Lin was gone the next day, as he was learning from the bowyer, so Shen wasn’t able to send him on errands. Still, the shop kept going the way it had before, with Shen working on developing new products and the twins making various items from the new materials. Shen had asked if it was possible to make some sort of item to summon a spirit, thinking that they could be useful, and got a strange answer. Technically it was possible, but because the artificial mind required complex information to form properly they would need to include jade in the design. This would let them give the relic the information it needed to produce identical minds each time. The user wouldn’t be able to alter that information, but they might be able to alter the body and abilities of the spirit. Unfortunately it was an extremely complex technique, so it was unlikely that one could place it on something as small as a bracelet. Armor or a shield would be big enough, and they might get it working on a sword, but nothing smaller would work at their current skill level.
Shen considered asking them to teach her to summon spirits, as she was a much better relic crafter, but she already had several other techniques she was trying to learn, so she decided to leave it up the them. Instead, she went back to her studies of Space and Dark. She had read much of the book on space last night and learned much about it. If she could finish it today she should be able to attempt to make a storage item tomorrow.
The day after that, after a night reading, she showed up at work and brought out a small amount of spirit copper. She spent the next hour making a ring that was the right size for her finger. She left the top of it much larger than a ring would normally be, closer in size to a signet ring that a noble or rich merchant would have. She carefully made it so that the top could be removed and the center hollowed out. This would be the ‘internal space’ which the formation would expand.
Within this space she carefully carved two tiny formations. She used a holder for the ring and her engraving tool to help guarantee that her hand didn’t shake during the operation due to the intense concentration needed. Both the bottom of the chamber and the top of the ring which would seal it off had the formation added to them. Either one could technically make the effect work, but by using two of them you guarantee that if one of them is damaged or flawed the ring still works, but has less storage space.
She added a chi gathering array to the outside of the ring, and the copper in the ring started to build up a charge. She hadn’t realized that, due to the material becoming filled with chi, the formations which expanded space had become active, drawing the chi from the ring. Within a few seconds the area which could only hold a pebble was now big enough to contain the ring. She stared at it for a few seconds as it expanded, studying the effect, before poking the expanded area with her engraving tool. Her hand shifted slightly to the side when she did so, and the tool was cut in half. She realized that it could cause problems if left open like this, and quickly scratched one of the lines of the gathering array. The space started to shrink again and, when it was about the length of a finger across, the end of the engraving tool fell out of the space.
That was an effect that was either annoying or welcome depending on who you asked, as damaged or destroyed storage items would dump the objects inside of them out as the space shrunk. This was often used by bandits when they found a storage ring, as they could simply hit the ring with a rock hard enough that it would drop the items it contains.
Eventually the effect faded away and the Copper lost all of its chi. Shen should have designed it so that the area didn’t start expanding until she was finished, but hadn’t realized that would happen. Next time she would put the top of the ring back together before she activated it. She put some powdered Spirit Copper around the edge where the two parts would meet then pushed the two together. It was a tight fit, but she managed to get them together with a bit of strength. After that was done she created a ball of Fire Chi around the ring. This heated the powder until it started to melt and let her push them together slightly more, permanently sealing the two together.
After the Copper cooled down she carved the formation for moving things into and out of it into the top of the ring and cleaned up the weld. She chose to use the Gathering version of the formation, as she hoped to sell these to Outer disciples. Unlike the Foundation version, which let you move your divine sense into the item to look at what it contained and select things to be removed, the Gathering version only let you reach inside to feel around, and you had to find what you wanted without seeing it. She at least made it so that the opening had to be opened and closed with a command from the user, so that you couldn’t dump things out like with a magic bag, but the downside of that version was inherent in the nature of the formation and couldn’t be removed without using a different technique.
Once she was done she fixed the formation she had damaged and waited a few seconds before opening up the container. Air rushed in as the space expanded and a minute later the size seemed to stabilize, as no more air rushed in. She started putting things in it, starting with a sword that was nearby. The opening was only about the size of a fist, so it couldn’t accept large objects, but she was able to put many things inside of it. She estimated it could hold almost one jar worth of objects, but was actually wide and shallow, the same shape as what the cavity was. Her own ring could hold about two jars worth of objects, but the storage space was roughly spherical, making it difficult to put in an object like a sword. Thankfully the expanded space has a slight amount of give to it, and her sword is shorter than normal, or a ring the size of hers wouldn’t be able to fit.
