The next morning she decided to go into work and work on one of the special order suits of armor. This one was from an Inner Disciple who wanted the same formation as the mercenary. Because they were an Inner Disciple, she knew that they would almost certainly be Foundation stage, and therefore didn’t need the compression circuit. That meant that she could remove it and use the room to make the gathering array bigger, so they could feed chi into the formation more quickly and with less resistance. As the disciple had offered to pay sixty stones for the work instead of the stated fifty five in order to get put at the front of the line, she also used the more elaborate formations to improve the efficiency. She set the emergency cut off at the same point as the last one, the peak of Cleansing, only this customer would be able to fall below Foundation and would have the barrier follow their chi level once it did.
She tested it to find that it used less than half as much chi as the first set, but produced a barrier that was just as strong. She added the self-cleaning formation to it as a separate circuit as an added bonus and put it in a box for delivery.
Once she was done she informed Master Chen that she needed to test something she had made and might be late returning from her meal, then went to the training field. Once she got there she notified both sets of children and went to where she had stood yesterday. “Ok, same deal as yesterday, only I have a totally new shield I want to try out.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the shield. “In this case, a physical shield that I made last night. All of you can work together, but try to only hit the shield, not me.” Just to be safe, she would be keeping her own Dragon Scales up as well, but didn’t tell them that.
Once she had knelt down behind the shield, she asked them to begin and over sixty children launched their attacks almost simultaneously. About ten percent of the attacks missed her and hit the ground, but thankfully none of them hit her directly. Then a massive ball of Earth chi hit the shield and pushed her backwards slightly, though it didn’t actually injure her. Obviously Herm had tried his best again.
Once she was sure the attacks had stopped she stood up and examined the shield. It had taken no damage, so she called over to the supervisors. “Hey, if you guys want to try too, you can. It was designed to be Middle Foundation in strength, so it should be able to block your attacks.” The field master and the two instructors looked at each other, then readied attacks.
Shen knelt behind her shield and a few seconds later she started to feel the impact of several attacks hitting her shield. Her arm went numb from the impacts, but she couldn’t let her arm move out of place or she would be hit. After a minute of bombardment the last of the attacks came in, a fireball that pushed her into the wall behind the mannequin.
She stood up and rubbed her arm and, when the feeling returned, she examined the shield. The only damage she could see was a slight bit of discoloration on the metal rim, likely caused by a fire spell heating it up followed by a water spell rapidly cooling it.
She walked to where everyone was waiting and thanked them for their help, then gave each of the children a silver coin for helping and the three instructors a gold coin each. Even in total it was worth less than two stones, but the kids seemed to appreciate it, even if it wouldn’t be useful until Caravan day.
Shen returned to the shop and told Master Chen about the results. After a few questions he agreed to let her sell it here in exchange for splitting the sale price, as she had used his shield. She had enough scrap leather to make another two or three shields, but they weren’t sure what they should charge for the shield, so they decided to let the customer make the offer.
“One thing I don’t understand,” said Timp, “is why you were able to make a Foundation level relic when you are peak Gathering. I thought you had to be the same realm as the formation.”
“That’s a common misunderstanding.” she replied. “You have to have the understanding to produce the effect you want the formation to produce, but technically if I advanced to Foundation, learned a Foundation shield spell, then reset my cultivation I could still make Foundation level shield formations. I just couldn’t improve them any further through understanding because I would lose the extra senses I gained at Foundation.”
“But you’ve never been Foundation, right? You’re still an Outer Disciple?”
“Right, but the shield is a special case. Many, but not all, spirit beast or plant parts let you use their bloodline abilities if you provide them with chi. And because it’s a bloodline ability it will improve up to a certain point even if the creature it was taken from was never at that realm. This shield was made from the skin of a giant snake with a Dragon bloodline, and it had the Dragon Scales bloodline ability strongly enough that it could produce a Foundation quality barrier even though the snake was late Gathering.”
After a few more questions, he nodded and returned to his work. He wasn’t bad at making flying swords now, but he wasn’t good enough to make the medium grade ones yet. Shen was barely qualified to do so, in her opinion, and she was far better than him. They simply had too much to do and not enough skilled people to do it. If only they could get more employees. But that wouldn’t help, as there weren’t enough skilled relic crafters in the town. The few experienced ones tended to only make magic bags, storage rings, and flying swords, as they were common even before the rule change. If they wanted one they would have to recruit from a nearby sect or city. The other sects would likely get annoyed, as they would see it as trying to steal their members, but there were enough commoners in the nearby city-states and nations that were competent at relic crafting that they might be able to recruit one. Some of them were even mortals, people who couldn’t use chi, as one could use a charging formation to provide the chi and the person could simply guide it. This only tended to work on the most basic Cleansing stage items, though, as without the experience with gathering chi one couldn’t create arrays.
