The Elder in charge of the training fields in the outer city was let into the office by the secretary, a Late Nascent Soul Elder still in the prime of her life at only seventy three years old, though appearing to only be thirty two. “So, I’m told that you have something special for me?” asked the bearded man behind the desk. He was by far the oldest one here, at over five hundred and eighty years old, reaching that point only because he had managed to reach Immortal over five hundred years ago.
“Yes, Master Xing.” the Elder said, then bowed and handed a small object to the secretary, who walked over to the desk and handed it to the sect leader.
“This is a middle Foundation Earth beast core.” said Master Xing. “Rare enough to be sought after, but not that impressive. I have cores from many Nascent Soul beasts in my collection, and even an Immortal, though it isn’t Earth.”
“The core itself isn’t what is important, Master. It is what’s inside.”
Master Xing sent his senses into the core and noticed a pebble of Earth chi inside. “Thirty point seven percent. Many of the Elders can purify Earth chi to such a degree, and their isn’t much of it. Why should I be impressed?”
“Because that wasn’t refined by an Elder, Master, or even an Inner Disciple, but by an Outer Disciple.”
“An Outer Disciple?” he asked in surprise. “Are you certain?”
“Yes, Master. One of the field masters gave it to me. He says that a fourteen year old girl spent all night refining that with only a gathering formation to feed her chi, and when she finished she gave it to him and left, apparently oblivious to how important of an accomplishment that was. He, however, did realize it, and emptied the 11% chi from his beast core necklace before storing it there.”
“Impressive. Even if it took her all night, I was not able to reach such purity until I was Nascent Soul and twenty five years old. Even now I can barely manage 42% with a night of work. Do we know which girl it was?”
“Yes master. Apparently she has several minor accomplishments in the outer city, such as creating a special formation in one of the training fields which helps the disciples train faster, and adding defensive formations to the armor of several guards. She also received special dispensation to start a business with another outer disciple, as they found a valuable resource which the sect could use and were already selling it to the Caravan. By granting them special permission the sect was able to sign a contract which guarantees our own supply.”
“The water blossoms? I had heard a rumor that two outer disciples were harvesting them and selling them to us. She seems to have quite the gift for business.” Master Xing scratched his beard. “I want someone to monitor her. If she really did produce this Earth Chi without the use of purifying formations, she is at least a once a century talent with Earth chi, and we can’t afford to lose her. We need to make sure that she remains a part of this sect, even if we have to bribe her.”
“Master,” the Elder said, “I feel I must inform you of a slight mistake in your statement. She is not talented with Earth chi. From what I have heard about her from the field master, last night she returned to the field and did the same thing, but with fire, making it even purer. I believe her main affinity is with Fire and that Earth is merely an element she is competent with.”
“If that’s true, and she can do this without a strong affinity for the element,” Master Xing motioned at the beast core, “Then it is even more important that we keep her here.”
The Elder nodded and, as the conversation was over, bowed and left the office.
--
For the next two days Shen helped haul vinegar and empty jars up to Fisher, then went out with Ponma to gather the superior Blossoms. They had actually managed to bring in more than the Sect wanted for the moment, as the market wasn’t large enough for that many Late and Peak quality blossoms to be sold, so every night more were put on shelves at the rear of the warehouse, waiting for a day that they might be needed.
Every night Shen went to the training field and used the array there, working on one of the other elements. The only thing that changed about the field was that it now had a field master at night, likely because it had grown more popular thanks to her temporary formation. On those two nights she practiced purifying Metal and Wood. While she had learned more about every element while purifying the others, the one she worked on would always receive more training, and by the end of the night Water had solidified its position as her worst element.
It started raining on the last night, but Shen didn’t want to stop and couldn’t spare the attention for a proper barrier, so she relied on the Wall dome above her to keep the rain off of her as she finished purifying the Wood chi.
