Another four days passed with Shen turning the materials into useful items. Every day she would spend the day making relics, and at night she would practice her techniques. She had read through the Body cultivation book, finishing it the night before she was recruited to repair the shield formation, and was now ready to try one of the techniques. While she wasn’t at the peak of Formation yet, and so couldn’t start creating a Core, she could start integrating elemental chi into her body.
She decided to start with Fire. Fire was energy. Well, chi in general was energy, the energy of heaven and Earth working together in harmony, but Fire seemed more energetic. It was heat, and light, and could become the motivation to act faster and perform more. When it was incorporated into the body, it became exactly that. When in the muscles they could move faster. When in the nerves they could react faster. In the organs they became more efficient and could do their jobs faster and better.
Shen began the meditation, taking tiny amounts of Fire chi from a candle and cycling it through her meridians. She had done this in the Gathering stage with far purer fire chi, so she didn’t feel any pain from it, her body already having adapted to that level of fire chi. Then she began willing the chi into her body. She had to visualize the system she wanted to improve as something absorbent and have the chi be absorbed into it. As she was dealing with fire she saw her muscles as charcoal, trying to visualize them all in the image.
Her muscles started to feel like they were burning, like she had worked out too much, but she forced herself to continue. Soon the fire that was there started to cool as her body adapted to storing it and she was able to gather a bit more. Every time she did this, though, the muscles never fully stopped feeling hot. She continued for another thirty minutes until the heat got to be too much for her and she was forced to stop due to being unable to concentrate. As it was night, she went to bed and decided to sleep off the damage.
The next morning she got up and noticed that the heat in her muscles was almost completely gone but the chi remained, her body having adapted to it over night. After bathing and eating, she followed Mae to the Alchemist shop. She had been able to make her chi cell design work to power a water barrier the night before last, testing it on a custom piece of armor, but that was of limited use, as water was only really good at stopping Fire attacks. When she had described this problem to Mae at First Meal Mae had mentioned that the sisters were planning on teaching her a Foundation realm Healing technique once she managed to reach Foundation. Unfortunately, Mae was still at upper Gathering, and so hadn’t learned it yet, but with Shen at Early Foundation she should be able to learn it.
Once they entered Mae explained to the sisters about her plan and the sisters agreed that producing a healing formation based on the technique, powered from Water Blossom Essence would work well. Kyu went into the back and brought out a book titled “Many Rivers Technique”. Shen started reading as Ku explained.
The technique required that one see their meridians as streams that carried water, in this case water chi. The damaged tissue was then seen as parched, cracked land. When the stream reached it, however, the water chi would naturally be soaked into the soil, and one only needed to will life to grow in that barren land to see the healing start to occur.
It was similar to the Fire Infusion body cultivation technique Shen had used the night before, only instead of trying to keep the water chi in the tissue and have the tissue adapt to storing it, one had the chi immediately do something when it entered. Because of the similarity Shen was able to quickly learn the technique, though her own weakness with Water chi meant that her performance was terrible compared to the sisters. While Kyu was only at peak Gathering, the Gathering and Foundation versions of the technique only differed in that, during the Foundation Realm, one could use their divine sense to more accurately access the damage and the meridians, more easily directing the chi and increasing the healing rate several times over. Shen would have to try creating both forms of the formation to test their effects.
After thanking the sisters for teaching her, Shen returned to the workshop. While it wasn’t as busy as it had been for the last few days, she still had several special orders to complete. While her supplies of the special reward materials had been almost used up, Shen had six thousand spirit stones in her ring just from selling the materials to the shop, with Master Chen’s approval, so once materials were available again she would be able to buy much better materials for her projects in the future.
She managed to complete most of the special orders using what was left of the materials, but she had a small amount of extra Azure Platinum and not quite enough Flame Steel to complete the last order, having to mix in normal steel with the last sword just to finish it.
With no more orders left and an hour left in the day Shen considered making more generic weapons to fill the shelves, but decided against it. She had done that too much over the last few days, and wanted to make something interesting. For that, she had the perfect project.
First she took a tile of white Jade and carved the formation for the Gathering level Many Rivers technique into it. The tile had cost her one stone, but was a Foundation level material, so it would be the best for this experiment. She could add a few other sections to the formation later to add the artificial divine sense needed to assess injuries, making it a true Foundation ranked relic, but for now this would be enough. Once she was done carving she melted a small amount of Azure Platinum and carefully poured it into the groove. Normally one wouldn’t do this with such a small groove, instead making the platinum into a wire which one laid in the groove, but Shen wanted to test this method out.
