For the next hour they ran into the occasional rat, but no more than three at a time. Every time they did, however, Shen would draw the Light formation on the ceiling in their blood then drain the blood from any that didn’t form cores. They had gathered two more cores by the time they had found their first patch of ore, leaving not-yet-full jars under any rats that were being drained and hanging them as best they could from the wall, as they didn’t want to take the time to drain them properly.
This deposit was Spirit Copper. The blue-green crystals shimmered strangely in the light, a result of having absorbed chi and grown harder. While it could gather chi on its own, the process was slow, and if they were to draw the chi from this deposit it would likely take years to recover. Otherwise people would use Spirit Copper in relics instead of gathering arrays. Still, it could rapidly absorb the chi that was fed to it, so it had some use.
Shen passed out jars and picks and they started working, a light talisman on the ground beside each of them. They worked for almost two hours, filling seven and a half jars with ore during that time. Three times during their work individual rats came to bother them, but none of them formed cores so they were all hanging over the entrance the rats had used, slowly draining into jars. Maybe seeing the bodies of their tribe members would scare them away, Shen thought as she swung the pick.
When they were done she put most of the jars in her bag, and the rest in Ponma’s. With all of the blood she had gathered she only had one more jar left, and most of the free space was taken up in their bags. She dumped the half jar of ore into her bag, filling in the gaps between the jars, and put the now empty jar in Ponma’s bag. Now, when they found the Star Ore deposit they could take two jars back with them.
They continued down the passage until they entered a room with a ramp leading down. Shen threw a talisman down the ramp, using the Accurate Shot technique to make it go further than it should, and when it landed they saw dozens of rats standing around or sleeping. In the middle was a large female rat, the size of a horse and nursing a dozen medium dog sized black rats. The rats also saw her, though, and the female squealed.
Shen immediately started throwing fire balls into the room, aiming the first of them at the female rat. Ponma added in the four fire arrows he had left, then added in the Earth and metal arrows. Every one exploded on impact, the earth and metal ones tearing apart the ones that were too near. Several of the rats made it through the barrage and started running up the ramp, and Danka and Mae sent attacks down the ramp until the rats got too close. Danka then switched to blocking them with a shield while swinging at those he could hit with a sword.
After they stopped seeing movement below Shen and Ponma went over to the ramp where all of the rats had gathered. Shen joined Danka in swinging a sword, and Ponma joined Mae in attacking from range, this time using the Accurate Shot arrows. He wasn’t able to recover all of them the way Mae was with her darts, so he only fired twelve shots before he had lost them all and had to resort to throwing chi bolts.
A few minute later the last of the rats were dead. There were a few pained screams at the lower level, so they left the smokey area at the top of the cave and headed down. A few of the rats tried to make a last stand, but Shen or Danka quickly finished them off.
When the grizzly work was done, they gathered the corpses in the middle of the room. They could see well in here thanks to the ten or so light formations that Shen had drawn on the walls as they gathered the bodies, so they had no trouble finding all of them. Mae and Ponma removed the stones from the ones that had them, including the Mother Rat, then everyone grabbed a pick. There were several black rocks poking out of the wall, and they carefully dug around each one they found before throwing the rocks into one of the two jars they had saved for that purpose. Shen tried to send her divine sense into one of the rocks, but as soon as it touched the stone it felt like it was stretched and pulled apart. This must be an effect of the Space chi,’ she thought, then went back to mining.
Digging out all of the rocks took another two hours, but when they finished they had filled two full jars plus all of the free space in Ponma’s bag and her ring. They followed their marks back out of the cave and into the valley. The sun had already went behind the mountain, leaving the area in darkness, but the sky was just starting to turn orange, so they knew it wasn’t yet night. They quickly hopped on their swords and flew back to the sect.
Once they were there Shen went to the counter of the mission hall to turn in the three jars of Spirit Copper Ore and one jar of Star Ore, as well as the jar of Moon Blossoms. After receiving the pay for the jars she decided to bring up something that she had been thinking of on the way back. “You know.” she said to the receptionist, “The mine was full of rats. Probably a hundred or more. I thought the mission to clear it was finished recently.”
