climbed.
The humidity problem was even easier to trace. Back when the trenches froze over, the fire nodes evaporated a large amount of water out of the ground. This water turned into ice, and later into water, but now it was slowly evaporating out of the previous water trenches. Over time, it would be absorbed back into the dried sandy earth left behind from the previous fire nodes, but for now, there was a lot of free water within the world fragment. On top of that, Blue Tear Stones constantly generated new water, which seeped through the wall between the new fire and water nodes and quickly evaporated.
By the time five days have passed, the world fragment started to resemble a sauna.
She thought about fixing the problem by correcting the trench lengths, but honestly¡ She couldn¡¯t be bothered. On top of that, she wanted to save her calories, and so wasn¡¯t about to pick up her shovel for such a minor reason. If the temperature got too high to be comfortable, she could simply pop the lids on the water nodes for a while and let the free water spiritual energy drop the temperature in the world fragment. Until then, she decided to just let it be. The only thing she did was to move the Blue Tear Stones halfway down the water trenches: the temperature was below freezing there, and so at least the net influx of water into the world fragment would be zero. She moved the books and scrolls into the same trench too, not wanting the humidity to ruin the paper.
Rich spiritual energy in the world fragment made the grass grow quicker, and after five days, the trenches no longer stood out as black lines of dug up dirt.
By the sixth day, her bruises had entirely faded. The bone in her shin was also starting to heal: it was still not strong enough to hold her weight without an infusion of spiritual energy, but at least she didn¡¯t need her splint to keep the bone fragments in place anymore.
Her mood had brightened somewhat only to come crashing back down again.
In the middle of the sixth day, she heard a rustle of wind, and as she looked up she saw a colorful vortex form at the very top of the world fragment. She couldn¡¯t see through it. As she watched it, she saw a large axe, a pair of swords and a whip fall through the vortex and onto the ground, followed by an enormous pillow. The vortex closed shortly thereafter.
That meant the exit from the world fragment was at the very top. Unfortunately for her, she could neither fly nor jump thirty meters into the air.
She threw an angry glare at the trench storing her ¡°library¡± of cultivation techniques, where the scroll of the Scarlet Dragonfly technique was laying.
Damnable fire element¡
Assuming that the exit could not move, this put a flying sword straight through the idea of sneaking out of the world fragment, on account of her being unable to soar through the air like a bird. That left trying to fight the person who put her here, or trying to negotiate. Neither of the options seemed good.
First of all, if her jailers were in the building foundation stage and she tried to fight them, she would just lose. But even if they were only as strong as Wang Yonghao, she would really struggle.
Ordinarily, if she was well-fed and with a solid leg, she was sure she could put up a good fight against someone like him. Last time, she only lost so easily because she didn¡¯t expect him to actually start a fight. They were in the middle of one of the largest restaurants in the city, and she knew that the head chef was in the building foundation stage. On top of that, barracks of the imperial army were only a short distance away. Any cultivator trying to start a fight would get caught for sure, and so subconsciously, she felt safe, and did not bring up her spiritual energy shield in time. This time, she would know what she was getting herself into.
Furthermore, she could stack her odds. She had new protective robes, and there was even more specialized armor among the treasures. Besides the armor, she could use talismans, if she could guess which ones were defensive in nature. She could pop the covers on the chiclotron and fill the world fragment with metal spiritual energy, bending the environment to her side and allowing herself to recover energy faster in the middle of the fight.
Still, she wouldn¡¯t bet on herself winning. Her realm was quite low, and her cultivation law was mediocre: small improvements and little tricks could only get her so far.
That left negotiation, which seemed iffy at best. Her father was a merchant, and before she broke through and stepped on the path of cultivation, he taught her a bit about his business, which included negotiating. If she looked at her situation from the perspective of what he taught her, she would describe her situation as ¡°thoroughly fucked¡±.
To negotiate, you needed leverage, and as a starving prisoner, she had almost none.
Worst of all, she was missing crucial information. For example, how did she get here? When she lost consciousness, they were on the street in front of the restaurant. How did she end up in a world fragment?
Did Wang Yonghao bring her here? Why? For what purpose? How did he escape from the part of the city positively swarming with cultivators that dwarfed him in realm while carrying a body? Was he intending to use her as ransom? But her sect was one of the smallest in the city, and wasn¡¯t known for any particularly unique techniques or artifacts: any ransom they could offer would be dwarfed by the treasury in this world fragment.
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On top of that, if that was his intention, surely he should have at least given her food and medicine - a dead ransom is worth nothing. He couldn¡¯t have possibly expected her to pick her way through the treasure piles to find the single bottle of pills she could use - if she wasn¡¯t as stubborn as a donkey, she would have given up long before finishing.
Did someone else bring her here? Again, why? Why did they leave her to her own devices for an entire week, without giving her food or water? Why leave her here - alone in a treasury? Why was this world fragment so undeveloped?
When nobody appeared after several days of her confinement, she figured that whomever the owner was, perhaps they temporarily couldn¡¯t access the world fragment. Maybe their group had put her inside due to not having any other place to store her, and then avoided opening the entrance in order to avoid attracting attention to its location. Swords falling from the sky dispelled this strange theory, and only brought more questions along with them. Surely they had to have noticed what she had done with the place? Why did they not come down to talk to her?
There were dozens of questions roiling in her head about her situation, and that meant her negotiation position was fundamentally unstable. She had no idea who was on the other side of that swirling portal, what they wanted, what force or group they belonged to, what constraints or timelines they were operating under, and on the other hand, they likely knew everything about her. They could come and talk to her at any time, while she was imprisoned here, slowly starving to death.
In any negotiation, the other side would be holding all the cards, while she had none.
She waited for six hours, prepared to spring into action with her sword on her knees and decked in defensive talismans, but the entrance did not open again. Whatever this strange situation was, it seemed slated to continue.
While she was waiting, she decided that she might as well make a plan B for the next time the entrance opened. She took a long spear out of her storage of weapons, cut off a fifty-meter long strip of Silvered Demon Moth Silk, and tied it to the middle of the spear. If her jailers were not going to descend to her level, she would ascend to theirs: the next time the entrance to the world fragment opened, she would chuck the spear through it, and try to climb up as fast as she could. The spear was longer than the entrance was wide: if luck was on her side, it should lodge itself against the opening when she pulled it back, and all she would have to do is climb up the strip of silk to reach the entrance. Of course, wherever it actually lodged itself or not was down to chance.
If her luck was truly godlike, she would happen to spear whomever opened the world fragment, and pull them inside. Even if they were at the peak of the refinement stage, a fall from thirty meters with a spear through their guts should disorient them for long enough for her to slice their head off.
If they were in a building foundation stage or stronger, she was just dead.
The problem was that she had never trained herself to quickly climb up ropes. She was sure she was strong enough to manage it, but the question was how quickly. She would need to climb thirty meters up: how long would it take? Ten seconds? Twenty? She had no idea. What she did know was that unless the person who opened the world fragment was blind, they would see the spear, and ten seconds was an eternity when it came to cultivation. One chop, and she would come tumbling down.
It was a plan that could only work if everything went exactly right, but she wasn¡¯t about to sit on her ass until whomever was up there deigned to come down.
She was also running out of food. She was drinking four wine bottles per day, but that was clearly not enough. Cultivators needed more calories than normal people, and on top of that, she was injured, and spent the first two days of her confinement doing heavy labor: she could feel her muscles growing weaker by the day. At this point, she had five bottles of wine left.
That left two options: either deliberately cutting down her consumption, knowing that that will make her weaker still when she would need to break out¡or eating the monster egg.
She decided to risk it. The egg was large: if it could be eaten, and she stored the leftovers, she should have enough food for a long time, and it would make her stronger for the breakout attempt.
The key problem was that she didn¡¯t know any immortal chef techniques. She did learn the basics of cooking, after extensive nagging from Elder Striding Phoenix, but only that. Furthermore, the tools she had to work with were extremely primitive.
It would have to do.
She quickly cleaned up the world fragment, putting away the weapons and treasuries into the trenches of the chiclotron: if it was going to come down to a fight, she didn¡¯t want to give the other side more tools to use. Then, she took out half a dozen Igneocopper bricks from the fire nodes, built a circle with them, and put her trusty shield pan on top.
While she waited for the pan to heat up, she brought several empty wine bottles over, and carefully sawed their necks off with her sword. She would need to store most of the egg on ice, and she figured she might as well re-use the containers she had.
For a moment she wondered if perhaps this was all some kind of convoluted plot to make her eat the egg by starving her, but quickly dismissed the possibility. If someone wanted to do so, they could have simply tied her up and force fed her the egg.
With the pan nice and hot, she brought the egg over, carefully drilled two small holes into it, and started pouring it onto the shield, stirring the egg with a short dagger.
The egg albumen was bright blue. She doubted this was an auspicious sign for its taste.
It took her three pours to completely fry the egg omelet. She packed most of it into wine bottles that she¡¯d sawn in half for this purpose, and put the bottles on ice into the water trenches of the chiclotron. This left only a small amount for her meal - less than a quarter of what she would have eaten, were the omelet made from regular eggs, but she would have to make do. The egg could still be poisonous, or disagree with her empty stomach that had only seen spirit wine for the last while.
Before she ate the egg, she did her best to be careful. She took a small bit of the omelet, put it on her hand, and waited. After ten minutes, her skin did not react. After that, she licked the omelet, and once again waited. Surprisingly, it tasted like a regular egg, though unsalted, and with a bit more earthy flavor. She did not feel the effect of any poison: feeling encouraged, she swallowed a small amount of the omelet, and once again waited.
Another ten minutes later, and she still felt fine. She could feel the rich spiritual energy within the omelet diffusing through her stomach and into her sacral dantian, but surprisingly, it wasn¡¯t gushing nearly as fast as she feared. Perhaps this egg was safe to eat, after all?
She finished off her omelet and started cultivating, circulating spiritual energy through her body to reduce the load on her stomach and digest the omelet faster.
Ten minutes into the cultivation, Qian Shanyi staggered. Her vision was swimming, filled with strange shapes and blotches of color.
¡°Not safe,¡± she breathed out, falling on her knees. ¡°Not safe at all¡¡±
She lost consciousness. Her dreams were nonsensical, full of color, shapes, scenes flowing into one another, and a droning sound like the buzz of a thousand bee hives.
She didn¡¯t know how long she slept. When she awoke, her clock was completely empty, so it must have been at least twenty hours.
Surprisingly, she wasn¡¯t feeling that bad, and as she checked her body over with spiritual energy, she didn¡¯t find anything out of place. She guessed that the egg must have had some subtle drug within it - like alcohol, something that was fine in small doses, but would knock you out if you took too much.
She took another healing pill, washed it down with some spirit wine, and was about to try testing her theory by eating a much smaller amount of the omelet, when she heard rustling of the wind, and her head snapped upwards.
The entrance to the world fragment was opening again.
Chapter 6: Pour Smoke And Dance In Shadows
Qian Shanyi sprinted over to her rope spear, picked it up, and spun over to face the vortex in the sky. She reached back for a throw, but stopped. A pair of legs was going through the portal.
Soon the legs resolved into a man, their feet supported on two clouds of red dragonflies. He was wearing long, white robes, his long black hair pinned on top of his head into a complex shape. He was holding a golden sphere in his hands, and was absorbed in fiddling with it as he slowly descended, not paying any attention to his surroundings.
Wang Yonghao?
Even though he had his back to her, Qian Shanyi recognised the man. She hefted the spear in her hand, considering going for the kill with a precise throw. Her thoughts raced.
Wang Yonghao being here made no sense. Sure, he beat her up, but there should have been absolutely no way for him to escape unscathed from the city swarming with cultivators. He should have been caught, and beaten up even worse than her.
A fight between two cultivators, even ones of a very low realm, would inevitably be seriously destructive. Because of this, the laws around cultivators were very strict: whenever someone got into a fight in public, all sides would be apprehended, and the instigator dealt with with utmost prejudice. The administration of every large city retained ¡°spirit chasers¡± - special cultivators trained in breaking up fights, as well as tracking and capturing cultivators for this express purpose.
If two cultivators wanted to duel, they could go into a forest, deep into the mountains, or to a specially protected training area within a sect: this way, the damage would be contained. Many sects would rent out these areas, so it was quite easy to find an area where you could fight to your heart¡¯s content.
Of course, if a cultivator was strong enough, they could avoid punishment by simply beating up people sent after them, but this was easier said than done. For one, if a city couldn¡¯t deal with the problem, they would notify the Imperial administration, and no single man could fight the Empire. For another, even in the smallest cities, most of the spirit chasers were at least in the foundation building stage.
Qian Shanyi grew up in the Golden Rabbit Bay city: an important trading port at the delta of the Golden Snake river, with a population in the hundreds of thousands. It was a rich city, and so many spirit chasers of the Golden Rabbit Bay were in the middle or high foundation building stage. On top of that, the city was an administrative center for the Empire, and their presence was naturally much larger than normal.
Qian Shanyi focused on Wang Yonghao¡¯s back in the air. Yep, just as she remembered, he was definitely in the high refinement stage - not even peak refinement stage. Clearly, there should have been absolutely no way for him to escape: even a half-blind foundation building stage cultivator would have no trouble tracking down this little frog.
Was he suppressing his power?
The more time a cultivator spent cultivating, the more they would clear various blockages and impurities from their meridians. This, in turn, made the flow of their spiritual energy through the 40 000 spiritual pores on their skin more stable. Stability of spiritual energy flow was thus used as a general measure of how far along on the road of cultivation someone was, because of how easy it was to observe, and because clearing of the meridians proceeded at a fairly consistent rate. As a broad measure, the refinement stage was usually split into four substages: low, middle, high and peak, depending on the various signs about the flow of spiritual energy.
Of course, these were only broad categories. Cultivators did not just clear their meridians: they also strengthened their muscles and constitution, acquired skills with the sword, learned various techniques, expanded and unblocked their dantians, and so on. But because all these things would proceed in parallel, the flow of spiritual energy remained a decent measure of a cultivator¡¯s power, and so it was relied on by most sects and cultivation treatises in the world of cultivation.
By observing this flow, you could make a guess at how dangerous the other cultivator was to fight. Of course, this was nothing but an imprecise guess: special techniques, the quality of spiritual energy recirculation, as well as artifacts and talismans would all play a role in determining a cultivator¡¯s real combat power. Furthermore, cultivators could deliberately ¡°suppress their power¡± by masking the flow of spiritual energy through their skin by forcibly constricting their spiritual pores, though this took some amount of effort and concentration.
The more you knew about a cultivator, the more precise your estimation would be, but it would remain a guess. Ultimately the only way to know for sure was to try to kill them, and either succeed or fail.
Based on the flow of his spiritual energy, Wang Yonghao was definitely in the high refinement stage. She had also fought him before: he was very good, maybe even as strong as a peak refinement stage cultivator, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Normally, if she were to fight someone like that after suddenly nailing them with a spear, she was sure she could win the fight.
The problem was that the individual pieces did not fit into a coherent picture.
If Wang Yonghao was a loose cultivator, how did he find this massive treasury, and why did he remain a loose cultivator? Any sect in the world would accept him with open arms if he were to bring a world fragment like this to their doors. If he was really in a high refinement stage, how did he escape from the city? Was he a part of some secret power that helped get him out? But if so, why was this world fragment so undeveloped? Was he possessed by the spirit of some nascent soul old monster, who also gave him the world fragment? But again, why would this world fragment be so undeveloped?
It didn¡¯t make sense, which meant that she was missing something. Something major. Something that could make her lose the fight along with her life.
Should she risk it?
Her thoughts ran quickly: Wang Yonghao was still over twenty meters above the ground, but he was descending at a rapid pace. She needed to make her decision now.
Qian Shanyi gritted her teeth and put her spear down. She couldn¡¯t, not like this. Not when she had other options.
It was time for plan C.
Wang Yonghao¡¯s heart ached in a mixture of curiosity and dread as he descended down onto the ground. He had once again found some kind of strange ruin, and who knew how much he would need to suffer to get out. And this was only a couple days after being run off from that nice city, too¡
He had really hoped that this time he could stay in the city for more than a couple weeks, but it was not to be.
The golden sphere he was clutching was made from many different circular fragments that could slide against one another, and glowing lines would light up on its surface when they were put in special positions against one another. He figured it was some kind of fancy box, but maybe it was actually a keystone for some formation, or perhaps an energy core of an ancient weapon.
Well, whatever. He was here for the fly-whisk, not the sphere. He¡¯d figure it out eventually.
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As he touched down on the ground, a female voice suddenly called out from behind him.
¡°So, you finally deigned to visit. Took you long enough,¡± it said.
He jumped up, startled out of his thoughts. The sphere flew up and he struggled to catch it, but only managed to send it further away from himself into the grass. He turned around in shock - who else could be here?
He saw a woman with long black hair, lounging around on top of a large pillow. She was holding a sword and a bottle of wine, looking for all the world as if she had just been playing in a mahjong parlor. The air in between them was foggy, and her skin was covered in grime and dirt, but even through all that he could tell that her face and figure were those of a jade beauty.
¡°What? Who are you? What are you doing here?¡± he blurted out.
¡°Cultivating. What else?¡± she answered, motioning with her bottle of wine.
A drop of sweat slid down his forehead. This was his biggest secret, and he did his absolute best to keep it away from people - the one time he tried otherwise taught him well enough. And now someone managed to not only find it, but get inside.
¡°I meant, how did you get inside?¡± he asked.
The woman¡¯s spiritual energy made her seem to be in the middle refinement stage. An obvious trap - if she got inside, she had to be some kind of old monster.
¡°Am I supposed to tell you that?¡±, she raised an eyebrow.
He scowled. Was she making fun of him?
¡°How did you get inside my inner world?¡± he demanded.
Through superhuman force of will, Qian Shanyi managed to keep her eyebrow from twitching. She really wanted to kill this lucky bastard.
An inner world was a legendary type of world fragments that attached itself to the soul of a cultivator. They were rumored to have all sorts of properties, from being used as natural cosmic rings, to allowing the cultivator to travel through the void, to bringing mythical demon beasts into existence.
The key term was ¡°rumored¡±. Whereas world fragments were very rare, but known for being used by the largest sects, Qian Shanyi had never even heard of anyone possessing an inner world.
Until now, apparently. She supposed that explained some things.
¡°Hm, don¡¯t you know that knowledge is the most expensive commodity in the world of cultivation?¡± she sighed theatrically, keeping her voice level. ¡°How could I simply tell you what you don¡¯t already know? I¡¯d be suffering a loss.¡±
Scowl on Wang Yonghao¡¯s face deepened, and she raised her hand placatingly.
¡°How about this - a trade,¡± she said, ¡°An answer for an answer. I know quite a bit about you, but there are still some things that are unclear.¡±
She was going to try negotiating, but she had nothing to negotiate with. Worse still, she was swimming in ignorance about crucial aspects of her situation. If a worse starting position existed, she could hardly imagine it.
It was as if she was playing cards with her life at stake, only she had no cards to play, and didn¡¯t even know all the rules of the game. On the other hand, the other side had been playing this game for years, and had a full hand. Even if she was the best player in the world, how could she hope to win by following the rules?
The only way out was bluffing.
She already figured out that whomever was controlling this world fragment, they weren¡¯t watching her closely - otherwise, it made no sense for them to let her roam around so freely. At the very least, once she started cutting into the spool of Silvered Demon Moth Silk, they should have stopped her. This relative obscurity gave her something to bluff with, but Wang Yonghao really opened her options when he said he didn¡¯t know who she was.
She didn¡¯t know jack shit about Wang Yonghao, but the more smoke and mirrors she put in the air, the better her position would seem, as all the same worries about not knowing who Wang Yonghao was would now work in her favor.
Wang Yonghao grit his teeth. ¡°Fine. You first - how did you get here?¡°
¡°Why should I go first?¡± she immediately asked, pushing her luck.
¡°Because I asked first.¡±
¡°That hardly matters, this isn¡¯t a race,¡± she laughed. ¡°You came to me to make a trade, and I agreed. Clearly you want to know my information. Do you think you could find out some other way?¡±
He narrowed his eyes at her. ¡°So do you. You said things were unclear.¡±
She raised her eyebrow in return. ¡°Do I look like I am in a hurry? I could simply continue to follow after you and observe from the sidelines - everything will become clear in time. How long do you think I¡¯ve been doing this? The only reason I am even considering a trade is because of my good nature, and because I am lazy.¡±
She couldn¡¯t even get out of this world fragment, let alone follow after someone with an inner world, but she wasn¡¯t about to say that. Her stomach seemed set to rumble, and she pushed spiritual energy into it, forcibly suppressing the urge.
They locked eyes. Qian Shanyi kept her face relaxed, with a light smile playing on her lips. Finally, Wang Yonghao sighed, rubbing his eyes.
¡°Fine. What do you want to know?¡± he said.
¡°How did you escape?¡± she said.
He laughed weirdly, frowning slightly. ¡°Escape what? You¡¯d have to be more specific.¡±
Finding out new information was another gamble, as a wrong question could easily blow her cover. Until she knew more, she could only ask vague questions, and hope he would give her something she could use.
What she wanted to know was how he escaped from the Golden Rabbit Bay¡¯s spirit chasers, but she could not ask that directly. It was possible that he was linked to the Empire, and didn¡¯t need to escape. In fact, it was entirely possible he was still in the city, as his inner world could no doubt be opened anywhere.
¡°The last one, obviously,¡± she rolled her eyes, sticking to her guns. ¡°I couldn¡¯t see it myself.¡±
He laughed and ruffled his hair. ¡°Oh, well¡ I honestly can¡¯t remember that well, because I was kinda drunk at the time. I think I got into a fight? Then there was some kind of explosion, and I think I just ran. At some point I got into a forest, fell into a hole, and I think I must have landed on a teleportation formation because when I awoke I was deep underground, inside of an abandoned secret realm.¡°
She nodded, projecting confidence she desperately needed. Who just finds an entrance to a secret realm in the middle of a forest?
¡°Now, your turn.¡± he said, his face hardening. ¡±How did you get inside?¡±
¡°You brought me here.¡±
¡°What?!¡± he exclaimed in shock.
¡°Yeah, opened the entrance and everything,¡± she nodded.
¡°Why would I do that?!¡±
¡°Wait for your turn before asking more questions,¡± she smiled smugly. ¡°This secret realm - tell me about it. Have you found an exit yet?¡±
Wang Yonghao shook his head. ¡°No, but I¡¯ll get it eventually. It¡¯s not my first time. There was a wide sea of poison gas, and I figured I could clear it with this fly whisk I have here somewhere - ¡±
He looked around the world fragment, and exclaimed in shock again.
¡°Wait - where is everything?!¡±
¡°Is that your next question?¡±
He turned back to her, and scowled. ¡°No. Tell me why I would let you inside my inner world.¡±
¡°Oh, I have no idea.¡±
¡°What?!¡±
¡°How should I know? I didn¡¯t read your mind.¡±
His face was growing red, and Qian Shanyi laughed. Serves him right.
¡°Fine, fine, I won¡¯t count it as your turn. Ask something else.¡±
Wang Yonghao threw his hands up. ¡°Who are you? I¡¯ve never even met you before, how could I just let you into my inner world? This makes no sense!¡°
¡°Oh, so that¡¯s what you want to know,¡± she nodded, ¡°Well, that¡¯s easy enough to answer, I suppose. Who do you think I am?¡±
Chapter 7: Cut A Deal With Your Tongue As Saber
Wang Yonghao¡¯s head was hurting. First he was run off from the Golden Rabbit Bay city, then he had once again fell head first into some secret ruins, and now it turned out that someone was following him all this time?
His luck really was the worst.
¡°Who do you think I am?¡± the woman said. How was he supposed to answer that? He didn¡¯t even know her name.
He scowled at her. This bullshit toying was really getting on his nerves. He had enough of that in his life.
¡°It¡¯s my turn to be asking questions,¡± he said.
She shrugged. ¡°Look, if you don¡¯t want to answer then don¡¯t - just don¡¯t blame me if I tell you something you already know.¡±
He stared at her for a while, then sighed. That was honestly fair.
¡°You are a ring grandma, sentient weapon that can assume human form, ancient ghost cultivator, time-traveling blacksmith from ancient times, reincarnated shard of the personality of a ten-thousand year old cultivator, or something else in a long line of bullshit that keeps making my life a living hell,¡± he said, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of his voice, ¡°here to either try to kill me, or bestow an inheritance on me, or try to take over my body, or tell me that I am your bastard child, or something else of that nature.¡±
The woman blinked and hummed at him.
¡°I don¡¯t really want to teach you anything, no,¡± she said, ¡°mostly I was just curious about your inner world, and how you accumulated so many treasures.¡±
¡°I am just that lucky,¡± he threw back, sitting down on the ground opposite to her.
¡°That wasn¡¯t a question, but thanks for volunteering,¡± she smiled.
¡°Oh cut this bullshit,¡± he said, getting more annoyed, ¡°You haven¡¯t followed the rules yourself. Just talk like a normal person.¡±
She hummed again. ¡°Alright then,¡± she said, ¡°You¡¯ve met me in person in the Northern Sky Salmon while very drunk. You stumbled, spilled my noodle soup all over my robes, and then got into a fight with me for no reason. Because of the limitations of my current body, you beat me up and threw me into your inner world.¡±
¡°That¡¯s a lie,¡± he scoffed, ¡°I don¡¯t care how drunk I was, I hate fighting, and wouldn¡¯t start it on a dime. I am a good person.¡±
¡°It isn¡¯t,¡± she rolled her eyes at him, sitting up and crossing her arms. ¡°It¡¯s what happened. You even refused to apologize for the soup.¡±
¡°You liar!¡± he sneered, ¡°I absolutely would apologize. If you are going to lie, at least say something more plausible.¡±
¡°Oh, you said you apologized alright,¡± she rolled her eyes at him again, ¡°but then you told me you had no money. Talk about liars.¡±
His response froze on his lips and he covered his face with a groan.
¡°I really don¡¯t have money,¡± he said.
¡°Who do you think you are fooling? I¡¯ve seen your treasury,¡± she said.
¡°No, it¡¯s - you don¡¯t understand,¡± he sighed. ¡°It¡¯s my luck.¡±
She stared at him, with one eyebrow raised.
¡°Look, I am very lucky,¡± he started explaining, ¡°I can¡¯t walk through a forest without hitting my toe on a pile of heavenly materials and earthly treasures. If I visit a technique expert, chances are I will happen to be their ten thousandth client, and they will teach me their secrets for free. I keep stumbling on ruins and secret realms all the bloody time. As far as cultivation resources, techniques, weapons, or anything like that goes, I can get it as easily as turning over my hand.¡±
He paused to draw breath.
¡°But not money,¡± he continued. ¡°Never money. I am as poor as a pauper. When I walk into town, I don¡¯t know whether I will be sleeping on the street or in the guest room of the mayor, because they saw something in me. I eat either unsalted rice or like a king, with little in between, depending on how my luck feels that day.¡±
His stomach growled to punctuate his point. He hadn¡¯t eaten since he left the Golden Rabbit Bay three days ago.
¡°Worse, this luck doesn¡¯t stop,¡± he continued, ¡±I can¡¯t just¡relax. The longest I¡¯ve been able to stay in any one place in the last three years was three weeks - some bullshit always happens making me set off again. This time, I won a tournament, and a young master of some sect I don¡¯t even remember the name of swore revenge on me, because apparently he needed to win it in order to get married. This was three days after I arrived in the city. I wanted to go to a theater there, but apparently, no luck. Luckily enough a cousin of the owner of Northern Sky Salmon heard that and offered to at least feed me for free. I guess that¡¯s when I started drinking. I don¡¯t remember much more afterwards.¡±
¡°Uh huh,¡± she said, clearly unconvinced.
