“Kii~~” Silky chirped.

He brushed along Yung’s finger and spat.

Yung had his link sight on. He saw the yaoguai assimilate some null thread strands from the surrounding. It was a Heart qi-intensive process.

About a minute later, the small insectoid mandibles near Silky’s fox snout started twirling, and silken threads spun into existence.

“Fascinating. So your adorable mandibles act like spinnerets.” Yung muttered. He held the thread in his fingers. It was elastic, with a dim gold colour. Indistinguishable from standard dim gold foxmoth silk.

“Hey, buddy!” Yung called out to the apprentice working next to him.

It was a short and chubby boy, his hair dishevelled and his bright eyes sparkling with a hint of shyness as he worked with the jade slips. He wore a loose yellow tunic and baggy trousers that accentuated his doughy appearance. His cheeks were rosy, and he grinned from ear to ear. Though at Yung’s call, his body trembled with nervous energy, the warm smile that he showed to the inanimate jades fading to a wary tick.

“Can you see this?” Yung’s left hand held out a strand null threads he had just severed.

The boy looked at him as though Yung was mad.

With his right hand, Yung held out Silky’s silk, “How about this?”

“Dim gold silk.”

“Got it. Keep up the good work!”

The boy was happy to ignore the sudden pariah.

“Do you know what this means, Silky?” Yung asked the yaoguai before it could eat through his workbench.

“Kii?”

“No, I won’t tie up baddies. Look, it means we might be able to make sound transmission tokens with the silk you spin!” Yung was excited. “This is more special than normal dim gold silk, I am sure of it! Who knows what kind of magical artefacts we’ll be making.”

“Kuu~”

“It’s undergraduate-level stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

Yung took a qi-rich grape from his pouch and put it on a small wooden chip. Silky made happy insect noises and dove in.

“Now then, let’s see what we can do.” Yung took out his grandfather’s jade carving tools. A few needles, a small hammer, a scalpel-like instrument with a tiny spirit stone embedded at the tail, and so on.

Youjin Liu was more than happy to correct the misunderstanding with ten times the reparations from Youjin Ze’s coffers.

Yung picked out a lesser spirit stone that the shop provided to all apprentices. After that, a small jar of spirit stone dust. Next, a lesser void jade, and Yung scrunched his nose.

The void jade was a long, narrow, six-sided prism, similar to tower crystals. It was transparent, though it had a bluish tinge and gave off a muffled vibration at the touch of Yung’s Heart qi. The dense, numbing vapour that seeped out of it would make anyone breathe through their mouths, if they weren’t used to such void-touched materials. It had this chemical scent, like ethanol but more bitter. They were a speciality of the Void connecting land bridge. The Continent of madness on the land bridge’s south end to be precise.

Other places used spirit jades for jade slips. Yung had worked with those several times but felt more comfortable with the local alternative. It could act as a jade crafting material, so it would be more proper to call this one a low quality Imperfect Heaven 1st grade void jade. But the qi inside them could also be syphoned for cultivation, like a spirit stone. So most used spirit stone nomenclature when referring to them. Yung didn’t care either way, but there were rumours of how the Multitudinous Athenaeum Valley, a hegemonic superpower like the Su fox clan, hated such casual disregards of proper terminology.

Yung injected Heart qi into the scalpel in his hand. His own toolset only worked with Spirit qi, but his grandpa’s were uncommon class, and could support all three cultivated qi types.

A thin, ether-like blade appeared, finer than a hair. Yung carved away on the void jade surface and gradually etched the corresponding arrays.

It was steady but slow work. Yung’s rise in cultivation gave him a higher qi capacity but did not give him better control. Only an honest grind could give him that. Yung knew that jade carvers at higher stages didn’t even need tools. They could inscribe arrays on the jade with sheer control of qi.

Dust gathered into a pyramid and time ticked by. Silky had grown bored and retreated.

“It… looks like a language.” Yung had never noticed this before. He had only memorised the overall shape of the array but did not quite understand all parts of it. It wasn’t like Chinese, nor any language Yung was familiar with as Jung. But it did have a syntax. Yung spotted a pair of runes in the form of what could only be a ‘function.’ Within these pair blocks, individual runes acted as constants, variables, and sometimes even functional methods depending on how they connected to each other.

