They hauled the carts full of Water Blossoms back to town and placed them in the warehouse before heading to the cafeteria. All of the children had been paid one point per jar, or two per large jar. The children could only fill one to two jars per day, though, and a large jar usually took at least two days to fill, as the blossoms were that much rarer. Still, it was enough to keep them happy, as they couldn’t yet go out on the boats to earn points. Even many of the older children preferred it, as it paid as well as the other jobs they could choose, and was easier to do, simply being repetitive instead of difficult. While those that lived outside the towns weren’t required to work at a registered job seven out of ten days like the other outer disciples were, the fact that Shen and Ponma’s business was now officially sanctioned meant that they could work for this company and meet that requirement, should they choose to move to town.
After Last Meal Shen returned to her room. She needed to get her book on common formations and reread the sections on armor and defensive formations before she started working on Danka’s armor, just to make sure that she did the job properly. When she got to her room, however, she found Mae sitting at the desk between their two beds, reading by the light of a flickering candle. “What are you reading?” she asked Mae.
“The Basic Alchemist’s Compendium.” She responded, showing Shen the cover. “It lists several hundred ingredients and dozens of common pill formulas. The sisters told me I should memorize everything in the book, and if I could pass a test on the information they would buy me the Intermediate Compendium. It costs five hundred points.”
“Then you have a lot of memorizing to do.” Shen said, opening the lower desk drawer beside her bed. She took out her Formation book and began reading.
An hour later, however, the candle started burning out. “Oh, crap.” said Mae, pulling another candle out of the top drawer on her side and quickly trying to light it on the quickly dwindling flame of the other candle. The end of the candle’s wick got a tiny cinder on it, but the first candle went out before she managed to light it and the room went dark.
Shen held out her hand and a tiny flame about the size of a candle flame appeared in it. Mae used that to light the candle and Shen put out the hand flame. “I wish I had a better way to light the room.” said Mae. “These things cost a point each and only last a few hours.”
“I could give you a few stones to buy more.” she said, then reached for her magic bag to grab a few. When she looked down at the bag, however, she saw her book sitting on the bed beside her and had an idea. “Actually.” she said, “I have another idea”.
She reached into the top drawer on her side of the desk and pulled out her engraving kit as well as a few scrap pieces of jade tiles from when she made her first device. She held two pieces together which together were about the size as the palm of her hand and started engraving one of the basic formations from the book onto the point of one of them. Once she was finished she carved the majority of another, much larger, symbol on the two combined pieces, then separated them to finish the symbol’s halves and connected the large symbol to the smaller. Once she was done she handed the two pieces to Mae. “Put the two halves together.” she said.
Mae did so and over the next few seconds the first symbol started to glow until it was about twice as bright as a candle without flickering. “Wow. I didn’t know there was a formation for lighting.”
Shen smiled. “It’s called the Chi Light formation. I just connected it to a larger Chi Gathering array than I used on my bracelets.”
Mae then thought about something. “I wonder if this could be used to grow plants underground?” she asked. “I know that spirit plants can grow anywhere that the chi is dense enough, but since most plants turn yellow without enough light, and the leaves are the needed part of many magical plants, I’ll need a bright light to do that.”
Shen shrugged. “Sure, I can easily make it brighter.” She pulled out a spirit stone and sat it on the gathering array. Immediately the light got far too bright to look at, so Shen removed the stone and put it back in her bag. “That could probably keep it going all day for over a week. You could then put spirit stones or their dust in the pots with the plants to give them plenty of chi to grow. I just don’t know if that kind of light will work. There is another formation called ‘Daylight Formation’ which is supposed to make fake sunlight. It was specifically designed to grow plants in dark places.”
Mae nodded. “Won’t that spirit stone be worth less than a normal one, now that you used some of its energy?”
Shen shook her head. “What I used was less than your hair loss if I took a single hair from your head. Besides, spirit stones have a useful property. They always have about the same amount of energy as one another. A ‘stone’ is actually a standard unit of chi in formations and relics because of that. As long as you get within a few percent of the correct amount crystallized together, the crystal will stabilize and either gain or lose chi in order to balance its energy out at the standard level. The one I used will just collect a bit from the environment and fix itself.”
Mae had a thoughtful look on her face. “I didn’t know that,” she said. With that they both continued to read their books and, when both of them started to get sleepy, they agreed to call it a night.