¡°You don¡¯t believe me.¡±
¡°Not really, no,¡± she said, ¡±Everyone knows that some cultivators are more lucky than others, but what you describe is completely ridiculous. It violates all basic principles.¡±
He sighed. ¡°Fine. Do you have a die? I¡¯ll just show you.¡±
Qing Shanyi didn¡¯t have a die, but she did have some coins. She played a very simple game with Wang Yonghao: each of them would flip two coins, with two heads losing to head and tail, head and tail losing to two tails, and two tails losing to two heads. It should have been completely fair.
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Wang Yonghao won four fifths of the time. It didn¡¯t matter who flipped first, which coins they used, or even wherever he was flipping with his eyes closed.
Luck was a well-known force in the world of cultivation. Some things about luck were well known - for example, good feng shui would improve luck - but most of it remained a mystery.
It was definitely true that some cultivators were naturally more lucky than others. However, Wang Yonghao was breaking all known limits of luck - this was more than lucky, this was heaven-defying.
¡°Alright,¡± she sighed, ¡°Maybe you are more lucky than Buddha. Why don¡¯t you sell some of your treasures then?¡±
¡°You don¡¯t think I tried?¡± he sighed, ¡°It¡¯s not so simple. Even if I can find a way to sell something, I lose all the money just as quickly.¡±
¡°Hm,¡± she rubbed her chin, ¡°I suppose that explains why you started a fight after I called you a penniless bastard.¡±
He scowled at her again. Maybe she shouldn¡¯t have mentioned it.
She raised her hands in a conciliatory gesture. ¡°Well, sorry about that, but the idea of a loose cultivator going to Northern Sky Salmon without money was ridiculous.¡±
The scowl slowly faded from his face. ¡°It¡¯s fine, I guess,¡± he said, ¡°I wouldn¡¯t believe it either if it wasn¡¯t my life.¡±
He rubbed his face. ¡°Look, I¡¯ll compensate you for the fight. I would have offered for you to take some of the treasures, but they went missing somehow.¡±
He threw a glare at her.
¡°They aren¡¯t missing,¡± she said, ¡°I simply sorted everything and put it away. Your treasury was a complete mess - I don¡¯t know how you managed to find anything here.¡±
He ruffled his hair ruefully. ¡°Yeah, I guess I never got around to going through it properly.¡±
¡°On top of being hard to search,¡± she continued, ¡°it also produced a dangerous amount of ominous feng shui. It should have been pretty obvious.¡±
¡°I guess I don¡¯t really enter here that much,¡± he said, ¡°only makes me feel worse. At this point I only throw new treasures in because it would feel like a shame to leave them.¡±
With your luck, maybe you didn¡¯t come here much because it was fucking dangerous, she thought.
She didn¡¯t voice her opinion. His luck story was strange, and didn¡¯t add up in multiple ways. For example, great luck would make a cultivator more likely to get what they wanted - but if she were to believe Wang Yonghao, then his luck was actively working against his interests. She had never heard of anything like that. Until she could verify his story, it was best to keep her cards close to her chest.
¡°Are you hungry?¡± she asked, an idea slowly forming in her mind. ¡°I have some omelett here, if you want it.¡±
Whatever she was going to decide, she needed more time to think alone, without any watching eyes.
She walked over to the chiclotron trench, popped the cover open, and got the wine bottles storing the omelett out. Bringing a bottle of spirit wine along with her, she came back to Wang Yonghao and offered the omelett to him. He eyed her warily, not taking the bottles, though she could see his eyes widen at the sight of actual food.
¡°What, do you think it¡¯s poisoned?¡± She rolled her eyes, and ate a small clump to demonstrate. ¡°It¡¯s safe. Makes you drunk if you eat too much though.¡±
She frowned, deliberately exaggerating her expression.
¡°Actually, given what happened last time you were drunk¡ Maybe it¡¯s a bad idea,¡± she said, moving the omelett away and stepping back towards the trench.
¡°Wait, no!¡± he blurted out, snatching the omelett bottle out of her hands. She raised her eye at him.
¡°You sure? You seem to be a bit of a lightweight.¡±
¡°I¡¯ll be fine,¡± he narrowed his eyes at her, as if expecting her to take away his food. She shrugged, and went back to the chiclotron, heading directly to where she stored the various weaponry.
¡°You said you came here for a fly whisk?¡± she called out to him, and saw that the hungry fool was already devouring the omelett, ¡°You own two.¡±
She brought them over and Wang Yonghao pointed to one of them. She handed it over.
¡°Alright, now that you aren¡¯t dying of hunger, why don¡¯t we talk about how you can compensate me,¡± she said, looking him over, with her hands on her hips. She had perhaps ten minutes to iron everything out before he¡¯d knock himself out, so she had to work quickly. This was her golden ticket into the higher realms.
There should have been no way for her to leech off Wang Yonghao¡¯s luck directly. This was an absolute law: the luck of a cultivator was not transferable, and would only draw in events that they would benefit from, not someone else. His luck might be a little strange, but there was no reason to expect it to violate this principle.
That left benefitting indirectly. Her cultivation had already soared from simply being within the Inner World, and even if she could only use one percent of the treasures he found, it would shoot her straight into Heaven.
¡°First of all, if you think you¡¯ll get rid of me, tough luck,¡± she said, ¡°Your inner world is too good for cultivation. As compensation for the fight, you¡¯ll let me stay and train here for as long as I like. Also, I¡¯ll get to use anything and everything you put in here however I like.¡±
He narrowed his eyes at her. ¡°Do I get a choice in the matter?¡± he muttered.
¡°Ha, good joke,¡± she laughed, ¡°To placate you somewhat, I¡¯m not just going to train, I¡¯ll also take care of the world fragment, as you clearly aren¡¯t going to do it yourself. You say you eat unsalted rice? If you planted a garden, you could eat proper food. There are a dozen things you can do here that would help make your life more pleasant.¡±
He still seemed unhappy, but quieted down. Did he not think of starting a garden before?
¡°Deal?¡± she asked, stretching her hand.
¡°You still haven¡¯t told me your name,¡± he complained.
¡°Qing Shanyi,¡± she smiled.
¡°Sure, it¡¯s a deal, fellow cultivator Qing,¡± he sighed, shaking her hand, ¡°If that¡¯s even your real name.¡±
¡°Excellent,¡± she nodded, sitting down opposite him, ¡°Now tell me about this underground secret realm.¡±
About ten minutes later, as he was telling her about the secret realm, Wang Yonghao slumped over, with white foam coming out of his mouth. Qing Shanyi waited for a while, put some clothes under his head as a pillow, grabbed the fly whisk, and prepared to leave the world fragment.
Her proposal was honest. Her subpar cultivation law was holding her back, and so she needed all the help she could get in her cultivation. This world fragment would let her advance by leaps and bounds.
But just because she was being honest, that didn¡¯t mean she would rely on Wang Yonghao, or trust him on his word.
It took her ten tries to get her rope spear lodged against the opening of the world fragment. She put the fly whisk into her robes and started to carefully climb up the silk line, doing her best to avoid dislodging the spear.
¡°I¡¯m going to get out of here with my own power,¡± she said, looking down on the circular island of the world fragment from thirty meters up in the air, ¡°and then we¡¯ll see if I¡¯ll truly feel like coming back.¡±
Chapter 8: Swoop Across The Lakes Of Poison
Qian Shanyi poked her head out of the entrance portal to Wang Yonghao¡¯s Inner World, but only saw pitch darkness. Cool humid air felt pleasant on her face, worsened by a slight acrid and musty scent. She concentrated on her spiritual energy sense: the air was filled with earth-type spiritual energy, and she could roughly make out some kind of building around herself. Her position was extremely precarious, hanging as she was by her hands from the spear stuck across the portal, doing her best to minimize her own movements to avoid dislodging it and plummeting back into the world fragment beneath her.
Wang Yonghao said that he didn¡¯t see any demon beasts in this secret realm, but it paid to be careful. She slowly circulated the Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes through her body, making her hair glow golden. Dim light spread around her, and she could see that the portal opened in the middle of a dilapidated gazebo. She waited for a while, but everything was quiet. Slowly, she moved over to one side of the portal, hooked a leg over the edge, and climbed out. She picked up her rope spear, and looked around.
The gazebo stood on top of a small hill. Its wooden columns were damp and molding, supporting a partially collapsed roof, and she could see an oily, green sheen covering everything from the floor to the ceiling. She felt its disgusting, slimy texture beneath the soles of her naked feet, like a slathering of rotting fish fat. What she wouldn¡¯t give for a pair of sandals, but hers were no doubt left behind in the Northern Sky Salmon.
The columns of the gazebo were built on top of stone foundation blocks, and she quickly untied the rope from her spear and tied it around one of them. She yanked on it several times to make sure it was secure, and threw the now useless spear back into the world fragment.
Her exit secured, she walked out of the gazebo and looked over the rest of the hill.
The light from her hair didn¡¯t spread very far. There was a paved path leading down the side of the hill, surrounded by flower beds filled with death. As she followed it, she quickly reached the banks of thick, viscous green fog, surrounding the hill like a wide sea of poison. The path headed further into it.
Wang Yonghao mentioned this fog before. He thought the exit to the secret realm might be inside, but said he didn¡¯t feel like going into it, and Qian Shanyi found herself agreeing. Even if she discounted his luck, it looked positively malignant.
In theory, the fly whisk she¡¯d carried up with her could scatter the fog. But just like slapping the surface of water, it could also send some of the fog back at her - she wasn¡¯t about to try unless she had no other option.
She had walked around the edge of the fog, circling the top of the hill, before her feet started to itch. At first she ignored it, but as time went on, it got worse and worse. She looked at her feet: the skin on them was slowly getting redder.
Perhaps this green slime was more than simply disgusting.
She rushed over to the world fragment¡¯s portal, and quickly slid down the rope. As she did so, she circulated Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes, and applied a bright red powder to her feet. Once down, she quickly rubbed the poisonous slime onto the grass; the powder would mark where it was, and she would clean up the contamination later.
Qian Shanyi made sure to wash her itching feet off, then started thinking. At this point, boots were not a question of comfort, but medical necessity.
She threw a glance at where Wang Yonghao was drooling on the grass, high on the demon beast omelett. The bastard probably didn¡¯t even notice, if he was walking on air all the time.
She walked over to him and checked his boots. They were cotton: the slime would seep right through them. She¡¯d need to find something else.
Sighing, she took a spiritwood log out of her chiclotron, grabbed an axe, and split it in half. With a couple more swings, she had a pair of reasonably flat planks, about as big as her feet. She cut notches into the sides of the planks, and channels into the bottom of the soles, and used a piece of rope from the wine crates to turn them into a pair of primitive sandals. They wouldn¡¯t be comfortable, but at least her feet would be safe.
Ten minutes later, she realized she was stuck.
The hill was surrounded by fog on all sides. This meant that the only way out of it was through the fog, no matter how dangerous it would be.
The fog itself was clearly a byproduct of the earth-type spiritual energy in the air, and Qian Shanyi had an inkling as to where it came from: a faulty spirit vein.
From what Wang Yonghao told her, this place housed the ruins of some ancient sect. When a sect was considering where to establish itself, two questions were of paramount importance: one of secrecy and of the availability of spiritual energy. World fragments would generally solve both of these issues, but their rarity meant that most sects had to satisfy themselves with lesser options. One of the best among them was to build a secret realm on top of a spirit vein.
Spirit veins or dragon lines were mysterious pathways which would direct the flow of spiritual energy through the world, radically increasing its concentration in the immediate vicinity. Their locations and strengths were hard to predict, but should one be found, it would provide a perfect foundation for a secret realm.
The term ¡°secret realm¡± was a more broad term than the ¡°world fragment¡±, as it could also refer to any deliberately constructed cultivation environment that happened to be secret. Even a simple cave could be called a ¡°secret realm¡± if it happened to be filled with high quality spiritual energy. She suspected that these ruins were built in one such cave.
Most spiritual veins were aligned with one of the major types of spiritual energy, though pure spiritual veins also existed. In rare cases, spiritual veins would suddenly become aligned with a minor type of spiritual energy, often to disastrous consequences.
There were hundreds of different ¡°minor types¡± of spiritual energy, with each being a subtype of a particular major type. Every minor type would behave in largely the same way as its parent major type when it came to the cycles of feng shui or being re-polarised by heavenly materials and earthly treasures, but their other properties could differ greatly. For example, earth-type spiritual energy was safe to handle, but its poison subtype was lethal to unprepared cultivators.
If the spiritual vein of this sect suddenly changed from earth-type to the poison subtype, it might have been flooded with poison gas before the inhabitants could react, killing everyone present in the sect at the time.
Unfortunately, this realization didn¡¯t help her solve her immediate problems in any way.
With her way blocked by the fog, the only thing left to her was to test the fly whisk. By tinkering with it, she quickly figured out how to use it: a burst of air would emanate from the front of the whisk when she channeled her spiritual energy into it.
To test how the fog would respond to her blasts she blasted it with the whisk, and immediately ran back to the top of the hill. Her suspicions were confirmed: the blast of pressure would displace the air in front of the whisk, forcing the air to the sides of the whisk to be drawn in to replace it. This would push the fog in front of her backwards, but the fog from the sides would immediately flood in and force her to retreat. She couldn¡¯t push her way through the fog in this crude way.
She ground her teeth. There had to be a way out of here. She would not be forced to rely on Wang Yonghao to make her exit.
Without a good plan, she settled for trying to gather more information.
Her singular source of light was the glow produced by the Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes, but it was dim, and so she could not see very far into the fog. She could increase the brightness of her hair by pushing more spiritual energy into the technique, but it was not designed to be overloaded in this way, and the losses involved in this process would quickly grow to overwhelm her reserves.
Since she couldn¡¯t make one bright light source, she settled for making many dim ones. The dilapidated flower beds on the hill were surrounded by rows of pebbles for drainage, and so Qian Shanyi started to put a glowing sheen on these pebbles and then chuck them into the fog. By tracing the path of the glowing stones and seeing where they landed, she could slowly trace out the boundaries of her surroundings.
To help orient herself, she arbitrarily picked one direction and called it north. She quickly figured out that to the east of her, some twenty meters away, there was a cavern wall, while to the north there was a stream or a pool or water, and what she could only assume to be a bridge. She was slowly covering the area to the west of her, when instead of the clack of stone on stone, or the almost silent thud of stone sinking into the poison sludge, she heard an echoing dull thud, and saw a flash of brown before the stone ricocheted away.
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That meant only one thing: Wood.
She smirked. Wood meant building, and building meant something else above the deadly fog, if she could only figure out how to get over there.
With another fifty throws, she covered the building in enough pebbles to make out what was in front of her. It was a small, two-storey construction, set up a good thirty meters away from her against the wall of the cavern. There was a pair of small windows on its side, though she couldn¡¯t make out what was beyond them. Still, it was a start.
She went back down into the world fragment, and cut off two more ropes from her shrinking spool of Silvered Devil Moth Silk. She tied one of them to her trusty spear, with its other end tied to a support block of the gazebo, and with a practiced throw, pitched it through the window of the wooden structure. As she pulled it back carefully it lodged itself against the open window, and after pulling the rope taught, she re-tied it tightly around the stone support block. Now, she had a rope line directly to this wooden structure.
Of course, she wasn¡¯t going to immediately climb over. First, she had to make sure that the rope would actually hold her weight. She yanked on it a couple times, and then slowly sat on top of the rope, gradually putting more of her weight onto it.
With a crack, the wall of the wooden structure gave out, and the spear flew out of the window. Qian Shanyi sighed, and started reeling it back in.
Another pitch later, and she had drawn a rope line to a second window. She tested the rope, and this time, it seemed to hold.
She considered the situation. Just because the structure held for now didn¡¯t mean that it wouldn¡¯t give out when she was halfway across the rope. She could wait for Wang Yonghao to wake up: with his help, exploring this secret realm would be much safer.
But if she did that, then she would be sacrificing her negotiation position in the future. The more information she could gather without his help, the easier it would be to bluff, and the easier to convince him that trading with her was worthwhile. He seemed like a reasonable, if impulsive person, but she could not be one hundred percent sure of that - she would be sacrificing her long-term security in favor of a short-term feeling of safety.
And on top of that, she needed to do this herself. She had been a prisoner of that world fragment for a full week, not even knowing if it would be her grave. She could not, would not go back there to wait for longer if she still could cut a way out towards the clear skies with her own two hands.
Before climbing onto the rope to explore the sect, she decided to prepare a trap. Many types of demon beasts made their dens in spots with high concentrations of spiritual energy, and if she disturbed one, she would end up in danger. Wang Yonghao had gone through the sect before, but with his luck, they might have just happened to be asleep. If she had to retreat, she wanted to have extra options.
She quickly dug a hole wide enough to make a large animal fall in, and connected it to a small hole with a short trench. She put fire treasures into the larger hole, and turned it into a pit trap by covering it with a square of Silvered Devil Moth Silk borrowed from the chiclotron. The hole was far too wide for the silk to rest naturally, and she chopped off some wood from the gazebo to support it.
In the small hole, she put wood- and metal-type treasures, and then blocked off the connecting trench with a curtain of Silvered Devil Moth Silk. Earth-type spiritual energy from the air surged into the pile of metal treasures, and from there flowed into the wood ones, supercharging them. All she would need to do is yank the curtain away, and then the larger hole would immediately turn into a firestorm from the wood-type spiritual energy superheating the fire-type treasures inside.
That this would make the sect marginally safer by removing the poison spiritual energy from the air was a nice bonus.
She tied one end of her second rope to a support block of the gazebo, the other end to her belt, and started to carefully climb the taut rope line. The clouds of deadly poison glistened mere meters below her, and she did her best to put them out of her mind.
She was mere meters away from her target when she heard the cracks.
She leaped forwards, but this jerk of the rope was the final straw for the aging structure, and the wood finally gave out. She plummeted downwards: despite her forward momentum, she was going to fall far short of the window, and directly into the poison fog below.
Her right hand grabbed onto the rope tied to the spear, and pulled it back, sending the shaft into her hand. With a desperate twist of her body, she had just barely managed to ram the spear through the wall of the wooden building, and land her feet on top of the spear.
She swallowed. She was standing mere centimeters away from the fog. That was close.
With great care, she climbed up to the window, and pulled her spear behind herself. Once she crossed the windowsill, she breathed a sigh of relief.
The room she found herself in was long, carved deep into the cavern wall. The rot had touched everything inside, and she tread carefully on the wooden floor, wary of it giving out. A dozen skeletons were lined against the walls, lying down on top of squares of rot and slime that might have been bed mats back in the day: the poison must have hit them in their sleep. Cupboards next to the beds have been overturned, personal possessions spilling out.
In the center of the room, there was a series of thick columns supporting the ceiling, and she quickly tied the rope from her waist to one of them. Hopefully it would hold out better than the window.
There were two exits out of the room: staircase down into the poison fog below, and a door at the other end of the room leading into a rock tunnel. Qian Shanyi headed straight for it: there was nothing of value for her here.
Fortunately for her, the poison fog and the slime seemed to be largely confined to the large cavern, so the rest of the sect proved much safer to explore. Everything had been covered in a thick layer of dust, and once she got into the back areas of the sect, she could see the footprints of Wang Yonghao, before he started walking on air. She traced his path backwards, and found a room with a broken teleportation formation - at least that part of his story seemed to check out. The room itself was hidden behind a bookshelf, in a large room with a single wide empty bed: perhaps that of a sect elder.
The rooms she passed were covered in darkness and disarray. Back when the sect had been alive, they must have been well-lit, but the lighting formations on the walls had long ago run out of the necessary spirit stones.
The sect was quite hard to navigate, with the rooms and corridors twisting in on themselves and connecting in strange ways. Many times she found herself back in the wide cavern filled with poison fog, coming at it from strange directions. One passage even came out of its ceiling. She supposed that some of these passages were there to allow the spiritual energy or fresh air to freely circulate throughout the sect, while the purpose of others was hard to guess.
Not wanting to get lost, she marked her way by circulating the Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes and leaving glowing arrows on the walls, pointing back to where she came from.
As she explored, she found more corpses. There seemed to be two types: ones closer to the large cavern, covered in the poisonous green sheen, either clearly caught in their sleep or simply collapsed in random passages, while the others were relatively clean aside from the dust. She found a pair of them in what used to be a storage room, their hands clutching weapons stabbed through each other¡¯s chests. Another one was lying at the end of a long, crudely chiseled tunnel, clutching a pickaxe. In one room, she found a small group, each holding a knife and with a long gash across their necks.
It seemed that the initial flood of poison did not cover the entire sect, but the survivors did not fare that well. If only they knew about the hidden teleportation formation, they might have been able to get out.
Curiously enough, she didn¡¯t find any treasures in the sect. She saw places where formations were torn out of walls, empty weapon storages, and even a structure she assumed was a more sophisticated version of her chiclotron, but it was completely empty of any materials. Someone must have looted this place long before Wang Yonghao came here.
The sect had its own library, split into different sections, clearly marked by symbols carved into the stone walls. The entire section on cultivation - kept in its own room, and clearly protected by powerful defensive formations back in the day - was picked completely clean, with not even a single scrap of paper left. The rest of the library did not fare much better - most of the books were completely destroyed by the dampness and rot, though she did find a set of poetry recorded on small clay tablets that had survived the ravages of time.
Way in the back, she found a couple book shelves marked as ¡°Womanly studies¡±. She glanced through them, and almost missed the jade glint under the piles of rotten paper. Curiously, she came closer, and reached into the pile of wet and slimy paper.
She pulled out a jade slate about the size of her palm. It seemed to be hidden inside of a painted wooden cover, though it had long since rotted away to such a degree that no text could be distinguished. She broke off the wood, and looked at the jade slate itself. Her hand trembled when she saw two symbols on the very top edge of the slate: êŽ and ½ð , yin and metal.
Surely not. I could not be so lucky.
She sat down in a corner of the library, leaning against the wall, and carefully channeled her spiritual energy into the slate. Its surface darkened, as characters slowly started to come through. The title started to fade in: there seemed to be three lines in total. The top line appeared first.
Notes on Spiritual Energy Cultivation by Tang Qunying.
Her heart thrummed in her chest. Was it really? Her eyes skipped to the next line in excitement.
Commentary on the Three Feminine Obediences and Four Feminine Virtues.
Her heart sank.
With personal notes on cooking, sewing, household management and conduct.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall. It was useless. Maybe she should just go and walk straight into the poison fog right now.
¡°The one cultivation law I find¡¡±, she groaned. ¡°And it might as well be telling me to call my fucking husband.¡±
Chapter 9: Whisk And Dance The Mists Away
A couple minutes later, she managed to fight through her sense of ennui, and began to read the jade slate. Even if she would need to force herself through the sort of philosophy she wouldn¡¯t ordinarily even spit on, it was still a genuine yin/metal cultivation law, a rare treasure that she has long been searching for.
On top of being aligned with one of the five main polarities of spiritual energy, high-quality cultivation laws were also aligned with either yin or yang spiritual energy. Men had a yang constitution, while women had yin, and each of them required specially tailored cultivation laws.
Most cultivators were male, and the sects would naturally only put forth the significant effort needed to develop a new cultivation law if it would serve most of their members. To make things worse, during the previous imperial dynasty women were forbidden from cultivating any combat cultivation law. Thirty six years ago, the new emperor had put an end to this policy, but the cultivation world was slow to adapt to the changes. To this day, finding a good yin cultivation law was very hard.
As she focused on the jade slate, she quickly discovered how to control it. By pushing her spiritual energy into it in special ways, she could flip through the ¡°pages¡± of the book in any order.
Despite her fears, she got through the first chapter quickly. It couched its presentation in flowery language, but largely went straight to the point of explaining the base method of spiritual energy circulation, with well-drawn diagrams and detailed advice on cultivation. From a cursory glance, she was extremely satisfied with this cultivation law.
As soon as she had the time, she would start to adapt to this new spiritual energy recirculation technique. It would leave her body and soul in a weakened state for a couple weeks, as the spiritual energy would try to flow according to two different patterns at once, but the end result would make it all worth it.
Out of curiosity, she decided to check out the other chapters of the book. Even if she couldn¡¯t properly study the following techniques until she adjusted to the base cultivation law, she was still giddy to know what else she could get out of this slate.
The next chapter was centered around feminine conduct, interweaving excerpts from classic literature and author commentary. Qian Shanyi slowly started to frown as she read through the chapter.
Of course, every woman should defer to her father, her husband, her sons, or failing that, to her teacher on the path of cultivation. However, how often should she defer? What should happen if she needs to make a decision while they are away? What if she knows that a decision has to be made, but it would cause trouble to get her superiors to agree? Here are some of the basic strategies on getting the men to prescribe the actions that have to be taken.
She skipped further ahead.
A woman must remain chaste in her bearing, and guard her actions with a sense of shame. Here, it is instructive to look at the case of the conflict between the Heavenly Mountain Alliance and the Three Thunderous Demonic Sects, when the Lady of the Six Vipers challenged the Grand Elder of the Heavenly Mountain Alliance to a duel. As they fought, the Lady happened to lose all her clothing, and the Grand Elder, ashamed of looking at a woman¡¯s uncovered body, lost his composure and averted his eyes for a moment. This was all it took for the Lady of the Six Vipers to slice his head off in a single slash. Take care to preserve your chastity, lest you distract the men in your life at a critical moment!
What kind of ¡°womanly conduct¡± was Tang Qunying endorsing?
Never utter slanderous words. Your conduct should be exemplary here: this is an especially important principle for cultivators, for carelessly spoken words, imbued with spiritual energy, could lead to catastrophe. Even a single curse could kill a man, if spoken at the right moment. The second of the Three Thunderous Demonic Sects was infamous for their malign speech: seek to avoid repeating their sins.
The rest of the chapter covered cursing techniques. The author outlined, in great detail, exactly which words, at which cadences, and imbued with which particular pattern of spiritual energy should never be spoken under any circumstances.
Qian Shanyi flipped over to the next chapter, which covered dressmaking. It started slowly, by explaining the basics of weaving, knitting, sewing and so on, before Tang Qunying claimed that there was never enough time in the day to sew everything that was necessary for a household, and proposed some ¡°humble needle control techniques¡± that could be mastered by anyone in the middle refinement stage or above.
Qing Shanyi turned the page over, and her eyes boggled. This was the single most complicated spiritual energy diagram she had ever seen in her life.
¡°How am I supposed to pack all of this into the size of a needle?¡±, she wondered faintly, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. ¡°You would need to be at least in the building foundation stage to be capable of this level of precision.¡±
She shook her head, skipped the rest of the sewing chapter, and looked at the chapter on cooking techniques. Just like the sewing chapter, it began with the basics: heat control, basic knife skills, six key classifications of cooking methods, and so on. And just like in the sewing chapter, she soon encountered strange things.
Some immortal chefs consider the capture and butchering of demon beasts to be the domain of hunters, and only learn how to process the sorts of animals it is safe to keep in a kitchen. This is a mistake: all ingredients are best when used fresh, and if you seek to prepare the best meal for your husband and their guests, you have to learn how to butcher every demon beast that might be needed for the recipe. Trinity Scorpion of the Fire River makes for a good target to learn basic butchering techniques, though mastering them might take you your entire life.
Qian Shanyi has never heard of a demon beast called the ¡°Trinity Scorpion of the Fire River¡±, but based on the description, it was the size of a horse, wicked fast, with a carapace that was all but invulnerable to damage, and had three tails, each tipped with a stinger as sharp as a spear. To kill it, you had to strike at very small gaps where different carapace plates interlocked with one another, and pierce through to the vulnerable organs inside the body, all the while making sure your strikes wouldn¡¯t ruin the meat.
The book went into a great deal of detail about the ¡°knife techniques¡± needed to pacify the Trinity Scorpion, from defense, to offense, to pacing yourself to not become fatigued in the middle of combat. It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that she was reading a detailed guide on fencing with a sword.
She frowned, turned back to the needle spiritual energy diagram that baffled her before, and looked at it with new eyes. If taken literally, the precision of the diagram made no sense, as you would have to be a training genius to be capable of following it¡ But if the ¡°needle¡± was a meter and a half long, then it would suddenly start to make sense.