Encouraged by the success, she made one more ring before going home late. This one had a slightly larger compartment to expand, and she was careful to take her time on all of the engravings and not complete the gathering array until the ring was sealed. She even made the opening a bit bigger so that she could add larger objects like jars or backpacks. After it was done she tested it and found that it could now hold about two jars worth of materials. It was now as large as what the sect gave its members, but she could make two per day for only a small amount of a fairly common metal. She was starting to suspect that the sect was getting ripped off on the rings they were importing. It may be worth talking to one of the quartermaster elders to see if she could provide them instead.
Several months passed and it was time for the caravan to arrive once more. They had been slightly delayed due to having to take a different route to get here, and would have less variety in their goods, both of these facts being caused by the demons advancing to a distance of only three hundred li to the south. The sect had now started sending people directly to the front, which had resulted in many of the inner disciples and elders leaving, resulting in a shortage of people at the mission hall and the businesses hiring more outsiders. In response to this the sect had started to allow some mercenaries to accept and turn in quests, allowing mercenary teams to continue working here instead of forcing them to leave for the front due to an inability to work.
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Those that left were well equipped, however. Shen’s workshop had been expanded and now the shop was one of the most popular in the sect. Many outer sect disciples had been hired as both smiths and apprentice relic crafters, and Shen lead the relic crafters in creating the new relics, while the twins lead the smiths and Don lead the talisman makers and the painting teams. Those teams had a lot of work over the last few months, as most of the training fields in both the inner and outer city had been given the formation, but now the work mostly consisted of repair work or the occasional creation of a meditation area.
Now the shop carried a wide variety of weapons, including bows and arrows, with a wide variety of effects. With the spirit wood she had been able to solve the overload issue and made reusable arrows, but some people still purchased the single-use explosive version due to the lower cost. They also had talismans of most of the basic techniques, with others available as special order, as well as armor, chi gathering bracelets, body cultivation bracelets and rings, rings and bracelets with techniques, and even a few storage items, though Shen never seemed to be able to keep the later in stock.
One of the relic shops in the inner city was now an affiliate shop, and they sold most of the storage rings Shen could make, as well as a variety of Foundation level equipment, the one in the outer city mostly limiting itself to Cleansing and Gathering stage equipment. Shen had managed to improve the ring to the point where it could store ten jars worth of material through the use of Star Metal, and this had made it an in-demand item for every inner disciple and elder in the city. She now had two versions of the ring, one with the sect’s symbol, which was sold to the sect and given to everyone that advanced to Foundation, and one without, which was sold in the store.
This increase in demand meant that the sect now had a permanent presence at the mine where the metal to make the items was being mined. They had picked all of the spirit plants near the mine before starting, but a small town was starting to be built up there, so Mae was slightly worried that the locals would kill the local plant life and destroy the renewable resource. Thankfully, so far the mission hall had convinced the elder in control of the mine’s defense to limit the destruction of the area, but no one knew how long that would last.
Shen had posted many ongoing jobs with the mission hall, including the gathering of beast cores, but there was never a large enough supply of them to meet all of the demand. For that reason, special order items which needed them could often only be made if the one to place the order could provide the core in question. All of the shadow cores they had originally gathered from the mine had been sold off, except for the four strongest, which Shen had turned into Shadow Hide bracelets and supplied to her team.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to go on another mission together. The demand for relics meant that Shen was always busy, to the point that she couldn’t even help Ponma at the lake. The Water Blossom business had greatly improved, though. Due to the increased use of relics and the drastic decrease in cost for some of them due to the use of the formation paint instead of proper engravings, flying boats were now fairly popular in Fisher, and the company owned ten of them. Instead of destroying the plants, if they were far enough that they didn’t interfere with the fish the workers just picked the flowers off of the plants directly, placing them in a jar that already had approximately the right amount of vinegar in it. This let them fill more jars per day and, while it increased the cost of production slightly due to the need for flying boats, the business’s profits had increased greatly while keeping the workers happy.