She completed another two sets of armor with the basic defensive formation before it was time to close and presented the idea of hiring from another city to Master Chen before leaving. He wasn’t sure if that would be possible, but said that he would think about it.
That night Shen started reading the Complete Dragon Technique guide. She found many techniques that were early forms of some of the techniques she had already learned, like the techniques to guide chi through muscles to increase strength and how to guide chi through your bones to increase their strength. These two would have been part of the basis for body cultivation. It also had some interesting ideas that she hadn’t come across yet. One of the most shocking was a passage on the nature of cultivation.
“Within the Laws of Reality, what some call the Heavenly Dao, there is no right or wrong. Morality is a convention of living, thinking beings, not an immutable fact of reality, and therefore reality makes no judgments on moral issues. It is up to you and your society to make such judgments. The Laws of Reality merely describe the universe. They are the basis of the universe, without which we would not exist, at least in the same form we now possess. And it is through the study of these Laws that we gain an understanding of reality and gain the power to effect reality.” It then went on to describe how one might go about studying various simpler concepts like the five elements while giving examples.
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She wasn’t sure what she thought about that. She was certain that many people had used that statement to justify immoral acts, but she was also certain that she had no intention of doing so. Perhaps it was statements like that which resulted in the Immoral Dragon Pai Wo being referred to as a philosopher, as such questions require one to think about the nature of reality and morality.
What was it that made one evil? From what she had learned earlier from asking about demonic cultivators and techniques, it was selfishness. They were willing to put themselves above others to the point that they saw others as a resource. As for the techniques, they were considered evil because they were addictive and harmful to the user. But many things were addictive. There were pain killers and stimulants available from any apothecary which were slightly addictive, and people became addicted to many acts, especially entertainment. There were several gambling addicts in the sect, as well as several alcoholics. Did that make gambling and alcohol evil? Shen didn’t think so. Besides, most people could control themselves and not use them too much, so was it the degree of addictability that determined evil?
Then there were harmful activities. But there were many such things that people did every day. Every time one stepped into the training field, there was a good chance you would be harmed. Every mission you took from the sect, even the low level ones like picking wild plants, came with risk. But these things weren’t evil. Many were even considered good. Jumping in the way of an attack to prevent it from hitting a friend or loved one was extremely dangerous, but it was widely considered a great Good. So where was that line?
She pondered the question until she went to sleep. For the next two days she worked half the day and tried to improve her skills in the afternoon, practicing the Barrier technique or the various Five Elements changing techniques so that she could use them better in her formations.
The next day she started her five day off period, so she made her way to the warehouse after First Meal. Ponma had bought an extra cart, so she loaded it up and pulled it herself. When they arrived she emptied her cart and reloaded it with what Water Blossoms were in the warehouse before sitting down. None of the four carts they brought with them were full of jars, so they would simply load the jars that were being filled onto the carts as the children filled them.
After a few minutes one of the boats returned with a load of vines to add to the pile and after offloading it the two adults came over to sit with her. “Taking a break?” the woman asked. It was a man and woman in their late teens or early twenties, and judging by the fact that they were holding hands they were either married or in a relationship.
“Yeah, I just brought jars up here and loaded my cart, so I was trying to figure out what I should help with. Last time I joined the kids in filling jars, but that kind of takes away work from them. I also tried hauling in plants from the lake, but that seems to be taken care of as well.”
The man thought for a bit. “You want the best quality blossoms, right?” he asked.
“Sure, but they should be deeper in the lake where the boats can’t get to.”
“Right, all of the ones past a certain point should have matured into Gathering stage by now, so if we could get them, we could get jars full of the good ones. What are you using them for anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Oh, the sect is turning them into Water Chi pills and sending them to the front.”
The man nodded. “So why don’t we use them ourselves? We certainly make enough.”
Shen shrugged. “Not many of us are water specialists and no one wants to risk an imbalance or to throw off the purity of their internal chi.”