This wasn¡¯t a needle control diagram at all. This was a diagram for controlling a flying sword shaped like a needle.
She tapped her finger on the side of the jade slate. At first, she thought the Heavens had played a cruel joke on her, but perhaps she was wrong. This wasn¡¯t a cultivation law for being a good wife; this was a ruthless cultivation law for slaying devils written to pass casual censorship.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
She turned the jade slate off and carefully put it inside her robes. She would have plenty of time to study this later.
For now, she had to find an exit out of this secret realm.
By now, she had explored most of the sect, and she knew Wang Yonghao had explored the rest. She didn¡¯t find any exit, and based on the corpses, suspected there was none. This meant she would need to go straight through the poison fog.
If her suspicions were correct, the fog must have come from dense poison-type spiritual energy brought into the cavern by a spirit vein. As the spiritual energy recirculated around the cavern, it would slowly produce poison, which would sink down to the floor and form a cloud. Over time, this poison would lose its potency, and gelatinize from the fog into the toxic slime covering everything around the cavern.
The pile of metal treasures she used as part of her pit trap was already slowly converting the poison-type spiritual energy in the air, slowly reducing the production of new poison. The cavern was quite large, so this process would take quite a while. While it was going on, she had to deal with the poison that was already here.
Qian Shanyi couldn¡¯t simply blow it aside with the fly whisk - she couldn¡¯t control the backflow of the air, so it would be down to luck if she could keep the poison at bay. She wasn¡¯t Wang Yonghao - if she tried that, she would simply die. She needed a better idea.
There were two basic types of artifacts that could control the winds: ones that moved the air already in place, and ones that created more air to move. She went over to the sect kitchens, and tried activating the whisk inside an old barrel, and saw it explode into shards - this meant the whisk had to be creating new air. This gave her an opportunity.
The sect could not be a sealed system: somewhere, there needed to be an exit that could be used to let bad air ventilate out and bring goods into the sect. Since she hadn¡¯t found this exit so far, it must have been somewhere under the poison, and the many ventilation channels linking back to the large poison cavern further supported this theory. If she created new air in the cavern, the increased air pressure would create airflow out of the sect, and this airflow should slowly bring the poison out with it.
At a guess, this fly whisk must have been creating several cubic meters of air. There were ways to estimate this more precisely: she knew that there were figures for the expected rates of conversion of spiritual energy into elemental matter, but she had never been taught them, and her sect Elders never gave her unrestricted access to the sect library. That even their past obstinance still threatened her life grated on her, but there was nothing to be done about it.
She did some crude estimations about the sect and cavern geometry, and if she was right, the level of poison should drop by several meters per hour. Within a day, she might create a path out of the sect, assuming she didn¡¯t simply miss any other ventilation holes, and the exit didn¡¯t collapse entirely as the time passed.
This left the question of where to generate the air. She could feel that the feng shui of this secret realm was bad - dilapidation, and the unburied corpses had all played their role. It wasn¡¯t quite as bad as the Inner World before she made the chiclotron, but she still didn¡¯t want to spend many hours circulating her spiritual energy and blasting air from the fly whisk in any random spot.
She briefly considered re-using the chiclotron structure of the sect, before dismissing the idea. To restore its functionality, she would need to bring over tens or hundreds of kilograms of heavenly materials and earthly treasures by climbing over on a single rickety rope line. And then, once she was done, she would need to lug all of them back. There was no way she was going to do that, starving as she was. Digging a new chiclotron on top of the gazebo hill was also out of the question.
Creating the air within the Inner World would have been ideal, but even though the entrance was open, it remained separated from the outside: no steam of pure spiritual energy was gushing out from it. If she were to generate air inside the Inner World, all she would do is raise the internal pressure.
Fundamentally, the only thing she needed was to find a place with the least bad feng shui in the sect, and do her job there. She could vaguely feel that some areas were better than others, but she wanted more precision.
What she needed was a way to measure local feng shui.
She climbed back into the Inner World, grabbed an empty bottle of wine, a small dagger, and went looking for a good plank of wood.
The bookshelf blocking the entrance into the teleportation room proved to be a good source. She broke it apart with a few good kicks, took a small, solid piece, and started slowly whittling it down with her dagger into a set of wooden dice. Her woodcarving skills were quite crude, making all the dice come out different, but that was okay - she didn¡¯t need extreme precision.
Feng shui affected your luck, and so if you could measure your luck you could measure feng shui. What she needed was a way to do these measurements reliably, on command, and hundreds of times in a row. After about an hour, she had sixty dice, and she decided it was good enough, scooped them into her wine bottle and plugged it with a cork.
Luck was a mysterious force in the world of cultivation, said to be affected by hundreds of different things, depending on the perceptions of the cultivator: a lucky cultivator would tend to see the outcomes they wanted, while an unlucky one would see the reverse.
Qian Shanyi shook the bottle, focusing on the number six. When she looked down, she saw three sixes and seven fives.
Statistically speaking, with sixty dice, about ten should land on each side. The more lucky she was, the more dice would come out close to six, and the more unlucky she was, the more would come out as ones. If about the same number of dice came out on each side, then she probably had neutral luck.
Her current place seemed quite unlucky. She got up, and headed through the sect, looking for good feng shui.
The best place she found was the tunnel dropping down into the big cavern through the ceiling. Feng shui there seemed about neutral, which she supposed made sense. The tunnel was made of spiritually neutral rock, there were no corpses nearby, and no real dilapidation had happened there since the sect was established.
She settled on the edge of the hole, and started blasting air down into the cavern using the fly whisk. By the time she ran out of spiritual energy hours later, she was yawning from boredom.
She headed back to the Inner World to regenerate her spiritual energy. When she reached the gazebo hill, she went down to look at the level of the poison fog, and grinned. It had dropped significantly, at least by a meter. It was much slower than what she expected, but still, her idea was working.
When she descended into the Inner World, Wang Yonghao was still drooling on the grass, mumbling nonsense. She briefly wondered how long he would be hallucinating - he did eat quite a lot of the omelett.
When she took out her sword, prepared to briefly cultivate in order to absorb spiritual energy out of the air, she paused. Should she directly start cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues? It would weaken her temporarily, and she was still in a dangerous situation¡
She grit her teeth. Damn it, it was an actual yin metal cultivation law, and she had been waiting for this moment for so long - she would start right away. She would deal with her weakness when it started causing problems.
The movements of Three Obediences Four Virtues were nothing like those of the Seven Flowers Bloom. They also flowed together like a dance, but individual steps were sharp and abrupt, filled with concealed, violent intent as if she was butchering a thousand oxes at once. As her feet stomped on the ground, and her sword sliced the air, she thought she could hear the sounds of skulls crushed under her feet and the curses of her enemies echoing in the air.
She didn¡¯t push herself as hard as she could. Her goal was to regenerate spiritual energy, not to refine her body and soul. After fifteen minutes, she headed back up to work with the fly whisk.
It took her the entire day of work to drain the poison fog until she could see the ground below. Her stomach rumbled in protest, and she ate tiny portions of the omelett throughout to quiet it down. Circulating spiritual energy for hours took a toll on her body, even if it was not as strenuous as digging trenches.
Where the fog receded, it unveiled ground covered in a thick layer of green sludge. Her eyes shined in triumph. All she would need now was a way to deal with the sludge, and she could explore the rest of this cavern.
Hopefully, she would find the exit, and finally see the open skies once more.
Chapter 10: Find A Feast Among Forgotten Ruins
Qian Shanyi picked up a small axe and went out searching for bookshelves to cannibalize. Toxic sludge in most of the cavern was at least a foot thick, and if she wanted to pass through it, she would need stilts.
There were two parts to a basic stilt: a long plank supporting the weight, and a short footrest, which she attached together by slotting it into a hole through the longer plank. She did her best to pick out good pieces, but everything in this place had some amount of rot. Since she couldn¡¯t rely on the sturdiness of the wood, she made four separate pairs of stilts, and brought them all over to the gazebo.
Sure enough, three stilts broke while she was learning to walk, but after an hour she had figured out how to move around at a good speed. The other five weathered the tests, but she had no way to know if their structural flaws were simply concealing themselves.
Before setting off, she checked over her pit trap near the gazebo. She was probably just being paranoid. If there were any demon beasts left alive in the poison fog, they would have surely heard her moving around during the last day, and came over to investigate.
With her trap prepared, she armed herself with anything she could think of - she wasn¡¯t about to track back across a field of toxic sludge if she needed another tool.
On her hip, she had her sword, and a small axe that would be more convenient for chopping through walls of decaying wood. Three replacement stilts were carried on her back in a crude sling fashioned from one of her Silvered Devil Moth Silk ropes, and in her right hand, she carried the longest spear she had, to poke ahead of where she walked and check for gaps and holes. Fly whisk was tied to her forearm with a short cut of rope - it took more focus to channel her spiritual energy into it than through the pores on her palm, but she wanted to keep her hands free.
She checked herself over another time before setting off. There were other things she considered bringing, but ultimately, her greatest defense against any threat was to run away, and the more things she carried, the slower she would move.
Finally, she sighed, and got on her stilts. There was no point in delaying the inevitable.
She slowly trod across the sea of poison towards her freedom, following the paved path down the hill. It was framed by trees - dead and rotting, but most of them still standing tall. Poison fog pooled in recesses and gaps of terrain, forcing her to take the long trek around. Her stilts clacked quietly against the paved road beneath the thick green sludge, her movements too slow to make the sludge slurp.
The cavern was split in half by a stream of water, with a broad bridge over it. Back in the past it must have flowed freely, but the water was stagnant now, glistening on top of the sludge that sank down to the bottom of the stream. At the far back end of the cavern, the road headed downwards as the cave narrowed down.
As she headed down, her eyes opened in excitement. She could faintly see the fog in the distance, shining green - which meant there was light. And light meant an exit.
The passage narrowed down to the width of a horse carriage before widening again into a smaller cavern, most of it still flooded with the poisonous fog. Fortunately for her, there was a wooden walkway built into the side wall, slippery and covered in slime. She tested her every step with her spear, securing her footing as much as she could - if it broke, she would fall into the clouds of death below her.
The walkway led to a brick wall built across the entire width of the cavern. Down below, in the poisonous fog, the wall was broken up by a wide open gate, dim light flooding through it. This must have been where the fog spilled out of the sect, pushed out by the air she created.
At the end of the walkway there was a short set of stairs, leading up to a closed door. With great difficulty, Qian Shanyi managed to inch her way up and pull the door open, and stepped aside, waiting patiently for the flow of poisonous fog out of the door to stop.
The room inside was narrow, and almost completely clean of the slime. There were some boxes inside, a table with a pair of cups, and a single bed in the back, much better preserved than anything in the center of the sect. Opposite to the door she came in, there was a second door, leading to the other side of the wall.
She opened it, and blinked her eyes. The cavern on the other side opened up, the paved road heading out through the gates, out of the poison fog and up towards a ledge at the far end of the cavern. Beyond the ledge, she could see the blue sky. The walkway led around the side, heading in the same direction, completely free of the slime.
Qian Shanyi put her stilts up against the wall in the gateway house, and stepped out onto the walkway, her heart trembling with excitement. She could smell the forest beyond. Finally, freedom!
As she headed towards the open skies, she almost missed the bear.
It bounded up towards the walkway, deceptively quiet on its giant paws, and she only noticed it when it was a short thirty meters away. It was large, at least as long as she was tall, and reaching up to her shoulders in height. Her eyes widened, and she fled back towards the gatehouse as fast as she could.
She burst into the gatehouse, slamming the door behind herself. In a flurry of motion, she kicked the table to slide in front of the door and jammed one of her stilts against the opposite wall to keep it closed. This barricade would not hold for long, but it would buy her precious seconds as she could already hear the walkway behind her cracking under the bear¡¯s weight.
She jumped on her stilts and leaped out of the other door. As she came down on the walkway, one of the planks underneath her gave out, and the stilt went right through, jammed completely in between the walkway planks. Behind her, she heard the bear slam into the door, and the crack of her barricade splintering. The animal was still eerily silent, its huffing barely audible above the blood thumping in her ears.
Qian Shanyi left the jammed stilt alone, yanked one of her last two spare stilts off her back and started running down the walkway as fast as she could.
She heard the bear burst through the door and out of the gatehouse by the time she reached the end of the walkway, not daring to look back. In her mind, she counted the seconds before the bear would be onto her. Suddenly, she heard the sound of wood splintering behind her, and a loud thud as something heavy fell on the ground. This time, the bear roared: the walkway must have splintered under it. If she was lucky, the poison fog would kill it.
Oh, who was she kidding?
Heavy thuds and the slick sounds of the bear slicing through the toxic sludge behind her confirmed her thoughts. She was up in the large cavern by now, but she could already tell she wouldn¡¯t make it to the gazebo hill in time. She needed another way out.
She moved off the path and towards one of the dead trees. With a powerful leap, she flew up and grabbed one of the branches, pulling herself up on top of the trunk. The tree groaned under her, but held.
She finally turned around. She couldn¡¯t see the bear in the darkness, but she could hear it huffing as it was coming closer.
Her stilts were left behind in the toxic sludge below, mere meters away from the trunk, so she was now stuck here. She¡¯d need to figure out a way to reach them, once the bear succumbed to the poison. As she puzzled over this problem, she took her last stilt off her back, not wanting it to get in her way. At least she should be out of the bear¡¯s reach here.
The bear bounded up to the tree and leaped onto the trunk, starting to climb. The tree groaned under its weight.
¡°Leave me alone, you bastard!¡±, she shouted at it in a panic, spinning her spear in her hands, ¡°Can you not seek death on your own lonesome?¡±
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
She thrust her spear straight at its head, drawing blood. The bear roared again, batting the weapon aside with its claws. They were evenly matched: she had little experience with the spear, but the bear was stuck, unable to climb with just one paw.
The tree finally cracked in half under their collective weight, sending her and the bear down into the sludge below. She barely managed to put her legs under herself, keeping most of her body from being dunked into the sludge. It came all the way up to her knees, feeling cold on her ankles. Her spear was wrenched out of her hands by the sudden fall, lost somewhere in the sludge.
¡°I will make you into soup, you oversized squirrel!¡±, she roared, unsheathing her sword. The bear responded in kind, getting up from the sludge.
Instead of trying to debate it, she raised her arm and channeled her spiritual energy into the fly whisk, sending a blast of air into the sludge just in front of the bear. The air hit the sludge, sending a splatter of it into the bear¡¯s muzzle and eyes. She spun around and ran towards the bridge, toxic sludge burning on her ankles. The bear roared behind her, giving chase.
This time, she managed to get all the way to the bridge before the bear was on her, its jaws dripping with drool and death. She dodged to the side - one of its eyes was still covered by the sludge, and the acrid smell must have covered her scent. Her long hair was glowing and whipping all over the place, further disorienting the animal.
She was doing fine, scoring cuts on the animal¡¯s paws and snout, when she felt the back of her foot hit the bridge railing. She had nowhere left to dodge.
She blasted air into the sludge in between them again, sending more liquid into the bear¡¯s muzzle, but it was too late. The bear swung blindly, and she only barely managed to bring up her sword in time to block.
Weakened as she was by hunger, injury, poison and the change of her cultivation law, she couldn¡¯t manage to fully resist the powerful blow. Her sword was pushed up against her body, and her spiritual shield shattered, the impact sending her flying down the bridge, skipping through the sludge like a stone over water.
As she hit the ground, she came down badly on her already broken leg. Barely healed, the fracture sheared again, and she screamed in pain. Fighting against the darkness creeping at the edges of her vision, she pulled her leg back together, and slowly got back up on her shaking legs. She felt a shooting pain every time she drew a breath: a broken rib or three, no doubt. By some miracle, she kept a grip on her sword.
The bear was huffing somewhere on the bridge, trying to clear its eyes off the sludge again. After she got her bearings, she realized the hit sent her closer to the gazebo hill, and she limped over, fighting through the pain. By the time she heard the bear bounding up the hill she had already reached her trap, and set it into an active state by pulling the curtain of Silvered Devil Moth Silk out. She stepped to the other side of the large hole and stood her ground.
¡°Now lie down and accept your fate,¡± she spit through her clenched teeth, as the bear¡¯s front paws came down on the trap¡¯s cover. Its weight broke straight through the wooden planks, and it plummeted head-first into the hole. Dense fire-type spiritual energy in the hole burst out in a pillar of fire, a rush of air covering up the bear¡¯s panicked roars.
Qian Shanyi turned around and started limping towards the entrance to the Inner World, not waiting for the bear to die. She was covered head to toe in poison, and needed to wash it off immediately.
She reached the Inner World¡¯s entrance when she heard the bear moving again. Fur on the front of its body was charred black, and it was a lot slower now, but it was still alive.
Qian Shanyi scowled at it, and grabbed the rope she used to descend into the Inner World. She waited until the bear was within the gazebo itself before leaping inside, baiting it to follow.
She came into the Inner World with some speed, sliding a good distance down the rope, using her velocity to swing away from the entrance portal. The bear leaped in after her, unable to see through the opaque entrance portal, and plummeted down through the thirty meters of empty air. It hit the ground with a crack, leaving a small pit behind.
Somehow, it was still not dead, and trying to get back up on its paws. Qian Shanyi swung on her rope, leaped off, and plunged her sword in its neck in one smooth motion, severing its spinal cord.
The bear dropped to the ground and drew its last breath. She stomped down on its head and yanked her sword out.
At least now she had something to eat for dinner.
She quickly stripped down and started putting together a bath from Igneocopper bricks and Blue Tear Stones. After the bear¡¯s hit, she was covered head to toe in the sludge, and her skin all across her body was rapidly growing redder from the poison. She could only hope that it lost enough potency that she would survive in the end.
While the water was accumulating in one of the old trenches, she went over to the desiccated ground left behind from a fire node. Dust bath was not as good as washing herself with water, but it was faster, and she was working against time.
She got the shakes halfway through her bath, but simply grit her teeth through it. Her body felt weak and feverish, and the last thing she managed to do was throw some Ice Crystal Bars on top of the bear corpse so that the meat would not spoil. Then, she dropped down on the grass, waiting for her body to fight off the poison it had already absorbed.
At some point, she lost consciousness. She didn¡¯t know how long she was out: she forgot to refill her water clock while she was cleaning the sect of poison, and it was completely empty by now.
This was her third time losing consciousness in this world fragment, and she was worrying it was becoming a habit.
Her body still felt weak, but already better than after her bath. It seemed that her short trip through the toxic sludge came a hair short of killing her.
Her stomach grumbled, and she fought through her weakness, making herself move. It took her a good five minutes to slowly get up on her shaking legs, but she wasn¡¯t about to give up: it was time to cook a proper meal.
With how weak she was, she wasn¡¯t about to try and butcher the enormous bear. Instead, she took an axe from the treasury, and simply chopped off its hind leg.
She dragged the leg over to the old ditch she used as a bath, to wash off the toxic sludge that still covered it. Having cleaned the leg, she constructed a stove out of Igneocopper bricks, put her pan shield on top, and consulted her jade slate for advice on how to cook the leg. There were two things she wanted to know - how to check the meat for poison, and how to cut the leg apart to preserve as much of the meat as possible. Fortunately for her, the bear didn¡¯t have a great quantity of spiritual energy in its body, so at least she didn¡¯t need to worry about that.
To think that a mere animal could bring her this close to dying.
There were helpful diagrams on how to skin and butcher animals of many different body types on her jade slate, and she followed the instructions easily. But the question of wherever the meat was ruined by the toxic sludge proved to be much more complex.
The basic problem was that there was no such thing as poison. ¡°Poison¡± was simply any substance that would be detrimental to your body - but what was detrimental would depend on many different factors, such as your current condition, specifics of your cultivation, amount and location of your injuries, and so on. For example, if your body had too little yin spiritual energy, then an increase in your yin spiritual energy would be good, but if it already had too much, then it would be quite bad.
Human bodies were incredibly complex, and cultivator bodies even more so. In general, it was not possible to determine how an unknown substance would affect your body before eating it - at best, you could make an educated guess.
She did find a simple technique that could take a sample of a known substance, and then identify how much of it was in an ingredient, with many limitations. She compared the sludge (which she knew was poisonous) to her skin (which she knew contained poison, since she still felt weak), and to Wang Yonghao (who was still asleep, and presumably wasn¡¯t poisoned). Then, she compared it to the meat in the bear leg.
Based on the comparison, she thought that if she were to cut off the top layer of the meat, she should be fine - the rest of the leg had less poison than her own muscles. She supposed that when the bear died, its blood stopped circulating the poison through its body, preserving most of the muscular tissue. This was not a sure bet: the meat might have already reacted with the poison, alchemically transforming into a different substance entirely, but she felt safe enough to risk it.
Soon enough, the unthawed bear shoulder steaks were happily sizzling on her pan. She watched them hawkishly, referring back to her jade slate for how best to control the heat. She added some spirit wine into the pan: bear fat served admirably in place of oil, but the liquid should make it easier to cook. Her hunger rose up again, and she couldn¡¯t help salivating at the sight of the browning meat.
When the steaks looked done to her eyes, she carefully cut them apart into small chunks, and tried one of them with a dagger. The meat was tough, unsalted, and prepared without any spices except for the wine. On top of that, she took the meat off the fire too soon, and the center ended up undercooked. It was, objectively, about as badly prepared as it could be.
It was the best damn meat she had ever eaten in her entire life.
She properly ate her fill for the first time in a week, and rested down on the grass, waiting for the strength to come back into her limbs, her eyes half closed in euphoria. A couple hours later, she heard Wang Yonghao stir. It seems that the smell of meat in the air had finally woken him up.
Chapter 11: Feed The Hungry With A Single Pan
Wang Yonghao slowly got up off the ground, rubbing his bleary eyes.
"How long was I out?" he groaned.
"I told you, you are a lightweight," Qian Shanyi said.
"I am not a lightweight -," he said in an exasperated tone, turning to face her. As his eyes fell on her, his face blushed red, and he turned away, covering his eyes with his hand.
"Why are you naked?!" He exclaimed.
Qian Shanyi looked down on herself. Her ¡°bath¡±, if one could call it that, was just a mud hole in the ground filled with cold water. On top of that, she didn¡¯t have any soap - while she managed to mostly wash the poison off, she wasn¡¯t clean by any measure. Not wanting to soil another set of robes after her previous one was soaked through with poison, she wanted to at least wait until she was dry in the warm air of the world fragment, and most of the dirt would start to fall off on its own.
"What are you, a baby?" She sighed, "Never seen a naked tit?"
"Just¡put something on, please."
¡°I suppose I will have to, before you knock yourself out from all the blood going to your cheeks,¡± she grumbled, got up and headed towards the pile of robes that served as her bed.
¡°Don¡¯t you feel even a little embarrassed?!¡±
¡°What do I have to be embarrassed about?¡± she asked, picking through the pile of robes for something that would fit her well. Her first set of robes was the best of the lot, but ruined by the poison and the gashes left behind by the bear¡¯s paws.
¡°Being naked in front of others?¡±
¡°What of it? Cultivators are naked all the time. Has your clothing never been torn in battle?¡±
¡°Not to that extent!¡± he said, his voice tinged with annoyance, ¡°I cover them in my spiritual shield, like a normal person!¡±
¡°If you have the spiritual energy to spare, I suppose,¡± she said, throwing a glance in his direction. He was still hiding his eyes, ¡°Besides, many body fundamentalist cultivators fight only in their underwear, to leave fewer places for an opponent to grab onto. Are you scandalized from seeing a shade of a pectoral muscle?¡±
¡°Oh that is so not the same.¡±
¡°How is it not?¡±
¡°Because you are a woman?¡±
¡°So?¡±
¡°So - what do you mean, ¡®so¡¯?¡±
¡°Woman, man, naked, clothed, what does that matter?¡± She said, finally finding a robe that wouldn¡¯t drag on the ground for her, ¡°As long as a cultivator carries their sword, aren¡¯t they already dressed to kill?¡±
He didn¡¯t have a response to that.
"There, all done," she said, tying off her belt and hanging her sword guard from her waist. "Your highness can rest assured that your eyes will remain unmolested."
She headed back to her pan, and put another, smaller cut of the bear on. Having starved for a whole week, she was feeling peckish again.
Wang Yonghao finally turned around, and slowly approached her, looking cautiously at the large bear in the middle of the world fragment.
"While you were out, I found the exit," Qian Shanyi said, quickly searing the meat on the pan, "we can leave after picking up a couple things from the sect."
Wang Yonghao sat down in front of her, eyeing her meat hungrily. After she finished cooking and cut it into small parts with a pair of daggers, she saw him reach out for a piece, and slapped his hand away with the flat of her blade. He yanked his hand back.
"What do you think you are doing? That''s my food." She said.
"Are you too greedy to share? I''m hungry," he responded, looking hurt.
"He who doesn''t work doesn''t eat," she noted with a wise look on her face. "If you want food, then see that bear? Drag it to the edge of the world fragment, and turn it over on its back, we''ll need to butcher it later."
Wang Yonghao threw a glance at the bear.
"It must be more than half a ton," he whined, "can''t you at least help?"
¡°Didn¡¯t you care so much about me being a woman mere moments ago?¡± She said, ¡°Women aren¡¯t supposed to carry weights.¡±
¡°Oh come on!¡±
"You are a big guy, you''ll manage it," she cut back. With her leg and ribs broken, she wasn''t going to be dragging anything unless forced to at sword point.
Wang Yonghao looked uncertainly between the meat on the shield and the heavy bear. She made sure to moan a bit as she swallowed the next piece of meat, smacking her lips in satisfaction.
"It''s so good, you can''t believe it," she said.
"Oh fine," he scowled, got up, and walked dejectedly towards the bear.
"Careful, that slime it''s covered in is poisonous," she called after him. He threw an accusatory glance back at her, but didn''t say anything.
He circled the bear a couple times, and finally decided to pull it by its front paws, where most of the slime was burned off by the flames. While she watched him drag it away, she took out her jade slate and made sure she remembered the butchering steps correctly.
Finally done with her meal, she set aside the daggers she used to cook and eat food, picked up a longer dagger she would use for the bear, as well as a short axe, and headed after Wang Yonghao.
When she arrived, he was massaging his own shoulders, and looking at her warily. He seemed a bit shaky on his feet: it seems that the effects of the egg have not completely faded. She motioned for him to grab hold of the bear.
"Pull its front paws apart, and as far away from its body as you can - I need its chest and stomach taut," she commanded. Now that she looked at the bear from this angle, she could see that it was female - this would make the entire process simpler.
Wang Yonghao did as she said, grumbling throughout. It was nice having minions - she would have had so much trouble doing this alone.
"I''m only doing this for the food," he said, seeing the look on her face.
Well, some adjustment was still needed, but he''ll get there in time.
"Sure," she said, choosing to keep her plans hidden, "just keep holding like that, this will take a bit."
She stepped down on the one back paw of the bear, fixing it in place. In retrospect, it may have been a bad idea to cut off its other back paw in advance, but damn it, she was so hungry.
She sliced vertically through the pelt with small, shallow cuts, trying to slowly get through the layers of fat and muscle. The flesh was stiff from rigor mortis and the freezing temperature - Ice Crystal Bars might have prevented decomposition, but they sure didn¡¯t help with the butchering.
¡°Why are you going so slow?¡± Wang Yonghao echoed her thoughts. ¡°Can¡¯t you just, you know, take a sword and slice it apart in one blow?¡±
¡°Because if I fuck up I might pierce the intestines, and I don¡¯t want poop all over the meat I will be eating,¡± she said slowly, concentrating on her work. She opened a vertical gap into the body cavity, showing the entrails, and was slowly widening it. ¡°This is my first time doing this, don¡¯t distract me.¡±
She heard a sound from Wang Yonghao, and looked up to see him go green in the face at the sight. She snorted.
¡°What did you think was inside the animals you eat?¡± she said.
