“I came across something in a relic crafting book that might let me use that.” Shen said, pulling out the book and flipping to the page. They had been discussing the various materials that she might need, including the possibility of her growing spirit trees for me so that Shen could have a stable source of Spirit Wood, when Mae mentioned that she could extract something called ‘essence’ from the plants. ‘Essence’ was the parts of a spirit plant or beast part which contained the effects of the item. By distilling the Essence from a material, one could make far purer pills and elixirs, and therefore far better ones. It was an essential step in creation of almost all pills past the Gathering realm.
While Shen did briefly realize that Essence could be used with the Foundation body cultivation methods she had glanced at which could infuse the effects of alchemical ingredients into the body, she was interested in something else. Her relics had one massive weakness that was keeping her from making anything truly impressive. Energy. Every design she produced could be greatly improved if only she could feed them enough Chi to produce a stronger effect.
The existence of Essence could be the solution to that problem, as not only did it contain the effects of the item it was made from, but their chi as well. Some items, like Water Blossoms, were only used for the Chi they contained, and thus their essence would make an excellent source of energy.
Shen showed Mae the diagram of the ‘Chi Cell’ item. “Could I build one of these, but use Essence as the chi source?” Normally the item would work more like the fake Beast Core she had made, and have a material which could store the chi surrounded by another material which had the formations needed to control its charge and discharge. From what she understand, however, she could engrave a glass tube with those same formations and fill it with the extracted essence of a spirit plant.
Mae shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe? I’m not a relic crafter, but from the description of the relic, it just draws the stored chi from an item, so it should work. I’m not sure if you can put chi back into essence once it had been used, though. I know that pills can have their purity and the amount of chi in them enhanced during the creation process, so it’s possible, but doing that with a relic, especially one meant to use chi storing materials like Spirit Copper sounds completely different.”
Shen nodded and thought about it for a few seconds. “Do you think you could make some essence for me if I brought you the material to make it out of?”
Mae nodded. “Sure, I can do that, but I’m not sure how much it will cost. I can’t do it for free, and it will vary depending on the material I’m distilling the Essence from.”
Shen stood up. “In that case, I’ll bring you a jar of Water Blossoms. You already work with it, so it should be familiar, and I already have a supplier.”
Mae smirked. “Yeah, I suppose you do.” With that Shen stored her things in her ring and left for the warehouse. While she didn’t have an agreement with Ponma about buying them, she would just have to leave the stones and a note explaining what she had done, then talk to him tonight to make sure that two stones was enough. As far as she knew he was still receiving one and a quarter per jar for the lowest ranked blossoms, so it should be enough.
A few minutes after Shen left, a man Mae didn’t recognize entered the store. “Hello.” he said. “I was wondering if you had anything for a hangover.” Fei Hua would ask about other drugs later, burying his real purchases in the purchase of generic drugs any group of travelers might need, but for now he needed to make sure it at least looked like his cover story was true.
After Shen brought by two jars of middle gathering Water Blossoms, not knowing that Fei Hua had been there, she purchased a few glass tubes from one of the shops in town and returned to her shop. Engraving glass was much harder than she thought and she destroyed fourteen different tubes before succeeding in creating the proper array. Well, something close to proper, as the difficulty in carving the glass made the lines wavy. Still, when she dropped a few scrap pieces of spirit copper into the tube she was able to feed it metal chi, which it stored, and then draw the metal chi out at about the same rate she added it.
Mae wouldn’t be done with the extract for a few more hours, so she carved another ten tubes before returning to pick her order up. It was almost time for them to close when Shen arrived, so Mae was cleaning up her work station. “Oh, hey Shen.” she said, then went over to a shelf and grabbed a jar about the size of a drinking gourd and placed it on the counter. “That will be five stones.”
Shen looked at the pale blue liquid which mostly filled the jar. “Is that an elixir of some sort?” she asked. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t something that looked like juice, and there didn’t seem to be enough of it. After all, she had brought two full jars of blossoms.
“That’s the extract. I could get it down to about half the volume by removing some but not all of the water, but at my current skill level I would probably damage the purity. I got the purity up to about five percent, though.”
“You can’t remove all of the water and just make it a powder?”
Mae shook her head. “Not with Water chi, since removing an essence’s element damages the purity. With the other four main elements there are substitutes, but things like alcohol and vinegar only do so much with water chi, and would make it a 3 or 4% paste instead. So it isn’t worth trying.”
