Cha Ming’s soul developed as he studied Jun Xiezi’s painting. His knowledge of dual-element combat formations and both single- and dual-element standard formations grew exponentially. He started to sell lesser-grade talismans through the Alabaster Group to vetted buyers, funding his increasingly large collection of formation flags and formation stones.
One day as he was meditating, he recalled his first excursion outside the city. A small vial appeared in his hand with but a thought. It contained the golden liquid that resonated with the Clear Sky Brush. The resonating feeling appeared once more as he withdrew the vial.
What use could you have? he thought. People sometimes use evanescence to increase talisman grades, but the cost to benefit ratio is atrocious.
Sighing, he uncorked the cap and sucked it into the Clear Sky Brush. The brush passed emotions on to Cha Ming—pleasure and satisfaction. He sent his awareness into the Clear Sky Space and noticed that one-tenth of a jin evaporated into nothing. One-ninth, however, was deposited into its own small pool beside the pool of liquified elemental essence.
Things didn’t stop there. Out of nowhere, a small channel appeared in the liquified elemental essence lake, leading it to the small pool of gold evanescence. Cha Ming didn’t stop it, figuring that there must be a reason for this behavior.
Cha Ming looked on as the pool of evanescence diluted again and again. A ninth of a jin of evanescence was diluted into one hundred, then a thousand, then nine thousand jin of liquified elemental essence. The normally blue liquid was now light gold in color.
Is it just normal ink? he thought, summoning the light gold liquid to his brush. He infused gold qi into it and guided it with spiritual force. He tried it on a least-grade talisman. Unfortunately, something went wrong, and the talisman crumbled into nothing.
The ink is very different, he thought. It’s like it has a completely different nature, and it’s not compatible with my current painting technique. Then it dawned on him. He recalled the book he had studied previously, Five-Element Talisman Artistry—A Primer.
That’s right, he thought. The light gold ink seems more aligned with nature. If that’s the case, I should use a technique that’s more in line with nature as well.
Cha Ming tried again. This time, instead of light slashes, he made bold, incisive strokes. At the same time, they were soft and malleable. It was a mystical brush technique, one that Cha Ming had greatly admired when he first read about it.
One by one, the brushstrokes laid runes and lines down onto the sheet of paper. It wasn’t long before the paper turned light gold. Amazed at the success, he tried ten more times. One success piled up after another. Intrigued by this result, he moved onto a lesser-grade talisman of gold alignment. Here too, he met with great success. He didn’t fail a single time as long as he utilized the Five-Element Talisman Artistry method, but he would invariably fail miserably if he used his previous method.
In fact, this familiar feeling reminded Cha Ming of formations. Formations naturally stabilized together because they were in harmony, both with themselves and with heaven and earth. His previous talismans had not been made using proper materials and the proper form, so they felt unnatural. Now that he had corrected his mistake, his talismans were automatically coming together without much strain on his part.
This was great news for the current Cha Ming, since he was low on funds. One more day generated enough income to buy the next set of evanescence. He returned to the Talisman Artist Guild and sold the talismans at nine-tenths their face value, a privilege that only master artists enjoyed. After eight more days, he had completed the cycle and purchased one jin of each element. He had even made a small profit.
The only thing that concerned Cha Ming now was how to remedy his problem with combat formations since he couldn’t purchase more sigil focuses. That and stabilizing his cultivation. He could get the pills whenever he wanted, since his regular work with Mo Tianshen was proceeding smoothly, and the experiments were promising. Over the course of the past month, they had narrowed down the number of powder compounds to five and the number of rune materials to ten. The remaining experiments revolved around optimizing rune structure, dosages, and powder balance.
How to optimize my base sigils, Cha Ming thought. Sigil focuses were reusable, but he had tried to stick two different elements into a single sigil focus in the past. The results had been disastrous.
All I can do is upgrade them for the time being.
Unlike his foundation-establishment pillars, which only contained the barest stable sigil for each element, he could continue building onto the foundation of his sigil focuses. In fact, he didn’t even have to completely reprogram the focus. Withdrawing one from the rosary on his wrist, he made a gesture that ripped out the existing sigil base. The multiple characters imbued inside the malleable blob remained, and they were still linked to the base sigil. Cha Ming opened his mind’s eye as he used his newfound comprehension in talisman artistry to imagine the remaining structure. The outline of the full sigil of water became clear to him.
Cha Ming breathed deeply and summoned the dark-blue ink that had appeared when he mixed water evanescence with liquified elemental essence. His strokes were fluid but turbulent, showing resistance and momentum simultaneously. It wasn’t long before the perfect water sigil snapped into place. After sending it back into the sigil focus, its effectiveness had increased by thirty percent. Further, retracting energy from the sigil focus led to a very minor loss in qi. Only a single point out of one hundred was lost. Having met with success, he repeated the same process for all hundred and eight sigils.
All in all, it was a very eventful week and a half. He had made great progress in terms of talisman arts, sigils, and formations. All he was missing now was time. And a solution to his combat-formation problem.
Boom.