¡°I just¡didn¡¯t think about it, alright?¡± he said, looking away.
¡°Well, then you will like this part,¡± she smirked, putting down her dagger, and picking up the axe. ¡°I¡¯m going to need to widen this rib cage.¡±
She stepped around the bear and started chopping upwards, straight through the middle of the rib cage. In a few quick chops, the rib cage was split in half, and she stretched it apart with her hands to look inside.
She rolled up her sleeves, picked up her dagger, and reached deep into the body cavity - the next step was to cut the connective tissues keeping the organs attached to the rest of the body. Wang Yonghao tried backing away, and she yelled at him to keep holding the bear so that it wouldn¡¯t tip over.
¡°Why are you so disgusted by this?¡± she said, her hands up to the shoulder in guts and blood. ¡°You have all the same organs inside of you.¡±
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
¡°My organs stay on the inside,¡± Wang Yonghao muttered, looking as far away as he could manage without becoming an owl. ¡°I don¡¯t need to think about them as long as that is true.¡±
¡°Thinking about your organs is good for cultivation,¡± she said, slowly pulling the pile of entrails out of the bear¡¯s body cavity. Her own broken rib sent a spike of pain through her body, and she suppressed a groan. ¡°For example, take the heart,¡± she picked up the bear¡¯s large heart to punctuate her point, ¡°there are two major meridians that pass directly through your heart, and one of the seven dantians also sits right on top of it. Out of all the organs in the body, it has the highest concentration of spiritual energy - which is also why it tends to explode from severe feng shui deviation or spiritual energy overload. Condition of your heart is directly linked to the condition of your meridian network, and you can monitor one by monitoring the other. The better you understand your organs, the faster you can cultivate.¡±
She threw the heart onto clean grass nearby, and started picking her way through the other organs to see what was edible, checking them for poison.
¡°All the more reason not to think of them,¡± Wang Yonghao muttered. Qian Shanyi stopped what she was doing and looked at him.
¡°You don¡¯t want to cultivate faster?¡± she asked incredulously, gesturing with bloody hands. ¡°Every cultivator wants that.¡±
¡°I want a normal life!¡± he exclaimed. ¡°This luck already pushes me much harder than I can keep up with.¡±
He looked at her clearly incredulous face and laughed.
¡°You don¡¯t believe me?¡± he said, ¡±Fine. How long did it take you to fully unblock your first dantian?¡±
She frowned. ¡°Just about average, around two years. Why?¡±
¡°It took me one month,¡± Wang Yonghao said smugly.
¡°You liar,¡± she sneered.
¡°It¡¯s what happened,¡± he said, folding his hands on his chest.
¡°How?¡± she said.
He shrugged. ¡°Luck, like I say.¡±
¡°It¡¯s impossible,¡± she flatly stated.
¡°Why not?¡± he asked, looking curious. ¡°I am lucky at finding treasures. Why can¡¯t I also cultivate faster?¡±
Qian Shanyi squinted at him. He seemed genuinely confused. ¡°After a cultivator unblocks their first minor meridians by luck, their entire meridian network is still filled with impurities,¡± she started explaining, trying to keep herself calm. ¡°They can¡¯t circulate spiritual energy because there is no unblocked path for their energy to circulate through. The only thing they can do is keep their unblocked meridian filled with spiritual energy, and wait until it slowly washes away at the impurities on the path to one of their dantians. Only once at least a single full closed pathway has been partially cleared from the impurities, can they start to circulate their spiritual energy and actively purify their meridian network. Even with the high quality spiritual energy in your Inner World - ¡±
¡°I only got it much later,¡± Wang Yonghao shook his head. Qian Shanyi sighed in frustration.
¡°It doesn¡¯t matter, because the quality of spiritual energy does nothing if you can¡¯t circulate it,¡± she continued, ¡°Local concentration of spiritual energy doesn¡¯t matter either - early in cultivation, your meridians are so narrow that you can fill them up to bursting in a single breath. Learning how to manipulate your meridians helps, but at the end of the day, it is still just a waiting game until the first closed pathway clears up.¡±
She pointed a bloody finger at him. ¡°Which is why you saying you did it in a month is a clear lie!¡± she said, triumphantly.
¡°What if I discovered a secret art for clearing the meridians faster?¡± he asked curiously. She could tell he wasn¡¯t being serious, but she decided to humor him.
¡°Any secret art that could clear meridians faster without the cultivator circulating their spiritual energy could also be used to unblock them for ordinary people,¡± she said, ¡°any sect that developed such a secret art would take over the cultivation world, as they could turn ordinary people into cultivators whenever they wanted.¡±
Wang Yonghao nodded, and scratched his head. ¡°Well, I didn¡¯t really find such a secret art. But how about drugs?¡±
Qing Shanyi got a bad feeling.
¡°I have heard of some medicines that could loosen up the impurities,¡± she said slowly, ¡°but they are rare and very expensive. I have never been given any. And besides, their effect plateaus - you need to take ten times as much for one tenth the effect. For example, young master Yao, the direct disciple of the Golden Rabbit Bay¡¯s city regent and the richest noble for many miles, still took a full year to open his first dantian. Are you saying you found some?...¡±
She trailed off, uncertainly. Wang Yonghao looked away guiltily.
¡°Well, not so much found as fell into a barrel, but yes,¡± he said,
¡°A barrel?¡± she asked, incredulously.
¡°Yeah, a barrel,¡± he laughed ruefully, ¡°I think it was Asure Heart Cleansing Dew - I had to look it up later.¡±
¡°You simply fell into an actual barrel of Asure Heart Cleansing Dew? It¡¯s measured in drops!¡± she clutched her head in her hands, paying no mind to the blood staining her hair. Her left eye was twitching violently.
¡°Yeah, I fell into some ruins,¡± he explained, laughing slightly, ¡°hit my head, spent a day within the barrel before I woke up. Absorbed most of it. After that, my first dantian unblocked pretty quickly.¡±
¡°How? Your skin should have rotted away from an overdose!¡±
¡°Just¡lucky, I guess?¡±
Qian Shanyi blinked, then stood up, and headed towards Wang Yonghao with a slight smile on her face. He backed away from her.
¡±Come here, I am not going to hurt you,¡± she said, motioning with her bloody butchering dagger.
¡°Weren¡¯t you going to, uh, finish with the bear?¡± he laughed, backing away more.
¡°I¡¯ll get right back to it after I strangle you for being so disgustingly lucky!¡± she shouted, and set off after him. He turned around and ran away. It was a comical scene, as her legs felt sluggish after her brush with poison death and the sharp spikes of pain from her broken bones sent her off balance, but Wang Yonghao also kept stumbling from the aftereffects of the egg omelet. In the end, they were actually fairly closely matched in speed.
When she chased him all the way to the edge of the world fragment, he circulated his spiritual energy, and jumped into the air, rising up on top of two clouds of fiery fireflies. She scowled up at him.
¡°Come back down here!¡± she said. Running around had calmed her down somewhat, but her blood was still throbbing angrily in her ears.
¡°I think I¡¯ll stay here for now,¡± he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. ¡°It feels safer.¡±
She squinted up at him, and pointed towards the rope hanging from the entrance of the world fragment. ¡°See that rope?¡±, she said, ¡±Who do you think put it there? You really think I can¡¯t reach you in the air if I need to?¡±
His face had the decency to grow white when he glanced at the rope hanging from the sky. She snorted, and turned away.
¡°Whatever,¡± she said, walking back towards the bear, ¡°If you feel like flying, then fly around the sect, I need some materials. Pots and plates from the kitchens, tables, bookshelves, barrels - it is all going to be decaying and rusted, but I am sure we could salvage something from it. Oh, and there should be a pair of holes near the gazebo filled with heavenly materials and earthly treasures - bring them down here too.¡±
Wang Yonghao nodded shakily, and walked on air up to the World Fragment entrance. She considered wherever she should follow, but decided against it. There was a risk that Wang Yonghao would close the entrance and leave her stranded, but she estimated it to be minor. He was still clearly intimidated by her, and didn¡¯t seem like the ruthless type that would simply wait for her to starve.
She got back to her autopsy. The lungs and stomach were unsalvageable - the bear had breathed and swallowed far too much toxic slime during their chase. The liver seemed fine - Three Obediences Four Virtues, when discussing poisoned animals, mentioned that it might absorb poison, but she figured that the bear died before that could happen. The kidneys, spleen, and the heart were fine too.
After she was done with the organs, she moved over to skinning the body and breaking it into parts.
The bear¡¯s pelt was soaked through with the poison slime, and would need to be thrown away. Her heart ached at the waste, but even if she could clean it, she had no idea how to tan leather to prevent it from rotting. At least it kept the poison away from the meat.
Bear¡¯s jaw, one of the front paws, and many of the ribs were broken in the fall. The other bones were mostly fine, and she was careful to cut between the bones as she separated the meat into parts. She would find a use for the bones later.
To deal with the poison slime, she set up a washing station. It was a simple construction - three different spears tied into a tripod, with a Blue Tear Stone and an Igneocopper bar hanging from the middle, wrapped in one of the spare sets of robes. Water produced by the Blue Tear Stone soaked the robes and flowed down, and made it easy to wash the meat before it could be stored in the cold water trenches of the chiclotron.
She piled everything she would be throwing away together. If not for the poison, she could have considered reusing it for a compost pile, but as it was it would simply contaminate the ground.
By the time she was done, Wang Yonghao had bought back what she asked. Somehow, he seemed even more wary of her now - staying up in the air, stepping from one leg onto the other. She squinted at him.
¡°You want to ask something,¡± she stated.
He cringed. ¡°How did you get rid of the fog?¡± he finally said. ¡°There was so much of it.¡±
¡°I blew it away,¡± she said matter-of-factly, washing her hands under the tripod. ¡°Now, do you want those steaks?¡±
Wang Yonghao nodded vigorously.
¡°You¡¯d need to come down then,¡± she said, smiling at him.
His face went white again, and he swallowed.
She watched the steaks sizzling on the pan carefully. The heart of cultivation was constant improvement: as long as this piece of meat was cooked better than the last one, then eventually, she could cook it perfectly.
Wang Yonghao sat opposite her, sipping from a bottle of spirit wine. She glanced up at him, and he looked away. She sighed.
¡°I think I believe you about how quickly you cultivate,¡± she said, bringing up their previous discussion. Hacking the bear corpse apart had brought her blood pressure back down. ¡°It would fit the overall picture. But that does not explain why you think it is bad.¡±
He groaned, and stayed silent for a while.
¡°Because my luck tailors itself to my realm,¡± he said, finally opening his mouth. ¡°When I was in the low level of the refinement stage, I got into fights with other low level refinement stage cultivators. Now, they are high level ones. If I advance to the foundation establishment stage like this, then I couldn¡¯t even walk into town without putting ordinary people in danger.¡±
¡°Your luck makes no sense,¡± she said, bluntly.
¡°Tell me about it,¡± he groaned further, flopping down on the ground.
¡°I mean it,¡± she said, flipping the steaks over. This time, she got the timing just right: they were browned, but not charred. ¡°It¡¯s not just that it is absurd in scope. Your luck should depend on your desires - if you don¡¯t want to cultivate, why would it push resources at you?¡±
¡°Are you saying I want this?¡± he asked exasperatedly, raising his head. ¡°I don¡¯t!¡±
¡°I am not saying anything,¡± she shook her head, ¡°If your luck worked the same way it does for everyone else, it would not be anywhere as powerful. Maybe what it does has changed too.¡±
She took the steaks off the fire, and handed them over to Wang Yonghao. He bit into one, yelped, and started blowing on it to cool it down.
¡°The real question is, who in Heaven has your name on their desk, to grant you such luck?¡± she wondered out loud, ¡°And what else about it might have changed?¡±
Chapter 12: Stroll Amongst The Trees With Seeking Eyes
Qian Shanyi reeled back the rope she used to descend into Wang Yonghao¡¯s Inner World, and wrapped it around her waist. She had only tied it around the gazebo column a mere day ago, but it felt like ages. The knot on the rope was hard as stone, tightened to the limit after holding her weight many times that she had climbed in and out of the world fragment.
Wang Yonghao stood next to her, looking around without a care in the world.
She prepared for the trip as well as she could, which was not very. With Wang Yonghao awake and conscious, there was no need to overload herself with tools that could be retrieved directly from the Inner World, but she still carried the fly whisk, her sword, and a small axe. Several spears, additional ropes, and everything else she could think of was arranged on the ground near the center of the Inner World, easy to grab in an emergency.
She didn¡¯t want to waste the time to bring the poisoned earth out of the inner world, but they did throw out the remaining bear entrails before they had a chance to stink up the place, by making a makeshift lift out of a rope and one of the largest pots they took from the kitchens.
Once the rope was drawn fully out of his Inner World, the entrance shrunk into a dot and vanished. All it took was a thought from Wang Yonghao to do it, and she wondered what would happen if it closed on someone¡¯s hand. Probably nothing good.
She tied off the rope on her waist, picked up a new pair of stilts, and nodded to Wang Yonghao.
¡°Shall we go?¡± she said, and walked down the hill. He quietly followed after her, walking on air, clouds of dragonflies under his feet shedding enough light that she didn¡¯t bother making her own hair glow.
They got to the edge of the slime, and Qian Shanyi got on top of her stilts. Wang Yonghao got ahead of her, and walked backwards in front of her, with his hands folded behind his back. She ignored him.
¡°Why don¡¯t you fly?¡± he asked, ¡°You said you could, before.¡±
Qian Shanyi had already anticipated this question. If she was going to cooperate with Wang Yonghao closely, he was inevitably going to notice that she didn¡¯t do anything befitting of an old cultivation monster. This ruse would have to break eventually, but for now, she had ways to stall by relying on layers of implications.
For example, she didn¡¯t actually say that she could fly - she only said she could reach him in the air, but she wasn¡¯t about to correct his misconception.
¡°My cultivation law is special, and I am doing recuperative training,¡± she replied dismissively. ¡°I don¡¯t use spiritual energy unless I absolutely have to.¡±
¡°You know, I could have just carried you,¡± he noted.
¡°It¡¯s a good idea,¡± she nodded, ¡°it would make it much easier for me to reach your neck, if I needed to wring it.¡±
After a long day of exploring the sect, removing the toxic fog, getting almost killed by the bear and then butchering it for food, she was quite tired, and knew that she would fall asleep as soon as her head touched the ground. The short nap she took while suffering from the poison helped, and the aches her newly re-broken shin sent up her leg kept her awake, but she still felt exhausted.
She considered sending Wang Yonghao out of the secret realm alone and just going to sleep, but the idea rankled her. If she didn¡¯t walk through the sect gatehouse on her own two feet, wouldn¡¯t it mean that in some sense, she had lost the fight to the bear?
As they passed by the fallen tree, she stopped, and headed off the road, looking around for the lost spear. Wang Yonghao followed after her curiously.
¡°What are you looking for?¡± he asked.
¡°I lost a spear here when I wrestled with the bear,¡± she said, sweeping some slime aside with a wave of a fly whisk, ¡°it would be a waste to leave it behind.¡±
¡°Why would you wrestle a bear?¡± he said, coming closer.
¡°We had a spirited debate about who was going to be the food and who the chef,¡± she said, ¡°It lost and got sent into your Inner World. Now do you want to help me look or not?¡±
Working together, they soon found it, lying not far away from the tree crown. Wang Yonghao threw it into his Inner World, and they continued on, through the gatehouse with broken doors and out into the cavern beyond the sect. She saw the bear tracks in the dirt and dust on the ground, leading towards a depression on the side of the cave - perhaps her flood of poison disturbed its sleep, and that was why it was so angry.
She was the first to scramble up to the ledge where the cave opened up into the wider world, and sat down on the warm stone ground. The warm, humid wind made her long hair flutter softly amid the rays of daylight, casting long, wriggling shadows on the walls of the cave behind her, as if a bestial octopus had crawled up from the Netherworld.
The cave was set into the wall of a cliff, and opened up into the forest of towering black trees. They looked similar to the pines that grew near the Golden Rabbit Bay, with long clean trunks and a wide crown of green casting shade onto the ground below, but much taller, and with smooth, pitch black bark that shone slightly at the edges. With a start, she realized it must have simply been so smooth it was reflecting sunlight.
The ground was covered in thick red moss and tall reedy grass, blackened in a wide circle where the poison fog spilled out of the cave. Thankfully, it had long dissipated by now.
She could see where a hidden road had been cut into the forest in the past, narrow tracks left behind by carts barely visible among the vegetation. Songs of birds and insects filled her ears, almost deafening after the muffled environment of the sect caverns.
She filled her lungs with the fresh air, and smiled. She was finally out.
Wang Yonghao came over and sat down next to her.
¡°I like forests,¡± he said, ¡°they are nice and quiet. Very few people can find you here.¡±
She glanced at him. ¡°Speaking from experience?¡±
¡°Yeah,¡± he said, ¡°I spend a lot of time in between cities, running away from this sect or that. Forests are some of the best places to be - no eyes to report you, no ears to hear you moving around. Unless a sect hires a spirit chaser, tracking someone through a forest is very hard.¡±
She frowned at his mention of sects. She didn¡¯t have the energy to think of it before, but her sect - Luminous Lotus Pavilion - must have already noticed she had disappeared, and had surely heard about the incident at the Northern Sky Salmon. Without her dead body, the only assumption - not entirely inaccurate - must have been that she was kidnapped, or ran away. Her teacher was sure to worry.
She didn¡¯t feel a great sense of obligation towards her sect. She joined it for a simple reason - it was one of the few sects near the Golden Rabbit Bay to accept novice female cultivators from a family of commoners without binding them by lines of marriage. The sect had only given her a fraction of the resources she needed, and in return, she did her best to dawdle in her assigned duties, and spent as much of her time on personal cultivation as she could. The only person there she was truly grateful to was her teacher, Elder Striding Phoenix, who gave her plenty of helpful advice, even though he obviously did not practice her cultivation law. She was sure that legally, she was still tied to the sect, but morally, she felt that she had kept her tab clean.
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She decided that when they would reach civilization, she would write to Elder Striding Phoenix and tell him she was going away. He deserved that much.
Of course, she wouldn¡¯t tell him about Wang Yonghao. The sect would be only too happy to help him with his luck problems - but in doing so, they would completely sideline her. She was not about to hand over her unique opportunity to someone else - instead, she would bite into it with all her teeth and never let go.
Well, this was something to worry about later.
¡°If you have spent so much time in forests, does that mean you know how to forage?¡± she asked.
He laughed awkwardly. ¡°I kept meaning to ask someone to teach me, but never got around to it. Just¡kept having other things interrupt me, I guess.¡±
She snorted in response. Of course he hadn¡¯t. She took out the jade slate from her clothes, and activated it with her spiritual energy, going straight to the chapter on cooking.
¡°Fortunately for us, I happen to have a manual on foraging with me,¡± she sighed, slapping her other hand on her knee, and getting up, ¡°Come on, let¡¯s follow this road. I¡¯ve never been much of a forager, but if we are lucky, I may be able to get us some herbs and forest vegetables, so that we won¡¯t be forced to eat only unseasoned bear meat for weeks.¡±
¡°You want us to travel together?¡± he looked at her weirdly, ¡°Can¡¯t you just give me this manual or something?¡±
¡°How could I trust someone who did not even clean up their treasury with a precious manual?¡± she asked rhetorically, ¡°Chances are, you will manage to lose it.¡±
She was not about to let the jade slate out of her hands. It contained her cultivation law, and if Wang Yonghao flipped through it and realized that was what she was practicing, her ruse of being a wizened old master would go up in flames.
¡°Well, it¡¯s just¡¡± he laughed strangely again, ¡°With my luck, strange things tend to happen when I walk on the road. You fed me and helped find the sect exit, so I guess I owe you a warning.¡±
¡°I am sure it will be fine,¡± she said, walking off towards the forest. ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡±
As the suns made their march across the sky, they slowly made their way through the forest. It seemed peaceful, filled with sounds of nature, almost unnaturally idyllic in a way that begged her to relax, pushing on her mind, tired after a long day of clearing out the sect and fighting for her life. The bear encounter was still fresh in her mind, so she kept a hand on her sword, treading carefully, and trying to make out movement in between the trunks of reflective trees.
Wang Yonghao walked several paces away from her, humming along while swinging at small flowers poking their way through the moss with a tree branch. She did not stop him: if another bear came, he would make for a perfect distraction away from her.
The road was their best bet for finding civilization, but it disappeared entirely as they headed deeper into the forest. She supposed that was to be expected: it wouldn¡¯t do for a sect to leave any obvious trails that could be followed back to their secret realm. Wang Yonghao tried walking on air to try and see above the forest, but the edge of the world was hanging low here, barely above the tree crowns, and he could not see very far.
After some pushing (and more than a few insults), she managed to get him to admit that he could find a way out of the forest. He closed his eyes, threw his branch into the air, and pointed in the direction where it fell. Apparently, his luck let him directly divine a ¡°good¡± direction for him to head in, but given that he didn¡¯t like where it kept leading him, he didn¡¯t use this method very often.
She managed to hold her tongue after seeing this ¡°method¡±. At least he seemed to focus on his surroundings more afterwards.
Their attempts at foraging were going badly, mostly due to her own inexperience - they managed to find a lonely oak tree and collect some acorns, but that was all. To cope with the disappointment, they took the time to cut the tree down and put it inside of Wang Yonghao¡¯s Inner World - she had many uses in mind for the wood. The entrance portal of the world fragment made easy work of the trunk and the long branches, shearing them easily as it closed - though they still needed to move the trees around, since it could only open horizontally, and could not intersect solid objects.
Right now, Qian Shanyi was staring at a plant, flipping between two pages on her jade slate. It was about fifty centimeters tall, with a narrow stalk and cream-colored flowers growing in pointed clusters. She scratched her head, and turned to Wang Yonghao, showing him her jade slate. The forest was quiet around them.
¡°Does this look like the same plant to you?¡±
Wang Yonghao looked at the picture, and nodded.
¡°Looks like it,¡± he said, ¡°What is it?¡±
¡°It¡¯s either wild garlic, which would go great together with our meat, or it¡¯s death camas,¡± she said.
¡°And what¡¯s that?¡±
She raised an eyebrow at him. ¡°What do you think ¡®death camas¡¯ does?¡±
¡°Fair enough.¡±
She looked at the pair of pictures again. They honestly looked completely indistinguishable to her. The manual said the plants smelled differently, but that was of no help at all when she didn¡¯t know the smell of the right one. On top of that, the evening had fallen, and she needed to light up her hair to see clearly.
She sighed, and got up. Best not risk it.
As she turned towards Wang Yonghao, something put her on edge, and her hand dropped on her sword. She spun around, looking for a threat, but only saw the same quiet dark forest, reflective tree trunks, and the ground covered in red moss and reedy grass.
Eerily quiet. Mere minutes before, birds were singing, but now all she could hear was the rustle of wind in the reeds. Even the insects went silent.
She put her back against a tree, looking around for any hint of movement, and drew her sword out, extinguishing her hair and strengthening her spiritual shield at the same time. Wang Yonghao looked at her curiously.
¡°What are you doing?¡± he asked her, not even bothering to lower his voice.
¡°Why are the birds quiet?¡± she hissed at him, ¡°Something is wrong.¡±
¡°The birds?¡± he looked around, and to his credit, immediately went for his sword.
Suddenly, he yelped as something yanked him by the legs, making him sink down to his waist into the moss. He helplessly tugged at his sword, but it was stuck in its sheath.
Qian Shanyi pushed herself off the tree to help him, but something caught her by the throat, and she was jerked back. She clawed at her windpipe, and felt a cord of something thick and cold, pressing against her spiritual energy shield. If she didn¡¯t bring it up in time, she would have been strangled already.
A vine?
She pushed more spiritual energy into her spiritual energy shield, expanding it around her body to push the vine away. Her spiritual energy reserves, already depleted by the many hours of holding her broken shin together, dropped further, but she managed to get her sword underneath the vine. The angle was awkward, but with the push of her shoulder she managed to slice through, and tumbled forwards, using her momentum to instantly spring back to her feet.
She saw a bundle of wriggling vines enveloping the tree trunk she was leaning against. In the middle of the bundle, there was a large flower, its petals black in the dim evening light of the forest. Something white glistened in the middle of it, and as it crawled around the tree trunk to face her, she realized it was a maw full of teeth.
Spiritual energy flowed from the vine she sliced, but the rest of the flower was almost entirely blank. Even now that she knew where to sense, it was very easy to miss it.
A burst of light and a deafening cry of a goose came from behind her, illuminating the forest for a brief moment. The petals of the flower in front of her started to glow blood red, and behind the tree, she could see more patches of red, crawling closer.
She glanced at Wang Yonghao out of the corner of her eye, and saw him getting out of the hole in the moss, shaking the remains of a similar flower from his feet.
¡°Maneating flowers¡¡± he sighed, ¡°Just what I need.¡±
She didn¡¯t have time to respond as the flower leaped at her, its hungry maw opening wide.
Chapter 13: Cleave Through Groves And Dream Of Luck
A single flower demon beast was of little danger to someone of their realm. The flowers tried to close in and entangle their prey, but were too weak to pierce directly through a solid spiritual energy shield. As long as one kept their distance, they could slice off the vines one by one until the core body could be destroyed.
The problem was that the flowers kept coming, and each one took many minutes to kill. On top of that, their vines could absorb spiritual energy on contact: it was a battle of attrition, and she was losing, even though she cut her spiritual energy usage to a minimum. Once she would fully run out, it would be all over.
Wang Yonghao fared better, but only just. Because he didn''t need to spend spiritual energy all day to keep his leg in one piece, his reserves started out full, and he dipped into them with abandon. His attacks spread fire around the moss, and the Honk of the Solar Goose technique sent razor-sharp bursts of sword light slicing through the forest. It looked very dominating, but the flowers had an uncanny ability to dodge just before the attack connected, and would keep moving even with most of their bodies sliced apart. Compared to her conservative style, she wasn''t sure who would falter first.
Qian Shanyi grit her teeth. Something needed to change.
¡°Let¡¯s retreat,¡± she shouted, kicking away the flower next to her, and sprinting over to Wang Yonghao. She grabbed him from behind by the collar of his robes, and planted her good foot on his back, standing tall.
¡°Hey!¡± he protested, ¡°Get off me!¡±
¡°Less whining, more running on air,¡± she curtly ordered, ¡°I¡¯ll keep your back safe.¡±
She wasn¡¯t about to tell him she couldn¡¯t fly, and she was definitely not letting herself be carried.
He went upwards, complaining loudly throughout. That put some distance between them and the flowers, but the plants gave chase, swinging from one branch to another at surprising speed. They needed a way to throw them off.
She racked her brain. How were they following them? Plants didn¡¯t have eyes to see.
The birds went silent, she thought. They knew the flowers were coming. But how?
The flower beasts moved silently, and she doubted the birds could sense them any better than a pair of cultivators. This left two possibilities: either the birds heard some kind of concealed signal, or the flowers came out at the same time every night. Many animals would hunt at specific times of the day. If these flowers were doing the same, then it wasn¡¯t out of the question for other animals to learn their schedule. That they all went quiet at once spoke to the threat on display.
¡°I think they can hear us,¡± she said to Wang Yonghao, ¡°try to keep quiet, and run in a different direction - maybe it will throw them off.¡±
He immediately stopped complaining, and even his breathing slowed down. She smiled - the man could manage to think right when prompted. His footsteps on the fiery dragonflies were silent as they pivoted away from their path, but the flowers still kept on their trail. She frowned. Was she wrong?
No, she dismissed the thought, they probably have a spiritual sense.
All creatures needed to consume calories in order to stay alive. Spiritual creatures - cultivators, demon beasts like these flowers, ghosts, and many others - also needed to consume spiritual energy, or they would turn sick and die. Because of this, most demon beasts could innately sense spiritual energy, and right now, Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao must have looked like two bundles of tasty food.