Shen nodded and paid the stones. “Well, I’m going to go test this really quickly, then meet you at the cafeteria.” Shen said, and turned to leave.
“You should probably get a measuring pipette.” Mae said, and Shen turned around, a bit confused. Mae went to her work table and grabbed something, then returned. It was a hollow glass tube with markings on it. “Just put this in the liquid up to the amount you want to remove, then put your finger over the end, and you can measure how much you use, or use it to transfer small quantities of a liquid. Here.” she handed it to Shen. “I’ve got several of them, and they only cost a point each. You should probably buy some backups if you are going to be making several things with them, as they break easily.” Shen nodded, thanked Mae, said goodbye again, and left.
For the next hour she carefully transferred different amounts of essence into the different tubes. From what she could tell, each drop of the essence contained about four points of water chi. That means that at her current level it would take about...Shen pulled out a piece of paper and did some math. About 1700 drops of essence to refill her with water chi. Though to keep it balanced, she would only use around three hundred and just fill up the needed water chi.
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Not that it was pure enough for that, but she could use it if she needed to rapidly restore her own chi. That would mean that the chi in this essence was two to three times as dense as a standard Low spirit stone, though it couldn’t substitute, as stones contained neutral chi. That explained why Middle, High, Peak or Very High, and Immortal spirit stones existed, containing about five times as much chi as the stone type a grade lower.
She tried pulling water chi out of the essence tubes and putting water chi back into it, and made a discovery. The water chi from one tube could easily move to another tube that was depleted, likely because the essence was all from the same jar, with no visible damage to the essence. She had even drawn in water chi from the moisture in the air and, with some difficulty, it had also went in. Artificially created water chi, like that which she had imbued water properties into, however, would cause the solution to go cloudy and lose capacity. In the worst case, when she tried to feed it 20% water chi she had just created, the solution turned black and couldn’t be charged or discharged. If, however, she made four or five percent chi by having the metal chi in the area feed it or the other four elements purify it, it would easily enter the essence and only cause minor cloudiness. The best chi also seemed to be that which was closest in purity to what it had originally.
If Shen wanted to use this new chi source in a relic she would have to add a recharging formation to the tubes which matched the purity of the original essence using ambient chi. That would probably mean a much larger device would be needed to feed them water chi from an area, or that a cultivator would need to feed them water chi from the environment. It was not the most convenient way to use it, but it would let her make something that functioned similarly to a beast core to power her devices.
As it was getting dark, Shen put all of her experimental materials into her ring and left for the cafeteria. All of her employees had left already, so she was the last one there and had to lock the store, not that a simple lock would do more than a ‘no trespassing’ sign would have.
After getting her food she sat down with her friends and they started discussing how their days had went. After an hour Danka brought up the idea of them going on another mission together. Ponma and Mae were willing to do so, but as they weren’t interested in combat, they wanted to choose a mission without any. Danka on the other hand wanted to test his new Foundation level strength against a Spirit Beast, and Shen wanted to find new materials, but didn’t care about if they harvested them from plants, the earth, or spirit beasts. Unless one of them knew of a reliable way to get beast cores. Her entire current project was about finding a way to get around the need for them, but they were still the easiest way to store chi in an object.
While they were discussing what type of mission they should take there was a sudden explosion that shook the cafeteria. The four of them got up and ran outside with all of the other people and looked to see what had happened. In the middle of the city the Central building was on fire. That, in and of itself, was strange. The building was made of stone and contained little to no wood or other flammable materials other than papers. Even then, most of the records were stored on jade slips as far as Shen knew, so there likely wasn’t enough fuel there for a fire of this size.
The crowd moved towards the scene, but were stopped from entering the inner city by the gate guards. “I’ll tell you what I find out.” Shen said to the others, pushing through the crowd.
“I’ll join her,” said Danka, following close behind. As the two of them were Inner disciples, they were allowed to enter the inner city but not the core city where the fire was happening. At least they would be closer, though, and might overhear an elder from the core city talking about it.
--
Thirty minutes earlier Fei Hua leaped from the wall and grabbed onto the bottom of the window. While the closest roof that was tall enough to reach the third story window was over fifty heights away, no doubt deliberately to prevent what he was trying, he had learned a special jumping technique just in case he was in a situation like this one where formations might detect the presence of a flying relic.