The next day Shen got up and hurriedly took a bath before eating and flying to Fisher. Today they had to meet with the fishermen to see if they were willing to bring the plants in for the Water Blossom business. From what Shen had seen, the lake was more overgrown than usual, but the fishermen only bothered clearing out what got in their way, resulting in the areas more than two tenths to a quarter of a li from the dock having more of the fast growing plant than they should. While this helped feed the fish, who ate their roots, it meant that the fishermen were unable to get to any of the fishing spots deeper in the lake.
Upon arriving she found that seven men and three women had gathered near the docks. They were all wearing fishing gear, but it didn’t look like any of them had been fishing yet as they were all dry. “Hello.” she said upon landing, before making the sword float into her hand and tucking it back in the sash on her waist. “My name is Shen. I work with Ponma in the Water Blossom business.”
“My son works for you then.” said one man.
“As do my two youngest.” said a woman. “They say you’re a fair boss, but that they don’t see you around much.”
“Yes, well, I actually work in the town making talismans and relics, so I haven’t had much time to actually help with this business. Now, though, I should work here about half the time.”
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The adults nodded. “In that case,” one of the men said, “I’d like to skip ahead to what actually matters. How much are you paying? I got a family to support, so if I can’t earn as much doing this as fishing, I can’t afford to do it.” The others nodded in agreement.
Based on how much they had collected yesterday, you could haul back about two to two and a half jars full of flowers per boat load. So, while it would cost the business more to pay people to bring the blossoms in, it would be worth it, as it would drastically increase how many they could produce.
The math for the product was pretty simple. One jar of water blossoms required about half a jar of vinegar and an empty jar. Vinegar was five points per jar, and a jar by itself was one point, so that was three points per jar, as they could use the vinegar jar with the second batch. Then they paid the kids one point per jar as well, bringing the cost up to four points per jar. “One point per trip.” she said. If she offered the adults one point per trip, assuming they got two jars worth of blossoms each trip, that would put the cost at four and a half points per jar. The company would barely make any money if they sold the flowers to the sect for five points, but as Ponma had managed to negotiate for a bit more they would actually get six and a quarter per jar.
The adults started thinking and talking among themselves. Each trip out would take a little less than an hour. That meant that they could do maybe ten per day. Which, as it took two people to haul in the nets, meant five points per day. Or about what a job in the town would pay for someone just starting out, or at least an adult. “What about the fish?” one man asked Shen. “We used to go for fish and end up with a lot of weeds in our nets, so we would just throw them out of the lake. Now that we are going for weeds, we’ll probably end up with fish in the nets too.”
“Oh, you would keep them.” Shen said. “I don’t have any need for fish. I only ask that you bring in enough buds for at least two jars full each time you come back. Other than that, you can bring in as many fish as you want to.”
They talked for a few more minutes before telling Shen what they had decided. While they would actually make slightly more points fishing, the spots near the docks were drying up, so they needed to go out further. This meant that they would have to clear out the weeds to do that. While doing that, they would no doubt bring up many fish that were in the roots of the plants, and because they were able to keep those fish, they were actually making roughly the same amount. She would have to pay them more if they had to go out further to collect them, perhaps even guaranteeing them five points each per day, plus the fish, if she wanted them to go out too far, but for now they would do it.
She asked that they only bring in as many as the kids can process, as there was no need to waste them and that helped guarantee that the plants grew closer to the docks, then shook hands. After that Shen went to tell Ponma about the decision and waited for the first load of blossoms to come in. Just as the boats started returning the children came out to the pile and Shen spent the rest of the day, along with Ponma and the other children, pickling Water Blossoms.
This continued for the next three days, at which point she returned to work. At night she studied her book and was now certain that she could make a good quality array on metal armor to protect the wearer, though how much protection it provided wasn’t something she was certain of.
When she got to work she informed Master Chen of her idea for further expanding the business. They could make relic armor, or at least improve the armor of the guards. At first he wasn’t very enthusiastic about adding another service to their shop, but she pulled out her book and showed him a few pages she had marked. Each one included formations that could be added to armor to make it better in some way. Though none were that powerful, they were all useful.
The first was the basic protection formation which she had been studying. It was easy to add to armor and had an expanded version for each realm, though one needed to be at least in the realm of the formation to create it, as it required an understanding of what it was doing to properly work. Next were ways to add elemental chi to the protective formation, letting it protect more against specific elements and less against others. The book hinted that there were special formations which added other elemental effects, but that would be in the Intermediate version of the book. Then there were utility formations, like the Cleansing realm Self-Cleaning formation, the Gathering realm Recharge formation, which was like Shen’s bracelets and could be made to work with elemental chi, and the Foundation realm Self Repair formation, which required that the engraver understand the structure of the object, so that it could be restored to that state. There were also various health type formations, like lessening pain or stopping bleeding, but the true healing ones were in the Intermediate book as well.