When she returned to work she noticed that all three of the new employees were working on a low grade elemental flying sword. It had stopped raining about fifteen minutes earlier and Shen didn’t think it would start again for a few days, so she went to Master Chen’s office. “Hey, boss. Do you mind if I borrow Timp and the three new people?”
“You want to leave me alone here with Breen?” he asked.
“That wasn’t my goal, though I guess it would be a result of doing that. Actually, I figured I’d show them how to do the special field formations, as the customer asked for them a while ago.”
“We’re behind on all of the special orders. I’ve actually been making some of the armor for you, as some of the orders are more than fifteen days old.”
“Oh, I didn’t think about that. What if we do the special field formations in the mornings, then come back after lunch where I do the armor? At least two sets per day until I’ve caught up?”
Master Chen sighed. “Fine. But only because those formations are super popular and have a higher profit margin than the armor. If they can be trained to do them, that would bring in a lot more stones.” Shen figured out how many stones the supplies would be for each field, and Chen gave her enough to buy what she needed, having not spent much over the last few days just in case he needed the money. They needed three extra paint brushes and handles along with two more buckets, but those were basically one time expenses, assuming people cleaned out their brushes properly.
When they got to the field Shen had been using for practice she greeted the woman on duty and informed her why they were there. She put up the sign over the entrance to keep people out, and Shen showed the plans for the array to the others. She had slightly modified it to purify the elements to some degree and make them available separately to the user, and had the other four each choose their best element from the list. Larl picked Water, Don picked Earth, Lin picked Fire, Timp picked his second best element Wood, and Shen took Metal. After Shen used a bit of Hydrokinesis to dry the field and Geokinesis to remove what was left of the chalk, they laid out the basic circle of the array in chalk and each of them drew their element’s purification formation on the circle. These formations imbued the chi with a specific purity of a specific element, rather than purifying the chi that was gathered, so they were more efficient than the alternative. Shen also added the main gathering array to the center of the formation so that their arrays would have something to amplify.
Once everyone was finished, Shen double-checked each of their work, correcting a small mistake in both Timp and Lin’s formations, then showed them how to mix the paint. Once it was ready, everyone took their brushes and started painting in their symbols. While they shared buckets Shen took one for herself and painted both the main array and the Metal symbol.
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Once everyone was done, Shen gave them a copy of the feeder formation and each of them drew three of them on the ground, as this field had fifteen spots to stand, then checked them for errors. As no one had made any mistakes, they painted over the symbols, then connected each of the feeder formations to the outside circle of the main formation.
When they connected the formations they could feel chi entering the feeder formations, then start to stabilize. The main array was now dry enough to start working, but not dry enough to work at full power. They couldn’t use it until it was completely dry, however, as having chi run through it could cause the paint to dry unevenly and cause problems, such as the Water formation taking longer to dry, the Fire formation drying too quickly, and the Earth formation hardening but not drying.
As it was now almost time for Middle Meal, they cleaned their brushes and buckets, told the field master not to let anyone use it until it was completely dry, and went to eat, returning to the shop when they finished.
Once they finished eating they returned to the shop where Shen managed to complete the formations on two more sets of armor before they closed. This time, however, Shen felt that the main thing restricting the performance of the barrier was the material. This was similar to why she improved the quality of the jade she was using on the bracelets as she increased their performance, as lower quality materials limited how good you could make the relic. In this case the leather and steel wasn’t a good enough material, so the higher quality work only slightly improved the performance. If she wanted to make better armor, she would need to find better materials for the leatherworkers and smiths. Though, even with the poor materials the armor, which would normally only have a middle Gathering barrier effect, now had a Peak Gathering effect due to the improved efficiency.
She took three of the green jade bracelets home so that she could make them for Breen, Timp, and Master Chen, like she promised. After Last Meal she made the three bracelets, taking thirty minutes each instead of the twenty it would normally take her, as she wanted to make them as good as possible. She realized when she made them that, while all of the elements improved in quality, Water had barely improved, but all of the others had made large improvements. Still, with the limit of the material, she was only able to make around 9% balanced chi to inject into the user in larger quantities than before, as green jade couldn’t handle the much higher purity of four of the elements and therefore contaminated it. Still, as the Water chi was the only chi below 9% purity, the higher purity meant that they were able to more easily improve the water chi, allowing the bracelet to use little chi to do so and therefore give more to the wearer.
