For the next month Shen studied the Balanced Elements book every chance she got. She continued with her businesses, as well as sparring with Po and the other child dragons, but what was in the book began to distract her. She did make use of it a few times to defeat Po, as she had plenty of Earth chi to cancel his water attacks, and even managed to use a bit of Wood chi to add a bit of extra power to her fire uppercut, which knocked him out.
She studied little else during this time, though Sho did make sure she could reliably use the shifting technique. Shen was only able to change her hair, eye, and skin color, but for now it was enough. The rest of the time she spent practicing what was in the book.
Shortly after her twelfth birthday she discovered something. The large number of Water Blossoms which Fisher couldn’t pickle due to a lack of supplies allowed her to have an easy source of water chi, which she could use to refine wood chi. Only the largest of the buds contained pure enough chi to improve its purity, at just over five percent, but it did allow her to create a large quantity of wood chi at around three and a half percent which could be purified later, only needing to use the abundant water chi to enhance the wood chi she gathered from the plants in the forest.
Her life was disrupted, however, when the major life event occurred which made her officially a woman. Thankfully she had been told of this by some of the other women in the sect, as they knew she was approaching that age, so when it happened she went to Wuxan to talk to her about it. After being assured that there was nothing about her bloodline which would make this occurrence unusual, she left. She took the next few days off from going to the dragon village, telling Mae the truth about what was happening, but telling the boys that she was simply going to spend the next several days in cultivation. She had plenty of water and Water Blossoms in her room, and could go to the bathroom down the hall when she needed to, so for three days she spent her time eating Water Blossoms instead of normal food and purifying her various types of Chi.
First she lit many candles around her and drew in the Fire chi, purifying it as she drew it out, then focusing on the concept to get it up to 7% purity. Once she had so much Fire chi inside of herself that she felt hot and started sweating from having too much, she put out the candles and started meditating again. This time she used the Fire chi to purify the Earth chi. It took her over a day to get the Earth chi to 7%, by which point the Fire chi she was bringing in was at 7.1% purity. She then used the Earth chi to purify the Metal Chi, refilled the Earth chi, and then refilled her Fire chi.
She soon realized that this would require larger and larger quantities of fire chi as she completed the circle, but she was running out of candles, having depleted her contribution points to get them. After three days of meditation her symptoms were all but gone, so she took a shower and left for dining hall, as it was now night. She told her friends of her progress in purifying chi, and that she wanted to find a larger and cheaper source of fire chi so that she could continue her meditation. The boys suggested a bonfire. They could disguise it as an exercise for the fire aligned outer disciples and would likely get permission to do it as long as she played along. Shen wasn’t a fan of the plan, however, as it would still leave her with the same problem as before. She would need huge amounts of Fire chi to complete the circuit, and likely an entire bonfire for herself to fill dantians to their limit. Even then, she would want to go even further to expand that level as well, and might take years expanding it, as the process of expanding it was slow. After all, while she would have to get a job at thirteen she could remain at the Gathering phase as long as she wanted to. She only needed to reach Foundation and be automatically promoted to Inner Disciple if she wanted to be able to pay rent in contribution points and take major missions with the sect.
That night she dreamed of the layout of the city and when she woke up she had an idea. What if, instead of purifying all of the elements on her own, she could do like the immortals did when building the city and build a formation to gather and purify the energy itself? She would then only need to sit in the middle of the formation to gather the elemental chi.
That, however, sounded like it would be expensive, so she bathed, got dressed, and left for the dragon village. Now that she had a magic bag she was able to carry five jars with her every time she went there, so, assuming there were enough jars in Fisher, she could earn the money that she needed by just going to the village like normal.
When she arrived she privately met with Sho to explain while she had missed several days of practice. While Sho had studied humans enough that she understood the situation, almost to the point that she was obsessed with humans, she knew that the other dragons wouldn’t understand. After all, that wasn’t an issue for dragon women, so they wouldn’t know how to deal with it or be discrete about it. Shen informed her what she had told the boys and Sho decided that would be the excuse that they would use. Many dragons went into closed door cultivation, sometimes for months or years, so none of them would question Shen doing the same.
Shen returned to her routine and, for the next several months she continued with her trade and practice, saving up her money as she thought about the idea of using a Formation to gather chi. The only thing that really changed was that every month, around the same phase of the moon as the last time, she would take at least one day off to go into closed door cultivation. And strangely, for a day or two before that and a day or two after she returned, all of the adult male dragons treated her nicer than normal. She asked Do about it, but he didn’t know why it was happening. Sho seemed to know, but refused to talk about it, claiming that she need to ‘do some research’ before she could be sure.