Cha Ming was thrown back into a wall. For the twentieth time today, he had lost his formation battles against Lu Tianhao. “Let’s stop here,” the white-haired man said. “Do you know why you keep losing?”
“Because of the combat sigils,” Cha Ming said.
“That’s right,” Lu Tianhao said. “While the dual-element formations have their advantages, it’s simply impossible to fight me adequately with them. They aren’t strong enough to take advantages of those instances where double effectiveness is desired instead of fifty percent greater. You’ve capped the power of your formations.”
Cha Ming knew he was right, but he was helpless. “If I could get additional sigil focuses, I would. However, the embargo by the Wang family caught me where I’m weakest. I can buy formation flags just fine, but procuring focuses would take a three-week journey to another kingdom.”
“It’s only three weeks,” Lu Tianhao said.
“To you it’s only three weeks, but I have less than six weeks left,” Cha Ming said. “I just don’t have the time or the funds. I’m better off cultivating and learning more lesser-grade formations. Maybe I’ll be able to scrounge enough funds to make more formation flags at the mid-grade level.”
Lu Tianhao sighed. “I have a spare set of combat sigils, but you can’t even use them. And I can’t send someone in the Alabaster Group to purchase them on your behalf, because all of us have been embargoed.”
“Sorry,” Cha Ming said sheepishly.
“They’ll get what’s coming to them, don’t you worry about that,” Lu Tianhao replied. A cold gleam appeared in his eyes. “If I hadn’t transcended, this would already be resolved. I absolutely hate it when people make good men suffer for the sake of petty political squabbles.”
“I’ll figure something out,” Cha Ming said.
That night, Cha Ming sat on the cold stone floor of a practice room. It was a durable one, as Cha Ming wasn’t sure what would happen when he tried his crazy idea. It would stretch the very limits of his capabilities. He summoned a water sigil like before, separating the sigil from the focus. It was in its perfect, upgraded form.
Instead of painting directly o
n it, he started creating another sigil. This time, he painted the full form of the wood sigil. Once this was complete, he followed up with the fire sigil, the earth sigil, and the gold sigil. All five floated before him in a neat circle. After resting, he continued by drawing the outer ring and inner star. He did this with pure liquified elemental essence, untainted by any elements. He didn’t even use creation or destruction qi, as neither could be imbued into the liquified elemental essence.
The sigils snapped together into a stable formation once the last line was drawn. The liquified elemental essence turned white and black.
“Excellent,” Cha Ming whispered. “Now fuse!” He motioned for the mutable sigil focus to combine with the five-sigil ring. Its liquidlike form began encapsulating the symbols, incorporating a quarter, then one half of it. But that was all.
Cha Ming frowned. Is it too large to fit into the sigil focus? Using his half-step resplendent soul, he began compressing the sigil. It shrunk by twenty percent, allowing the blob to incorporate slightly more of the combined matrix. A little more.
The formation began to shiver slightly as he compressed it further. The instability grew significantly, but the volume integrated into the blob only increased slightly.
Just a little more, he thought. He pressed the formation further and heard a loud snap. Suddenly, great destructive power rampaged through the room. Even the five sigils that made the formation were disrupted, resulting in an explosion of all five elements. Cha Ming quickly slapped an ice shield talisman on himself and protected his vitals with his qi.
The smoke cleared, and Cha Ming discovered that, aside from slight damage to his body, nothing else had happened. The room was very durable. What left him most surprised was that the sigil focus was unharmed save for the loss of the many runes that swam within it. It was now pure and unaligned.
The result, while devastating, was quite encouraging to Cha Ming. Although he had lost some elemental essence and a bit of time, he had proven that it was possible to link the sigils together, much like the foundation-establishment matrix in his dantian. Whether or not he could compress them enough was a different matter.
Perhaps it’s a matter of luck.
Over the next week, there were many explosions in that same practice room. But there were no successes, only failures.
The deadline was approaching, and Cha Ming was beyond stressed. He had wasted an entire week. He would have been better off traveling to another kingdom, politics be damned.
Naturally, he decided to visit the art gallery for inspiration. The last time he had visited, he met Jun Xiezi, who had resolved his problem.
Who knows, Cha Ming thought. Maybe I’ll meet another mystical character who can help me.
Instead of looking through paintings, Cha Ming decided to look at sculptures. He had always admired sculptors. The precision and the visualization in their work was mind-boggling. He had always wondered how someone could lay eyes on a piece of marble and say: This is definitely a man and a woman frolicking in the wilderness.
There were nude statues and clothed statues, statues of landscapes and statues of cities. Like the art gallery before, he started by looking at amateur works and proceeded to look at the works of great artists. There was something to appreciate in every piece.
After spending the whole day in the main gallery, he stopped by the premium sculpture exhibition. He walked in, and to his surprise, he saw Jun Xiezi once more. No one else was there, so he cracked a joke. “I don’t suppose you sculpted this one as well?”
“Cha Ming?” Jun Xiezi said. “Gods no. It’s hard enough to push your limits as a painter. How could I possibly think of taking up another equally difficult art form?”
“Equally difficult?” Cha Ming said. “But in art, there is so much depth of color. It is something statues can’t hope to achieve.”