The receptionist woman looked surprised and called over the elder that oversaw them. She had Shen repeat herself, and Shen told them the full story of what had happened. She also showed them the eleven beast cores they had gotten from the rats. As often as they formed in Gathering phase animals there would need to be around a hundred of them minimum to produce that many. The Elder looked angry, but excused himself. He stepped outside and before the door closed Shen saw him throw his flying sword down and hop on it. Apparently he was going to verify what she had said. Shen was almost certain that the previous group had lied about clearing the mine for some easy money, and would be in trouble once they got caught.
Shen returned to the table where her friends were waiting. They had all ordered something to eat, and as they waited they discussed how to distribute their gains. The stones and points they had gotten could be easily divided, but if they wanted to keep the other things they would need to figure out how they needed to be divided. Shen wanted all of the ores, and had gathered the blood for herself, so they were happy to give all of it to her. The hides, however, would need to be processed. They would make good armor if Ponma or Mae wanted a set, probably early Gathering phase in strength. Shen would be able add arrays and formations to the armor if they did. They just didn’t know if they wanted such armor.
The one thing they could agree on was to let Mae see if her bosses wanted the alchemy ingredients. They would probably buy them all, but if they didn’t want them they would try other alchemists. After they ate Shen asked if she could buy the ore and cores. Five of the cores were initial Gathering, five Early Gathering, and one Late Gathering. The Initials would be worth about twenty stones each if they were sold to the mission hall, the Early would be worth about fifty, and the Late about four hundred and fifty. Shen didn’t have the stones on hand to pay for everything now but if they would agree to sell her the stones for that price and the ore for half of what the mission hall just paid them, she would use it to make them equipment worth their share of the price. She would even let them keep all of the equipment she had made for them free of charge. Technically it was prototype equipment that she was going to let them buy at cost, but if she could get a good discount on the material to make even better equipment, she was certain she could convince Master Chen to gave it to them. At almost eleven hundred stones for the material she owed each of them equipment worth almost three hundred.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
They agreed, Ponma stipulating that she replace the arrows that he couldn’t recover, and, after distributing the stones from the mission equally, Shen took all of the ore, blood, and organs to the workshop. She then returned home and gathered her bath supplies. With all of the blood she had gotten on her and her clothes today, she wanted to properly clean herself before going to bed.
After three more days of work she managed to reach a point where she could take time to read a book. It was called “Another Place, Another Time: A Complete guide to the Daos of Space and Time.” This manual tried to teach people at the Foundation level about the Space Dao, but it was confusing Shen. While it started off explaining basic concepts using examples people could wrap their head around, it got far too detailed, but confusingly so, like the author wasn’t used to explaining things. It went from explaining that space and time could stretch and shrink, to pages of math. She could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and had even started learning algebra from Ponma, but the author seemed to only know how to describe things with math problems. She could see how a space could be bigger on the inside than the outside because she had experience with her magic bag and ring. She couldn’t see how a page of equations and fancy words explained it, though.
She had spent the last three days refining the new materials. The first day she made all of the blood into Blood Iron, then Blood Steel. It ranged from Middle to Late Gathering in quality. She was certain that she could have gotten Peak Gathering or even Initial Foundation quality material from the mother rat, but as she had formed a core her blood wouldn’t have had enough chi left in it to produce even Initial Gathering material.
On the second day Shen refined the Spirit Copper. It also ranged from Middle to Late Gathering in quality, but that was because Shen wasn’t used to working with it. She and the twins had found that, while you could theoretically make it higher quality in a cauldron, the furnace here was high enough quality that they could just smelt it normally.
Today she had refined the Star Metal. Shen wasn’t willing to risk the material in the furnace, so she refined it herself using every element she knew about on a small batch to test which would purify it the best. Interestingly, Metal was only second best. Darkness seemed to work the best, with Space, even as impure as she could make it, in third place. Shen used what chi was in the beast cores to refine a small amount at Middle Foundation quality, but without understanding Darkness enough to properly refill them she had to fill them with neutral chi and was waiting on them to slowly purify it. That was one of the features of beast cores that made them popular with non-elemental cultivators. You could cycle chi into beast cores and remove it later to get fairly pure elemental chi. The best ones were, of course, Dragon Cores, which drew in chi to refill themselves and produced better purity chi than the other cores, but as dragons were all intelligent beings, only the ones from dragon/beast hybrids were available from reputable vendors.