Shen then informed Master Chen about Danka’s request for her to improve his armor. She suggested that she be allowed to work on it here, and that it could be used as a demonstration piece to show the other guards, who would be their biggest clients if he agreed to the idea. He asked for time to think about it, so Shen stored her book, grabbed a sword from the rack, and started making a slightly different sword. This time she would try making an uncommon Lightning sword. While it could be powered directly from Lightning chi, most people didn’t know how to produce lightning chi nor had any inside their dantian. For that reason she had taken an hour off of reading the book last night to build a test device. The formation on it was a version of the Fire to Lightning technique and, while she was certain that it wasn’t the best performing formation, it did work reasonably well. So, should the person be unable to produce Lightning chi, this would allow them to power it from almost twice the amount of Fire chi.
An hour later she was finished, so she held it in her hand and fed a tiny bit of Lightning chi into it. The blade sparked a few times before using up the chi. She tried again, feeding far more into it, and the blade sparked much more, with small arcs of lightning jumping up and down the blade. When used in combat it would discharge into the target, stunning or burning them. As for its use as a flying sword, it only really sped up during storms. Though it sped up slightly any time there was lightning nearby, even in a storm cloud overhead, if one were to feed it more chi at such a time it could reach speeds far greater than even the burst speeds of a Fire flying sword. Some had attempted to wrap lightning around the blade or use other lightning powers to artificially create such conditions, but unless the power altered the weather the attempt always failed. For that reason Lightning swords were considered far less useful and therefore only used in rare circumstances, like when one wanted to disorient their opponent with the stun effect or when a person had a natural strong affinity with Lightning.
When she was done she went to put it on the rack but Master Chen asked to see it. He looked at the blade, inspecting the sword, and she informed him that he could power it with Fire chi if he wanted, but it would be less efficient. He just smiled and the blade lit up with massive arcs jumping across it. When spots on the blade started to glow slightly from the heat of the discharges, he backed off on the amount of chi he was feeding it. “I actually learned the Metal to Lightning ability when I was an Outer Disciple, as I have an affinity for Metal chi and was considering becoming a Smith.” He removed the Lightning chi and the blade returned to normal. “I damaged this blade slightly from overheating it with my lightning, so you can have it.” he said, handing her the blade. “Good job, though.”
She took the blade and thanked him for it before putting it in her bag. While she didn’t know much about smithing, she did know that they used Fire chi to heat the blades, then cooled them with Water chi to do something called ‘tempering’, which let the blade spring back better and hold a better edge. By heating the blade with his Lightning chi, Master Chen had damaged that tempering, and the blade would need to be retempered to be salable. That, however, would remove the chi from the formation, making it necessary to imbue the formation with chi once again. Still, the blade wasn’t worthless, especially if one only wished to use it to fly. It would merely break faster than a comparable sword if used in combat.
“I’ve given your idea some thought.” he continued. “If you will give me a few days to practice the new symbols, and make sure you can make the defensive and self cleaning ones yourself, I will let you imbue your friend’s armor. Furthermore, as this was your idea, you will earn an extra contribution point for each item you personally imbue. I can’t pay you royalties on the ones I make, but if you want I can make imbuing armor your full time job here, and hire someone else to work on swords and talismans, as I was planning on hiring additional help anyway.”
Shen agreed and was handed a scroll on the proper method to engraving leather, as it had some unique properties which metal, wood, and jade didn’t have, such as its flexibility. While she had to keep making swords for the rest of the day, and was even allowed to imbue one of the medium quality swords that only Master Chen was previously allowed to work with, she was given several pieces of scrap leather to take home and practice on. She practiced on them that night and within a few hours she was able to work with the material just as well as she could with the others, even making a few pieces of glowing leather for practice. These were always on, but because the cheap leather she had been given was an inferior material to even green jade the light was dimmer, even being dimmer than a candle. They could be used continuously, however, so they could pull them out any time they wanted light and could use several of them if they wanted to read.
The next morning she gave the two boys one of the scraps to use as a reading light, having left a few in her room for her and Mae, and took the best of them to work with her to show to Master Chen. He was interested in the design and, after cutting them into a better shape and adding a leather strap, hung them up in the shop to be sold for one stone or five points, with Shen keeping all of the money. While he could have made a slight bit of money on the artificial lights, he had decided that their true value lay in drawing in new customers who would be interested in what relics could do.