“But what they lose in color, sculptures make up in their three-dimensional shape,” Jun Xiezi replied. “Just think about it. Could you possibly imagine creating such a vivid sculpture?” he said, motioning to the large exposition in front of them. It was a single giant sculpture made of marble. There were twelve characters in the sculpture, all equally flawless and expressive.
“The hardest thing about sculpting,” Jun Xiezi said, “is that you need to work with the material you’re given. You can’t just take a big block of marble and do whatever you like with it. A single wrong move and you could shatter the piece in half. You need to work with its nature, drawing out its potential into a sort of compromise between your will and the stone’s. When I paint, I don’t need to worry about all this.”
Cha Ming nodded. “You mentioned before that you go look at paintings to relax. Why do you come look at sculptures?”
“For inspiration,” Jun Xiezi replied. “Sometimes when you paint, you imitate three dimensions using two dimensions, shading, and color. It’s very difficult, and sometimes looking at something in the proper three dimensions can help. I mean, look at this.” He waved at the sculpture. “You have twelve people, but they aren’t standing beside each other. Some are leaning over each other, while others are sleeping on one another. That lady there is seated on her husband while holding a baby. It’s not just a matter of fitting twelve people together; it’s a matter of meshing them together in a way that works for everyone while still maintaining the nature of the marble. It’s a fascinating piece of work.”
“You see here,” Jun Xiezi started as he looked behind him. But Cha Ming had already disappeared. He had gotten the inspiration he needed, and he didn’t want to let it slip through his fingers.
Chapter 31: Tooth and Nail
Cha Ming was excited, a stark contrast to his stressed and fatigued demeanor less than an hour ago, rushing back after hearing Jun Xiezi’s words. The sigils were like pieces of granite. They couldn’t be forced together however he wanted. They needed to be placed in accordance with their nature.
He secluded himself in the stone room once more. Once again, he painted the five sigils he wished to join, along with the supporting black-and-white framework.
If I can’t compress them together on the same plane, what if I twist them?
He carefully used his incandescent force to twist both the water sigil and the earth sigil clockwise. As they twisted, so did the framework. The sigils realigned themselves accordingly. To Cha Ming’s surprise, however, they didn’t simply move rigidly with the frame. Rather, the frame slid alongside the sigils to keep them facing outward.
It seems they have a preferred orientation, Cha Ming thought. I need to work with this. At no point can I have them facing anywhere but outward.
As he continued twisting, he pressed them toward each other. As expected, there was much less resistance to this movement. He continued to twist and compress, twist and compress. The white circle was now a white spiral, and the black star no longer looked so starlike. In fact, both the white spiral and the black “helix,” for lack of a better word, got thicker as the length between each point reduced.
Cha Ming began to worry that it was going too well. The sigils had smoothly collapsed to half of their original volume, and it still continued. Since things were going so well, he was hesitant to try incorporating the twisting formation into the sigil focus.
I’ll wait until I hit a barrier or limit. One half soon became four tenths, and four tenths became three. The sphere was an optimal three-dimensional shape. It minimized volume for any specific radius.
To Cha Ming’s amazement, as he pressed them together, the sigils themselves began to change. It started with a subtle shifting in their runic structure. The inner side became thinner, and the outside became bulkier. The original black and white lines had also quadrupled in thickness. In fact, Cha Ming felt as though they were almost touching.
A little more, he thought. And then he heard a pop. The formation in his hands had stabilized in the three-dimensional shape. It was now in the form of a perfect sphere. And in between each gap of five colors and black and white
, a cloudy gray substance had filled in. The same gray he had seen in his meridians.
He didn’t hesitate to fuse the sigil with the sigil focus, merging them together like drops of water, and the sigil focus’s color changed from clear to the same gray that filled the spaces. The same gray as Fuxi’s brush. And the same gray as the qi seals connecting his qi pathways. At that moment, Cha Ming felt like he had discovered a universal truth.
He didn’t notice as the qi of heaven and earth rushed into him, replenishing his dantian, his body, and his soul. He didn’t notice as one after another, he summoned sigils into existence with a few swishes of his brush. He didn’t notice as his whole rosary turned gray.
Nor did he notice when every stroke of his brush brought hundreds of runes into existence, which rushed into the gray sigil focuses. He was a heavenly painter, bringing something very natural into the world.
Lu Tianhao sat at his desk, gently holding his late daughter’s doll. Oh, how he missed her. But there was no bringing her back. Even the few immortals he had asked were helpless. A person would always be reincarnated, but they wouldn’t be the same person as before. By the time he had found his daughter, she was already living a happy life with her new family. His own daughter was dead, and someone else’s daughter was born. How could he take her away from them?
That was how his hunt for devils began. Since his strength was feeble in a transcendent realm, he headed for the lower realms, where he would be at the peak of power. His actions would be limited, yes, but he could guide others onto the correct path. Like he did his brother for a time. It ended badly, but for hundreds of years they accomplished great deeds together.
Treachery, Lu Tianhao thought. I have experienced treachery far too often in this life. First one, then the other.
Suddenly, he felt all the energy in the city moving toward him.
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