When Shen returned she saw that a tiny blue ball of light was flying around the two new guys, blowing cool air on their heads as they emptied the smelter. “What’s that?” Shen asked, as she had never seen such a thing before.
“Oh, that’s an ice spirit.” Lao said, not taking his attention from the work. Shen knew nothing about spirits, but she waited a few seconds for him to finish pouring the ingots out while his brother cleaned the slag out of the smelter.
Once they were finished they explained to Shen that a Spirit was just a ball of energy that could follow instructions. At Gathering phase they could only make an artificial mind that only understood simple commands and a basic body for it, but that was enough for what they used it for. Like relics, spirits could also be given abilities, but the spirit would decide when to use them based on the mind that was controlling it. At Foundation they could give the artificial mind some reasoning capability, letting it make simple decisions, and at Nascent Soul they would be able to give it a soul fragment so that it could actually have a personality and might even have an elemental alignment, but for now they were stuck at Gathering.
Shen nodded her head. They just seemed like more complicated relics to her, though the fact that they didn’t need a body could have some advantage. She would have to look into making spirit weapons at some point, merging a spirit and a weapon, so that her relics could also obey commands.
After their explanation was finished Shen brought out the cauldron, blood, and organs. “Well, I do have something else I want you to make.” she said. “I’m going to produce Blood Iron, and I want you to make it into a few sample weapons.”
“And what are the organs for?” asked Lao.
“Oh, that’s for making Blood Steel. I need to refine the flesh of spirit beasts to charcoal and mix it with Blood Iron to make it. I’ll try to turn most of the Blood Iron into Blood Steel, but I doubt I’ve bought enough to turn all of it.”
Shen started on the organs, flooding the vessel with Fire chi and swirling it around through the material so that everything except the carbon was swept away. As she worked she could feel the coal absorbing some of the fire chi and after an hour she sent her divine sense in, where she saw a red glowing chunk of coal inside in the shape of the organs. She knew that if she opened it now the coal would catch on fire and be destroyed, so she left it closed until the coal cooled down. Once it had she opened the jar and let out the massive amount of black smoke. She removed the organs and noticed that they all contained a good bit of fire chi, even seeming to be warm despite being the same temperature as the outside air.
She made another batch of coal and ate some field rations, having missed the cafeteria window, and started on the blood. This time she used metal chi, as it helped purify the metal more, and three hours later removed a mass of metal powder the size of a fist from the bottom of the cauldron. She still had half of the blood to refine, but locked up the shop and went home.
The next day was supposed to be a day where she worked with Ponma, but as she had notified everyone of her new position, he knew she would need to skip the next five days of work, not including the one where they were going out on a mission.
The next morning she opened the shop and started on her next batch of Blood Iron. With all of it being mixed together the material only came out Early Gathering in quality, but it would be better than using normal steel. She gave today’s batch of Blood Iron powder to the twins and returned her last batch to the cauldron along with some of the coal. She spent until lunch trying to merge the two materials, but seemed to hit a limit when they were 80% combined. After letting it cool she removed the ball of material from the cauldron, broke the slag off the outside of it, and removed a small, irregular ball of Initial Gathering Blood steel. The slag was returned to the cauldron so that she could continue trying to merge the two after eating and went to pick up lunch for everyone.
Many of the production workers had been missing meals recently, so the cafeterias started allowing people to pick up food for colleagues so that they could still eat. Tomorrow she would ask Don to send someone for their food but for today she wanted to do it herself so that she would have time to think.
By the time she returned she had realized that the two different energies used in the refinement might be interfering with each other. After all, metal was destroyed by fire, so while those were the ideal elements for those materials, they would negatively effect each other when mixed due to the conflict within them.
She emptied the slag and returned some of the special coal to the cauldron, then refined it again with metal chi. As the twins hadn’t used all of their Blood Iron powder, she took a small amount of it, mixed it with a small amount the metal elemental coal, then merged the two. This time the process was 95% efficient, and when she opened the cauldron she found a tiny ball of Middle Gathering quality Blood Steel. She would have to use that method in the future.
“So, what do you want us to make with this material?” the twins asked after she had refined all of it. “It might be enough for a sword, but just barely.”
“Actually, I’m heading out with some friends in a few days to go on a mission, so I was hoping we could test a few prototypes in the real world.” Shen responded.
“I suppose that’s possible.” Su said. “What do you need.”
“Arrow heads, and if you think you can pull it off, acupuncture needles. One of them likes to throw them.”
“I’m guessing the team healer. There were a few in our sect that used them as darts.” Shen nodded. “Well, we’ll need the Blood Steel for that. I doubt they’ll be big enough to add a formation to, but the material will make them difficult to damage and their ability to store chi should make them channel attacks easier.” With that they got to work.
