Shen quickly ran back to her shop, using the Flash Step sword with the Fire beast core to boost her speed. She likely had less than six hours before she would be needed, and needed to make the best of that time. She didn’t have time for experimentation, so she went into full production mode. First, she started pulling white jade tiles from a shelf. It was an expensive way to make things, but that didn’t matter right now. It would slightly increase the quality and if they defeated the enemy they could replenish the tiles afterwards.
Shen started by making another three charging arrays for the chi cells. She would need them to charge as quickly as possible in order to heal as many people as possible, and wanted to guarantee that all of the cells were full before the enemy arrived.
As she was working on the second plate, the one she made before and the new one currently recharging cells, the twins showed up. Apparently all of the non sect members had been warned about the incoming army and offered a chance to evacuate. The family if coworkers had accepted the offer and were on their way north with a caravan of other workers. The twins, on the other hand, had decided to stay. Their own sect had been destroyed by the army while they hid, and they wanted to fight back this time.
Shen instructed them to make as many single use items as possible, as they were fast to make. They decided to go with the exploding arrows she had designed for Ponma the first and only time she and her friends had gone on a mission together. They could be made with cheap materials, including normal arrows, though the lower quality would limit their power.
While one of them got to work carving the basic formation into the head of each, essentially an array which would absorb chi of a specific element until the circuit burned itself out, starting when triggered. They didn’t really have any safety features, but were common enough among the adventuring types that everyone should know not to give them chi until you were about to release the arrow. Still, she would have to make sure that everyone knew that before handing them out.
Shen kept working until she had four basic charging devices, painting on the formation using the best paint she had instead of properly casting it, because it was faster, even if the durability would be much lower and the quality would slightly decrease. After that, she started making healing tiles. These needed to be as efficient as possible, enough that the user can just inject their own water chi if they wanted to use it when the cell was dead, so she had to carve the formation into the tile, then use what little Azure Platinum she had left to fill in the lines.
About an hour before Middle Meal someone came to the district and announced that scouts had seen the army setting up camp five li away, and that everyone who had signed up to help needed to come with them to the staging area for their assignments. Shen injected some Ice chi into the latest tile, as it was still a bit to hot to move, then stored everything in her ring. She and the twins, who had the outside sales type storage rings, took all of the workshop’s inventory, just in case anyone needed it, with Shen taking most of the raw materials. It only took them a few minutes, and by the time they were ready all of the other workshops in the district had shut down and grabbed their useful supplies as well.
They were all lead to the Water District main gate. The path up the mountain lead directly there, so that was where the enemy would most likely direct their attack. There was a possibility of other gates being attacked as well, so small teams would be sent to them, as well as outer sect members patrolling the entire outer wall to keep watch in case they tried to enter the shield or wall elsewhere.
All of the mercenaries which had stayed, which were most of the ones in the city, were assigned to the main gate, along with most of the Inner Disciples and Elders. After dropping off all of her weapons and armor Shen had brought from the shop for others to use, setting up the healing tiles and chi cells, and instructing those in charge of the archers and healers how to use their respective equipment, Shen was assigned to a spot on the walls near the front gate. She saw Danka being assigned to a different section. If the enemy started scaling the walls or got inside the city the guards and other melee fighters would be sent to meet them, but for now Danka had been given a long bow and a set of arrows, many of which Shen recognized as coming from her workshop. She hadn’t known that he could use a ranged weapon, but the city guard had likely taught him the basics in preparation for an attack like today.
Shen saw a few other people she recognized as well, like Li Tan, who was with the melee fighters but had a club in her hands with an Aura around it. Most likely it could also throw attacks, as she was near Danka’s group. She also saw Mr. Li there, along with Shoom. He was gathered with others that had spirit beasts inside the wall, many of which were retired like him. They would be assigned to the various areas the enemy attacked as they were discovered, as Shoom and most of the beasts around them were large enough to be ridden and therefore could go where needed.
A gong was rung, symbolizing that the enemy was starting their march up the mountain. Several of the elders and Inner sect disciples specialized in flying techniques would be attacking them from the air to try and lessen their numbers. The demons had already cut the Wood chi line coming from Farmer, so it was only a matter of time before they cut the others, but Shen knew the city could hide behind the shield at full strength for weeks just on stored chi thanks to the giant elemental crystals they had been growing for the last five hundred years.
Shen put on her armor and hung her sword on her side before checking that she was wearing both a defensive bracelet and her recharging bracelet. She had stored her body cultivation equipment, other than the recovery rings, as she needed to perform as best she could in the coming battle. She saw that many others were wearing recovery and/or chi gathering rings or bracelets as well and nodded. All around her people were pulling out talismans and checking their equipment, preparing for the attack.
Shen was able to see part of the way down the mountain from where she was stationed and saw the line of enemy soldiers making their way up. She didn’t have the range with her attacks to do so, or she would attack them from here. She did, however, see many people on swords flying around them, throwing chi attacks at them, only to hit some sort of barrier.
Surprisingly, there were also two water dragons flying around, attacking the enemy. They seemed to do a bit more damage than the people on swords and occasionally managed to get an attack through the barrier, but whenever they did, only direct attacks like Ice Bolts seemed to do anything, with area effects being blocked by barriers around the demon soldiers.