She wasn’t sure how to create a formation to mimic her now-preferred method of chi purification, as she didn’t have a good way of selecting bits of chi for being closer to certain elements, so she decided to practice a bit more with it, hoping that the idea of how to do so would come to her as she practiced the technique. She went to the field where they painted the formation earlier today and went inside. There was a field master on duty, as well as two people using it for practice, so she checked to verify that the paint was dry then talked to the field master. “Any issues with the formation so far?” she asked.
“Actually, I did have one complaint.” said the man in charge. “The Metal is too pure.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Isn’t higher purity better?”
“Not really.” he said. “Most of the chis are between four and five percent pure, what you would expect from the middle Cleansing phase, so everyone can handle it. Wood is about 6%, so peak Cleansing or initial Gathering. Most people in the outer sect can handle it. Then there’s the Metal chi, which is at 9.2%. That is initial Nascent levels of purity. Most people can’t handle it, so when they try to use Metal techniques, it hurts them to use the array’s chi.”
“They can easily get used to it.” she said, holding out her bracelet. “This has my internal chi at 10.5% in all elements, and I got used to it after a few days.”
“Sure, they can, but most people can’t use it as it is. They came here expecting the purities to be low enough to be useful, but have to either avoid or treat Metal differently. After all, this is the Outer City training field, so only Outer disciples tend to use it.”
Shen nodded. It was essentially doing too good of a job, so the people were having trouble using it. Like giving the best tools to a novice, they can’t properly use them and the tools may even hinder their training. “In that case, for now, I’ll lower the metal to 6%. That should make the people better able to use it.” The man nodded and, after notifying the two that were practicing what she was going to do, she went to fix it. As neither of them were going to practice with metal due to the purity issue, she could start immediately.
She quickly blocked the chi leaving the metal purification symbol by placing a barrier in the middle of the line and injected Fire into it to destroy the Metal chi which enforced the effect of the symbol. She didn’t have to do so long before the quality of the Metal chi it produced dropped drastically. When it reached 6.1% she stopped adding Fire chi and the drop slowed down, eventually stopping at 5.9% when the paint cooled down. She then removed the chi barrier she put in the line and let the chi flow again. After letting it flow for a few seconds she told the two that were practicing that the metal should be more to their liking now. One of them pulled out a throwing knife and drew some of the chi from the formation into it. They looked like they were able to control it properly now, so Shen wasn’t surprised when the teen used the chi to guide the knife to the center of the target, then retrieve it for another throw.
Now that it was adjusted she sat down on one of the feeder formations and started drawing in the chi, duplicating what she did last night, but this time with water. Now that she had an unlimited supply of all the elements at a descent purity she made much quicker progress than normal, and was able to get the water to above thirty percent in a matter of hours. She wanted to keep going, as she knew she could do better, but throughout the exercise she had been distracted multiple times but the issue of the people here not liking higher percentage elemental chi. While she would have welcomed it, as it helped her understanding and could be used to improve her meridians and, at lower levels, improve her cultivation level, for some reason most people didn’t want such high purity chi. If only she could give them a choice.
Shen opened her eyes and dropped the barrier before throwing the fist sized Water ball in her hand at the target, blowing some of the wood off of it from the pressure. There was a way she could do that, and it would help with her issue with the bracelets as well. All she needed to do was mix the purer chi with neutral chi to lower the purity. In the field version she could even let the user adjust the amount somehow, changing the purity to full purity with no neutral added, or lower purity with more chi added. She would have to make sure that all of the gathering arrays for the various elements were creating it at the same purity, otherwise the user would have to adjust it between every element, but that could be adjusted after the formations were created, and it would only require a minor change to the feeder formation to mix the five elements to create neutral chi, then inject it into the pure stream.