Shen got to work on the Bow, further refining the Power Shot ability to use chi from either the user or the environment. After that she brought out a few arrows she had purchased and started adding the formations to them. For something like an arrow, you couldn’t make large formations on the shaft due to their size. There was a different technique for cylindrical objects, but it only worked with formations where each circle fed into the next, limiting the complexity of the formation. In this case, she had a gathering array at the back of the arrow to take chi from the user, then fed it into a formation which imbued it with an element, then fed that into the formation for the Aura ability, so that the arrow would be coated in chi of the chosen element. Every circle had the symbols added to the side closest to the arrow head so that they would be on the ‘outside’ of the formation. She made five Fire arrows by painting the formations on with talisman paint before the brothers finished the five Blood Iron arrow heads and were ready to try and make the needles.
Shen wanted to learn to forge things as well, but they told here that this wouldn’t be the right time. “Special materials like Blood Iron require special skill to work with. If you forge it incorrectly you can destroy its special properties, turning it into normal iron.” They would have to teach her using iron, steel, and bronze later.
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Shen fit the fire arrowheads onto the arrows and put them into the quiver, then went to the training field to test them. At one of the archery ranges she nocked an arrow, and, after charging the arrow, drew the string back and fired. Her only experience with a bow had been her father giving her a few lessons when she was five, just before he died, and the few times she practiced the techniques so that she could use them with relics. For that reason she missed the target, hitting the wall behind it. The arrow exploded on impact, but as it had hit stone it didn’t cause much damage. On the third shot she did hit the target and when the arrow exploded it blew a hole the size of a head into the dummy, then set it on fire. Shen ran over to put the straw dummy out, them collected the three arrow heads, which didn’t seem damaged at all, before returning to work.
“They work really well.” she said to the brothers, one of which had made another five arrow head and the other which was almost finished with a needle. “They tend to explode, though, so they are single use. I’ll have to note that.”
“Probably because you are putting too much, or too pure chi into them. Releasing it all at once overloads them. You should probably look for better quality materials to make them out of.”
Shen nodded. “I’ll keep an eye out for some. Feathers should be easy to get, as there are plenty of spirit birds in the forest, but I don’t think there are many spirit trees.” She knew that spirit wood was useful in relic crafting but hadn’t seen any yet, just heard of it.
The boys nodded and everyone returned to work. When the end of day approached Shen asked Don about how they did wages. Master Chen had paid at the end of each day, but Don said that in the cities you usually get paid every ten days, so he would synchronize that with Shen’s schedule to make it easier on her, paying them on the last day of her time there. Because they had started on that day this pay period would include the half day they worked yesterday. Shen agreed to this and verified that everyone’s time was written down properly before closing up for the day.
Things continued that way until the day the friends were planning to go on a mission together. That morning they all met at the cafeteria. After they were done eating Shen started pulling the relics she had made for them from her magic bag. Danka got a shield. She had gotten it up to Middle Foundation, so any attacks he intercepted would need either be from a higher realm or higher pressure to make it through. The shield itself or the shield formation effect would break if the attack did too much damage, though, so they couldn’t go after any spirit beast that was too powerful, but it would be more than enough when facing most of the beasts the sect might let them accept a mission against.
Mae got a set of six acupuncture needles. They were made of Blood Steel so that they could maintain an effect that was placed on them, but the only formation Shen had managed to add due to their size was the Gathering phase version of Accurate Shot. They could maintain that effect for around five seconds after they left Mae’s hand, so while Mae wouldn’t be able to feed it energy after it left her, she could still control it. Shen had attempted to add an array to recharge the spent chi, but the dart was too small for her to do so with her current engraving or painting ability.
Ponma got a short bow. While it used a fairly common type of wood in its construction, as well as having a string made of the guts of Cleansing phase spirit beasts, Shen had managed to put a middle Gathering level formation for the Power Shot technique on it. Despite its small size and fairly light draw weight, the bow would draw on the chi of the user to fire any arrow shot from it with over twice the power of a mortal war bow, allowing it to penetrate the hide of most beasts in the Gathering Realm and even some of the weaker Foundation realm beasts. She also gave him a quiver containing five arrows for each of the five elements and five with the Accurate Shot formation. All of them had Blood Iron arrow heads and feathers from spirit beasts, but the elemental ones were still single use items, as she hadn’t fixed the overload issue yet. Those twenty five arrows would explode when they hit the target, dealing a large amount of damage of their specific element. The other five would listen to his commands for two to three seconds at most, long enough for him to redirect them into a sensitive area on the target. The shorter time compared to Mae’s needles was due to the lower quality of Blood Iron compared to Blood Steel.
