Shen entered her room shortly after it got dark outside. Do had managed to get two blows through her Dragon Scales, as she was still slow at activating it. While you could keep the power on all of the time, it was like Releasing your chi constantly. It wasted a lot of chi and would quickly tire you mentally.
She laid down on her bed and started moving wood chi through her bruised arm and ribs. While this wasn’t a true healing magic technique, it could relieve pain. For this she used the Wood chi stored inside her dantian. It wasn’t as pure as the fire chi she had in there, at only five and a half percent, but she had gathered much more of it in order to balance out the other elements. At first she had just tried to gather as much fire chi as possible, but she started hurting and sweating all of the time, even when in cool locations like underground, so she decided to bring in some water, wood, earth, and metal chi to balance it out. She didn’t have any real techniques for the others, tough, so they mostly just sat there keeping her from getting too out of balance. Eventually, she knew, she would get used to the imbalance, but she also knew that day wouldn’t be any time soon.
As she laid there Mae walked in. “You’re hurt.” Mae said, noticing the bruise on her arm, then dropped her bags and ran over. “Did you get in a fight?” she asked. Mae was a natural with Wood chi, and had been learning several healing techniques which used it. Mostly they only dealt with bruises, swelling and pain management, but that was all that was needed in this situation.
“Just a sparring session with some other kids. I didn’t think it was that bad until I got back here.” She lifted her shirt and showed Mae her ribs.
“They’re already turning yellow. Idiot.” Mae said, then started fixing the bruising on her ribs. Mae managed to make the worst of it go away before she ran out of chi and had to take a break. Mae was still at the Cleansing level and, as such, only had the weaker wood chi she had to make on the fly, so she had little energy and her spells were less effective than normal. Still, it was good to be friends with a healer.
“Tomorrow I’ll take it easy.” said Shen.
Mae shook her head. “You are scheduled to fight Danka in the ring. You agreed to it a week ago, so no backing out.”
Shen sighed. “Right.” Danka used a sword, so she would have to use different tactics than with Do. The others didn’t know that she was going to the dragon village. She told them that she just liked walking through the woods and studying the plants and animals. She had even picked up a few minor missions from the mission hall so that she could bring back useful medicinal and alchemical plants and keep up appearances. It had earned her a few points, but she hadn’t bought anything new with them. Maybe she should pick up a new technique?
With her ribs mostly healed, she sat up and started drawing in chi. It wasn’t much, but she should try and store as mush elemental chi as possible, just in case. The small amount of extra strength she got from having more chi in her body could be the difference between winning and losing.
The next day she got ready and went to the field, the pain having almost entirely went away. A few minutes later Danka arrived. “Ready for the fight?” he said, going over to the practice weapon rack and grabbing a wooden sword.
“Sure I am. Are you?” Maybe if she could make him unsure about this it would give her an advantage.
“Of course I am. I’m the one that’s been practicing fighting, after all. You’ve just been taking walks. At best you can avoid me long enough to wear me out.”
Shen shrugged. “Exhausting your opponent is a valid strategy.” she said. She noticed Ponma nodding slightly at the other side of the sparring area.
Danka just smiled and walk onto the field. The field master motioned for them to start and Shen dashed at him. This surprised him and he swung without really aiming, missing her as she ducked and headbutted him in the stomach. It didn’t do much more than knock the air out of him, as she hadn’t wanted to risk injuring herself. Do liked to headbutt her at the starts of fights too, but dragons had much stronger skulls and neck muscles than humans so he didn’t risk a concussion when he hit her at full strength. Luckily Sister Sho was there to heal her cracked ribs the two times he managed to take her by surprise.
Shen grabbed him and kicked his legs out from under him and he hit the ground. She swung at his face a few times, managing to get two blows in before he got his arms up to block, and making him drop his sword. The dragons might not have taught her proper fighting with a weapon, but they were great at wrestling.
He managed to roll to the side so that she punched the stone under his head and, when she instinctively grabbed her hand he rolled away and got up. He was about three meters from his sword now, so he would need to either fight her in hand-to-hand or get back to it. When she stood up and kicked the sword off of the platform he knew which option was being forced on him.
They circled each other for a few seconds before he jumped at her. She jumped to the side to avoid him, but he shifted onto his right foot and swung sideways, hitting her in the ribs the same place she was bruised yesterday. Strangely, his blow felt like it hit some sort of soft armor, but she still grabbed her ribs from the pain.
Unknown to him she had figured he would try something and left herself open, engaging Dragon Scales for half a second just as his blow landed. Still, it wasn’t as solid as she would have liked and the fact that he hit where she was already bruised meant that she still felt it. She took several steps back and when he swung at her again she ducked and swung with a fire enhanced uppercut. This was based on a technique that dragons had taught her, though Do used ice to give himself claws using a similar technique. Still, the fire was enough to throw Danka off balance and let her sweep his legs.