¡°It didn¡¯t work,¡± she said, breaking their silence, ¡°they might be following our spiritual energy as well as the sound."
"So what then?" he said, "I can''t keep flying without using spiritual energy."
"Let¡¯s descend to the ground and continue on foot,¡± she said, eyeing the plants behind them. It was subtle, but she thought they were slowly closing in, as she could see flashes of red reflecting off the trees on their flanks.
¡°If we descend to the ground, they¡¯d be on us in moments,¡± he grumbled, "especially if we suppress our spiritual energy."
Honestly, it was a great point. She looked around, searching for a solution.
¡°There. See that dense copse of trees?¡± she pointed over his shoulder, ¡°run through it, and use that sword goose technique to slice the trees apart. The noise of them falling down should cover our retreat.¡±
Wang Yonghao headed towards the trees, and his sword danced in a tapestry of blinding light. In a single breath, every tree in the copse was sliced through by razor-sharp sword light, and collapsed to the ground with deafening cracks and groans as they ran past. They dropped to the ground, and started to walk away as quickly and quietly as they could while suppressing their spiritual energy by squeezing shut the 40 000 pores on their skin.
She glanced back, and saw that the collapsed trees were now positively covered in blood red flowers. They were searching around wildly, without any direction. She smiled - their distraction had worked.
She walked in front of Wang Yonghao and made a motion of a circle opening and widening with both hands. It took a minute, but eventually he figured out what she wanted, and opened his Inner World in front of them. She saw the flowers in the distance spin around and head in their direction, sensing the burst of spiritual energy, but by now it was too late.
She hopped on his back despite his protests, and they descended down into his Inner World, closing the entrance behind themselves. As he got down to the ground and she hopped off, he spun around and glared at her.
¡°Did you need to ride on my back?¡± he demanded.
¡°Like I said, I don¡¯t use spiritual energy unless it¡¯s absolutely necessary,¡± she replied lazily, turning away from him and heading towards her improvised bed.
"What do you mean unless it''s necessary?!" he threw his hands in the air, ¡°It was necessary - we were surrounded! You even said we should flee!¡±
¡°Hm. No, I don''t think so,¡± she said, ¡°You ran away just fine, didn¡¯t you? Why would I need to use my legs to run when yours are still strong?¡±
"I am not a horse for you to ride on!" he ran in front of her, again meeting her gaze with a scowl.
She met his scowl with a smile.
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"If you aren''t a horse, why didn''t you throw me off?" she asked, yawning lazily, and refilling the water clock that seemed to have ran out, "Besides, it was a good division of labor. You could concentrate on running, and I could watch the flowers. Or do you have a technique for growing eyes on the back of your head?"
"Well, no - " he began.
"Excellent," she clapped him on his shoulder, and moved past him, laying down on her bed. "Looks like we agree that from this point on, you''d do the running while I relax on your back. It is the most optimal arrangement."
"Hey, no way!" he shouted again, as she picked up a spare set of robes to cover her eyes for sleep. "We didn''t agree to that at all! I am not letting you ride me again!"
She glanced up at him, and saw his face blushing from what he just said.
"Letting me?" She said, "You have to pay for that in most cities."
"Shut up," he said, blushing further.
¡°Tell you what," she said smugly, "morning outsmarts evening, and this here cultivator is tired. Let''s talk about this tomorrow."
She covered her eyes, laid down, and was out like a blown out candle.
When she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep down on the grass, having followed her example by tying a different set of robes around his head. The strange sphere that he brought into the world fragment was laying by his side - he must have been tinkering with it the night before.
By the clock, she slept for ten hours. She took her medicine, cooked up a large portion of bear ribs for breakfast, and started to catalog their food supplies.
Yesterday¡¯s foraging went pretty badly, mostly due to her own lack of skill. The only thing they had to show for it was a small pile of acorns, as well as a broken up oak tree. The acorns had to be dried before they could be cooked, so she placed them all inside of an earth trench of the chiclotron, where the air temperature was a bit milder than in the adjacent fire trench.
In terms of calories, they were set for the next while. She didn¡¯t have a set of scales to weigh the meat, but the bear must have been at least six hundred kilos, and according to the Three Obediences Four Virtues, meat was about a third of a mammal''s body weight. Even if each of them ate two kilos a day, they should still last for a month and a half. Remaining egg omelet would add a couple days on top of that.
This was, of course, assuming that the meat didn¡¯t go bad. For now, she stored it in the ice-cold water trenches of the chiclotron, but given how often she took it apart for her various projects, she would need to figure out a less fickle solution sooner or later.
Having gone through her food stores, she picked up her sword, and started cultivating. Her broken rib and leg made her wince in pain, but at this point, she was used to it. She wanted to adjust to her new cultivation law as soon as possible, especially if traveling with Wang Yonghao would mean she had to fight something new every other day.
She came out of her fight with the bear surprisingly whole. Besides her broken rib and leg, the rest of her body was pretty healthy, and now that she was eating her fill, she managed to keep practicing for two whole hours. At this rate, she felt that she would be back to peak shape by the end of the week.
She took a break after cultivation by relaxing on the grass and reading deeper into the Three Obediences Four Virtues, giving her tired muscles time to recuperate.
This time, she decided to read the chapter on household management. There was a lot of genuinely helpful advice, especially when it came to making containers, accounting, and conducting small repairs, as well as a fair amount about the basics of feng shui management when building a house - something that was currently useless to her, on account of living under the open sky.
Besides the general advice, there was a set of complementary techniques for keeping track of inventory. One of the techniques could create primitive talismans - ¡°marks¡± - that could be attached to various items in a store room, with supplementary techniques for counting them based on type, or for locating particular types of marks in space. The marks themselves were crude, and could only last for about a month before running out of spiritual energy, but she could already tell it would be invaluable when running a large sect.
To make sure she wasn¡¯t missing any other techniques, she quickly skimmed the other chapters. Cursing techniques seemed largely self-contained, and put a large strain on the body: she would only consider practicing them once she was in her peak condition. In the cooking chapter, she found two minor techniques for managing a kitchen - one for controlling the strength of fires by manipulating their access to air and one for measuring temperature - with the rest of the chapter focused on manipulating and transforming food. The advice and information seemed very comprehensive - she was sure that if she fully absorbed the lessons here, she could become a good immortal chef.
The sewing chapter, after discussing needle control, went into thread control techniques - they were clearly meant to be used together. Thread could be controlled by linking its movement to that of a second piece of thread held in her hands, either directly or by making it repeat a recorded movement on a trigger. The rest of the chapter was dedicated towards a variety of cutting, sewing and knitting patterns for shirts, robes, bags, and other common items.
Taken together, this cultivation manual held seven different spiritual energy manipulation techniques, as well as the base spiritual energy recirculation law, and a wealth of more general advice. Even though its focus was somewhat broad, in terms of the overall quality it could probably compare to some of the best cultivation manuals out there.
She pondered this fact as she laid on the grass. This cultivation law was very comprehensive - ordinarily, she couldn¡¯t expect to simply find something like this lying around. Furthermore, it¡¯s style was clashing with her own preferences. Was it her own luck at play, or Wang Yonghao¡¯s luck in finding a good manager for his inner world?
It was said that a cultivator''s luck was not transferable, but this was a simplification. In reality, luck would simply draw in events that would suit the goals of the cultivator in question - both conscious and subconscious. While luck could not be controlled directly, by focusing on specific goals, a cultivator could emphasize their effect. Direct, straightforward and immediate goals were easiest to affect by luck, while indirect, conceptual and distant ones were much harder. The goals of other people - even if those people were dear to the cultivator in question - had a much lower importance, and so luck would barely affect them.
Of course, this wasn¡¯t to say that luck could not make other people benefit. For example, if a cultivator¡¯s luck brought them over to join a sect, then the sect would also benefit from their joining. This was part of the reason why Qian Shanyi wanted to hug Wang Yonghao¡¯s thigh and not let go - just by leaching off his treasures, her cultivation could increase by leaps and bounds. But this type of benefit was almost always indirect and incidental, especially because of the limitations of what luck could affect.
Luck had the strongest effect on the subconscious decisions of the cultivator themselves, and following that, on inanimate objects - for example, a lucky cultivator would find that their clothes would happen to tear less often, even though the strength of the fabric did not change in any way.
The scope of luck dropped significantly when affecting living beings, such as animals and demon beasts. It was fairly easy for a lucky cultivator to make a die roll to one side of the table more often than not, but much harder to make a chicken stroll to a particular side of the yard.
The hardest to affect were the decisions of other people, and especially other cultivators. This was not only because they were living beings, but also because their luck would clash with your own. If you were fighting another cultivator, then it may be beneficial to you if they happened to step in the path of your sword, but it would not be beneficial to them, and so the effects of luck on their decisions would tend to balance out. Similarly, when two cultivators gambled, then unless one of them was much luckier than the other, their rolls should be more or less fair. On the other hand, if two cultivators shared a goal, then their luck would tend to work together.
For her to find this jade slate, she had to end up in Wang Yonghao¡¯s Inner World, and then he had to stumble into this destroyed sect. Did her own weak luck guide him on this path so that she could find it, or did his much stronger luck find her because she would make for a good manager of his Inner World? It would be an indirect goal mostly benefitting another person, but with how monstrous his luck was, perhaps it could actually happen.
She shook her head. It was pointless to wonder - wherever it was her luck, his luck, or just happenstance, all that mattered in the end was what she decided to do with the cards she was dealt. Luck was rarely a determining force, and the kinds of fools who relied on their luck to see them through danger were the first to end up in the graveyards.
If Wang Yonghao¡¯s luck tried to lead her astray in service to his own goals, she would simply find a way to kill him. Dead men had no luck to speak of.
¡°Tang Qunying¡ Who were you?¡± she asked the air, playing around with the jade slate. Was she a part of that sect? Who hid this jade slate among the womanly books? Did she do it herself, to pass on her experiences?
Her thoughts were cut short by Wang Yonghao finally waking up.
Chapter 14: Debate The Dao Over A Good Meal
¡°Can¡¯t we have breakfast first?¡± Wang Yonghao whined, using a dagger to pull nails out of a bookshelf.
¡°He who does not work does not eat,¡± Qian Shanyi noted wisely, choosing to conceal the fact that she ate as soon as she woke up.
¡°We aren¡¯t even in a hurry,¡± he complained, gesturing with his dagger. ¡°And we didn¡¯t have dinner last night after that fight. Please?¡±
¡°You know, the more time you spend talking, the longer it will take us to get through this pile,¡± she noted, ¡°and thus the longer it will take for me to make breakfast.¡±
He grumbled but went back to work. They were going through the large pile of things they took from the sect - a great variety of bookshelves, cupboards, tables, and so on, all in various stages of rot and disrepair - and taking it apart for the valuable iron nails inside.
Besides the furniture, there were barrels (rotting, but she could reuse the iron hoops), pots from the kitchens (rusted, and would need a lot of cleaning before she could use them to cook), ceramic and clay crockery (in strong need of washing), cutlery, and even a decent pickaxe.
Working together, it only took them an hour to go through their loot. Old wood was stacked in the middle of the world fragment, ready to be lifted out when they opened the entrance. She wrapped the collected nails in a robe, stretched, and got up off the grass.
¡°Alright,¡± she said, ¡°I think I have a plan for how to deal with the Glowing Rosevines.¡±
¡°The what?¡± Wang Yonghao asked. Instead of answering, she took out her jade slate, and flipped over to a page in the cooking chapter she noted earlier. She turned the slate over to him, showing him a picture of the same man-eating flowers that attacked them last night.
¡°They are called Glowing Rosevines,¡± she said, ¡°Apparently their vines make for good ropes, and the leaves can be turned into tea.¡±
Wang Yonghao nodded as he looked over the picture, then raised his eyes.
¡°Do we need a plan?¡±, he asked. ¡°If they only come out at night, we can just move during the day, and spend the night here.¡±
She snorted. ¡°Did you not hear what I said?¡± she asked, ¡°Their vines can be turned into ropes. I am tired of sleeping on the ground, I want to make a hammock.¡±
Her makeshift nest out of spare robes had been serving her well, but she still woke up with a sore back every day. By the looks of it, so was Wang Yonghao.
¡°So what, we go out at night, kill a bunch of them, and then retreat?¡± he asked.
¡°No, it wouldn¡¯t work,¡± she said, ¡°they are cannibals - if we leave their corpses on the ground, they would be gone by morning.¡±
¡°We could grab them and run,¡± he said. She looked at him weirdly.
¡°And if one of us gets caught, or our spiritual energy runs out? Any cultivator, no matter their realm, can be overwhelmed,¡± she said, ¡° Or perhaps they will learn better than to be tricked by some falling trees? This would be risky.¡±
He laughed. ¡°I think it¡¯d be fine.¡±
Her frown deepened. ¡°You really aren¡¯t taking this as seriously as you should. We were in danger last night, it would be stupid to simply go in without a good plan.¡±
¡°Well, what can I say,¡° he flashed her a grin, ¡°I guess I am just naturally lucky. I don¡¯t think I would die.¡±
She folded her arms, and stared at him with a blank expression. His grin faltered.
¡°You know, normally, lucky cultivators are harder to kill because their luck protects them,¡± she said, ¡°but normally, luck stays within reasonable bounds and doesn¡¯t force unwanted things on a cultivator. Yours does both. What makes you so sure your luck won¡¯t straight up kill you? Especially if you keep refusing its blatant attempts to make you cultivate?¡±
His smile froze on his face. She grinned.
¡°Really, it¡¯s me who doesn¡¯t need a plan,¡± she said, ¡°my luck is very ordinary. If I go out just before sunrise, I can probably safely grab the last couple of awake Rosevines left wandering around. If you go out, who knows what will happen.¡±
He stared off into the distance, and laughed hollowly as a drop of sweat slid down his forehead.
¡°That¡¯s¡a good point,¡± he said, turning back to her, ¡°so¡what is your plan?¡±
¡°We¡¯ll build a shelter out of tree trunks,¡± she said, ¡°with a narrow hole, not wide enough to let a Rosewine through. Then we¡¯ll hide inside. They shouldn¡¯t be strong enough to break through a wall of wood and packed earth, and without needing to expend spiritual energy on defense, we could kill them easily. As long as we wipe out the entire pack, there would be no problem with gathering up their corpses in the morning.¡±
¡°But first, we¡¯ll build the same shelter here, in your inner world,¡± she continued, heading towards the large pile of oak tree wood stacked at the edge of the world fragment, ¡°if we screw up and they manage to get inside our shelter, I want us to have a path of retreat.¡±
¡°Hey, no way!¡± He shouted after her, ¡°Breakfast first! You promised!¡±
¡°I am not hungry yet,¡± she said, ¡°we can eat after a couple hours.¡±
¡°How can you not be hungry?¡± he asked, ¡°We haven¡¯t eaten last night, and you¡¯ve been working since morning!¡±
¡°Because I had breakfast before you woke up, sleepyhead,¡± she said, grinning. He scowled at her.
¡°I am not doing any more work before I eat something,¡± he said, crossing his arms.
¡°So make it yourself,¡± she said, frowning, ¡°this was always an option.¡±
His mouth froze open in a silent objection. Finally, he closed it, and muttered something under his breath.
¡°What? Speak up,¡± she said.
¡°But I don¡¯t know how to cook,¡± he sighed.
She stared at him, then started laughing. Wang Yonghao scowled at her.
¡°How can you not know how to cook?¡± she said, pushing her laughter down. ¡°Just put meat on a heated pan, it¡¯s not complicated.¡±
¡°Well I just¡ don¡¯t know how much to heat it?¡± he said, blushing.
¡°Big strong cultivator, would starve if left alone,¡± she shook her head, ¡°But fine, I can cook for you.¡±
The fool seemed to relax, smiling.
¡°Just as long as you pay for it,¡± she said casually, heading towards her cooking station.
¡°Pay?¡± he asked, far too slow to catch on, ¡°What do you mean?¡±
¡°Surely you¡¯ve been to a restaurant before? Food is not free,¡± she said, shaking her head in disappointment. ¡°If you want me to work as an immortal chef, I deserve some remuneration.¡±
¡°But¡You already can use everything in here,¡± he continued, confused.
¡°Hm,¡± she grinned, preparing to deliver her strike, ¡±Last night, you said you, ah, ¡®wouldn¡¯t let me ride you¡¯ I believe?¡±
¡°You can¡¯t be serious,¡± he scowled.
¡°Deadly,¡± she said, ¡±How about it? For the next two months, I¡¯ll cook for you whenever you want, and you¡¯ll let me fly around on your shoulders whenever I want. Do we have a deal?¡±
Wang Yonghao stared at her for a while without responding.
¡°Well?¡± she asked, raising her eyebrow. His scowl deepened, and he stormed off towards the trench where the meat was stored. She settled down on the grass near the pan to watch his attempt.
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She had only started to study the dao of cooking a short while back, but by watching Wang Yonghao work, she already felt like a virtuoso. To heat the pan, he brought over nine igneocopper bricks: far more than what he needed. Back when she was cooking the egg, she used six, and even that was too much: if she had not been actively mixing the egg, it would have burned. For the bear meat, she only used four bricks.
When Wang Yonghao dropped the meat on the pan, she smirked, and he glared in her direction.
¡°What?¡± he said, ¡°You said meat on the pan, didn¡¯t you?¡±
¡°You are doing great!¡± she flashed him a thumbs-up, ¡°This here cultivator believes you can rebel against the heavens and cook this bear!¡± she continued, drawing out a second thumbs-up with her other hand like a poisoned dagger. Without a hand to support herself, she had to arch her neck to look up at him. ¡°Even the kitchens of the netherworld demon kings could not compete with the fiery taste of your cooking!¡±
This fool dropped the frozen meat directly on the pan, without holding it next to the igneocopper bricks for a couple minutes to let it unthaw. Not that she was going to tell him this.
She kept encouraging him until he snapped at her to keep quiet. The look on his face when he flipped the meat and realized the other side of it had been charred black was priceless.
Stubborn to the end, he tried to eat it, but it was impossible: charcoal on the surface and still frozen on the inside, the meat was completely ruined. Giving up, he covered his face with one hand. She saw a single tear slide down his cheek.
¡°Fine, damn it,¡± he said, ¡°You win. I¡¯ll do it.¡±
¡°Excellent,¡° she smiled, getting up and approaching him, ¡°Now let me teach you what you did wrong.¡±
It took some figuring out - as well as a complete redesign once she realized her earlier idea was far too ambitious - but four hours later they had built a shelter that was up to Qian Shanyi¡¯s standards. It was a squat construction, halfway buried into the ground, made out of oak planks as thick as her thigh and reinforced with packed earth. Glowing Rosevines could burrow, but her manual did not say how deep: nonetheless, she made sure that their shelter was completely enclosed in wood on the inside. Honk of the Solar Goose technique turned out to be useful for more than just gardening - its sharp cutting strikes could easily make flat boards out of the oak wood they brought with them.
There was only a single cramped room, its ceiling low enough you could only stand on your knees, with a heavy trap door covering it from the top. On the inside, the trapdoor could be locked to the ceiling by sliding a thick plank into it. A single narrow slit served as the window, leading into a two meter-long tunnel before coming out on the outside. The flowers would need to either slide into this tunnel, or try to slip their tentacles inside - neither of which would be easy. On the other hand, they could easily strike them with a long spear. As far as defense was concerned, it was almost perfect.
She knocked on the wall of the shelter a couple times, and climbed out through the trapdoor, nodding towards Wang Yonghao.
¡°I think we are ready. Let¡¯s go outside,¡± she said.
¡°If you don¡¯t want to fly yourself, can¡¯t you at least let me carry you normally?¡± he complained as she settled down with one foot on his back and one hand on his collar, ¡°this way is far too embarrassing.¡±
¡°Do you dare to not give face to your elders?¡± She said, ¡°It¡¯s impossible for me to be carried any other way. It would go against many profound and sacred principles we don¡¯t have the time to go into. Come on, up we go.¡±
He walked upwards, grumbling throughout, and opened the entrance when they reached the top of the world fragment. Qian Shanyi drew her sword as they went through.
Outside, it was night. As soon as she saw the darkness, she yanked Wang Yonghao by the collar.
¡°Back,¡± she said, ¡°go back!¡±
In the distance, she saw the glint of red reflecting from the trees, coming closer.
Wang Yonghao listened, and ducked back into his Inner World, closing the entrance, and descending back down to the ground.
¡°Ha, pretty unlucky for it to be night again,¡± he laughed, ¡°I guess we¡¯ll need to wait until morning?¡±
She glanced at him, debating wherever she should tell him.
¡°It¡¯s not luck,¡± she said, deciding that there was no reason to hide this fact, even if it was possible, ¡°the time in your Inner World flows at a different rate when it is closed.¡±
¡°What?¡±
¡°You probably never noticed, if you have never spent the night here,¡± she said, ¡°From the time we went to sleep, eighteen hours have passed here. It should be midday or late evening outside, but it is night.¡±
She watched him carefully. He didn¡¯t seem too shocked to be hearing about warped time, no doubt having had an experience with something like this in the past.
¡°Couldn¡¯t the darkness be because of something else?¡± he asked uncertainly, ¡°A big cloud covering the skies?¡±
¡°It¡¯s not just this night,¡° she said, ¡°I¡¯ve spent a good week inside of the Inner World before you showed up, while for you it must have been only a couple days. Unless you lied about what you did after you left Golden Rabbit Bay?¡±
¡°I am not a liar,¡± he scoffed.
¡°Then it must be the time,¡± she shrugged. ¡°At a guess, it should be flowing three or four times faster here than on the outside, when the entrance is closed.¡±
¡°Man, that must have sucked, being here alone for a week,¡± he ruffled his hair, ¡°I¡¯m sorry that happened.¡±
¡°I had the excruciating pain of my healing body to occupy myself,¡± she said, heading back over to their stores of wood. ¡°Come on, we have an entire day ahead of us before the sun rises,¡± she said, ¡°I want to make some furniture.¡±
¡°You don¡¯t need this much fat,¡± Qian Shanyi said, looking over what he was doing, ¡°use less. Even less. Yes, much better, that¡¯s enough.¡±
Wang Yonghao carefully cut off a small piece of bear fat and threw it on top of the shield they were using to cook. He moved it around, making sure enough of the shield was covered with grease so that the meat wouldn¡¯t stick to it.
He glanced at the mysterious woman sitting by his side, carving a wide oak plank with a small axe to make a shovel. Even though she stayed focused on her work, she had an uncanny ability to glance up just as he was about to make some kind of mistake.
He put his foot down on having dinner first, and she agreed readily, offloading the cooking on his shoulders. He tried to argue that she agreed to cook, but she responded that if she left he would have nobody else to cook for him, and he had no real argument against that. Even though he felt annoyed at being forced to do it despite their deal, he still appreciated the pointers she was giving. If he could eat better in the future, it would all be worth it.
He still didn¡¯t really know who she was or why she was originally looking for him, and when he tried to find out more, she kept deflecting his questions.
¡°After we are done with dinner, we really need to make a table,¡± she said, interrupting his thoughts, ¡°I need a workbench, my back is starting to hurt after working on the ground for many days.¡±
¡°Haven¡¯t we done enough work for today?¡± he sighed, ¡°Where¡¯s the rush?¡±
¡°Do you have somewhere else to be?¡± she asked, throwing him a baffled look.
¡°Well, no,¡± he said, ¡°but we could just relax. Talk about stuff, like normal people.¡±
¡°I¡¯ll relax when I can live like a civilized person instead of a barbarian that sleeps on the ground,¡± she said, ¡°and for that I need a woodworking station, which means I need a workbench, which means I need a table. So, we are making a table.¡±
¡°We¡¯ve spent the entire day digging and lugging wood around,¡± he said, ¡°My arms are tired, and you said your back hurts. Can¡¯t this wait until tomorrow?¡±
¡°So?¡± she snorted, ¡°Work while tired. Are you a cultivator or a baby? I work with a broken leg and don¡¯t complain.¡±
He narrowed his eyes at her. Some of the things she said had to be jokes or exaggerations, but he could never tell what was true and what wasn¡¯t.
¡°You don¡¯t have a broken leg,¡± he said, testing her, ¡°We¡¯ve been walking around all day yesterday. You don¡¯t even limp.¡±
Instead of answering him, she stretched out her leg in the air, and for a moment, her shin flopped around like a limp noodle. He recoiled at the sight, a shiver going down his spine. After a moment, her leg snapped back into shape.
¡°Why are you like this?¡± he complained, recovering his composure, ¡°Aren¡¯t ladies supposed to be gentle and kind?¡±
¡°Why?¡± she laughed, putting her carving to the side, and focusing fully on him, ¡°Because it would make you more comfortable?¡±
¡°And what¡¯s wrong with that?¡± he said, crossing his arms and crossing glares with her, ¡°We basically live in the same house! What¡¯s wrong with making your housemate comfortable?¡±
¡°Keep your eyes on the meat, junior,¡± she snorted, ¡°it¡¯s going to burn.¡±
The memory of eating burned meat made him flinch, and he looked down.
¡°To cultivate is to spit in the face of heaven,¡± she continued as he carefully flipped the bear stakes on the pan with a pair of chopsticks made from long oak splinters, ¡°If I only did what made other people comfortable as opposed to what I want, I wouldn¡¯t be much of a cultivator, would I?¡±
¡°But then people will do things that make you uncomfortable,¡± he sighed, ¡°Why do you want to be mean to others?¡±
¡°They already do, what of it?¡± she said, ¡°Did you think of my comfort when you and your brothers in drink approached me at the Northern Sky Salmon?¡±
¡°That¡¯s¡different,¡± he said, shifting in place. The memories of that night were still hazy, but he could remember the basics now. ¡°I was drunk, for one.¡±
¡°Drunk men do what sober ones want to but dare not,¡± she snorted.
¡°Well you seem pretty comfortable now, don¡¯t you?¡± he snapped out, ¡°Alone with a man, in the middle of nowhere?¡±
¡°I am comfortable because if you were to try anything I would open you up from your balls to your ribcage,¡± she replied grimly, ¡°In the city, my hands were bound by law. Do not think that a fight outside would go the same way, no matter how weakened my body may be.¡±
He gulped, and glanced down at her hands. For a moment, he could swear he could see drops of bear blood rolling off her fingers.
¡°I didn¡¯t mean it like that,¡± he muttered, ¡°I am a good person, I don¡¯t do things other people don¡¯t want, and I already said I am sorry for that night. I definitely wouldn¡¯t have wanted to get into a fight if I was sober. I just mean, well, isn¡¯t it natural for men to approach women?¡±
¡°Isn¡¯t it natural for a cultivator to be accustomed to the sight of shattered limbs?¡± she noted.
¡°That¡¯s not the same!¡±
¡°That is true,¡± she nodded, ¡°there is no cultivation technique that relies on unnerving others. Human cauldrons, on the other hand¡¡±
He flinched again.
¡°That¡¯s really not fair,¡± he said, ¡°Only the vilest of villains do that.¡±
¡°Yet the context is still there, is it not?¡± She said, ¡°Well, no matter. Let us eat.¡±
Chapter 15: Purge All Grime On The Forest Shores
Qian Shanyi breathed in, filling her lungs with air to the bursting point, and slowly exhaled. Her senses were focused inward, on the spiritual energy circulating through her meridians. She was finally seeing the first signs of the formation of the yin-yang cycles, and she couldn¡¯t tear her attention away from them.
Every cultivator possessed twelve primary meridians that transported spiritual energy throughout their body, with each one named after one of the major organs it passed through. The relationship between the organ and the meridian was reciprocal: the more spiritual energy passed through the meridian, the healthier the organ would become, and correspondingly, if the organ was damaged or affected by disease, the passage of spiritual energy through the meridian would suffer. The only exception to this rule was the heart, which was linked to two separate meridians - the heart meridian and the pericardium meridian - and the sanjiao meridian, which didn¡¯t pass through anything in particular.