Any time the platinum spilled out of the groove Shen would lift it with water chi and return it to the crucible she had melted it in, the material’s Water attribute allowing her to manipulate it almost like water with the Hydrokinesis method.
It took her several minutes of intense concentration and control to finish, but eventually all of the channels had been fill by wicking the metal from other channels. She allowed it to cool, pouring what was left of the metal into an ingot mold, and grabbed a generic sword from a nearby weapon’s rack. While the material cooled she could add another formation to a generic weapon.
Once it was done cooling Shen brought one of the chi cells out of her storage ring and connected it to the formation with a spirit copper wire. The formation started to glow slightly, and Shen disconnected it to prevent it from draining the cell.
Once the day was over, she locked up and took her new experiment to the training fields. There many people were sparring, another activity which had increased since the explosion. She talked to the field master of one of the training fields and explained her relic, and he agreed to let her test the relic on some of the injured trainees.
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One of the fighters, a man covered it bruises and scratches, came over and greeted her. She returned the greeting, then asked him to stand on the jade tile. Once he was there she connected the cell and the formation started to glow slightly. Within seconds the man’s face seemed to react, as the pain went away. He stood there for a few minutes before the cell completely depleted, at which point Shen switched it out. The man continued to be healed and two minutes later, after the second cell depleted, she checked his injuries. The bruises were almost completely healed and the scratches were mostly healed and no longer bleeding, and he thanked her.
Unfortunately she had used almost two stones worth of essence to heal the man. If she could get her charging device working that cost would mostly be mitigated, but for now the cost was quite high.
Shen thanked the man and the field master, then stored everything in her ring. She would need to acquire higher quality Essence. That would allow her to increase the speed of healing through the use of higher quality chi, and combined with the Foundation level improvements to the formation, might let them treat injured people without the need for medics to exhaust their own energy, letting them save it for emergencies. Coupled with an array to gather and purify chi, the healing formation might even be able to store chi when not in use and use it when needed, letting the healers focus on more serious treatments instead of every day injuries.
Shen went to Last meal and told Mae about the successful device, then after eating returned to her workshop. Instead of sleeping tonight she would finish the array and further cultivate the Fire chi into her muscles. She didn’t need to sleep very often and didn’t really need to go to meals more than every few days, but because it was a way to meet and spend time with her friends she would eat one small meal per day instead of three normal sized meals.
She took out her engraving tools and started adding the other parts needed to make it a proper Foundation relic. After she had melted down the leftover Azure Platinum from earlier and filled the new channels, she poured the remaining metal into a mold that was too large for it and let it cool as a tiny bead of precious metal.
Shen then took out a green jade tile and her formation painting tools and drew an array for gathering water chi and purify it by the same method she had produced high purity chi, only keeping the parts that best fit water. She only needed to get it to about 5% for maximum compatibility, so she didn’t need to do much work to reach that. Leaving the tile to dry, she made a second tile with a slightly different design. She thought that, if there were trace amounts of water chi left in the cell she could use it as a pattern to make more identical water chi, essentially duplicating what was there a thousand times over in order to guarantee that the chi was perfectly compatible with the cell.
As she had never seen such a technique before, with it being situational at best, it took her over an hour to design the proper formation for the effect. Eventually she had a design that should work but didn’t know if it would or how well it would. She painted it onto a green jade tile and, as the first two had cooled and dried, she placed the first depleted cell on the charging formation and saw chi start to slowly trickle into it, then added a third cell to the new healing formation. It seemed to work, so she left and returned to the training field.
The field master was still there and it looked like the others were starting to leave, having completed their nighttime training. Shen offered to test her healing device on them and, when the man she had healed a few hours ago told them it was safe, several people came forward to be treated. The device couldn’t do much for broken bones, but thankfully none of them had any.
The first man had torn his shoulder by being incorrectly pinned to the ground by another fighter, so Shen had him lay on tile while it was connected. It took almost a minute for the pain to go away and another minute before their was no soreness when he moved it. He thanked her for treating him and got up to let the next man go.
The cell still had about a quarter of its chi, so Shen placed the tile on the chest of a man with a pulled pectoral muscle and connected the cell. By the time the cell was depleted the pain had mostly went away, so she swapped it for a new one and gave him another thirty seconds before removing the plate.