The business still produced some spirit compost, but not as much as they had expected to. They did, however, start branches in other areas around the sect, especially Farmer, which produced other elemental plants. This had resulted in elemental pills being common on the market and, while people in the sect tended to use Shen’s chi gathering bracelets to refill their chi and study the energy, these pills were also said to be very useful in that study.
Shen had noticed something similar when trying to further refine the energy she gathered. The energy which she imbued her understanding onto seemed to not be able to improve as much as the energy she gathered through an array like those at the training fields. Those started off with a small percentage, but could theoretically be purified all the way to 100% with certain techniques. The reason was simple, but difficult to explain to others. When Shen had first learned this, she went back to Teacher to ask about it, as he seemed to be the most knowledgeable person she knew. He explained it to her with an analogy.
“Not all chi of the same percent is equal. Imagine you know how to make the left half of a gold coin. That is fifty percent of the coin. But no matter how many left halves you created you would never be able to put them together to make a full coin. Now imagine someone was taking coins and cutting them into 100 pieces. Some of those coin parts are given out everywhere, so they are common. Some are only given out a few places, so they are uncommon. This continues, with every piece being slightly less common than the one before it. You have learned to reproduce twenty or thirty of those, but that is all that you can produce. No matter how many of those you produce, you can’t make the ones you don’t know about.
Sometimes when you gather the fragments of chi, though, you feed a proper element into it, and the ones that only occur a fraction of a percent of the time duplicate themselves, letting you notice and gather them. That lets you improve them. That too has a limit, but it is better than only grabbing the common ones. To actually improve it you will need to gather a huge amount of chi and sort through every bit of it to find the rare ones. You may even need to find different versions of the same chi. The ones that are common may be the same in all of the samples, but the rare ones might be a bit less rare in another source of the element.”
He continued the analogy with certain coins being needed for certain techniques, but overall it made a lot of sense. She would need to study the elements more in order to find those rarer bits of elemental chi, which contained properties that she didn’t know about. Only then could she improve her understanding. Her limited senses had been the reason that she had hit a limit with her ability to purify the chi past the thirty or so percent she had managed a few times. After reading the books she had tried to do something similar with Dark and Space chi, but she could barely get them to ten percent purity, and was only able to imbue them to eight percent at best. This had limited the performance of the equipment she was making, but at the moment she didn’t have the time to study those Dao further.
One thing she could do, however, was improve her Divine Sense. The more she could improve it the more she could compress the chi inside of her, which would increase her cultivation. The improved senses would also let her improve her understanding of the various Dao by letting her extend her chi sense and see that chi with greater detail, so improving it would be very useful.
To this purpose she had made herself a chakram. She had made the core out of Spirit Copper, then bent a layer of Blood Steel over the edge before sharpening it. Due to its circular shape it was easy to add formations to so she added three. The first simply gathered chi from the environment. The second made the edge sharper. The third was a variation of the Flying Sword and Accurate Shot formations from the Foundation realm. It would allow her to use her Divine Sense to control the weapon anywhere within her range, and would let the weapon easily change directions and accelerate thanks to the Flying Sword elements.
She used this weapon to practice every few days, any time she had a chance. With how busy things had gotten at the shop she found it difficult to find a few hours to go to the range and practice, but there were several in the inner city where she could be free from distractions. But tonight, the night before the Caravan arrived, she had managed to make the time. During her practice Shen had managed to spin her blade without touching it and control its flight even at the other end of the field, cutting the target in half. She still didn’t have all of the detailed control she had when it was close, as the distance was near the edge of her Divine Sense’s range, but she could still control it well enough for it to be an effective weapon.
She was just leaving when she sensed a familiar presence. It was a person that was trying to contact her via telepathy, a skill she hadn’t practiced with in over a year. Recognizing the person, she quickly hung the weapon on her side and made her way to the gate which lead to the outer city. When she arrived she spotted the woman she thought she had felt.
“Hello, sister.” said Sho. “It’s good to see you again.”