“This part is the same as the sound capturing token.” Yung looked at a portion of the array, three squiggly characters nestled inside like a sorted list. “And this too. The part that brings the sound inside the jade. Huh?”

Not quite analogue, yet not quite digital either. Like a bastardised mix of procedural, functional, object-oriented, and scripted logic using magical hieroglyphs. Where the depth of the stroke, ink used, lines carved, surfaces worked, and materials process all played a role. Not to mention qi. It was good that all standard qi types could be used in such common formation. But the truly advanced stuff had higher qualitative restrictions.

Weird. Does the glow also act as a variable?

Yung took out all his manuals. The sound capturing token, light capturing token, and the most common jade slip, officially named the jade scroll token. He compared the formation arrays for each.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“This one is for input, and this is for storage.” These were the common parts in all four arrays. “The light capturing array's input is weird though. Wait, yeah! This rune is actually to detect light. Then this rune is to detect sound.”

Yung took the scroll for the jade scroll token.

“To detect thoughts?”

That can’t be right…

Yung had rarely recorded anything into jade slips. There was no need, and the few times he did, he had hardly ever pondered their technological workings. Their shop only crafted empty ones, and he wasn’t a scholar who would write magical journals. But he had read them a lot to gather knowledge, and hopefully find a clue to break his cultivation stagnation. Not to mention the instruction guides for jade carvers, a sub-profession of formation masters, were all stored within these handy trinkets.

Most cultivation techniques and spiritual arts were recorded with them too. There were exceptions, such as the Foxfire creek heart sutra’s scroll Su Nanya had given him. But then again, that scroll had letters penned in jade ink, and a similar telepathic information transfer telecommunications.

“Come to think of it… How the heck can I read these jade slips with my mind!?”

The usual way to read a jade slip was to inject a bit of qi into it. Then the contents would appear in the reader’s mind like augmented reality. And stranger yet, the sounds would mentally be audible too, and if the jade slip was of high enough grade, taste, smell, touch, and even emotions.

“What kind of technology have the cultivators been sitting on!” Yung said, exasperated. He earned a few stinky looks from the other apprentices in the room. So he hid a blush and lowered his head.

Yung never thought to delve deeper into these tokens because he never felt it was worth the effort. They weren’t as flashy as spiritual arts, or as suave as martial arts. They couldn’t kill enemies, nor woo women.

They were a business craft.

Yung put the scrolls away. One thing at a time. He made a promise to himself to come back to it at a later date. But he didn’t forget to create a list of the Earth technologies he could adapt with the few basic formation array parts he had isolated. He would need any advantages he could think of if he wanted to stay a step ahead of cultivator bullshit.

But later.

He went back to work. Carve the jade a little. Check it under the lamp light. Sprinkle spirit stone dust into the engraved edges. Then rinse and repeat.

An hour later, he had his first proto-sound transmission token with only a few more steps to go.

Yung carefully held the silk strand he got from Silky and inserted the fine thread into the lines he carved in the jade, covering the whole formation array.

“Done, next is….”

Yung took a clay vial from the workbench. He uncorked it, then poured the contents into a slot carved on the table surface. After the slots filled two-thirds of the way through, he gently placed the proto-sound transmission token into it.

He put the spirit stone into another grove.

“It’s a circuit.” Yung only acquired concepts such as circuits, codes, and technology after regaining his memories as Jung. He filed yet another item away on his growing “To-definitely-do” list.

The circuit wasn’t automated. There were two places where Yung had to place his hands. He did so, and then, with utmost concentration, injected Heart qi.

This was the step where everything could go wrong. It’s why silence was a categorical imperative in this place.

Yung slowly but steadily manoeuvred his Heart qi through the qi circuit. The liquid in the slot started to bubble, and light particles gathered around the proto-sound transmission token.

Ten more minutes passed. The room was kept cool with air cooler-like arrays, so Yung did not sweat.

The liquid in the slot had vanished, absorbed by the token. With a last static spark, the lights assimilated into the token, completing the process.

“Phew,” Yung let go of an overdue exhale. It worked. I wasn’t totally sure, but Silky’s threads can be used!

Yung hurriedly took out his original sound transmission token, made from normal dim gold silk.