He hit the ground hard and she kicked him in the ribs just to make sure he was down before the Field Master stopped the fight, declaring her the winner. The field healer came over and looked at Danka’s injuries. Apparently he had broken his arm when he landed, which would take at least two days to heal properly, so he was walked to the clinic and given time off of sparring for the next three days. He still had to do the morning run with the fighters, but as he couldn’t swing a sword with a broken arm he would have to practice one of the body cultivation techniques the Field Master taught instead. This only made it worse for Danka, as he hated meditating. The fact that he knew it would enhance his body and make him a better fighter was the only reason he did it, despite having Foundation level talent.
Shen was declared the winner and awarded a contribution point. She didn’t do it for the fight, however. She did it because spending all day ‘by herself in the woods’ looked suspicious. Many cultivators, however, trained on their own then came to town to spar, so it would serve as a great way to keep up appearances.
Once the field healer had treated her injuries, including several they were certain she didn’t get in that last fight, Shen grabbed a loaf of bread from the dining room in the Fire district and left the town, heading towards the dragon village.
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Thirty minutes later she went through Fisher village and picked up one of the jars. She had picked up a few Water Blossoms on her way through the village a few weeks ago and, when she got to the dragon village she had pulled them out and offered them to some of the kids there. As it turns out, Water Dragons really like them, as they don’t run into the same problem humans have with having too much water chi in their bodies, so they became quite popular. They treated them as a snack food, much like humans would carry nuts with them for when they got a bit hungry, so any time she brought them some they were happy to receive them.
She had started paying the kids in Fisher to pickle them for her, with her buying the supplies to do so, and every day she went up there she would take one jar of pickled Water Blossom with her. Some of the Dragons preferred the pickled ones to the fresh ones, so they disappeared within hours of her arrival every day. She was certain that she could make a business out of selling these to the dragons, but she wasn’t sure what they used as money.
Eventually she worked out deals to trade them for various alchemical ingredients that the dragons produced or gathered, and which could be sold in town. This netted Shen several contributions per day as she sold or donated the ingredients to the apothecaries in town.
The good will she gained from bringing the dragons a new favorite snack helped her fit in a bit more, and several parents swore that feeding pickled Water Blossoms to their babies made them learn water magic faster, making even more people like her. Unfortunately, she couldn’t really expand the trade. She had thought about buying a cart and hauling several jars per day, but there wasn’t a path to the dragon village. The jars were too bulky to bring more than two at a time, and even that was a serious workout at her current level of cultivation. Ideally she would buy a magic container of some sort, but storage rings were too expensive and even a magic bag, the cheapest form of storage which could only hold five or six jars, cost over a thousand contribution points.
She also considered having someone else help her carry them, but she couldn’t bring non-dragons here, the dragons wouldn’t go to Fisher just to get the jars, and as far as she knew there were no more part-dragon people in the town that she might get permission to bring to the dragon village with her. All of this basically meant that her business was stuck at barely making enough for her own needs. Not that she spent that much, but any starting apprenticeship paid three points per day, so she compared it to that.
Her daily trips to the village did mean she got in a lot of practice with her techniques. Besides getting used to Release and strengthening her muscles by carrying two jugs at a time, she also got to practice her enhanced senses, use telepathy when talking to the dragons, and practice telekinesis as she traveled by picking up anything useful that she passed as she took a slightly different path each time she climbed the mountain. She even got to practice her light spells when she spent too much time sparring with the dragons and didn’t leave until after sunset.
A few days before the caravan arrived Shen entered the library. She wanted to purchase several more techniques, including offensive and defensive techniques from the Earth and Metal elements, not being very good with water and only learning the basic healing spells from the Wood element so she could last longer in a fight. After all, these basic wood abilities were able to lessen pain, reduce swelling, reduce bruising, and stop bleeding.
She had already picked up a few tactical abilities, like heat vision through the fire element and vibration detection through the Earth element, which would let her sense when animals were nearby through the ground. The one she had picked up a month ago let her detect metal through the metal element, though so far it had only let her find a few small bits of ore as she wandered the mountain. Most of her money came from detecting various types of chi in the wildlife and taking it that wildlife back to the apothecary Mae worked for to see if it was worth anything. That simply added a bit to the income.
A few times she had found things that were dangerous poisons and ruined the rest of the magical ingredients she had gathered by putting them in the same bag, so now she had multiple bags and placed anything she wasn’t sure of in a bag by itself.
Now she had around six hundred contribution points in her account and went inside, hoping to buy something interesting before the caravan arrived. She was looking for the shelves when she saw two interesting texts near the back wall. This was where the library put the techniques that were unpopular. Sometimes they would even have discounts on them, as the popularity of techniques dropped and they found that they had too large of a supply of some copies.
