A few hours later, Shen was drawing charging locations around the city, creating places where people could meditate to recover chi far enough from the wall that it wouldn’t interfere with the ones which were near it. She had talked to Mae about getting other types of essence so that she could make cells for other devices, maybe even make one small enough to make it a direct replacement for a beast core, but Mae said that there weren’t many plant or beast parts in the city which she could collect essence from, so it would be difficult. Shen estimated that a glass ball the size of a spirit stone, about the size of an Early Foundation spirit beast core, would need around 11% pure essence to work as well as that core, meaning it would normally need to be extracted from Nascent or Immortal objects. That was likely why the book didn’t mention people making chi cells as direct replacements, instead using them more for large, stationary formations such as barriers, where the need for massive amounts of chi storage for low costs outweighed the need for the device to be small. In such situations people could simply make massive cells filled with cheap essence, or other similar substances.

  This lead to a second idea. What if she just made a device which could have spirit stones added to it, which imbued the pattern of Water onto the neutral chi? That would allow the healing formation to be powered in bursts by widely available and fairly power dense spirit stones rather than harder to find and more expensive cells or beast cores, and the increased purity of the chi might make the effect work even better.

  She was about to go build a prototype which could replace the cell in the healing formation when a High Elder walked up to her. High elders weren’t technically a higher rank than the other elders, but had greater responsibilities, and so had more influence and access to some resources the other elders didn’t. “Mo Shen?” the man asked.

  “Yes, senior Elder.” she said, bowing slightly. “How can I help you?”

  “I need you to follow me to the city core. I believe you already know why.” Shen briefly thought she might be in trouble, but then realized what it had to be. The city core contained the barrier formation which she had repaired, and they wouldn’t send a High Elder over a disciplinary matter unless she was a major security risk or had committed treason.

  “Yes, High Elder.” she said, bowing, then stored everything she was working with before following.

  He lead her back to the same room as last time, this time with two high elders, Peak Nascent in strength, guarding the door. He announced himself and the two of them were allowed inside. The first thing Shen noticed was that a strange chi signature was coming off of the formation where she repaired it, similar to how a metal or wooden object would creak before breaking. The second was two old men talking. The first of those men was Ling Tso, the former relic crafter for the sect who used to keep the array repaired and had brought her in to repair it last time. The second was taller, stood up straight and had a commanding presence, and Shen could only tell his age from the white beard and hair, both of which were long enough to go past his knees.

  “Ah, Shen.” Master Ling said, motioning for her to come over. “I need to introduce you to someone.” Shen walked over to Master Ling and bowed as he continued. “Mo Shen, this is Xing Lao, Sect Master.”

  Shen looked at the other man in shock. She thought there might just be a minor issue with the array which needed fixing, but now she was being introduced to the sect master. Why would someone so important be here? Had something gone horribly wrong?

  While she started to panic, Master Xing smiled at her. “I understand it may be shocking to meet me. I rarely meet with anyone other than the high elders, but I felt the situation made it necessary to introduce myself.”

  “Master.” Shen said, trying to calm down. “I don’t know how I managed to receive such an honor of meeting you, but I will be of help if I can.” She bowed as deep as she could, almost folding herself in half with the exaggerated motion which was by no means meant to mock him. It was closer to hitting ones head on the floor when kowtowing, though people rarely did that in modern times. “What can I help you with?”

  Master Xing nodded, acknowledging her sign of respect. “I assume you can tell that something is wrong with the formation?” he asked.

  “Yes, Master.” she said. “The damaged section is releasing strange chi, making me think that it will break soon.”

  “That was my assessment as well.” Master Xing responded. “In that case, do you think you can tell me why?”

  Shen nodded. “I assume I made a mistake while repairing it, and the stress of being used for around ten days straight has started to cause problems. Though I don’t know what I could have done wrong. Everything I did was the best I knew how to do when repairing it.”

  Master Xing nodded. “In that case, do you mind examining it to see if you can find the mistake? Perhaps you can fix it.”

  Shen nodded and bowed. “Of course, Master.” she said, then went to examine the repaired area. Several sections were producing the strange chi, but the worst was in the Earth section. She went to look at the repaired area, then ran a few tests. Before the damaged area, chi was being fed into it at an extreme purity she couldn’t estimate because of how pure it was. She knew that was the line which fed in Earth chi from the massive Earth crystal in the neighboring room, and because elemental crystals didn’t start forming until a minimum purity of around 92%, it had to be at least that pure. On the other side of the damaged area was a much less pure flow of chi. She had never felt this purity before, but because it had roughly four times the effect of the best chi she could make, in the high thirties of percent, she estimated that it was twice that level, probably 70-80% pure.

  Shen thought about what could be causing it to spontaneously lower the chi purity, and after a minute or so she realized that she had seen this effect before. She checked the Water chi line just to make sure, and upon seeing that it had only lost a few percent of its purity, knew her explanation was correct.