It was an uncommon class one, made by Youjin Bao himself. It only had Youjin Bao’s spiritual imprint too, not that he could transmit sound to it anymore. Youjin Chao, Ziyou Maque, and the others had offered to exchange spiritual imprints, but Yung had declined.

In his previous life, he was a person who muted all notifications on his social media. And only followed real-life friends. But Yung knew he had rejected it out of habit and would probably need to rectify that soon.

How embarrassing!

His only friend was Silky. Maybe Floofy too. But the grey fox was spending time with her fellow foxes today.

Yung quickly bound the newly created token with his qi. It stung, but for only a second. The token had to be imprinted with True qi to bind to one user uniquely. But True qi use at such low quantities wouldn’t create setbacks.

Yung touched one of the tokens with the other, injecting Heart qi into both. If all went right, they would remember each other’s spiritual imprint. Which was strange, considering both were bound to Yung.

A few seconds lapsed.

“Dangit.”

It didn’t work.

Yung disturbed the fat apprentice again. “Buddy! Can you do me a quick favour?”

The boy looked at him warily.

“I made this new and improved version of the Dim gold sound transmission token. I just need to—”

“Mine can’t hold any more imprints. It already has three.” The boy said in a way that gave Yung the thrill of being rejected in friendship.

“All you need to do is bind with another one. Wait for a sec!” Yung rushed out and requisitioned a fresh one from the grumpy old man and ran back in.

“Here.”

The fat apprentice rolled his eyes but took the token nonetheless.

“Great! Come to the Dim gold hotel after this, man. I’ll treat you.” Well, the Youjin clan would. Or maybe Su Nanya, since it was her tab, if she was paying at all.

“Really?” Light burst out of the fat boy’s eyes like supernovae. “You’re not lying to me, right?”

“You can order anything you like. Even 2-star fiend meat.”

The fat boy slurped, then nodded. He bound the token at record speed.

Yung repeated the process again.

“Doesn’t look like it works,” Both boys scratched their heads.

“Can I take a look at it?” The other boy asked. Yung handed the token over.

“What’s your name, by the way? I haven’t seen you here before.” Yung asked.

“Oh, Oh, it’s Wang Lihou.” Wang Lihou tested the token under a crystal glass. He injected Spirit qi, then went through each carved line. “My father is a fiendhunter working for the Youjin clan. I joined this shop as an apprentice five days ago. Trained under my master before that, but he said that I needed to brush up my basics. The inscriptions are fine. I don’t know… Did you change the material?”

“I did.” Yung brought out Silky’s silk. “This might look like normal dim gold silk, but it’s not.”

“Maybe you need to make another token with the same material?” Wang Lihou suggested.

Yung slapped his head, “I’m dumb. Thanks!”

“You can’t go back on your promise, okay? You have to treat me after this.” Wang Lihou looked the same age as Yung. A teenager.

Yung laughed and patted the guy’s chubby shoulders, then got back to work.

Another hour later, the second token was completed.

“Brother Lihou, come. Let’s see if it works.”

Wang Lihou had been working on a few light transmission tokens by the side. His fat fingers danced around the void jade like a ballerina. Flexible yet precise. He didn’t use any tools though, just his Spirit qi alone, which was quite impressive. His process was slow, and by the stack of finished tokens on his workbench, Yung guessed Wang Lihou was doing deliberate practice.

Above Wang Lihou’s head, a thicker-than-average celestial link rose to the heavens. Do they signify a person’s aptitude? But aptitude on what, exactly? It can’t be cultivation base since Chao is a cripple, but his celestial link is the thickest by far. Potential, then?

Wang Lihou bound the second token. Yung crossed his fingers.

They gently held the tokens against each other.

“It works!”

“Huzzah!”

“Kiii~”

The three celebrated until a loud “Shut up or leave!” from the old man promptly hushed their zeal.

“Brother Lihou, how about we do the rest of the tests at the Dim gold hotel.”

Wang Lihou packed his things with the speed of a leopard. “You’re a good man, Brother Yung. Chao didn’t lie to me!”

Yung stopped. “Oh, you know Brother Chao?”

“Know him?” Wang Lihou smiled, pointing at his chest, “I’m his best friend!”