The first technique book was called “Balanced Elements”. It explained how each element naturally benefited or canceled out one of the others and taught how to exploit that fact. It contained four primary techniques and a few side techniques. The four techniques didn’t seem to be ranked by cultivation level, but would grow stronger as you reached higher stages by adding in the secondary techniques which were ranked. One primary technique was about countering elemental chi with the one which canceled it out. The most popular way to do this was to shoot water chi at a fire effect, but according to the book you could also do the same to cancel Water with Earth or cancel Earth with Wood. The next technique taught one to use the element which fed the element to improve its strength. According to the text, a fire elemental effect could have wood chi added to it to boost the effect. The third technique was about enhancing the purity of the elemental chi by using a purer form of the element which boosted it up to the purity of the purer element. Essentially this meant that she could use her almost seven percent pure fire chi to make almost seven percent pure Earth chi, then continue that with Metal, then Water, then wood, completing the cycle. The fourth took that a step further by using the three elements which didn’t cancel an element out to remove any secondary types. While it wasn’t energy efficient, it could theoretically remove almost all other chi types from the elemental energy. The manual claimed that the best it had been documented to do was around 60%, though that was by an immortal who spent over a year refining wood chi to try and heal a sick friend of hers.
The second technique book was simply titled “The Complete Dragon Technique Guide.” It didn’t have a description in the front cover like every other technique book Shen had seen, instead starting with an elementary description of what chi and cultivation was, things that everyone grew up knowing. Both books were labeled as costing 500 points, so Shen took them to the front of the library to ask about them.
The chief librarian was familiar with the first one. One hundred and ten years ago, when she first started working in the library, it was quite popular. It lost most of its popularity fifty years ago, however, as it had little use in combat, and combat effectiveness seem more important now that the front with the demons was getting closer. Demons, after all, often didn’t use elemental attacks, which made the techniques in the book useless against them, relegating it to something one used to improve their own foundation rather than fight.
The second was similar, but much older. This was written over two thousand years ago by a man who collected everything he could find of what the Immortal Dragon Philosopher Pai Wo had taught his disciples. It claimed to be a complete collection of those teachings, though anyone that read it would realize that there were holes and missing passages. Both were first rate manuals, which confused Shen. After all, why would you only charge five hundred for a first rate manual, even if it wasn’t popular?
The Librarian explained that the first one was considered by most to just be a low level guide containing a few Gathering techniques at best, so, as it contained four primary techniques it was priced comparable to four Gathering phase techniques. As for the second, it was merely a curiosity that no one actually tried to cultivate.
“These are the original techniques which the dragons used, so it is far too slow.” said the Librarian. “After all, even a mortal dragon, not that any modern dragon doesn’t cultivate, will live for around 1500 years. The slowed aging from the higher levels merely expands that. So, if a dragon spends 500 years cultivating to reach Gathering phase, that is like a thirty year old human. There are many thirty year old Gathering phase people among the outer disciples. This doubles the time the dragon has left to two thousand years, so if they spend the next thousand reaching foundation, they are now middle aged. Some of our people take that long to reach Foundation as well. The reason this is considered first rate is because dragons end up with an incredible strong foundation. In terms of the amount of chi they have, an early Gathering phase dragon has more than twice what the Master has, even though he is six hundred years old. In fact, if he were forced to fight such a Dragon, he would need to rely on techniques from higher tiers which the dragon would have little defense against, as he couldn’t win a battle of force.”
Shen thought about it for a while and decided to buy the first book. After all, she didn’t have a thousand years to go to the Foundation stage. She had maybe one hundred and fifty. Maybe, once she reached Foundation and that one hundred and fifty doubled again to three hundred she might take a look at it, if only to understand where the idea of cultivation had started from.
By the time the next Caravan was set to arrive a year after the first she had hundreds of jars saved up at Fisher village, and Ponma merely needed to negotiate the price with the merchant. It meant that he made a much lower profit than her this time, but, as he did so much less work this time, he was happy to let her take the majority of the profit. Most of the wagons to arrive were the same ones from a year ago, so Ponma found the same man that purchased them last time and negotiated with him again. Apparently he had found a buyer in the next major sect town that had a shortage of water type ingredients and was willing to offer three gold each for the jars. Ponma talked him up to three and a half for the large buds, and the ninety eight small bud jars and the thirty seven large bud jars switched hands, as well as 423 gold coins and 10 silver. Shen let Ponma keep 43 gold coins and the ten silver, a little over ten percent of the sales, and thanked him for helping her out.
The 380 coins she kept were exchanged for 912 points and that night she used what was left in her account to buy a magic bag to carry with her into the mountains. With only a few dozen points left in her account, she tried not to waste any money at the caravan, only spending money when her friends, the guys from Fisher village, or one time Sho, wanted to spend time together.