She left the field around midnight, going home to draw out the new plan before going to bed. The next morning she swung by a carpenters to purchase several wooden staffs before heading in. Ideally these would be made out of jade, not wood, but as long as they conducted chi that didn’t really matter.
Once she was at work she handed out the three bracelets and showed the other four that worked on the formation the new design. Both the main Array and the feeder formations had an outer ring added to them, though the feeder formation had a break in the line. There were small symbols between the inner and outer rings of the main array, which would mix all of the elements together to make neutral chi, then the chi was fed into the outer ring, which would naturally reach the same pressure as the inner ring of separated elements. This would be connected to the outer ring of the feeder formation, and, by using a chi conductive material to connect the inner and outer rings at different locations, a different amount of neutral chi would be injected into the formation along with the elemental chi, thus letting a user select the purity they wanted by simply moving the conductive material.
Larl suggested a minor change. The mixing formation didn’t guarantee that the chi was perfectly neutral, and would fail if the chi became too imbalanced, such as if most of the people only practiced with a single element. Furthermore, it was very complex and more difficult for them to understand. So, instead, she suggested that they replace the symbol with the much simpler to draw and understand Neutralization symbol, which turned all elemental chi into neutral chi. That way, no matter what the mix of elements was in the main formation, the outer ring would always be purely neutral.
Shen agreed and, after changing the plan and, along with Timp, learning the new symbol, they went to the store to buy more supplies and then to the new field to add the formation. While they had slightly more work than the day before, they had done most of it before, so they finished at about the same time. Shen informed the Field Master that she would come by that night to adjust the formation and teach them to use it once it dried, and they cleaned up before going to eat.
After eating Shen took out the wooden staffs she had bought and cut them into quarters so that they were about as long as her forearm, then mixed up a little of the formation paint and painted all of the sticks, creating sixteen of them, which she propped up behind the shop to dry. The formation they made today also had fifteen feeder formations, like the last one, so they would get an extra one.
As she worked on the two sets of armor, going a bit faster than normal, as slightly poorer work would barely effect the performance, she thought about the rings and what else could help the guards. Could she make some kind of body cultivation ring? Maybe, but at the size of the ring it would only be able to work on one part of the body at a time, so that wasn’t the best unless they wanted to wear multiple rings for multiple body parts. She needed something which would improve their performance no matter what their cultivation level. She had considered making rings which would grow additional minor meridians, but that was only really useful if they were in the Cleansing stage, as your body wouldn’t really use any that were created after one advanced to Gathering, as the breakthrough stabilized the body below that point.
She thought about what training they did outside of that and had an idea. When she finished the armor about an hour before closing, rather than start on another set of armor she grabbed several rings and started carving a gathering array and another technique on them. She made five of the one she thought would be best, plus one each of the Body Cultivation rings which would improve the Bones, Muscles, Tendons, Skin, and Nerves of the people, making ten rings in total. When it was time to leave she put all five of the body cultivation rings on her fingers and started feeling pain, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from functioning.
She said goodbye and went to the new Formation Field, bringing the sixteen rods with her. When she got there she went to each of the purification arrays and imbued them with her own understanding of the elements, taking her time and bringing most of them into the 10% range. She went to the water one, which was only at nine percent and fed it metal chi until it was at 10.5%, then went to the others to improve them as well.
Once she was done she pulled the sixteen rods out of her storage bag and showed the field master how to use the formation. If one laid one of the painted rods at the beginning of the outer ring, the same amount of neutral and elemental chi would enter the formation, making the purity in the feeder formation 5.25%. If one laid it at the end, very little neutral chi would enter it, putting the purity at 10%. If one didn’t use the rod, no neutral chi would be fed into the elemental chi, and they would receive 10.5% chi. This way the user could adjust the purity to a point they were comfortable with, allowing those at the lower level or those that just wanted to practice their techniques to set it low and those that wanted to improve their own purity of chi to set it to a higher purity than they possessed.