Almost all of the energy flowing through the meridians had the type appropriate to the cultivator¡¯s constitution - in Qian Shanyi¡¯s case, yin-metal - but a small part corresponded to the type of each particular meridian. Six of the meridians had a yin nature, with the other six being yang; there were two meridians for every one of the five major types of spiritual energy, except fire, which had four.
Back when she was cultivating Seven Flowers Bloom, spiritual energy flowed freely between the yin and yang meridians, mixing together with little direction. Now that she practiced a proper, typed cultivation law, she was finally seeing the first signs of separation. Two separate cycles were forming among her meridians - one for yin and one for yang - with the energy moving between them only among specific pathways. As the cycles would continue to develop, the energy flow would accelerate, and her yin meridians - already better developed than her yang meridians due to her constitution - would further strengthen and expand. A similar process was happening to her metal meridians, and she could swear her lungs were already growing deeper.
Qian Shanyi forced her eyes to open. That was only a trick of the mind: she had been cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues for a mere three days. It would take a couple weeks for the energy vortices to fully form, let alone for her internal organs to catch up. For now, she had work to do.
She ended up underestimating how long the night would last. They¡¯ve spent a full day within the world fragment, going to sleep twice, and the morning sun only rose once they woke up - that meant the time within the world fragment was moving four or five times faster than on the outside.
Wang Yonghao was lazing about on the grass as she finished her morning cultivation, using a dagger to skillfully carve a chunk of oak wood into the shape of a small animal figure.
¡°You could have at least worked on our lathe, if you do not want to cultivate,¡± she chided him, getting up off the grass and dusting herself off, ¡°I don¡¯t want us to carve every little thing we need by hand.¡±
She had never seen a lathe, and only had a vague awareness that a piece of wood was spun around an axis in order to make smooth circular shapes. The motion of it seemed clear in her mind - now they just needed to figure out how to turn it into reality.
¡°I am not a refiner like you,¡± he said, shrugging, and motioning with his halfway finished figurine, ¡°I don¡¯t know how to make a lathe. I only know how to use a knife.¡±
¡°It doesn¡¯t take refining to put a couple planks together,¡± she grumbled, ¡°you know what the problem is, what is so difficult about trying things until you figure out a solution?¡±
She spent most of the last day memorizing the foraging advice of the Three Obediences Four Virtues in preparation for setting off into the forest again, but she did make sure to carve out several shovels and cobble together a large, though somewhat rickety table. For now, she avoided using nails, deciding to save them for something that would need to be especially robust.
¡°Well, you¡¯ll figure it out, right?¡± he said, ¡°What¡¯s the hurry?¡±
¡°You don¡¯t feel in a hurry to sleep on a good hammock, instead of the cold hard ground like a dog?¡±, she squinted at him, ¡°Would you rather I didn¡¯t make one for you?¡±
He gaped at her in horror.
¡°You wouldn¡¯t¡¡± he started, then paused, studying her face.
¡°Your poor, poor back,¡± she continued, twisting the knife, ¡°It must be starting to hurt. I know mine did, after a couple days, and I sleep on way more padding than you do.¡±
¡°How could you be this cruel?¡±
¡°To cultivate is to be cruel to fate itself. What is one more cruelty on top of that?¡± she said, ¡°Besides, why would I waste my time if you won¡¯t spend some of yours?¡±
Wang Yonghao shuddered and got up off the grass. ¡°Fine,¡± he said, ¡°what do you want me to do?¡±
¡°If you see a job, it¡¯s yours,¡± she said, heading over to their meat stores, ¡°Figure out what can be done, then do it. It¡¯s really that simple.¡±
After breakfast, they finally left the world fragment. Morning sun was shining through the leaves, and dew covered the moss and the tree trunks around them. After a short discussion, they decided to head further into the forest - now that they knew what they were doing, building the hideout would only take them a couple hours when the evening approached, and there was no reason to waste the rest of the day. They had to keep moving.
The forest slowly woke up around them as they walked among the gently swaying shadows cast by the heavy canopy down on the ground. As birds¡¯ cries filled the air one after another, Qing Shanyi tried to count their species by their songs. It was hard to keep track of their voices in her head, but it kept her mind occupied while her eyes searched for plants to forage. Perhaps they could climb the trees and look for bird nests? Surely working together they could manage to strike a bird out of the air, even if neither of them was much of a hunter. It would break up their diet of bear meat, at the very least.
¡°Do you just cultivate?¡±, Wang Yonghao suddenly asked, bringing her out of her ruminations.
¡°What?¡± she asked, confused.
¡°I mean, do you do anything else besides cultivating?¡± he asked, ¡°You keep saying cultivation is this or that, and I am starting to wonder.¡±
¡°I eat. I sleep,¡± she answered, raising her eyebrow, ¡°I do the work I think needs doing. One would hope most people would be similar?¡±
¡°I mean, besides all that,¡± the petulant junior rolled his eyes at her, ¡°you have to have hobbies, right? You can¡¯t just cultivate all day long.¡±
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¡°Of course you can,¡± she said, ¡°cultivators in the foundation building stage can easily spend an entire month in closed door cultivation.¡±
¡°You know what I mean,¡± he sighed in exasperation, ¡°Do you, I don¡¯t know, like birdwatching? I do woodcarving, for example.¡±
She stayed silent for a moment, thinking through her answer. There was nothing in it that could give her game away, but it still felt strange to talk about something so¡ casual.
¡°I like games,¡± she finally said, ¡°gambling games.¡±
Before she became a cultivator, she studied under her father, who wanted her to inherit his small merchanting business. She took to it like a fish to water, but what she liked most were the talks with the clients, the push and pull of negotiating wills, of bluffs and counterbluffs. After she joined Luminous Lotus Pavilion, she missed the thrill of it, but found it again in gambling. On the rare days when she managed to keep enough of her time free, she would stalk the city streets far away from the sect compound, enter gambling parlors where none knew her, and find some hapless victims for an evening. All she had to do was flap her eyelashes a couple times, pout her lips, and they would immediately put her out of their minds as a gullible girl way out of her depth.
Then they would lose miserably, and the look on their faces at the belated realization of her skill would warm her soul on even the coldest nights. That it gave her more spending money was just a nice bonus.
¡°Games!¡± Wang Yonghao clapped his hands together in satisfaction, ¡°That¡¯s great! I also love them. We should play a game together.¡±
¡°With your luck? It¡¯s pointless.¡±
¡°There are games that don¡¯t depend on luck!¡± he said, pleading in his voice.
¡°Why are you so insistent on this?¡± she asked, keeping her tone casual.
¡°Because I like playing?¡± he ruffled his hair, ¡°It¡¯s one of the few things I can do in between running away from one crisis or another. Besides, it¡¯s good to know the people you live with, right? Come on, you can¡¯t be all work and no play. We could share a story or two?¡±
¡°Hm,¡± she paused, ¡°Very well, as long as it does not cut into our work time too much.¡±
The forest floor was uneven, with hills and gullies breaking up their line of vision, forcing their path through the forest away from a straight line. Halfway through the day, they crossed over the top of one such hill, and suddenly walked out onto the clean, sandy shores of a calm, narrow river. The sand was black to match the trees, and surprisingly warm even under the forest shade.
Qian Shanyi came all the way to the edge of the stream and dipped her fingers into the clean, cold water, feeling it out.
¡°You think we should fly over?¡± he sighed, rubbing the collar of his robes.
¡°I think we should stop here for the day,¡± she responded, ¡°We¡¯ll build our cabin for hunting Glowing Rosevines at the crest of that hill for the night. For now, I want to take a real bath. I am sure you¡¯d appreciate one too.¡±
For a bath, they would need soap, and that meant two things: ash and grease.
She sent out Wang Yonghao to chop down some more pines to replenish the wood within his Inner World, and to gather as much tree bark as he could. In the meantime, she started preparing the shore of the river. She waded into the water and hammered sharpened wood planks into the riverbed, forming a cul-de-sac against the flow of water, then deepened it with the help of her new shovel, turning it into a natural bath. Some of the water flowed in between the planks, but that was fine by her; it would simply carry the dirty water downstream.
Having finished her crude construction, she went back to the shore, picked up one of the smaller pots they took from the dead sect, and started furiously scrubbing it with the sand from the river.
Out of the four pots from the sect, two were so rusted through that they could not hold water. The other two had to be thoroughly scrubbed before she would dare to put anything in them, let alone use them to cook. The sand was a bit too fine for what she was doing, and she had to strengthen the spiritual energy shield surrounding her hand to keep it from being cut by the rusty flakes of metal, but inexorably the pot was getting cleaner.
When Wang Yonghao returned, they started a large fire from all the bark and pine wood. On her own, starting a fire from fresh bark would have been a pain, but he just blasted it with pure fire spiritual energy until it lit up like a torch.
While she was still busy with the pot, she gave him one of their shovels to start building their hunting cabin. He seemed more motivated to work than before: she figured that the prospect of a bath and a hammock bed worked its magic.
It took her a good half an hour of cultivating the scrubbing arts before she felt the pot could be declared ready for cooking. She added some more wood to the fire, fashioned a suspension for the pot from a couple planks and a sturdy pine branch, and called Wang Yonghao back. Together, they quickly filled the pot with cuts of bear fat and a little water to keep it from burning on the fire.
The trouble with fat within a living creature was that it was attached to muscle, with no good way to pull the two apart. What she needed for the soap was pure fat, and the way to get it was quite simple: melt the fat away from the muscle, and then solidify it back from the liquid solution after filtering out the solid pieces of meat left behind. They would only need a small bit of fat for the soap, but she figured they might as well process all of it at once.
While the fat slowly rendered, they finished up the shack on the hill, threw out the old wood from Wang Yonghao¡¯s Inner World, cleaned the rest of the cutlery in river water, and even fully scrubbed the other, much larger pot. Once the fat seemed liquid enough to her eyes, they carefully poured it into the other pot through a silk sheet, and then Wang Yonghao carried it into a water trench of the chiclotron to be frozen into pure lard until further notice.
That left the ash, which had to be rendered into lye. The fire served two purposes: heating up the fat, and turning the wood and bark into ashes. Qian Shanyi quickly washed the smaller pot, and then carefully gathered the ashes from the fire into it with some water to dissolve them. She didn¡¯t know any alchemy, and so could not hazard a guess as to why bark made for better ashes than the wood - all she could do was follow instructions in Three Obediences Four Virtues and hope for the best.
They strained the water through a sheet of Silvered Devil Moth Silk several times to separate out the solid parts of the ashes, and then waited around for an hour until most of the water boiled off. To pass the time, she decided to measure the factor of time dilation between the world fragment and the outside world, by leaving one of her clocks outside with Wang Yonghao, and then cultivating within his Inner World for two hours. Assuming her math was correct, with the entrance to the world fragment closed, time passed within it four point six times faster than on the outside.
Once the lye solution looked concentrated enough, Qian Shanyi threw a chunk of solidified lard into it, eyeballing the needed mass, and then they waited for longer still until the mixture became homogeneous. For flavor, she added in some finely chopped pine needles. After another half hour, she declared it good enough, and sent the pot into the chiclotron to make the soap harden faster. Freezing it wasn¡¯t strictly necessary, but the daylight was beginning to fade, and she did not want to bathe in the darkness.
The soap looked¡ underwhelming to say the least. It was a mass of brown and green, and she doubted it fully went through whatever alchemical process turned grease and ash water into soap, but it turned into soap bubbles just fine when she rubbed it in the water, and that was all that mattered.
She stripped, then brought a brick of igneocopper into her makeshift river bath and channeled spiritual energy into it until the water warmed up to a comfortable temperature, and laid there, letting it wash off all the sweat, grime, blood and poison slime of her last two weeks, her hair spreading freely in the gentle current flowing through the gaps in the walls of her bath. For a moment, she could almost forget that she was in the middle of untamed wilderness, and still in mortal danger.
Of course, she brought her sword with her into the bath. She wasn¡¯t an idiot.
Wang Yonghao wanted to make himself scarce, but she told him that if some telepathic crab sneaked up on her while she was bathing because he was too bloody awkward to keep watch, she would make sure a dozen would end up in his pants while he slept. She could feel awkwardness wafting off where he was sitting on the river shore, but he would get over it.
She washed off with soap, then made sure to wash her robes - the ones she was wearing right now, as well as the set that got covered in poison slime. When she was done, her mood had improved by leaps and bounds.
¡°It¡¯s your turn, oh lord of decorum,¡± she said, tossing the rest of the soap over to him as she went back to the shore, squeezing water out of her long black hair. He pointedly did not look at her. ¡°Bathe quickly, and then let¡¯s go slaughter those demonic plants. It¡¯s what cultivators do.¡±
Chapter 16: Play Your Melodies On Soul Strings
Qian Shanyi grabbed a tentacle reaching into their hunting shack and pulled it closer. Glowing Rosevine lodged itself against the far end of the window slit, and Wang Yonghao speared it until it stopped moving. She released the tentacle, and the rosevine fell into the corpse pit in front of the hunting shack.
¡°It feels a bit unfair,¡± he said.
¡°Hunting isn¡¯t supposed to be fair,¡± she raised her eyebrows at him, ¡°We are cultivators, and they are demon beasts. We can plan, and they cannot. It¡¯s not ¡®fair¡¯ no matter how you slice it.¡±
¡°Well, I mean that they can¡¯t hurt us at all, and we just keep killing them,¡± he said, ¡°it feels unsporting.¡±
¡°These flowers are too dumb to recognise a trap for what it is,¡± she responded, yanking a new rosewine by the tentacle, ¡°If they didn¡¯t want to die, they should have cultivated some brains.¡±
Glowing Rosevines tended to hunt in groups. They were not smart enough to coordinate a proper ¡°pack¡±, but by swarming their prey in numbers they could cut off paths of retreat through sheer numbers, with no direct organization. Qian Shanyi put this advantage to work against them - the two of them would sing to attract rosevines from a great distance away, and as long as even a single one heard them, the whole pack would swarm over. This was the second swarm that found them over the night, and they were sure to be busy with ropemaking for quite a while.
¡°If you want to make it more equal, the hatch is right there?¡± she said to Wang Yonghao, motioning towards the ceiling.
Wang Yonghao shook his head and kept working the spear.
When the sun rose again, they laid the rosevines out on the grass in the Inner World to dry, and went to sleep. In the morning, Wang Yonghao cut them apart into leaves (that could be brewed into tea after drying), tentacles (for the ropes) and the rest (useless, to be thrown out), while she spent a couple hours cultivating. He seemed much more willing to do the butchering when the beasts weren¡¯t made out of meat.
They made a good haul: forty six demon beasts in total, with each of them having from ten to twenty tentacles of around five meters in length. Once they braided them, they wouldn¡¯t be lacking rope for the foreseeable future.
After the rosevine leaves were drying within the chiclotron, they made breakfast. To spice it up a bit, Qian Shanyi tried her hand at brewing tea out of pine needles - thankfully, they weren¡¯t at risk of running out of those in a pine forest. It didn¡¯t taste like real tea, but at least it was more interesting than pure water.
After some discussion, they decided to follow the river downstream: chances were that if there was civilization nearby, they would find it near a river. Before they left their bath camp, they collected some sand from the shore and popped the cover on one of the fire nodes of the chiclotron, warming up the world fragments to dry out their collected vines.
The stream wasn¡¯t deep enough to swim in, and so they simply followed the river along its banks. It slowly grew in width as they followed it, smaller streams bringing more water into it. Occasionally, they saw fish splashing in the water. Wang Yonghao tried his hand at killing them with the Honk of the Solar Goose, but by the time the swordlight hit the water, it was long gone.
Halfway through the day, they saw an enormous anthill in the distance, towering as high as the trees, and had to move away from the river to circle around it. On the way, they crossed paths with two insect trails - the ¡®ants¡¯ were reflective like the trees around them, and each was the size of her arm. She didn¡¯t want to think what an entire anthill of these could do to a person. After that, they were even more careful about following the river.
By the time evening fell again and they returned into his Inner World, all of the tentacles were dry enough to be worked. They only traveled for twelve or so hours on the outside, but within the Inner World, two and a half days had passed. They ate dinner (more bear, with a side of omelet and a salad of forest flowers), she cultivated, and then they started to process the tentacles. Each of them had to be carefully split open with their fingers to avoid damaging the fibers, then pulled apart into individual fiber bundles. To make the fibers elastic, they needed to be bent as much as possible, which Qian Shanyi did by repeatedly stretching them over the sole of her foot.
They didn¡¯t quite manage to breach into the rope-making realm before they called it a night. After she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep, so she focused on her cultivation to pass the time. Her overall state was rapidly improving, as her meridians continuously adapted to Three Obediences Four Virtues, and her broken bones had slowly started to mend themselves back up. That she was starting to run low on Mo¡¯s healing tablets worried her a bit, but as long as she avoided breaking more of her bones, she should be fine.
There was a surprising disadvantage to her situation: because of the high quality of spiritual energy within the world fragment, her meridians were being cleansed at a much faster rate than she would have expected - she was already coming close to unlocking the sixth out of of her seven dantians - and her body was starting to lag behind. Soon enough she would be stuck between realms, with the meridians of a high refinement stage cultivator and the body of a middle refinement stage one. Thankfully, this was not dangerous, but it would make purchasing medicinal pills a lot harder until her body caught up.
She shook her head. This wasn¡¯t much of a ¡°disadvantage¡±, as most cultivators would pray to end up in a situation like this. Training your physical body was a lot easier, all things considered.
She stopped once her meridians started to ache, and saw that Wang Yonghao woke up some time ago. He smiled, and waved her over, presenting her with a square board of eight by eight squares cut out of a solid piece of oak, with small carved figurines on both sides of it.
¡°This is shatranj,¡± he said, motioning for her to sit down on the grass, ¡°it¡¯s not really played in this part of the empire, but it¡¯s one of my favorite games. Come on, I¡¯ll explain the rules to you.¡±
¡°When did you make this?¡± she asked, raising an eyebrow.
¡°While you were busy cultivating, obviously,¡± he said, ¡°I started yesterday, but finished this morning.¡±
A corner of her mouth twitched downwards. Her back ached every morning from sleeping on the ground, and now she might need to wait another full day because this man wasted two good morning hours.
¡°You could have at least started on making the ropes, or done something else productive,¡± she frowned, ¡°I don¡¯t know if we¡¯ll make enough for our hammocks before the evening falls.¡±
¡°Eh, it¡¯s not my first time sleeping on the ground. I can wait one more day,¡° he grinned, ¡°Besides, if you can waste time on playing around with cultivation, I can waste it on games, right?¡±
¡°Cultivation is not a game,¡± she sneered, ¡°it¡¯s the path to infinite freedom! The more I cultivate, the faster I would be done with my recuperative training and would get off your back. Is this not what you want?¡±
¡°I don¡¯t know about that. I almost never cultivate and just play games, yet my realm keeps going up by leaps and bounds,¡± he said, still wearing that insufferable grin, ¡°perhaps you just aren¡¯t very good at it?¡±
She stared at him with a blank face. The bastard was clearly baiting her, and it was working. It was made all the worse by the fact that she knew she could not properly confront him about his unintentional kidnapping - even if she ended up benefiting from it greatly - lest their fragile cooperation shatter here and now, leaving her to slowly stew in her anger.
¡°Look, we¡¯ll be cooped up in here for two full days every night, right?¡± he continued, raising a hand in a placating gesture, ¡°You might as well play a game or two. What¡¯s the harm?¡±
¡°Fine,¡± she said, coming over and sitting down on the grass, starting to plan her small revenge, ¡°You want games? We can play games.¡±
She stayed quiet while he explained the rules to her. They were surprisingly simple, when compared to mahjong she used to play, and she memorized them with practiced ease. She had a fair amount of experience winning games she had never seen before - there was more to gambling than the play itself.
She waited for him to finish before she sprung her trap.
¡°What are we betting?¡± she asked casually.
¡°Betting?¡± he blinked.
¡°Well it¡¯s boring to play without a bet,¡± she responded, casually fixing her hair, ¡°so what are we betting?¡±
¡°Can¡¯t we just play for fun?¡± he asked, still not understanding what he was getting into.
She snorted, exaggerating her expression. ¡°Come now,¡± she said, ¡°What¡¯s the fun in playing without stakes? It would be like fighting without your life on the line, and didn¡¯t you yourself say that was unsporting?¡±
¡°But we don¡¯t have any money to bet¡¡± he scratched his head.
¡°How about this,¡± she said, as if the idea only now entered her mind, ¡°if you win, I¡¯ll do all the work in the world fragment for two weeks.¡±
She saw his eyes glint with avarice, and she knew that she hooked him. She continued, keeping her tone casual. ¡°And if I win, oh, I suppose you¡¯ll be the one reinforcing the chiclotron.¡±
¡°Reinforcing what?¡±
¡°The trenches,¡± she said, motioning towards them, ¡±It¡¯s just carrying some stones to keep the fire ones from collapsing. I wouldn¡¯t worry too much about it.¡±
She picked up one of the carved figurines, rolling it over her knuckles, watching Wang Yonghao with hawkish eyes.
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¡°Is this a trap?¡± he said, drawing out his words uncertainly.
¡°How could this be a trap?¡± she asked, fluttering her eyelashes innocently,
¡°You¡¯ve never even heard of this game, and you want to gamble right away?¡±
¡°The deal is in front of you,¡± she said, ¡°Have I ever been deceitful?¡±
¡°Yes?¡±
¡°Junior, you strain my patience,¡± she frowned.
¡°You aren¡¯t going to cheat, are you?¡± he asked, ¡°If you win by cheating, it doesn¡¯t count.¡±
¡°I swear on my cultivation that I won¡¯t cheat or lie throughout this game,¡± she said, putting her right hand on her heart. She wasn¡¯t going to in the first place: with a board this small, there was no way she could make sleight of hand pass by unnoticed, especially against another cultivator.
¡°Alright then, I won¡¯t be polite and will accept your gamble,¡± he grinned, ¡°You realize you are just going to lose, right? I¡¯ve played this game for years.¡±
¡°Well, I admit the sides are not in balance here,¡± she shrugged, ¡°so I hope you will allow me to even out the odds?¡±
¡°Sure, as long as it¡¯s not too ridiculous,¡± he waved her off, putting the figurines in their starting positions.
¡°First of all,¡± she raised a finger on her right hand, ¡°I don¡¯t want a single match to be decisive. We¡¯ll play five matches, switching sides. First to three wins wins it all.¡±
He nodded easily.
¡°Secondly, we¡¯ll begin by playing five practice matches,¡± she continued, ¡°A certain familiarity with the game is crucial when playing, is it not?¡±
¡°Be it five or ten games, you still won¡¯t be at my level,¡± he snorted.
¡°That is true,¡± she nodded, ¡°To account for that, I propose we use a clock to play.¡±
She got up and brought her replacement water clock over, and quickly fashioned a new water bottle for it that would drip faster.
¡°We¡¯ll count our turns in drops of water,¡± she said, ¡°Three drops fall for every breath. Whoever fails to make a move before a fourth drop falls on their turn will lose the game.¡±
That brought him up short.
¡°Hey, wait a moment,¡± he said, ¡°this is a strategic game! You can¡¯t think through your moves that quickly!¡±
¡°Hmm, that is true,¡± she said, pretending to consider this, ¡±how about this: we¡¯ll each have ten additional drops, to be used throughout the game whenever we want?¡±
¡°Come on, that is ridiculous!¡± He exclaimed with his hands, ¡°You can¡¯t think that quickly!¡±
¡°A new player can¡¯t think at all, no matter how much time they are given,¡± she smiled, ¡°really, am I not granting you a far greater advantage appropriate to your great skill?¡±
¡°No way,¡± he shook his head, ¡°You need more time to think.¡±
¡°Fine. How many additional drops do you want?¡± she raised an eyebrow.
He paused, thinking through his answer. She waited for him patiently.
¡°At least a hundred,¡± he finally said.
¡°Come now, that too is unreasonable,¡± she shook her head, ¡°Thirty drops will be enough for you.¡±
In truth, she didn¡¯t care how many drops it was, and only picked the ridiculously low number of ten to anchor his own proposals. If he was more cunning, he would have argued against the existence of a time limit in the first place, not where it was placed.
When she played mahjong, the parlor clocks were often set to limit a player¡¯s turn to five seconds, with an extra twenty seconds for the whole game. New players were often given more time, but in truth, it mattered little: those who weren¡¯t used to making decisions in a split moment would ironically find themselves paralyzed by the fear of losing time, even when their skill should have been sufficient to play quickly.
Whether it was a hundred or three hundred drops, she was sure that Wang Yonghao would see them all drain away. Still, it always paid to push your opponent. In the end, they settled on seventy drops, with her ceding ground willingly.
Once the practice matches started, she played carefully, stalling the game to think through the principles behind the rules and give herself time to develop a good strategy. Even with the sharp time limit, Wang Yonghao¡¯s sheer skill shined through, and she lost the first four practice matches with little to show for it. She could feel the arrogance wafting off him, an anticipation of victory shining through his eyes. She kept her face calm and casual: it would simply make her trap stronger.
¡°You know, this is the last practice match,¡± he said in the middle of their next game, ¡°are you prepared for the real matches?¡±
¡°Are you?¡± she raised an eyebrow at him. She was laying on the grass, with one hand supporting her head, ¡°I hope you appreciate my courtesy of giving you time to practice.¡±
¡°What?¡± he asked, pausing with a hand on a figurine, ¡°Giving me time?¡±
¡°Of course,¡± she nodded, spinning lies with every breath, ¡°I can see that you have never played speed shatranj before.¡±
¡°What are you talking about?¡± he asked.
¡°The game we are playing?¡± she looked at him as if he asked wherever the sky was green. ¡°Speed shatranj? I didn¡¯t want to be unfair to you by making you play without getting adapted to the clock.¡±
¡°Are you bluffing me?¡± he narrowed his eyes at her, ¡°You are the novice here.¡±
¡°Make your move,¡± she rolled her eyes at him ¡°You have forty drops left.¡±
He moved his figure, and she responded in kind. Two turns passed in silence.
¡°No, really,¡± he couldn¡¯t hold his tongue back, ¡°what was that supposed to be? You even said you have never played regular shatranj before!¡±
¡°I can¡¯t recall ever saying that, no.¡±
¡°Yes you did!¡± he pointed an accusatory finger at her, ¡°Stop lying!¡±
¡°I didn¡¯t,¡± she rolled her eyes again, ¡°for a cultivator, you really are quite inattentive. That I have never played this game was merely an assumption you made, one I didn¡¯t saw fit to tamper with. If you think back on what I said, you should see it as plain as day.¡±
¡°No but¡ You¡¡± he rubbed his face with one hand, the other one hovering over the board with a figure in hand. She heard his heart start to beat faster.
¡°You are at thirty drops, in case you lost track,¡± she helpfully noted, and he made his move. She immediately moved her own piece, sending the turn back to him.
¡°You listened to me explain the rules!¡±
¡°If you wanted to hear yourself talk, why would I stop you?¡±
¡°You said a new player can¡¯t think right!¡±
¡°I was referring to you.¡±
¡°You said you weren¡¯t at my level!¡±
¡°A hawk is not at the level of a mouse, even if they fly at half their height. Twenty drops.¡±
¡°This¡ No way,¡± he shook his head, ¡°you are just trying to trick me.¡±
¡°Am I?¡± she raised an eyebrow, ¡°If you do not believe me, then why are you wasting time?¡±
¡°You lost the last four matches!¡±
¡°What of it? They are practice matches, they matter not,¡± she shook her head in mock ruefulness, ¡°and to think I tried to encourage you to play better by giving you some early wins, and stalling as best as I could. It seems giving you more time to adapt to the clock was a mistake. Truly the youth have no appreciation for the efforts expended on them.¡±
She could see the thoughts circling in his head, questioning every little thought he had, everything he saw and believed. Did he lure her into the game, or did she lure him? Who was really a better player? If he had more time, he would have figured out her ruse - saw through her moves in the past games, thought back on times where she could have easily stalled for longer if that was really her goal - but time was the one thing he didn¡¯t have.