The next person was a woman with bleeding knuckles and a busted lip. Shen immediately recognized Li Tan. Apparently the man she was fighting, one that had worse injuries and was sent to the actual clinic, had gotten a proper strike in on her face and she had responded with several dozen punches to his face. “You really need to learn to control your anger.” Shen said, having Tan place her hands on the plate.
“I know.” she said. “Pretty sure it’s a heart demon at this point, and I’ll need to beat it just to attempt to reach Nascent.” The woman was joking, but from what Shen knew that was an actual possibility. Sometimes what held a cultivator back wasn’t a lack of cultivation or a physical issue, but a mental issue. If one had feelings of inadequacy, or some other issue that prevented them from being what they wanted to be, they would find it difficult or impossible to advance to the next realm. These issues would manifest as a voice or figure any time a person was in deep meditation, and their influence would prevent you from properly taking the steps needed to advance. In Li Tan’s case, she had likely had anger issues since she was a mortal, but had used working out and learning to fight as a way to convince herself that the issue didn’t matter, thus ignoring it. Now that she had real power and her anger issues had caused her significant trouble, including slowing her advancement due to impatience, she had no choice but to face them.
In fact, sometimes demonic cultivators could advance faster than neutral and righteous cultivators simply by not seeing their heart demons as a problem, and in some cases even allying with them, using them to find further strength. It resulted in people that were too dangerous to be around and sometimes too mentally unstable to work with, and thus made them outcasts from society, but to some demon cultivators society was meaningless compared to power.
When Tan’s hands were healed Shen briefly put the tile on her face, which fixed her lip, then called for the next person. Shen continued like that until all of her chi cells were depleted, then returned to her workshop. She still had about four hours until sunrise, and could probably recharge most or all of the cells during that time if her new design worked and she made a few more.
Just as she entered the shop, though, she heard a bell ringing to wake everyone up. She knew that the sect would only do that in the most serious of circumstances, and locked up the shop before running to the nearest guard station.
Once a small crowd had gathered the guard captain began speaking. “The demon army has been spotted approaching the city.” he said to the shock of everyone gathered there. “They should reach the base of the mountain by midday.” There were more surprised questions and more sounds of fear, but the guard captain called for everyone to be quiet, then continued. Apparently, a group of scouts had spotted them about fifty li south of here, marching in this direction. For that reason all of the sect members from the surrounding villages, including Farmer, Miner, and Fisher, as well as the small outposts at places like the mine Shen had helped clear, were being recalled to the city.
Once the demons arrived the sect would activate the shield. This would prevent all attacks from entering the city, but would let them send attacks out. The demon army, however, would also have a shield, though a portable one, so both sides would need to try and focus their attacks on a small area of the shield in order to force a hole to form before their own shield collapsed. That would let them enter the city and attack the citizens or, in the case of the defenders, get powerful attacks into the middle of the enemy formation. If they could capture or damage part of the wall, though, the demons could destroy the barrier formation and attack the city with long ranged attacks at will.
From the information Shen had received on the structure of the barrier, she knew that if even one of the sections of the outer walls were badly damaged or dismantled the entire barrier would be reduced to Peak Nascent, which would let the enemy’s attacks do even more damage. It was a common flaw and military tactic five hundred years ago, but modern cities used a slightly different design which placed the barrier within a heavily defended bunker in the city’s center and extended the field from there. This used several times as much chi to perform, the difference between protecting yourself and protecting an area around you with a technique. When this city was built, however, they were more concerned about the shield lasting through a siege than continuing at full strength even after it was breached.
Once the captain was finished telling everyone the news, he started having people sign up for the city’s defense. While every member of the sect was technically supposed to be able to fight to defend it, only about half of them were actually trained for combat. Around four fifths of those that were trained had other roles in the sect, and were therefore not already part of the normal defense force, leaving only 10% of the residents that were.
Shen signed up but didn’t start work immediately, as they had plenty of people for now. Everyone else was told to prepare themselves and others for the attack. Shen quickly ran home and woke up Mae, telling her what was happening. Once she got over the initial shock, Mae grabbed all of her adventurer’s equipment, including medical supplies. She would have to work as part of the medical staff during the attack.
Shen then ran to Ponma’s room. Girls weren’t supposed to be in the boy’s quarters after dark, but no one cared at this point. Ponma was already grabbing his gear, his roommate having already informed him of what was happening. He didn’t know what he could help with during the attack, as unlike Mae he didn’t have a skill that was useful in this situation, but Shen convinced him to sign up as support staff anyway.