After ten minutes or so the flying troops started flying back towards the city and long range attacks took their place in attacking the enemy. These attacks were techniques specialized in attacking at a distance, and sacrificed power for range, so few of the enemies fell to the attacks.
The sword riders flew over the wall and landed inside, where the caravan had recently set up. Along with them arrived two dragons, one much smaller than the other. Shen could tell that one was Peak Gathering and one was Middle Foundation. She had hoped that more dragons would come to aid them, but supposed that their position of avoiding the affairs of humans meant that the sect was lucky to get even these two.
Once all of them were inside the city five colored beams of light, corresponding to the five elements, shot out from five points on the wall where the districts met, then started to blend together, slowly solidifying into a barrier that occasionally gave off rainbow colored lights. This was the Five Elements Immortal Barrier the city was designed around, and would keep out anyone and anything that the founders would consider harmful, including attacks from immortals, should the demons have brought one.
The two dragons shifted to human form and quickly got dressed, at which point Shen realized that she knew them. It was Sho and Do. Shen sent them a telepathic greeting, but they looked busy and she had been assigned to the wall, so she couldn’t go and greet them in person right now.
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Once the enemy reached the top of the mountain, they started placing flags around the top of the path. The attacks on them continued, taking out a few hundred more troops, and once all of the flags were in place a Nascent level barrier was formed which blocked all of the incoming attacks. Shen knew that this essentially fortified their position enough that they could directly attack the city with the bulk of their forces without risking them.
The demon commander shouted something in another language and a group of demons came forward carrying some sort of staff in their hands. They held up the staffs and chi started gathering on their ends, turning into the various elemental colors. After a few breaths the demons launched their attacks, which flew through their barriers, past the incoming attacks, and hit the city’s barrier. From the size of the explosion Shen could tell that the chi from their attacks was unusually pure, likely at least 30%, and something about the quality of the staffs made her doubt that they were lower than Foundation realm attacks, likely being Nascent.
Shen hadn’t yet learned to sense souls, but it was likely that they had placed part of themselves into the attacks judging by the fact that the staff demons seemed to grow weaker and have less focus after each attack. If they were actually Nascent realm demons using Nascent realm artifacts, they would have conditioned their souls so that such damage didn’t effect them as much, and possibly even recovered the missing pieces or repaired their souls using chi. That meant that these demons were likely Foundation realm. This fact was later confirmed when one of them collapsed and, with an order from their commanding officer, the entire group handed off their staffs to another demon before staggering away.
The Sect’s shield had taken all of the attacks without weakening, but the demon’s barrier had held up as well, only occasionally getting a hole punched in it when an elder’s Nascent level attack impacted it, though even that rarely injured more than a few demons.
Shen noticed this and held up her hand, gathering all of the fire chi she could into her hand. Her dantian could hold far more chi than at Gathering, but she hadn’t had a chance to practice many attacks, so she wasn’t able to put all of her chi into the attack despite trying. She started sending other elements of chi into the ball of fire, purifying it. The purity quickly rose from 20% to 25, then 30. With every element she tried it increased a bit further. When she hit a maximum of 36%, she felt she could go higher, so she sent her divine sense into it and started sorting out the balance, taking out qualities that seemed overrepresented, increasing ones that seemed underrepresented, and adding in a few qualities that she saw in the fire attacks of those around her. When she was done she started compressing it, and it shrank to the size of a spirit stone.
She then watched one of the elders beside her, who was also preparing an attack. No one seemed to have seen what she had done, and she extended her divine sense as close to the enemy barrier as she could, given her limited range with it. As soon as the Elder launched their attack, she sent her own down the string of divine sense she had sent out, so that it flew directly behind the Elder’s attack. When the Elder’s ball of Metal chi struck the shield and put a hole in it, several of the demons received minor cuts and were knocked off their feet. Then a stone sized fire ball flew through the rapidly shrinking hole and hit in the middle of their formation, exploding. Over a hundred enemy troops were lit on fire, with many more being knocked down and stunned by the shockwave.
This didn’t seem to effect the enemy, however, as they simply ignored the burning troops and sent more into their positions, only avoiding the area where the fire chi was so concentrated that the ground still burned.
The elder saw what had happened, and after nodding at Shen, called out to the people around them. “Wait for an elder to throw an attack and aim for the hole they make.” The nearby people mostly listened to their instructions and the enemy’s casualties started to increase, but no matter how many the sect killed or injured, the demons always seemed to have replacements.
Shen fired three more fireballs comparable to the first one behind the attacks of an elder, two of them making it inside the barrier, then one each of Earth and Metal before stepping back from the wall and letting someone in the reserves take her place. She had used almost all of her Fire, Metal, and Earth chi, and most of her Water and Wood chi, so she needed a break. Only an hour may have passed since they arrived, but those that were on the wall had mostly depleted their chi, other than the elders, and were being swapped out.
Once off the wall Shen went to where she had left the healing formation plates to check on them. As no attacks had made it through the barrier, the only people who had used them were some of the people from the flying sword team who had taken injuries from return fire. Thankfully none had died, and the ones that were injured were all healed by now.