¡±Seven drops,¡± she noted, pushing him further, and she saw him start to crack. He moved his knight without thinking, then had to move it back because it would have illegally exposed his king. Even despite this, she still couldn¡¯t manage a win, and they ended up in a draw.
¡°Well, are you prepared for the real matches?¡± She cracked her knuckles, grinning wolfishly as they set up the figures again, ¡°This was the last practice match, you know.¡±
She felt warmth in her soul at the sight of his eyes opening wide in fear.
¡°So this was a trap!¡± he said, his spiritual energy starting to flow freely out of his body as he started to lose control of his emotions.
¡°I never said it wasn¡¯t. Make your first move.¡±
¡°You¡you swore!¡± he pointed a finger at her, ¡°You swore you wouldn¡¯t lie or cheat!¡±
¡°Still haven¡¯t,¡° she raised an eyebrow at him, ¡°what of it?¡±
¡°Setting this trap is cheating!¡±
¡°It isn¡¯t,¡± she shrugged, ¡°and besides, even if it was, what of it? I swore I wouldn¡¯t lie or cheat during the game, not before it, when we discussed the terms.¡±
He just scowled at her.
¡°Admit it,¡± she grinned, ¡°you walked right into this one.¡±
His agitation made his moves sloppy, and she captured both of his rooks before he could get his game back under control, and won the first real match. He scowled at her angrily, but she heard his breathing and heartbeat slowing back down.
Well, that certainly wouldn¡¯t do.
¡°I suppose I have been somewhat dishonest with you,¡± she started slowly, ¡°when I said that if you lose, I wouldn¡¯t worry about the work too much.¡±
¡°What, are you going to try to go back on your word?¡± he replied grimly, ¡°I agreed to move some stones, that¡¯s all I¡¯ll do.¡±
¡°Oh no, that part is true, it¡¯s just a question of where those stones are,¡± she said, concentrating back on the game. She couldn¡¯t afford mistakes right now.
¡°And where is that?¡±
She shrugged, and pointed down at the ground. ¡°Somewhere down there,¡± she said, ¡°best guess, under two or three meters of soil, though I haven¡¯t checked.¡±
¡°What?¡± he scowled, ¡°You want me to mine them from bedrock?¡±
¡°Oh it would be soooo much work,¡± she dragged the words out, pushing her bluff further, ¡°Hard work, too. I bet you¡¯d need at least a week for everything. Just imagine yourself working with a pickaxe - and thank me that I thought to bring one from that sect, or else you¡¯d have been doing this with a sword.¡±
¡°Are you a demonic cultivator?¡± he spat out, his heartbeat going back up, ¡°With how evil you are, you must be.¡±
¡°Oh don¡¯t you worry, there is a point to it,¡± she said, savoring her minor revenge, ¡°Those trenches really need strengthening. I was going to do it myself, but now that you¡¯ve volunteered, why should I mar my delicate hands?¡±
With how agitated he was, it wasn¡¯t too difficult for her to score a second win in a row.
¡°Two to zero, fellow cultivator Wang,¡± she grinned, helping him reset the board, ¡°Are your hands prepared for the sturdy handle of a pickaxe?¡±
The pressure of losses compounded on top of the pressure of time, and turned into a death spiral, a whirlpool from which none could escape. Like an experienced sailor, she guided his mind directly into it. He started making mistakes, which only made him more anxious, which led to more mistakes. Halfway through the third match, he gave up and admitted defeat. She gently clapped him on the shoulder, accepting her victory.
Her teachers always wanted her to pick up an instrument. Personally, she preferred playing on the raw human soul. The sound of it was¡exquisite.
Chapter 17: Braid The Strands With Wheels Of Oak
Making rope ended up being more complicated than Qian Shanyi expected.
Three Obediences Four Virtues was of no help here: it simply said that the fibers could make decent ropes, and left it at that. Instead, she had to closely study the structure of the ropes from one of the wine crates with the secret divine art of destructive analysis.
The rope was composed out of yarns - bundles of fibers - that were bound together into strands, and those finally composed the rope. The fibers themselves overlapped within the yarns, held together by friction, and allowed the rope to be much longer than any individual fiber. Every layer of the structure was twisted, with the fibers and strands twisted leftward while yarns and the overall rope were twisted rightwards, probably to keep the rope from untangling.
Figuring that she might as well kill two demon beasts with a single flying sword, she opened up Three Obediences Four Virtues to the sewing chapter, found the description of thread control techniques, and started practicing her first proper external spiritual energy manipulation technique.
Spiritual energy manipulation techniques could be split into two categories: internal, and external. Internal techniques manipulated spiritual energy within the body of a cultivator, moving it around their meridians, strengthening their spiritual shield, or increasing the strength and durability of their limbs. Most of these techniques were unstructured, relying on the body itself to help stabilize the spiritual energy and guide it where it needed to go, and were no more deserving of being called a ¡°technique¡± than taking a single step of being called a ¡°martial art¡±. The way she had been holding her broken leg together was an example of such an unstructured technique, and every cultivator learned them simply as a matter of course.
If spiritual energy was to be used outside of the body, this support had to come from somewhere else. Talismans and artifacts could be used for this purpose, but their expense and rigid design greatly limited their use - to achieve true flexibility, a cultivator had to learn to construct the support structure on the fly out of the spiritual energy itself, casting it into shape much like a smith melted down metal to make some pots.
The simplest example of this process were the techniques to project swordlight, like that of the Honk of the Solar Goose. First, spiritual energy would be collected on the surface of the sword, and then, with the slash, this razor-sharp ¡°envelope¡± of spiritual energy would fly towards an enemy.
Thread control technique Qian Shanyi was practicing was quite a bit more complex than a basic swordlight technique. For one, it required her to shape two separate spiritual energy envelopes in parallel: one around her target thread, and one around the thread she would use to control its movements. For another, threads weren¡¯t solid objects like a sword: they were elastic and porous, making it much harder to collect spiritual energy on their surface. It certainly didn¡¯t help that she had relatively little experience manipulating spiritual energy outside of her body.
After trying and failing to get the technique to work for a full hour, she gave up. She would spend more time practicing in the future, but for now, she needed another solution.
She headed over to their large table. It was time to build a lathe.
The lathe didn¡¯t so much get built as it put itself together - all she had to do was pick the most natural solution to every individual problem.
The basic principle behind a lathe was to spin a piece of wood around an axis while cutting into it with a knife, shaping it into smooth and round parts. This presented two concrete engineering challenges: affixing a piece of wood to an axis, and making it spin.
To solve the first problem, she took a spear from the treasury, then drilled holes through a series of planks a hair narrower than the width of the spear shaft. After pushing the weapon through the holes, she hammered the planks tightly to the surface of the table, fixing the spear in place. Then, she built the same structure on the other side of the table, aligning the spearheads to face each other so they would form an axis. Any piece of wood jammed in between the spearheads would be secured, free to rotate as much as need be.
At first, her mind was filled with overcomplicated designs for how to make the wood spin, but in the end she cut it down to the bare basics. She took a long oak branch, planted it into the ground on the other side of the table, and tied one of her silk ropes to its end. In front of the lathe, she dropped a plank on the ground that would serve as a pedal, tied the other end of the rope to it, and wrapped the rope around the wood stuck between the spearheads. By pushing down on the pedal, the rope would be pulled down, making the wood spin. The branch on the other end kept the rope taut, flexed, and brought it back up when she released her foot. All she had to do now was get into a rhythm and start cutting.
She pressed her sword against the edge of the table, carefully guiding it into the wood on the lathe. It was time to cut some axles.
She curiously approached the hole where Wang Yonghao was digging down into the dirt. It was time for lunch, and she would have expected him to come out already, but he was still working, earth quietly flying out of the hole. When she said it would take a week for the stones, that was a pure bluff: after only a couple hours, he had already dug a hole as deep as his height, and at that rate she figured he¡¯d be done in only a couple days.
¡°Are you hungry?¡± she asked him, squatting near the edge of the hole, ¡°I need to know if I should cook a portion for you.¡±
¡°Yeah, and then you¡¯d poison it,¡± he said, not raising his head. She blinked.
¡°Poison it?¡± she repeated slowly, ¡°I have no reason to harm you.¡±
¡°Maybe you¡¯d do it as a joke,¡± he said.
¡°That isn¡¯t a joke,¡± she frowned, ¡±that would be a disgrace to my skill as a chef.¡±
He didn¡¯t respond and kept digging.
¡°You seem¡frustrated?¡± she asked uncertainly.
He finally put the shovel down and looked at her.
¡°You tricked me!¡± he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air, ¡°You pretended like you didn¡¯t know how to play shatranj, and then you made me lose this stupid bet!¡±
¡°You knew what you were getting into.¡±
¡°No I didn¡¯t! I thought you didn¡¯t know how to play!¡±
¡°You thought I didn¡¯t know how to play, yet you accepted the gamble?¡° she asked, blinking twice, ¡°Doesn¡¯t that mean you are mad because you were trying to trick me? You can¡¯t claim your soul is as pure as jade if you reach into another¡¯s pocket with your free hand.¡±
It was a common principle: one of the best types of marks were the people who thought they were conning you.
Confronted with his own irrationality, he scowled at her.
¡°How was I supposed to know why you wanted to gamble?¡± he asked, ¡°You old monsters have all sorts of deviances!¡±
¡°You could have tried to convince me not to do it, or at least to reduce the stakes,¡± she said, ¡°you didn¡¯t do that, did you? When you thought it was in your favor, an unfair gamble was fine; it¡¯s only when you lose that it becomes an issue.¡±
He ignored her and went back to digging. She sighed: it seems she had pushed him a bit too far. Ideally, she wanted to keep him in a constant state of bewilderment, annoyance and confusion: that way, he wouldn¡¯t notice any inconsistencies between the image of an old monster she was projecting and what she actually could do. This ruse could not be sustained long-term, but for now, even though she wasn¡¯t acutely worried for her safety, the fact remained that she was quite vulnerable while she was changing her cultivation law, recovering from her broken bones and being stuck away from civilization. Coming clean about her real power would put her in a vulnerable position she would rather avoid.
If he started to truly stew in his frustration, there was no telling how he would react. She doubted he would attack her, but it was entirely possible he would try to run away, leaving her stranded in the wilderness - from his perspective, she would be perfectly capable of fending for herself. No matter how entertaining it was, or how irrational his frustrations were, it was time to pull back a bit and mend relations.
¡°I¡¯ve never explained to you why we need those stones, did I?¡± she sighed.
¡°Does it matter?¡±
¡°I think it does,¡± she said, ¡°I assume you¡¯d be happier about this if you knew I wanted to make a bath.¡±
¡°We already had a bath yesterday.¡±
¡°Do you always travel near a river?¡± she raised her eyebrow, ¡°I want a permanent bath, much like in a bathhouse. So that one could take it whenever they want and wherever they are. Did you not mention you never know if you would have to sleep on the street? I figured you would appreciate this.¡±
That finally got him to raise his head and look at her. She smiled pleasantly.
¡°You said it was for the trenches,¡± he said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
¡°Those are related,¡± she said, getting up, ¡°come on, I¡¯ll show you.¡±
She led him over to the closest fire trench.
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¡°Look here,¡± she said, ¡±The high temperature desiccates the ground, making the trenches collapse. Right now, I put the fire and water nodes together to keep their temperatures close to normality, but this isn¡¯t a good solution - the trench walls still turn to sand, only slower. They are already nearing the point where they¡¯d need maintenance, which is just in time, because we¡¯ll be rebuilding them from scratch. Once we line them with stones, the problem of desiccation would be in the past.¡±
¡°And the baths?¡± he asked.
¡°I am getting to that,¡± she responded, ¡°with the trenches secure, we could move the fire and water nodes away from one another, and then we will have a lot of heat to work with. Be it dried meat or a warm bath, anything would be possible. We¡¯ll use the stones to line the bath as well - you don¡¯t want to swim in a mud hole in the ground, do you? I already have a design in mind.¡±
She turned back towards him. He was still scowling.
¡°You could have told me all this right from the start!¡± he accused her.
¡°And miss seeing your anguish?¡± she blinked, ¡°Never.¡±
The scowl grew wider, and she couldn¡¯t hold her laughter back.
¡°You asshole!¡± he ceded through his teeth.
¡°Oh, permit this old cultivator her eccentricities,¡± she waved him off.
¡°I thought you were different from all the other old monsters because you weren¡¯t trying to make me cultivate, but you are like all the rest!¡±, he continued.
¡°Did the others trick you at shatranj too?¡±
¡°Shatanj is not the point!¡± He stabbed his pointer finger at her, ¡°You just want to bully me for your own amusement!¡±
¡°And?¡± She asked, smugly folding her hands on her chest.
His face grew as red as a sunset. Perhaps she shouldn¡¯t have done that, but she couldn¡¯t have simply let an opening like that lie.
¡°Alright, alright, before you try to bite my throat out, I promise to cut down on the bullying,¡± she chuckled, raising her hands in an apologetic gesture, ¡°I got my fill with the shatranj game in any case. How about this: from this point on, I would not trick you for longer than an hour whenever you are personally affected?¡±
¡°Are you going to apologize?¡±
What good would that do?
¡°Sure, I apologize for my horrendous behavior,¡± she said. The color slowly started to recede from his face, and she headed towards their cooking station, ¡°I assume you must want to eat? I did promise I would cook for two months.¡±
He grumbled, but followed along. Now she would need to find something else to amuse herself with¡
After lunch, she got him to play Shatranj again. At first he resisted, slandering her good name by saying she would ¡°cheat¡± again - as if she would ever be caught cheating by him - but when she said they could play without any bets, he cautiously agreed on a couple matches.
Without the psychological pressure, the outcome of these games was never in doubt: even though she was a fast learner, Wang Yonghao¡¯s experience eclipsed hers by miles. When he won the first time, he rubbed it in her face, and she accepted it readily: the fool didn¡¯t know he was simply playing into her hands by improving his own mood. But after the second loss in a row, he started to frown, and when he put her king in checkmate for the third time, he sighed and looked straight at her.
¡°Are you losing on purpose?¡± he said.
¡°I am playing to the best of my abilities,¡± she replied honestly.
¡°Yeah, right. You play like a novice, but I know you can do better than this.¡±
¡°Perhaps I am just a novice?¡± she asked innocently.
¡°You are lying again!¡± He folded his arms on his chest. ¡°No way you are a novice. You won against me three times in a row.¡±
¡°If you don¡¯t think I am a novice, then why would I play worse deliberately?¡±
¡°I don¡¯t know.¡± He narrowed his eyes at her. ¡°to lure me into another bet?¡±
¡°Would I do that to you?¡±
¡°Yes. Definitely,¡± the brat nodded his head.
¡°Oh fine,¡± she scoffed, ¡°I am not luring you into another bet. Happy now?¡±
¡°You could just be lying again.¡±
¡°When did I ever lie to you?¡± She raised her eyebrows, ¡°I¡¯ve been nothing but a picture of perfect sincerity.¡±
¡°Are you joking?¡± he boggled at her, ¡°You lied just now! You said you are a novice!¡±
¡°I don¡¯t believe I ever said that, no.¡±
¡°Yes you did!¡±
¡°I asked you wherever you thought I was a novice. I didn¡¯t say I was one.¡±
¡°Oh that¡¯s the exact same thing,¡± he scoffed.
¡°How is it the same thing? One is a statement of fact, and the other one is an open question.¡±
¡°A question that¡¯s a lie!¡±
¡°A question is hardly a lie, it is just a question,¡± she said,
¡°Yes it is!¡±
¡°How could it be a lie? I am not making a statement, I am asking you what you think.¡±
¡°That¡doesn¡¯t matter?¡± He said, ¡°It¡¯s still a deception. If you ate the last pastry from the kitchens, and then shrugged when I asked you if you knew who ate the last pastry, that would also be a lie, even though you didn¡¯t even say anything. What matters is wherever you are trying to get the other person to believe a false thing.¡±
She frowned. That his thinking was so clean on this subject was troubling, as it would make it much harder to run rhetorical circles around him. Perhaps it was to be expected, if he had to regularly deal with old cultivators.
¡°Wait,¡± he frowned, ¡°you did this during the game too. Do you say you don¡¯t lie because you didn¡¯t say anything that was strictly speaking false?¡±
¡°Well yes, quite obviously.¡± She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. ¡°What else could I mean?¡±
¡°That¡¯s so wrong,¡± he said, ¡°so you just lie and pretend that you didn¡¯t?¡±
¡°I very rarely lie,¡± she said, ¡°and I don¡¯t think I have ever lied to you.¡±
¡°Yes you did! You¡¯ve been deceptive every time you opened your mouth!¡±
¡°Semantics,¡± she rolled her eyes, ¡°Anything can be deceptive to someone. Perhaps if I say that I have stabbed a bear to death, you would assume I have a stinger like a bee, for you have never seen a steel weapon in your life. Would you claim I was lying then?¡±
¡°That¡¯s absurd,¡± he said, ¡°Obviously everyone assumes some common knowledge all the time. You don¡¯t have trouble recognising deception, you are just playing with words.¡±
¡°Maybe so.¡±
¡°Then why do you want to lie?¡±
¡°I don¡¯t, unless I need to.¡±
¡°Oh fine,¡± he scowled, ¡°why do you want to be deceptive?¡±
¡°Because it amuses me?¡±
¡°But if it¡¯s just about you,¡± he said, ¡°and I end up believing false things anyways, why not outright lie? It¡¯s not like I would be able to tell.¡±
That brought her up short, and she took a while to answer.
¡°It¡¯s something of a game, I suppose,¡± she said, ¡°if the other person pays attention and is clever enough, they could figure out what I truly said, and respond in kind. Otherwise, they will be tricked.¡±
¡°Games need two players,¡± he said, ¡°a game with one person is not a game at all, it is bullying.¡±
She raised an eyebrow at him, and couldn¡¯t help but laugh. He narrowed his eyes at her.
¡°Are you saying I am bullying you by winning and losing at shatranj?¡± she asked, ¡°At least when you complained of me tricking you it made sense. Stop fooling around and set up the new game, junior.¡±
After shatranj ran to a natural end, she went back to engineering.
She finished cutting an axle for her rope-making machine, and then made a wide disk - a wheel - to fit on top of it. Making the axle hole wide enough for it to spin freely but not so wide as to wobble took careful cutting in several steps, but her lathe served its job admirably.
She attached the axle to a small wood table, then quickly made a spool and attached it to the wheel on top of a second axle. Then, she took a bundle of fibers, fixed it to the spool by jamming it into a cut on the side, and pulled on the soon-to-be yarn to keep it taut.
The biggest problem she had when spinning the rope by hand was that it took far too much time. With the wheel, she could quickly spin it with a single foot and easily control the twist of the fibers by counting the number of wheel turns. Once a yarn was properly twisted together, she took out a peg fixing the spool in place, and wound a bit of yarn onto it. In her hands, she held the other end of the yarn, carefully adding more fibers into it to keep increasing its length. It took her some experimentation to settle on a number of twists that would keep the yarn from kinking, but once she did, it was all about keeping the number of wheel spins per meter of thread consistent.
Once she had some thirty meters of yarn wound onto the spool, she took the spool off, cut the yarn into three parts, and started winding it into a strand using the same process. The strand got cut into three parts as well, and in the end, she ended up with three meters of solid rope, about as thick as her finger. She went over to Wang Yonghao, who was strengthening the walls of his hole with wooden planks.
¡°Come on up,¡± she said, ¡°I need you to fly up and hold this rope.¡±
She gave him one end of the rope, held the other, and did her best to tear it by yanking on it with her entire weight. The rope held fast, and she considered the test a success.
A much better test would have been to load the rope up until it broke, but she didn¡¯t want to waste the time to build a testing rig. In the end, as long as these ropes could hold a person, it was enough.
The rest of her day was spent spinning, spinning and spinning hundreds of meters of rope. After a while, the movement of the wheel and the weaving of fibers into the yarn became so automatic that she started practicing thread control techniques at the same time just to keep her brain occupied.
She worked late, many hours after the clock told her it was bedtime, silently cursing Yonghao for distracting her with shatranj and herself for being baited, and for leaving him to dig when he could have been making more rope. She was far too arrogant, thinking she could finish the work alone and go to sleep on time, and by the time she realized her time estimates were off it was already too late to build a second spinning wheel to get him to help, as it wouldn¡¯t save that much time.
Her eyes were drooping by the end, but she had pushed through and managed to braid two separate long ropes and weave them into a pair of hammocks. She and Wang Yonghao hung them up in between a pair of tall wooden tripods, and she finally climbed into what she could call an actual bed.
She sighed in content, feeling her tense back properly relax in the soft embrace of a hammock.
¡°Well, fellow cultivator Wang, what do you prefer?¡± she said, feeling her eyelids slowly close beneath the robe covering her eyes, ¡°Deception that grants you a bed, or sleeping on cold hard ground?¡±
¡°Lying didn¡¯t make this bed.¡±
¡°Is that so?¡± she sighed, ¡°I suppose we¡¯ll never know.¡±
For the first time in weeks, she drifted off into calm, quiet sleep, unbroken by the aches in her back.
Chapter 18: Circulate Heat Through Granite Meridians
¡°Rise and shine,¡± the evil woman spoke right into his ear, ¡°It¡¯s the day of the shovel.¡±
Wang Yonghao grunted in response. His muscles ached after an entire day spent digging, and the only thing he wanted to do was stay in his nice and comfortable hammock.
¡°I¡¯ve cultivated and made breakfast already,¡± she said, ¡°Now I am bored. Also, it¡¯s time for you to get up, we have more digging to do.¡±
¡°I don¡¯t want to,¡± he groaned, ¡°Can¡¯t you dig alone?¡±
Suddenly, he felt himself move, and he flailed his arms around as he was unceremoniously tipped out of the hammock, landing on his face in the grass. He pulled the robe covering his eyes off his head, and stared at her blearily.
¡°Wasn¡¯t a request,¡± she grinned at him, offering him a hand to get up, ¡°Come on, eat your breakfast while it¡¯s still warm.¡±
¡°How can you be so evil?¡± he asked, getting up without her help and rubbing his shoulders, ¡°Did you find a secret manual of the dao of malevolence?¡±
¡°There is no need to butter me up with compliments. Now chop chop, we are behind schedule.¡±
While Wang Yonghao ate his breakfast, she decided to turn the acorns they gathered back during their first day in the forest into flour. The first step was to break their shells with the back of an axe. The soft acorn centers would then be steeped in cold water for hours to leach the bitter tannins out before they could be eaten - she would keep them in their large pot for the rest of the day, dry them again while they slept, and hopefully by tomorrow, they could make some dumplings.
After they finished, Wang Yonghao headed back over to his hole, and she heard him exclaim in surprise. As she came over to look, she saw that the bottom of the hole, almost two meters below the ground level, was filled with water.
¡°There¡¯s water!¡± he said, turning towards her. She supposed it was good he didn¡¯t go blind overnight.
¡°An astute observation, junior,¡± she nodded, ¡°you¡¯d need to deal with it to dig deeper, or you¡¯d risk the walls of the pit collapsing on you.¡±
¡°How do I do that?¡±
¡°Am I supposed to tell you this?¡± She raised her eyebrows, ¡°Come now, you¡¯ve got to come up with an idea or two of your own. I can¡¯t think for both of us.¡±
He squinted at her, and she laid down on the ground to wait for him to come up with something, putting one of her hands behind her head.
¡°You said you¡¯d stop bullying me.¡±
¡°Fine, fine,¡± she sighed, ¡°I will help you brainstorm, how about that?¡±
He nodded, and started pacing in thought.
¡°We¡¯ve got a pot, right?¡± he finally said, ¡°I could use it as a bucket and drain the water out of the hole.¡±
¡°You think that will work?¡±
¡°Why wouldn¡¯t it work? It¡¯s a hole with water.¡±
¡°Where do you think this water came from?¡± she asked rhetorically.
¡°From¡the ground?¡± he said, slowly.
¡°And where will you pour the water from the pot?¡±
He rubbed his face ruefully in response to that, putting the picture together.
¡°Okay, I see what you mean,¡± he said, ¡°But I could throw it out of the world fragment, right?¡±
¡°You could,¡± she said, ¡°but will that help that much? You had kept Blue Tear Stones within your world fragment for ages. Who knows how much water is there deep in the ground - as you keep digging, more and more of it will seep out.¡±
¡°So¡What do I do then?¡±
¡°Indeed, what do you do?¡± She asked, looking up into the sky, ¡°It is quite a conundrum. The water leaks, yet you can¡¯t spend the time waiting for it all to drain.¡±
He frowned, and continued pacing. She took out her sword and started playing around by tossing it up into the air and catching it by the hilt.
¡°If only there was some kind of technique to prevent the water from flowing,¡± she continued rhetorically, ¡°seal it up somehow, away from the hole. Sadly we don¡¯t have clay or cement to patch up the walls themselves, but surely there must be other options? Perhaps something that could turn it into some kind of ¡ solid form, so that it could not flow anymore. But could something like that really be possible?¡±
¡°I could freeze the water within the walls into ice with one of the treasures!¡± Wang Yonghao snapped his fingers, grinning widely, ¡°if the walls were frozen, then it wouldn¡¯t seep out.¡±
¡°An ingenious idea, junior.¡±
His grin faded as he turned back to her with a scowl.
¡°You are making fun of me again!¡±
¡°Me? Making fun?¡± she pressed a hand of hers to her chest, shaping her face into a mask of perfect sincerity, ¡°You really think this here cultivator would do that? I am just giving you face.¡±
¡°You are!¡± He pointed at her with his finger, ¡°Why couldn¡¯t you just tell me this right away?¡±
¡°Now you are just being paranoid,¡± she shook her head, getting back up, ¡°But if I did do this, then don¡¯t you think it¡¯s best for you to come up with it on your own? This way, you¡¯d better remember the principle in the future. Come on, while we wait for the earth to freeze, we can start modifying the trenches.¡±
Her new design would have all of the trenches going either up or down an incline, and that meant moving a lot of earth around, either digging deep into the ground or building ramparts that could contain the newly heightened chiclotron nodes. They worked carefully, disassembling individual nodes and moving them into their new positions one by one. When they broke for lunch, he asked her what the purpose of it all was.
¡°It¡¯s because of the draft,¡± she said, ¡°like in a chimney?¡±
¡°Chimney?¡± he asked, ¡°Are you going to burn things?¡±
¡°No, I meant the air,¡± she said, ¡°hot air rises, while cold air falls down, and the trenches follow this principle.¡±
¡°It does?¡± he asked, looking surprised.
¡°You don¡¯t know this?¡± she raised an eyebrow, ¡°It¡¯s because of the air pressure, but even most peasants would be familiar with a chimney. Have your parents never showed you one?¡±
¡°I am an orphan,¡° Wang Yonghao scratched his head, ¡°I guess I¡¯ve never looked at chimneys much.¡±
¡°I see,¡± she nodded, ¡°Well, it¡¯s not too complicated. Let me explain it quickly.¡±
She went over to their wood stores and brought over a flat plank she used to plan the new trench network while Wang Yonghao was still asleep, turning it over to its clean side, and started drawing on it with her finger while circulating Crushing Glance of the Netherworld Eyes.
When she was younger, her father wanted her to inherit their small merchanting business, and taught her as much as he could. As part of that, he paid for tutors to prepare her for the imperial examinations - becoming a minor court official could open many doors in her life.
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Once she happened to unblock her spiritual root and stepped on the path of cultivation, all of that fell by the wayside, but she still remembered her education in natural philosophy quite clearly. Once she joined the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, it surprised her that most other inner disciples had not heard of the study of the heats and pressures, given their obvious relevance to many cultivation techniques.
She once asked Elder Striding Phoenix why this topic was not taught within the sect itself, and he told her that it was simply not relevant until cultivators actually started practicing techniques that could produce wind or fire, and disciples should focus on training their body and cleansing their meridians. To this day, she still thought that was a mistake, but there wasn¡¯t much she could do about it at the time.