Shen got up and closed the book, ready to take a break. She had studied the formations for the Magic Bags and Storage Rings while she was running the smelter yesterday, as it doesn’t require as much concentration as using the cauldron, but without improving her understanding of Space she wasn’t sure she could make a functional storage item. It was a very complex and advanced Dao, far more so than the elements or even the more complex Sword chi Danka used. Maybe she should study more complex ones so that she got use to them? She wasn’t sure if such practice would help, but she could at least try.
Needing a break from studying she got an ingot of Spirit Copper from the stack and started fashioning bracelets. They were the same size as the jade one she was wearing, and also just as chi conductive as white jade. Their ability to gather and store chi could make them more useful than Jade in many situations.
Shen remembered her past lessons in illusion spells, which she could only use to change her hair and eye color. With the help of a Shadow core, however, she could do even better. Darkness was an interesting element with many uses. It could be added to illusion spells, which were often Light based, its opposite, to allow it to alter perception. This also let it be used for stealth. It could also be used as an attack. There were techniques which let it mimic Ice or Death chi, and could even be used to put people to sleep. It was also good at absorbing other forms of chi. All of these abilities came with one major setback. It was difficult to understand. While Fire and the other basic five elements could be seen, one of the core properties of Darkness is that it can’t be seen. This made it more difficult to study. Maybe studying it despite that complexity would help her be able to study Space as well.
All of this made her want to make a relic from it. If Shen was better at illusions she might choose that effect, but it would be a waste of a valuable material to make a relic that merely slightly changes your looks. Instead, she would need to find a different effect to use.
She lacked techniques which would make proper use of the cores, so she decided to go to the library. The others were all working on their assigned tasks, so she didn’t need to do much managing at the moment. That gave her the opportunity to expand her knowledge so that she could make a larger variety of relics.
At the library she looked around for useful books. Thirty minutes later she returned to work. Once there she put her purchases on the table. The first was a Space movement technique called “Warp Step”. It allowed you to move a large distance with each step, far greater than your own stride. This was the only technique she could find for Space at the Foundation level, other than the technique form of the storage formations. She also purchased two Darkness techniques, Shadow Hide and Sleep Bolt, both Gathering phase techniques. There were far more techniques available, but this would let her test the abilities. She also purchase the introductory and intermediate books on the Darkness Dao, as well as “Introduction to Space”, which looked to be a far better written book on Space Dao.
Now that she possessed materials which might actually be able to teach her something she could start improving. She read the introductory Darkness and Shadow Hide techniques that night and the next day she came in and immediately grabbed one of the bracelets she had made before. She added a trigger formation so that it wasn’t always active, then the Shadow Hide formation and a Gathering formation which would collect Darkness from the environment. Darkness chi was interesting in that it existed everywhere, but the darker the area the purer the chi. For that reason some people that used Darkness chi would meditate in pitch black rooms, and relics which used Dark chi would be stored in solid boxes.
After all of the formations were added she added a holder to the top of it and placed the weakest of the cores in the holder. The bracelet started to feed Dark chi into the core and Shen quickly put it in a drawer to prevent the light from getting near it and ruining the purity of its chi. Normally she would test the equipment the same way it would be used, but placing it in a dark area to recharge was simple enough that it would probably be very common.
She took out the intermediate Darkness book and began reading it as she waited for it to refill. There were other things she could be working on, but with these new materials she wanted to learn what she needed to in order to use them properly.
As she was about half way through the book Lin knocked on her door. “Hey, Shen.” he said, and she looked up.
“What is it?”
“I gathered the wood you wanted.” he said. Shen had asked him to go into the nearby woods and look for spirit wood. At first his father didn’t want him to go, but when Shen offered to loan him a flying sword and teach him to use, as well as give him several talismans for defense, they agreed that would be safe enough as long as he stayed close. She sent him to a grove of young trees two li away and had him gather small trees and small logs. She needed wood which naturally contained chi so that she could make arrows and bows from them.
Shen, however, wasn’t a carpenter, nor was she a bowyer. She didn’t know how to make those things, so she talked with one of their neighbors who were a bowyer. He agreed that if she could get him Spirit Wood, he would make them bows and arrow shafts out of the material. “Take it down to Mr. Qing’s place. If he’ll let you, see if you can learn to make the arrow shafts yourself.” He nodded and ran off, wooden flying sword on his back.