  Shen returned to Master Xing. “I believe I have figured out the problem.” she said with another bow.

  “And what would that be?”

  “To put it simply, the repair material is too low quality.”

  “I thought you had compensated for that.” said Ling Tso. “Didn’t you make the lines deeper in the new area so that the larger amount of material meant that resistance didn’t weaken the effect?”

  “Yes, Master. That is the same method the White Jade Road uses to carry all of the chi into the city. At the time, however, I failed to realize that would only allow more chi to flow through the circuit, but wouldn’t help with the purity issue.”

  “Purity issue?” asked Master Xing.

  “Yes, Master. I noticed one time when making chi gathering bracelets that materials have a maximum purity of elemental chi that can go through them.”

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  “Like the one you are wearing?” he asked.

  “An early prototype of this bracelet, yes. I was making one out of green jade, but no matter how good of a job I did when crafting the array, it couldn’t produce chi above 10.5% or so. At the time I assumed that I was simply making a mistake that I didn’t know about and forgot about it. When looking at the repairs, though, I was reminded of it.” Shen pointed to the repairs. “The Earth material used is Middle Nascent in quality, the Fire material is Late Nascent, and the Water material is Initial Immortal grade. The Earth material is lowering the quality of the chi that passes through it by around 20%, the Fire by around 10%, and the water by around 2 or 3%, the same order of the quality.”

  Master Xing scratched his chin. “Then it was our inability to find the proper materials which caused this problem.” He nodded his head. “Very well, then, how do you propose we fix the issue?”

  Shen thought for a minute. “If we lower the purity of the incoming chi to around 75%, it should mean that the stress is no longer occurring. It will slightly weaken the barrier, but we can compensate for that by using more chi.”

  “How would you do that?” asked Ling Tso.

  “At the training field I lowered the 10.5% purity chi to another level by splitting off some of the chi, neutralizing the stream, and combining the two. That probably won’t work here because the material for the second line will only be nascent quality, and won’t be able to handle the initial purity, but I can feed a small amount of its Overcoming element into each stream. This should quickly ruin the quality of the chi. I could also feed it neutral chi, but that would require a large number of high or above quality spirit stones. It would be able to be made with more common materials, though.”

  Master Chen thought for a few seconds before holding out his hand. In his palm were three crystals that were so clear that Shen could barely tell they were there. “These are Immortal grade spirit stones. I used to practice by making them a few hundred years ago, and happen to have a few left. Would these work?”

  Shen didn’t want to touch them, as they seemed far too valuable, but, Master Xing placed one in her hand. The rating of Spirit stones went from Dust, to Petty, to Low, to Medium, to High, to Exquisite, to Immortal. Each of those roughly corresponded to a cultivation level. Dust was what Cleansing phase students learned to make in many sects which used Neutral chi, and was something Teacher had taught her to make when she joined. There were also Cleansing level techniques to condense that dust into a Petty level spirit stone, what was the standard currency of the cultivation world, by removing things like air, sand, and water which made up the majority of the dust. At Gathering one could learn a technique which can turn Petty stones into Low grade stones or, once mastered, Low grand into Medium grade. At Foundation there was a comparable technique that converted Medium grade to High, and at Nascent there was one which turned High grade into Exquisite grade. The Immortal ranked technique could turn Exquisite grade spirit stones into Immortal grade stones, pure condensed neutral chi that corresponded to the transparent elemental crystals, which were almost pure elemental chi. Though each stage only purified the stones by a factor of five, the rarity of Immortal and Nascent ranked cultivators meant that Exquisite and Immortal grade stones were far rarer than the others, and therefore worth far more than the multiplication would suggest.

  The stone which Master Xing had placed in her hand contained approximately 3,125 times the chi of a normal spirit stone. Just the amount of chi she could take out of it without damaging it was almost as much chi as her body contained, as she only had enough to maybe make two medium spirit stones if she had mastered all of the techniques. “Yes, master, this should be enough, though I’m not sure how many I will need to not deplete them.”

  Master Xing pulled another ring out of his pocket, transferred some items to it, then handed her the ring. “That should be around 500 of them. Tell me if you need more.” Shen agreed to do so, and, after receiving permission to do so, went to modify the array. An hour later the quality of all five streams were an equal 78%, having used all but a few of the crystals. That caused the barrier itself to only be around 67% as efficient at blocking damage as it was before, but the stress on the formation was gone.

  Shen did discover one problem her modification had caused. Some of the effects which made this an immortal formation required extremely high purity to function properly. Without that high purity, most of those sections of the formation were no longer active. Shen had never heard of that occurring with a technique. Usually, higher purity merely made the effect exponentially stronger, though she had to admit that she didn’t have much experience using low purity chi with her formations, as she usually gave them far purer chi than they required. It could also be a peculiarity of this particular barrier. The Jade Slip she had been allowed to view about the barrier didn’t include a reference to Five Elements Barrier technique, so it was possible that this barrier wasn’t based on a technique. Instead, it could be a formation that was only developed as a formation, which exploited the unique properties of high purity elemental chi to produce some of the effects.