Wang Yonghao was a patient listener, especially when she explained that there wasn¡¯t any direct relation between this knowledge and cultivation. Once she finished with the basic principles, she turned over the plank and showed him her plan for the trenches.
¡°Here is the idea,¡± she said, pointing towards various parts of the heightmap she sketched out, ¡°I want as much air draft as possible - this means trenches with hot air should be angled upwards, while trenches with cold air should be angled downwards. There will be two primary air flows through the chiclotron: one producing hot air we will use for drying, and one producing cold air to balance out the temperature of the world fragment.¡±
¡°Wow,¡± Wang Yonghao said, frowning at her diagrams, ¡°this looks pretty complicated. Will we really need to dig up all this?¡±
¡°Yes.¡±
¡°Couldn¡¯t we just use the fire treasures to dry things?¡± he sighed, ¡°That looks like way too much digging to me.¡±
¡°Proper drying requires strong airflow, not just heat,¡± she shook her head, ¡°and besides, many ingredients respond badly to being surrounded by fire-type spiritual energy, or aligned spiritual energy in general. It¡¯s better to set this up properly for the future.¡±
In the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, they used wood-fed fires to dry ingredients, but the principle remained - she supposed that only a rare sect would have enough treasures to waste them simply to produce hot air.
¡°Wouldn¡¯t spiritual energy spill out anyways?¡± he scratched his head, ¡°Through the air holes?¡±
¡°Not if we keep the air trenches - or the chimney, in case of the outgoing hot air - long enough, and shorten the nearby spiritual energy trenches,¡± she said, shaking her head, ¡°spiritual energy prefers shorter paths, it would not spill out of the chiclotron just because a path to the outside exists in principle. Look at where the air holes would be - they are very far away from each other.¡±
She pointed to the crude top down diagram she had drawn on the side.
¡°Besides drying,¡± she continued her explanation, ¡°This design will have other uses. I left one of the fire nodes out of the air cycles - we will put our bath right on top of that strong heat source. Your inner world is quite humid - you have already seen how much water lies underground - and by drawing the air through the ice cold water trenches, this moisture will start to condense and turn to ice, which we can later throw out to reduce the total amount of water in circulation. Taken together, this should allow us to control spiritual energy, heat, and humidity independently of each other.¡±
¡°You really thought of everything, huh,¡± he frowned, scratching his head, ¡°How do you come up with these things?¡±
¡°It¡¯s a straightforward application of base principles,¡± she said, flicking her hair behind her, ¡°Nothing more.¡±
¡°Well, I don¡¯t know,¡± he said, ¡°I wouldn¡¯t have thought of all this. It¡¯s very clever.¡±
¡°Thank you,¡± she blinked, smiling slightly. The compliment shouldn¡¯t have mattered - she knew her own skills perfectly well - but hearing them acknowledged did feel nice.
¡°With how clever you are, why do you feel the need to bully people?¡± he sighed.
¡°Come on, enough chatter,¡± she said, rolling her eyes and getting up, ¡°It¡¯s time to get to work.¡±
They worked on modifying the nodes in stages, starting with the metal ones and following the creative cycle of feng shui from there. By the time they went to sleep again, they only just started on the water ones, but Qian Shanyi felt they were making good progress. She left the ground and leached acorn meal inside of a metal trench to dry over the course of the day, and closed them up.
Even though based on her time measurements, the forest got fifteen hours of daylight at this time of year, they could only manage eleven hours of travel time. She had played around with scheduling, but didn¡¯t manage to squeeze more time out: needing to stop to cook and eat food, as well as cultivate in the morning and evening, ate into the daylight time too much. Ultimately, she decided that it was fine: they had plenty of food, and sacrificing some travel time to speed up her synchronization with Three Obediences Four Virtues was a worthwhile trade.
They followed the river, seeing it slowly grow wider from many smaller streams flowing into it, only stopping for a short time when Wang Yonghao noticed a good clay deposit. She told him to be on the lookout for it - they would need clay to properly seal the gaps between the stones lining the chiclotron, as well as to prevent their bath from leaking. As they walked alongside the river¡¯s shore, cutting through or flying over occasional patches of underbrush, she got him to talk about his past adventures, both to fish for information and to build rapport.
Even though at times she wanted to tear her hair out, he had a lot of good stories to tell.
The stream they were following merged into a much larger river, easily thirty meters wide, and with a quick current. Here and there, the water turned white as it flowed over a sharp rock sticking out of the river bottom, burbling among the quietude of the surrounding forest. As they walked out on the shore, Wang Yonghao stopped with a considering look on his face.
¡°Do you think we could make a boat?¡± he asked her, ¡°I¡¯m tired of walking.¡±
¡°Making a boat would take far too long,¡± she frowned, coming closer, ¡°but we could cut down a pair of trees to stand on. We couldn¡¯t forage while on the river though.¡±
¡°We already have enough plants for a couple days, right?¡± he said, ¡°And this way, we could travel faster.¡±
She nodded, conceding his point. Besides, she could practice her thread techniques while floating downstream. Working together, they quickly dropped two large pine trees into the water, and chopped off all the branches.
An ordinary person might not have dared to use a bare tree trunk to float on: without a solid boat, and not knowing wherever river rapids might be around the next river bend, it would be far too dangerous to enter the water, but they were cultivators. Balancing on top of a tree trunk was child¡¯s play for them, and even if they were to sink, swimming back to shore would be only a couple arm strokes away, rapid waters or not.
Well. She would swim. Wang Yonghao only needed to step on air to be safe.
They chatted as they floated downstream, and she practiced thread techniques, while Wang Yonghao kept a careful watch on her surroundings. He was the first to notice the forest vanish into the open horizon in the distance on the left side of the river, and called out to her.
¡°Could you fly up?¡± She said, ¡°I can¡¯t see if that¡¯s a waterfall we are heading towards.¡±
He did so, and then had to jog through the air to catch back up with their tree trunks.
¡°I don¡¯t think it¡¯s a waterfall.¡± he said, finally landing back on his tree and regaining his balance, ¡°I think that¡¯s just the edge of the world.¡±
She frowned at that.
¡°Do you think it is dangerous?¡± he said, glancing at her expression.
¡°I can¡¯t see why it would be,¡± she responded, ¡°at the end of the day, it¡¯s just a wall. But I have no experience steering a ship, let alone one near the edge of the world. I might be missing something obvious.¡±
She shook her head to clear it.
¡°It¡¯s probably just paranoia,¡± she sighed, ¡°If it comes down to it, you can fly, and we can always retreat back to your world fragment. Even if there is some danger, we should be reasonably safe.¡±
It felt strange to float down the river alongside the edge of the world, seeing sunlight come from underneath the waters where the invisible vertical wall curved below the stream, clean of silt and detritus.
Before she ended up in the world fragment, she had never seen an edge from this close - there were none within a hundred miles of the Golden Rabbit Bay, in fact. This was fairly typical for most of the world.
Much like the boundaries of a world fragment, the edges of the entire world were invisible and impossible to pass through for anyone except legendary cultivators in the void shattering stage. Heavenly bodies - suns, moons, stars and many others - traveled alongside the edge, shedding light and spiritual energy, or blocking other astronomical bodies from doing so. This was one of the distinguishing features of the world fragments, in fact - they lacked the sun or the moons. In places where the world edge was concave, it could be seen through - though light faded into the light blue fog of the sky fairly quickly, and the edge tended to warp light passing through it.
As the day came to a close, they saw one of the solar circles pass them by, traveling alongside the world¡¯s edge, spewing fire and yang spiritual energy into the world. Its light was almost blinding from up close, forcing them to turn away and shield their eyes, though it got much better once it dipped into the water and thick clouds of steam obscured their vision. Qian Shanyi briefly considered wherever the additional sunlight from below the waters could let them travel for longer while staying on the river, but decided against it. Being attacked by the Rosevines while out in the open would be disastrous.
Once the evening fell, she carefully hooked one of her long silk ropes under their tree trunks, and had Wang Yonghao drag them over to the shore by walking on air - the idea of making a new set for each day of travel rankled her.
Wang Yonghao opened his Inner World, and she climbed on his back to descend into it. Tomorrow, they would be back to digging trenches.
Chapter 19: Peer Into The Flames Through A Ball Of Clay
Qian Shanyi poked her finger at the clay in between the stone slabs. She made sure to seal the gaps in the new walls of the chiclotron before going to bed, and disappointingly, the clay had cracked as it dried overnight. Furthermore, a short test showed that even though the material was bone dry, it would quickly begin to dissolve in water.
She sighed. Her hopes of waterproofing the trenches this way were clearly not to be. Neither she nor Wang Yonghao had any experience with pottery, but she believed that furnaces were involved at some point: perhaps that was the key element she was missing.
She could easily fire the clay using a variety of fire-type spiritual treasures, but the problem was that she didn¡¯t know the specifics of the process: wherever the firing should happen before or after regular drying and at what temperature, if some other elements had to be mixed in, and so on. This called for experimentation.
She went over to where they had stored the river clay. The small pile had dried unevenly: outsides were cracked and dry, while the insides were still quite wet, so she had a lot of material in different degrees of wetness to work with. She rolled the clay into small balls, then put them aside.
To test the firing temperatures, she took apart the fire nodes of the chiclotron, dug several holes in the ground, and put different amounts of fire treasures inside. After adding the clay balls, she had a solid set of tests: all combinations of dry and wet clay with a variety of firing temperatures.
Seeing how she was already tinkering with the fire nodes, she decided to move the fire trench modifications up in their schedule, and called Wang Yonghao over. The trenches were covered in a thick layer of black dust, and as they were dragging the trench covers away, it puffed up into the air in clouds of darkness. Wang Yonghao frowned, and reached inside of the trenches, touching the dust on one of the walls.
¡°What¡¯s this?¡± he showed her his fingers, black and glistening where they got covered in the black powder, ¡°Soot? I didn¡¯t think we were burning anything here.¡±
¡°It¡¯s solidified fire,¡± she said, ¡°otherwise known as coal dust or, yes, soot. It appears whenever fire spiritual energy reaches a critical concentration point. Careful, don¡¯t breathe on it - it¡¯s very light, I don¡¯t want to spread it around, or we¡¯d never be rid of it.¡±
¡°If it¡¯s so light, wouldn¡¯t it cause problems for your air circulation plans?¡± he raised an eyebrow at her, ¡°Don¡¯t want coal dust all over our bear jerky.¡±
¡°No,¡± she shook her head, ¡°it usually burns up as soon as it appears - that¡¯s the source of the fires you often see around fire treasures. The only reason there is so much of it here is that I¡¯ve artificially lowered the temperature of the fire node by placing the water node alongside it, preventing it from igniting. We¡¯d need to collapse these trenches very carefully to cover it up without spreading it more, but the new design wouldn¡¯t have this problem.¡±
¡°If it¡¯s flammable, can¡¯t I just set it on fire?¡± He smiled smugly at her, ¡°I¡¯m surprised you didn¡¯t think of this.¡±
For a moment, she considered just letting him, but her sense won out in the end. A prank like that would not be worth further soiling their relations, no matter how amusing it would be.
¡°Stop,¡± she called after him, seeing that he moved closer to the tench while she was deliberating. He turned back to her with a questioning expression.
¡°It¡¯s called solidified fire,¡± she said, giving him a blunt stare, ¡°what did you think it turns into when ignited? If you do that from up close, you won¡¯t have a face left.¡±
¡°But I really do not want to dig,¡± he sighed, and started rising into the air. As soon as she saw him move, she headed towards a metal trench on the opposite side of the world fragment and hopped inside. He looked at her curiously.
¡°What are you doing out there?¡±
¡°I don¡¯t have your legendary luck to save my body from horrific, full-body burns,¡± she responded, ready to duck her head below the lip of the trench, ¡°So I am making sure I am as safe as possible before you do this very dangerous experiment.¡±
¡°...you think this is a bad idea?¡±
¡°I think it¡¯s a fine idea,¡± she snorted, ¡°I don¡¯t like unnecessary labor any more than you do. But it is also dangerous. Your choice on how to proceed.¡±
He didn¡¯t respond, but retreated a couple steps more, and then sent a series of sword slashes at different parts of the fire trench.
As he finished his last sword move, his foot happened to slip, ending the fire dragonfly technique, and sending him down to the ground with a yelp.
BOOM!
Coal dust, disturbed by the movement of the sword slashes, mixed with the air and immediately exploded into a fiery cloud. Wang Yonghao fell just a hair faster than the cloud expanded, managing to only skirt the edge of it. His surprised yelp turned into a panicked yell as he rolled on the ground, trying to put out the small fires sticking to his clothes.
¡°Fascinating,¡± Qing Shanyi said, hopping out of the trench, and heading over to help him, ¡°I¡¯ve never seen such extreme luck from up close. It¡¯s quite entertaining to watch.¡±
He glared at her.
¡°Hey, I told you this might happen,¡± she said, ¡°At the very least, if what you said about your adventures was true, you were in no real danger. And if you exaggerated, like cultivators tend to do¡Well, let¡¯s not think about that.¡±
She helped him up, and motioned to the other four trenches.
¡°Let¡¯s do this a bit more carefully next time, shall we?¡±
She kept the clay balls in their furnaces for a good six hours, and in the end, all of them had cracked.
Several dozen small clay balls littered the ground around her. The first thing she did was carefully inspect all of her samples, and chip off pieces of fired clay into water to test wherever they would dissolve. The high temperatures clearly did something different to the clay as all but the two of her hottest furnaces ended up completely useless, the clay from them quickly softening in water, but those same temperatures also led to way more cracks.
Clay on the surface of the balls from the wet and dry clay seemed equally water-proof, but the drier ones had fewer cracks: this meant that drying the clay before firing was a step in the right direction, but not a sufficient one. She needed something else.
She was laying down on the ground, throwing one of the cracked balls up in the air and catching it back in her hand, thinking about the problem. What was a crack, really?
At the end of the day, a crack was a gap, a hole in the smooth clay surface. But why would such a sharp geometric discontinuity appear?
The clay balls started out soft and pliable, and then, during the firing process, hardened into solid spheres. A crack on the surface of the ball could, logically, appear either while the ball was still soft, or once its surface hardened into a shell. The former seemed unlikely to her, as the soft clay should deform rather than cracking: this meant that first the surface hardened, and then a crack appeared.
Qian Shanyi caught the ball and squeezed it hard in her hand, watching it carefully. The ball stood strong, and she had to push spiritual energy into her fingers before it cracked in half, sending a small piece of clay bouncing off her forehead. She threw the remains of the ball aside, and picked up a different ball to play with.
Once the surface hardened, a crack could only appear if some significant force pulled it¡¯s sides apart. This moved the central question to where this force would come from.
She briefly considered the temperature within the furnaces: many things would deform and crack when heated, after all - before dismissing the idea. The balls weren¡¯t all that large: they must have heated up to a stable temperature mere minutes into the process, far before any cracks appeared. The force must have come from somewhere else.
As she was deliberating this question, Wang Yonghao came over and leaned over her head, meeting her eyes.
¡°What?¡± she asked, casually tossing her ball to him. He caught it, and she picked up a different one.
¡°You said you¡¯d go and quickly check out the clay, but now you are just napping,¡± he accused her completely innocent self, ¡°I am not going to dig alone.¡±
¡°I am not napping, I am thinking,¡± she said, tossing her ball from one hand to another.
¡°About what?¡±
¡°About why the clay cracks,¡± she said, ¡°don¡¯t distract me.¡±
¡°What¡¯s there to think about?¡± he blinked, ¡°it¡¯s hot, so it cracks.¡±
She sighed, and started to explain her reasoning.
The key, she felt, was the water. She used the ingredient-testing technique from Three Obediences Four Virtues on the clay, and even though some of the unfired clay seemed completely dry to her eyes, there was still a fair amount of water inside of it. Fried clay, on the other hand, contained almost none. On top of that, wetter clay led to more cracks. This meant water must have been the real culprit, but the question was why.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
¡°So here is what I am thinking,¡± she said. ¡°Have you seen fried Jiaozi dumplings? There was this restaurant where the chef would fry them right in front of you, and the skin of the dumpling would shrink a little when they were dropped in oil. Once, I¡¯ve even seen it burst apart when a clumsy apprentice put in too much filling - like a large man putting on robes five sizes too small. So I think the same thing happens with clay.¡±
Wang Yonghao sat down on the grass next to her, and she turned the ball in her hand over so that he could see the crack.
¡°Imagine clay as a stew,¡± she said, ¡°there is water, and then there is everything that isn¡¯t water. As the clay is fired, water evaporates, leaving everything else behind. But water takes up volume, right? Just like a stew reduces in size as you boil it, clay must also shrink. As water leaves the outer shell of a clay ball, it hardens and shrinks at the same time. But water can¡¯t leave the insides of the ball as easily - just like within a juicy dumpling, it is trapped. So the inner ball shrinks slower than the outer shell, and that makes the outer shell crack. This is why wetter clay cracks more - the difference is more pronounced. And this is why clay cracks in between the stone plates of the chiclotron - the plates do not move, and the clay shrinks too much to fill the gap.¡±
¡°Wow,¡± he said, ¡°You figured all of this out from a couple clay balls?¡±
¡°I didn¡¯t figure out shit,¡± she snorted, ¡°this is merely a theory, a just-so story. Exactly like your hypothesis about my skill at shatranj, it¡¯s worthless unless I can prove it. There are a dozen assumptions I am making here that are, practically speaking, based on nothing.¡±
She lifted her legs up, and leaped up onto her feet in one smooth movement.
¡°If I am right - and only if¡±, she said, ¡° - then the way to solve our cracking problem is to mix clay with something that wouldn¡¯t shrink when the water evaporates, such as the sand we have gathered from that beach. The more we mix in, the less the overall mixture would shrink, but the higher the chance it wouldn¡¯t behave like clay in the first place¡ We¡¯d need to do more experiments to figure out a good ratio.¡±
She headed over to a small pile of sand they brought into their world fragment.
¡°Come on,¡± she said, ¡°Let¡¯s take a break from digging and mix some clay.¡±
By the time their two-day stay in the world fragment came to an end, they had finished redesigning the chiclotron, lined the trenches with stone slabs, and sealed the gaps with clay. Her idea of mixing the sand in with the clay had worked perfectly, and she decided to fry it while they traveled. To do this, she had filled the nodes on one half of the chiclotron with fire and metal heavenly materials and earthly treasures, making sure that every trench there was filled with dense fire-type spiritual energy, heating them up to the proper temperature. The feng shui of the world fragment would suffer, but the other half of the chiclotron should compensate for it somewhat, and without them in it, it should be fine.
The river widened more and more as they traveled downstream, thinner streams flowing into it from the depths of the forest. They were still yet to see any sign of civilization, and this sent pangs of worry down her neck. What if the teleportation formation sent them so far away, that they would reach an ocean and still there would be nothing?
As they entered the world fragment to cook a midday meal, she felt the scorching air temperature inside: it seemed that the large amount of fire-type spiritual energy overpowered what little cooling came from the water nodes on the other half of the chiclotron. She popped the hatches on the water nodes to make them work harder, but neither of them felt like suffering in the heat, and they ended up cooking on the shore of the river. Wang Yonghao finally managed to slice a fish in half with a sword technique from a dozen meters away while they floated downsteam, and grilled fish made for a good break in their regular diet of bear, bear and more bear.
As the evening approached, they arrived at a place where the edge of the world formed a wide tunnel, leading away from the forest. The river flowed directly into it, but they couldn¡¯t see where it ended, and without any shores to rest on, decided to put off exploration of the dimensional tunnel until the next day. Instead, they went back into the world fragment, and spent a good hour checking how well the clay firing had worked. The air in the world fragment felt stuffy, but she supposed that was to be expected due to the large number of open fires on display.
Some cracks were still there, but rare enough that Qian Shanyi felt good about the ability of the chiclotron to resist leaks, and so they spent another hour moving the heavenly materials and earthly treasures around to fry the other half of the chiclotron, sealing what little cracks were present, and working on constructing a drying chamber that would be put on top of the hot air outflow. Wang Yonghao went to sleep early, complaining of being tired and having a headache, while she decided to cultivate.
The hard work of the past days took its toll on her too. She stopped early to drink some water, and wiped the sweat off her forehead. Her skin was flushed red, and the blood was thumping in her head, making it hard to think.
She rubbed her forehead. This wasn¡¯t like her. She would finish her cultivation, and then go to sleep. She just¡ Needed a break. Yeah, that¡¯s what it was.
She sat down on the ground near her water clock, sipping water from a reused wine bottle. Why was she so tired?
She closed her eyes for just a moment. When she opened them, she was lying on her face on the ground, her head throbbing from a monumental headache. She rose up, slowly, and looked around in confusion, breathing heavily. Her eyes fell on the water clock, and her eyebrows closed together. Surely she couldn¡¯t have been out for a whole hour?
Something was wrong here, but the damnable headache was making it hard to think. This was¡ What did this feel like?
She looked down on herself. Her skin was really red. Why would it still be red if she was fast asleep for so long?
Her heartbeat sped up. She wasn¡¯t just tired, something was wrong with her.
She spun around, and saw Wang Yonghao still sleeping in his hammock. His skin looked quite red too, and his breathing was heavy.
Were they both poisoned?
Her mind slithered over the possibilities, far too sluggish to work properly. What did they have in common? Water? No, their water came from a Blue Tear Stone, it should have been safe. Food? They ate bear meat for a good week now - she doubted it was the problem. Even if it contained the sort of poison that slowly accumulated in their bodies, their weights, metabolisms and how much they ate were all different, so the chances of both of them being affected at once were quite low. Perhaps the fish they ate? No, she checked with Three Obediences Four Virtues, this species should have been completely safe¡
She brought a hand to her throat, grimacing at her own heavy breathing, and an idea struck her.
The air. It had to be the air. Something¡from the fried clay, perhaps?
She shook her head. It didn¡¯t matter, the first priority was to get the hell out of here.
She ran over to Wang Yonghao and shook him, trying to wake him up. He groaned, but remained asleep. Not standing on ceremony, she shook him out of his hammock, and slapped him across the face.
¡°Yonghao!¡± she shouted in his sleeping face, ¡°Wake up! We are in danger!¡±
He simply groaned again.
She ground her teeth. Could she rely on his luck to survive?
No. Absolutely not. Even if his luck would save him - which wasn¡¯t a guarantee by any means, no matter how many times he slipped in front of an explosion - there was absolutely no reason to expect it to save her. Perhaps one of the weapons in the treasury could create a bubble of safe air, or one of the many unidentified pills could deal with poisons, but by the time Wang Yonghao would sleepwalk over to one of them, she might be long dead.
She quickly ran over to one of the fire nodes, wrapped her arm in a spare robe, grabbed an igneocopper brick, and dropped it on Wang Yonghao¡¯s hand. The brick, heated red hot after lying in the node for several days, sizzled on his skin until his hand jerked away. His eyes just barely fluttered open, and he sat up, still clearly out of it.
¡°Entrance to the world fragment,¡± she slapped him in the face again, speaking as clearly as she could, ¡°Open it. Now.¡±
He didn¡¯t respond, but she heard the entrance open up above her. As soon as it did, Wang Yonghao fell over on his side and started snoring.
She cursed. Even if she woke him up now, there was no way he could manage to get his spiritual energy under control enough to fly.
She quickly picked up a spear, tied a rope around it with her shaking hands, and pitched it through the entrance of the world fragment. The spear slipped, and she cursed again.
¡°Come on, you damnable thing,¡± she muttered, throwing it again, ¡°serve your mistress.¡±
She got it to stick in five throws, which felt excruciatingly long, given the circumstances. As she grabbed onto her escape path, she glanced back at Wang Yonghao, still drooling down on the grass.
Surely he¡¯d be fine.
With his luck? Barely even a question.
¡°Fuck luck,¡± she ground out, letting go of the escape rope and heading over to get a second one, ¡°Fuck the heavens, and especially fuck me, for being such a bleeding heart.¡±
She tied the second rope tightly underneath his arms and his groin, turning it into a crude harness, tied the second end to her waist, dragged him over to the center of the world fragment, and started climbing the escape rope. She gasped when her head breached the entrance, breathing in clean forest air, sweet as sugar on her lips after the dead air of the world fragment. Her vision swam from the shock, and for a second, she almost felt her grip on the spear slip. She shut her eyes, and breathed slowly, letting the shock pass her by.
Once she felt herself come back to reality, she carefully inched her way to the side, hooked her leg over the edge of the entrance portal, and sprawled out on the forest moss, breathing deeply.
¡°Fuck you,¡± she breathed out, ¡°fuck you. I am not dying here. Not today, not ever.¡±
She got up on her feet, shaking from adrenaline and whatever poison was affecting her, and looked around. She saw a sliver of the sun just out of the corner of her eye: the night was mere moments away, and with it, the Rosevines would come.
She grabbed the rope leading to Wang Yonghao, planted her feet in the ground, and slowly started to raise him out of the world fragment. She would only get one try of this: if her knots failed, the rope snapped, or he fell out of the harness, she wasn¡¯t going to risk her life by going back in.
Once she saw his head poke out over the lip of the entrance portal, she tied the rope around a nearby tree, then went over to drag him fully out by the collar of his robes. Once he was out, she took another breather: her muscles were already burning, even though she barely did any work. Another symptom?
With the world fragment out of the question, she needed to find a safe space away from the rosevines, and she needed it fast. Her eyes ran feverishly over the forest around her, looking for something, anything. Wisps of spiritual energy were coming off the portal, like a lit up beacon for any Rosevines that might pass nearby.
She frowned. Maybe that was the key here. With the portal open and faintly spreading spiritual energy, they wouldn¡¯t be searching for other prey.
It took another ten minutes for her to use her ropes to climb on top of a tall pine with a wide crown, secure herself to a wide branch, and then lift Wang Yonghao alongside her. He was still asleep, but mercifully quiet while he was sitting down. She tied him to the branch, took her sword out, and prepared to wait out the night.
No Wang Yonghao, no world fragment, and not even a primitive shelter. All she had was her sword, some ropes, and her painfully thumping head. She didn¡¯t think she would sleep tonight.
Darkness of the forest closed in around her, leaving her alone with her ominous thoughts.
Chapter 20: Whisper Truths Within The Darkness
Wang Yognaho groaned as he came back to awareness, and felt someone''s hand clamp down over his nose and mouth. His eyes flew open, and he saw Qian Shanyi''s cold stare boring into him mere inches away from his face, a finger pressed against her lips, her other hand keeping him quiet. She motioned with her free hand, and in the darkness, he saw a pair of characters written on the skin of her forearm in blood.
He nodded, and she slowly moved her hand away from his mouth. He was tied to the tree trunk by a rope, and Qian Shanyi helped him untie himself, moving slowly and silently.
They were sitting on top of a branch, high up in the forest canopy. The forest was quiet, illuminated by faint rays of moonlight piercing through the leaves above their heads - bright enough for a cultivator to see, but not very clearly - and when a whisper of wind passed by, it sent dancing shadows all around them.
It would have been a contemplative sight, but instead it set him on edge, every shadowy movement making him think those rosevines were sneaking closer. It didn''t help that the last thing he remembered was falling asleep within his Inner World.
With a start, he realized that one of the shadows down on the ground really was a rosevine. Thankfully, it didn''t seem to have noticed them yet, and he focused on preventing any errant spiritual energy from leaking out of his pores.
Qian Shanyi motioned to him to bring his attention back to her, and showed him her other forearm, where more bloody characters were written down.
He looked at her in confusion, and saw her turn one of her palms towards him and start to use it like a writing slate, slowly tracing out characters on the skin. It took many tries - keeping track of what was written or not was difficult when no actual ink was left behind, and the darkness did not help matters - but she simply started over every time there was a problem. Eventually, she settled on closing her fist any time a character was over, and finally managed to convey a full sentence to him.