Sho and Do were waiting beside the Formations, as they were powered from water chi, and even Do had as much chi as a Nascent soul elder. With no one to heal, however, they didn’t have much to do. Do was currently asking if he could go to the wall and attack the enemy, and Sho looked like she was about to allow him when Shen walked up.
Apparently the two of them had decided to come and offer their support out of a combination of friendship for Shen and a desire to learn more about humans. The two of them had been studying humans for a long time and wanted to see how humans fought. There was no better way to study that than to watch a battle, they thought, but after the initial engagement the humans had hid behind their barrier and launched attacks, so there was little real fighting happening.
Shen wondered if the two of them would be safe if the Demons made it inside the barrier, but Sho assured her they would. The two dragons were officially mercenaries, and demons tended to capture mercenaries and send them to work camps at worst, as they weren’t actually loyal to the enemies being conquered. They also tended to sell them back to allied or neutral groups they were part of, such as the Soul Blade Mercenary group, who were being employed by both sides of the conflict. This meant that, because the Demons had signed a non-aggression pact with all of the Dragons they had come across so far, they would no doubt release Sho and Do to their tribe, possibly after payment was received.
While the small groups of Dragons wouldn’t be capable of fighting off the demons if they went to war, Dragons tended to band together any time a group threatened one of them. This was mostly seen hundreds of years ago when humans hunted them and all the dragons, regardless of tribe or type, agreed to work together to fight back. With the dragons now taking a neutral stance in the war, the demons decided that it would be better to leave them alone. Sho didn’t doubt that an envoy from the demon army had already been dispatched to her village in order to offer them a non-aggression pact as well.
After the conversation was over, Shen said goodbye and went to a waiting area. Several chi gathering formations had been set up to allow people to recharge their own chi reserves, but all of them were currently in use. Shen could add some more, but the density of chi in the area was already lower than normal from the ones that were here, and she wasn’t sure if adding another would do much more than split the energy from the others into the new formation.
Instead, she started walking towards the training fields. At the gate between the sections of the city, however, the doors were closed, and the guards that were stationed there said that they would only let through people with authorization. They were only Late Gathering outer disciples, so Shen could force her way past them if she wanted, but decided not to. The gates were likely closed as part of some security measure, and she didn’t want to disrupt that.
With no other known formation available she was about to just find an empty area to start meditating when she thought about the shop. Master Chen would be fighting somewhere on the wall, but she could use the facilities there. She went to the store and quickly bypassed the lock, then went inside. There were a few trinkets still on the shelves which wouldn’t be useful in a fight, but other than that all of the items they sold were gone.
The back of the shop, however, still had materials in it for crafting. While most of the materials the shop received were sent to her workshop, this shop kept some of them. Shen looked through the various items and saw something interesting. Someone had cut down a young spirit tree and was using it as a walking staff. Shen wasn’t sure if it belonged to Master Chen or one of the Employees, but she remembered the artifacts the demon mages had used and had an idea.
She carefully drew formations into the bark of the tree. Spirit wood had a natural affinity to Wood type techniques as well as some affinity for water and earth. She considered making an Earth type attack staff, but the affinity was so low that it would likely suffer from strength. Instead, she remembered a technique called ‘Binding Roots’ in the formations book she had recently bought, which used an artificial Divine Sense to let the roots it grew target those near it and grab them. It was one of the few actual formations in the book of mostly theory, but was in the manual for two reasons. First, it gave an examples of some of the Wood specific modifications, and second, it showed multiple versions of the same formation so that one could tell the difference in quality.
Shen would use a material with a better affinity for Wood if she had one, but as she didn’t she stuck to using paint to fill in the marks in the bark. She used the more complex version of the formation, as it was a massive improvement over the lesser form, the lesser one being a direct translation from the technique.
When she was about half finished two guards stepped into the shop. “What are you doing here?” one of them said. “Decide to do some looting in the abandoned shops?” He then noticed what Shen was doing and looked confused. You rarely saw looters that started making things out of what they stole, and Shen seemed to have some skill.
“Oh, I work here.” Shen said, putting down her supplies. She went to the main desk in Master Chen’s office and pulled out a list of employees. She then pulled out her identity bracelet, realizing that she hadn’t used it to purchase things outside the Cafeteria in over a year, as she had started using stones for everything.
After verifying her story, one of the guards shrugged. “Still, shouldn’t you be on the walls attacking rather than here, making things? All of the artisans who couldn’t fight were already taken to the inner city.”
“Oh, I was up there for over an hour already.” Shen said.
“Kill any of them?” the guard asked.
Shen assumed he was trying to verify her story again. “Oh, I managed to injure a few. I got my timing down pretty well and sneaked four attacks in behind an elder’s attacks. Probably injured a hundred or more, though I don’t know if any of them died.”
The guard nodded. “Fine. Just return to the wall once your chi is restored, okay?” Shen nodded and the guards handed her a note, then left. The note was simply in case another group of guards saw her, so she wouldn’t have to prove herself again.
Shen returned to the staff and, when she was finished, left for the wall to test it.