He lifted himself inside the storage closet and went to the door, carefully listening in case anyone was nearby. He also had Foundation realm techniques which could boost all of his senses without having to extend a Divine Sense thread that might be detected, but heard no one nearby. He slightly opened the door just to double check, then, seeing no one, left the storage closet.
Ten minutes and several close encounters in which he had to use mortal stealth maneuvers to avoid detection later, he entered the records room. He had a few Nascent level talismans on him in case things got desperate, but anyone that cultivated, even at the Cleansing realm, could detect chi use with even a bit of training and practice, so he was limited to using chi inside his body and in things he touched.
Inside the room were dozens of shelves filled with slips of jade. He skipped past the ones on green tablets, as only the least important information, like backup copies of techniques, would be stored on such low quality material. At the back of the room, behind a barrier, was a single shelf filled with black jade slips. Black Jade wasn’t even mined on this mountain, and despite only being the size of a hand each of the slips would cost over one hundred spirit stones. They were, however, the best way to record information, and could record memories with more accuracy than the vast majority of minds, able to store memories that felt like you were living in that moment.
This would most likely be where the defense plans were stored. There may be other copies stored around the sect, but those would take time to track down and may not contain the full plan. The only place guaranteed to have the complete plan was here, where the original was kept.
Fei Hua pulled a set of Formation tools out of his vest. These contained multiple different inks and brushes, various wires of spirit materials, and an engraving tool, everything one would need to dismantle a formation. The fact that the entire formation was protected by the barrier was a problem, but not an insurmountable one.
Based on the structure of the barrier’s formation he was able to quickly determine the type of barrier he would be facing. Five Elements Immortal Barrier. Fitting, given this sect’s penchant for trying to balance the five main elements. In fact, it only took him a few seconds to realize that the formation here was an almost perfect map of the city. That meant that the barrier which protected the city was also a Five Elements Immortal Barrier.
The smaller one was powered by five elemental crystals the size of a spirit stone. Compared to the cost of the black jade slips they protected, it was like comparing a single person’s income to the sect’s income. If he was a normal burglar he could steal the five crystals, sell them to the ruler of some city state, and live like a rich merchant for the rest of his two hundred or more years. Instead, he was a spy, which meant that he needed to leave them in place so that the enemy wouldn’t suspect a thing.
It only took him one minute to find a minor flaw in one of the drawn lines of Fire chi and another minute to draw a second formation onto a blue jade slip, drawing chi from the formation. The plate quickly heated up, but the brief imbalance was all it took to put a hole in the barrier. Once that hole was large enough to fit a tool inside he placed the end of his paintbrush inside and marked between two of the lines. This caused the entire array to short out and turn off in a way that could quickly be reversed.
He quickly searched through the slips until he found the one he was looking for. He hadn’t been able to carry the slip duplication relic he had been given due to all of the other tools he brought with him, or he would have simply made a copy. Instead, he touched it to his forehead and sent a tiny sliver of his divine sense into it with the smallest amount of chi he could manage. This might leave some chi residue on the slip, but it was necessary.
The entire contents of the slip, including hundreds of pages of contingency plans, were sent into his brain in seconds. While his brain physiology wasn’t exactly human, it was close enough that he only got a minor headache from the memory transfer. He placed the slip back and wiped the ink from the formation with a cloth before storing it and the jade tablet he had used to put a hole in the barrier. A few seconds after wiping the line away the barrier faded into existence, able to stop even an immortal level attack from the outside.
Checking once again to make sure that no one was in the area, he pulled out a communication relic from around his neck and touched it to his forehead. It was shaped like a good luck charm from one of the religious groups of the Forest region, and only upon close examination would one know that it was a relic. ‘Mission complete, awaiting further orders.’ he thought, then sent all of the information from the slip as well as all of his memories during the mission into the tablet. He had no doubt that his superiors would want to evaluate his performance and nitpick it later.
Fei Hua slipped out of the room and made his way back to the storage room he had entered from, intending to leave the way he had entered, when the necklace became slightly warm. ‘Damn it.’ he thought as he pulled it out from inside his shirt and touched it to his forehead.
‘Objective verified complete. New objective, sabotage the city’s barrier.’
‘Damn it.’ he thought again, this time more intently. He would no doubt be reprimanded for supposed disloyalty when his superiors heard that thought, but he had almost managed to leave with a perfect record, and now they wanted him to sneak into the most heavily guarded room in the sect and sabotage it, but not destroy it. Sometimes his superiors didn’t realize just how difficult his position was.