  Shen explained her findings to Master Xing, and He stroked his beard. “You were able to tell that much from the way the barrier performed? Most interesting.” He nodded. “As far as I know, you are correct. There is no Five Elements Barrier technique. The properties of extremely high purity elemental chi are needed to make the different effects synergize properly, and I am not even sure if Ascended beings can produce chi pure enough without a formation aiding them. It is more like a puppet, where there are properties which cannot be translated into the form of a technique.” He thought for a few more seconds. “So, I assume this means that the barrier is no longer an Immortal level barrier?”

  Shen nodded. “Yes, Master. The barrier is now technically a False Immortal barrier. While it has the raw power of an Immortal barrier, it can no longer ignore Nascent level attacks. That means that, while it would be difficult to do so, it is possible for the demons to put a hole in the barrier with enough concentrated attacks.”

  Master Xing nodded. “In that case, there are preparations which must be made.” He took a piece of nascent level Flame Steel, about the size of two fingers, from his ring as well as a few dozen pieces of Late and Peak Foundation materials, many with elemental affinities. He handed them to Shen. “Here is your payment for this work. Please use them to keep the enemy at bay and protect the sect for as long as you can. I must go and prepare, in case they enter the city.” With that he turned and left.

  Shen stared at the metal in her hands. With this much material she can make some very high quality relics. In fact, while she had hoped for some before, she didn’t know of any effects that can fully take advantage of the Nascent material. She decided that she would do what she could with the Foundation level materials, but as it would be years before she reached Nascent, there was nothing she could make which wouldn’t waste it.

  “Master Ling.” she said, and when he looked at her she held out the material to him. “As I will not reach the Nascent Soul realm for several years, I have no use for this material. I ask that you take it and make use of it, as you are in the middle Nascent realm and can therefore properly use it.”

  He looked at it and thought for a few seconds. “In that case, I shall thank you by making you a relic with it.” He took the metal and bowed. “Perhaps, even should this old man die in the attack, he will still be able to aid you.” Shen was about to tell him that he didn’t need to do that, but he had already turned to leave.

  Shen was escorted out of the inner city. One of the Elders had given her a jade slip which would allow her to pass through the gate between the Inner and Outer city, and exempt her from the need to help in the defenses, though she could if she wanted. Essentially, she was a special case within the fight, and could now spend her time creating things which aided her and the city rather than having to fight like the others, then use her rest time to try and help as much as she could.

  Shen returned to her shop and, while all of her supplies had been taken away already when she joined the battle, she could make use of the forge. She knew that this material could be used for something more than just making nice weapons. She had seen how important chi, and high purity chi at that, could be, but didn’t yet know what to do with the material. Whatever it was, it would need to be something big.

  She poured over the books she had, looking for some sort of solution. If she had a better Essence, she could make a better cell, but she didn’t. What about the idea she had this morning, using spirit stones to produce a large amount of fairly pure chi of a specific element? That at least showed promise. With these materials she wouldn’t start running into the purity issues she had seen in the sect’s barrier array, and could get the purity up to above thirty percent. A thirty percent purity would make the healing 36 times as efficient as the five percent chi the cells contained. Maybe that is what she could do with this material.

  She brought out a white jade tile and started to carve it. Perhaps if she did the best job she could, she could make something that high quality. When she was done carving the channels for the formation, she pulled out a bit of Peak Foundation Azure Platinum and started making it.

  This formation would use many things she had learned recently. Her formations on the walls had taught her how to have a formation update its own imbuement. Her experiments with the chi cells had taught her to use an existing amount of chi as a template to imbue more chi. She had made several devices which could purify their chi by sorting the properties to look for new properties in an element, and according to what Teacher had taught her, different materials of the same element might have different rare effects. So what if she combined all of them?

  At the beginning the imbued chi would be the water chi inside her. It was created by having the different elements refine each other, so it should have a good amount of potential for improvement. Then she split off some of that chi and had a tiny stream from all of the small bits of materials with water affinity merge with it, combining their properties in a way that would likely preserve the tiny bits of extra properties.

  When she was finished with the water one, she made one of those devices for each of the elements and, much like her first device, these devices were combined so that they could purify each other. With each round of purification, the new pattern was sent into the inbuement section, further improving it so that the chi gathered in the next step would slightly more pure.

  She used every material she had with an elemental affinity from the five elements in the formations, and when she was done she put them together. The five elements began feeding into each other and slowly improving the chi in the middle, a mixture of all five.

  Shen stored her tools and laid down on the ground. Unknown to her, the creation of this master piece had taken three days of intense concentration, and her brain was barely able to continue functioning. She wanted to do something with the chi once it was purified, but as tired as she was, she couldn’t do so right now. She closed her eyes and let the formation work. She just needed a short nap before she found something to do with it.

  ap before she found something to do with it.