Shen hadn’t made a weapon for herself, as she already had a flying sword, but as she lacked armor she had spent most of her remaining money on a robe made of the cocoons of spirit butterflies and painted a protection array on it. The array was only Initial Formation level, but it would allow her to fight without spending chi to activate her Dragon Scales unless there was a serious threat, making her chi reserves last even longer. Of course, if she needed the her reserves to last longer the group would be in a very bad situation, as she estimated she had around twenty times the chi of any of the others simply because she was in the Foundation stage while they were still in the Gathering stage.
They went to the Mission Hall near the outer wall. There was one in the Outer Fire district which had more dangerous missions for sect members, where combat was guaranteed, as well as one in the Inner Water district where the ones which only Inner Disciples and above could take, but they went to the one in the Outer Water district, where anyone, including those that weren’t sect members, could go. Inside the building were multiple mercenaries. It seemed that every team had at least one, with several teams being only mercenaries with a single Inner Disciple there to accept and turn in missions.
The other three people in Shen’s group got a seat and checked their gear while Shen went over to the mission board. She was hoping for something combat related, so that they could all test out their new equipment, but all of the combat missions seemed to be missing. With so many mercenaries around which specialized in such jobs that fact wasn’t surprising, but Shen had hoped that there would be one left behind.
She looked over what was left, hoping to find something interesting, when she found an interesting one. On the surface it looked boring. About five li to the west, inside a mountain valley, were Moon Lilies. These flowers had multiple uses, but were usually used to make illusion pills or to enhance the Darkness element within pills and elixirs. The reason it interested Shen, however, was that there was an abandoned mine in that valley, which also had a mission on the board. It had been part of a pair at some point, as there were marks in the corner of the page which indicated that it was part two, but part one was missing. This was most likely because the mine was infested with monsters and the mercenaries which went to exterminate them didn’t want to waste time mining. This second mission asked that for them to gather Star Ore and Spirit Copper ore from the mine, about a jar of each, and return it to the mission hall. Shen’s ring could only hold a single jar of material, but she also had her magic bag which had five bags worth of free space in it. Once she was there she could gather more of the materials than was required and keep the excess for the workshop or her own projects.
Spirit copper was similar to Blood Iron in that it could store chi, but it could store three or four times as much as Blood Iron while being too soft for weapons. It would be an ideal material to make jewelry from, but almost worthless for weapons. Star Ore were pieces of meteorites which crashed to the ground long ago. According to some stories, two immortals had a battle in that valley around five thousand years ago, and one summoned meteors from space to land on his enemy. Shen wasn’t sure if that was accurate, but did know that the valley was almost perfectly circular, likely meaning that it was the impact sight of a large meteor at one point, which left fragments behind. The mine had found a layer of fragments from that impact and tapped into it, but hadn’t managed to gather all of them before the spirit beasts were drawn to the area and they were forced to abandon the mine. Star Ore had the interesting property of being able to increase the chi reserves of those that consumed it by increasing the size of their dantian, an effect which drew spirit beast to it instinctively. The material would act as a poison if one injested too much, however, due to the second effect it had. It reinforced Space elemental effects. Or as some sects put it, it contained part of the Space dao and naturally produced Space chi.
Shen had been looking into how the Storage effects on magic bags and storage rings worked the last two days so that she could produce them for the shop and found that both of them were Space elemental effects which relied on the creator’s understanding of the Space dao to work. While magic bags contained the Gathering level version of the technique and storage rings contained the Foundation level version, both could be enhanced if one used Star Ore to craft them. While a magic bag went from the size of a jar inside to the size of five to ten jars inside depending on the skill of the relic crafter, and storage rings went from an inside area the size of a pebble to one or two jars in size, both could either have their volume expanded several times over or, in the case of the magic bag which relied on spirit stones to maintain the space, could be made the same size with no energy input needed. These things weren’t usually done because the material was so rare, but if she could get her hands on some she might be able to do so.
Shen took both of the notices and, after explaining both missions to her friends and getting approval, went to the counter to accept them. The person at the counter was surprised to see her, as she used to bring in various spirit plants from the area but hadn’t in years. When she explained that she got a job and was an Inner Disciple now, though, they realized that she had simply had other things to do. They signed her up for both jobs and thanked her for taking both. Normally you would need a good reputation to accept two at the same time, but Shen had once done a good job on missions and these two were beside each other. Also, the mining job was twenty three days old, so they were somewhat desperate to have it done.
The team left for the store, where they purchased mining equipment and jars for storing things in. They also went by Master Chen’s shop while they were in the area. Ponma had some extra money so he looked over the talismans as Shen looked at the flying swords. Danka had gotten one when he joined the Guards and Shen had one for becoming an Inner Disciple, but Mae and Ponma didn’t have one. Normally Shen would just ask if she could borrow the boat and fly them there in it, but they didn’t have a storage item it could fit in and she didn’t want to leave it laying in a field while they entered the mines. So, after buying Ponma a Water sword and Mae a Wood sword for four stones each Shen quickly taught Mae how to fly on one and they set off.