“Sure.” said the woman, “But if you empty your reserves, neither of those last two are a problem, and even if you aren’t a water specialist, you can still benefit from the practice. Lots of techniques work the same regardless of which type of chi you use, at least until you get to the Foundation stage.”
Shen thought about it for a few seconds. If you were constantly depleting all of your elemental reserves and only refilling them with pills you would get used to running out of chi and only havign water chi, thereby being effected less by chi depletion and such an imbalance. You wouldn’t have to worry about messing up your elemental balance with the low quality chi of the pills. Then there was the fact that she could now make relics which replenished your chi slowly with good quality elemental chi, so no one would have to rely on the chi they could gather themselves. They might get behind on their ability to refine chi, but there were ways of improving chi quality through techniques that worked fine at low quantities, and you could get better at it by studying the Laws of the element even without gathering and refining it yourself.
The issue was the cost of the pills, which went for around a quarter of a point each, even for the lowest quality ones. An array, on the other hand, wouldn’t have that issue. She could make a version of her bracelet on the floor of the training field, and feed chi to all of those that were training there. The elemental balance wouldn’t matter either, as they would use all of it.
“You’re right.” she said after more than a minute of not speaking.
“Stuck in thought?” the woman asked.
“Yeah, but I think I now have a way to improve training here at the sect.”
The two nodded and stood up. They had rested long enough, and would need to get back out on the lake if they wanted to earn more points.
Normally Shen would run off to work on her latest relic idea, but this time she decided to finish her day here first. After all, she had some planning to do, and she could do that while working the boring job here, as it didn’t require her to think too hard.
She went to the warehouse and put three jars each of vinegar and three empty jars into her bag, about its limit. “Hey, Ponma.” she said. “I’ve got an idea of how to get better quality blossoms, so I’ll be gone for a little while.”
“Sure.” he said as he loaded another jar into his cart.
She climbed onto her sword and flew off over the lake. As she watched the plants she saw them get larger and cover more of the surface. By half a li into the lake they were just a net covering the surface. She slowed down and tried to stand on it. It sunk into the water and made her boots wet, so she used a bit of hydrokinesis, a simple Gathering level spell which used water chi to manipulate water, to dry her boots, then kept flying. Eventually she made it to the center of the lake. There the vines had started growing over the top of themselves. They were three or four layers thick and woven together so tightly that stepping on them was more like stepping on a tight rope than stepping on a net, like she had before. She landed and the vines barely flexed under her weight.
The surface looked more like a clearing with sparse flowers than a floating plant, especially concidering the dead flowers and leaves which filled the gaps between the vines and acted as a compost for the plants. In fact, when she found this place she had wondered if it was an island before she discovered its structure.
She pulled an empty jar out of her bag and sat it down where it wouldn’t fall over, then started collecting the flowers. This area had probably not been harvested in years, possibly decades, as it was too far from the shore to ever be practical, likely seeding the area with more Water Blossom plants periodically. All of the flowers here were Late or Peak Gathering in their quality, and Shen was sure that she could negotiate for even more if she brought in jars of these instead of the Early Gathering ones from nearer to the shores.
After an hour of gathering blossoms she noticed a patch where the flowers were significantly larger than the ‘large’ gathering phase ones which were the size of her hand. She went over to them and saw that they were all around the size of her head and, more importantly, were Early Foundation quality. From what she had read, these flowers almost never became Foundation quality. The plants they grew from must be at least five hundred years old, if it was like other spirit plants which flowered or fruited.
Though she could see dozens of flowers, she only picked ten of them, as that was all that would fit in an empty jar, and filled the rest of the jar with vinegar. She then took out her talisman ink and brush from her bag and painted a gathering array and protection formation on the jar and lid, then put the lid on the jar, connecting the two formations and guaranteeing that no one could open it unless they were at least competent with formations.
She put the jar into her bag and, after filling the other jars with the Gathering blossoms in the area, pouring the tiny bit of extra vinegar in her drinking gourd so she could fit a few more large blossoms in a jar, she shoved all of the jars into her bag and flew back to Fisher.
When she returned she called Ponma over and secretly told him what she had found. He agreed that they couldn’t just hand these over to the sect for the same price as the others, especially the Foundation grade blossoms, and told her to hold onto them while he negotiated with the quartermaster for a new price for the new product. If the sect didn’t want them he was certain that he could get one of the alchemists to purchase them. After all, Foundation quality materials were rare and the Late and Peak Gathering quality ones were still in short supply, even if the market was flooded with Cleansing and Low to Middle quality materials.