Soon Shen had enough money to start considering the idea of a formation, so one day she went to a shop in the water district. This shop specialized in Formations and arrays. She knew that the Jade Dragon Sect treated them differently than the other sects in the area. In most sects the disciples collected relics, including formations, arrays, and talismans, as well as all manner of magical devices, and used them to fight. In the Jade Dragon Sect, however, Teacher taught that they should learn to rely on their own strength, not the strength of an item. After all, items can be taken from you, but techniques and cultivation can’t. While the last part wasn’t entirely accurate, it was certainly true that you wouldn’t lose those things just from being kidnapped or robbed.
In this sect, they only used such external aids if they were needed to do a job. As such, most of the products being offered were for emergency use, such as a single use barrier, or talismans which used rare techniques to produce an effect few people learned but many would require at some point. In essence, relics were being treated much like pills or elixirs.
The man in charge looked to be in his forties, though Shen knew that he could be well over a hundred and still look like that if he cultivated to a higher level at a young age. After all, each time you advanced your aging rate was roughly cut in half, doubling the years you had left. He had many small scars all over his body and two burnt areas visible, one on his left forearm and one on the right cheek. Either he was an experienced warrior or he had many accidents while experimenting.
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It would be rude to ask which it was, though, so Shen just walked up to the front counter, greeted him, and explained her idea. From what she understood, a formation could be made to mimic any technique if one knew how to design it properly. Her idea was to take in massive amounts of all five elements from large sources somewhere in the woods and use them to refine each other. She wasn’t sure if she was going to use one element of higher purity to purify the others in a chain or if she should use the other method, using the four other elements to purify one of them to high purity. She would decide that after she had checked to see which would give her more and purer energy in the end.
The Formation Master wasn’t familiar with this technique, so he couldn’t build the arrays himself, but he did give her some pointers and recommend some materials. First, he suggested that she do it away from the sect town. What she was planning was much more like what he had seen in other sects, and definitely wasn’t creating emergency items. This technique would be used to directly produce high purity elemental chi which would be used in her cultivation attempt to reach Foundation stage, so it wouldn’t be accepted by most of the people in the sect. The Formation Master didn’t really care about that, however. The sects rules had held him back in his own study of Formations for decades, so now he would help her break, or at least bend, those rules.
He sold her a book on the basics of formations and arrays and some special chalk which was made by compressing crushed burnt egg or sea shells and jade dust together. This chalk had enough chi conductivity to make most Cleansing and Gathering level formations. He then invited her in case she needed more supplies or had questions.
For the next month she studied the Formation manual every day after her trip and practice. There were two basic methods for creating a formation. The first copied the chi pathways in the body, and therefore more accurately duplicated the abilities of a cultivator. It had the downside of being much weaker than the ability it was meant to duplicate, however, as the chalk she used was much less conductive than the chi pathways in her body. One could overcome this shortcoming by using more conductive, and therefore more expensive materials, but she didn’t have the money for that.
The second technique used techniques similar to talisman creation or imbuing a concept onto chi. There were certain symbols which humans resonated with on a fundamental level, like how they had an instinctive fear of reptiles or certain predator features. Through the study of and combination of these symbols one could create more complex effects like the concepts of the different elements, or health, or growth. That, combined with focusing on the symbols while imbuing them with chi would allow you to impart an effect onto the symbols which could be activated by adding chi. These had the advantage of power and efficiency, but the weakness of only being able to create simple effects.
If one wanted to create a complex and powerful effect, like the shield which protected the Sect Town, one would need to combine the two, using chi conductive materials to connect the symbols in the correct way to reproduce the desired effect. To learn how to connect them properly could take years if one started from the bottom up, and then they are unlikely to be the best they can be. Because of this, most formations which are used will be written down in a book so that the student can simply duplicate what the master did and hopefully, eventually, modify it to improve its performance slightly. Books of these Formations can be found in most sects, and the one which protects the city is such a formation, but they aren’t very common in the Jade Dragon sect for the simple reason that they don’t fit with the Sect’s teachings.
By the end of the month she had set up a healing Formation within her quarters which she would use whenever Mae wasn’t available, but she couldn’t go any further in her studies. The Caravan would be coming in one month, however, so she would have to search through what they had available to see if they had any more information on formations.
This time, when they arrived, she earned over a thousand contribution points by selling water blossoms to the caravan, over 420 gold coins. When she went to purchase techniques from them, however, she ran into a slight issue. The cultivator that was selling the best techniques only accepted spirit stones as payment. She hadn’t bothered practicing the technique to produce them, so she didn’t know where to get them. She asked around and eventually found that the sect sold them in exchange for contribution points. Five points got you one low grade stone. Above that quality you paid more contribution points, multiplying the cost by ten. While they only contained five times the chi of the level below them, these stones were rarer and harder to condense, so someone who specialized in purifying spirit stones could profit by combining lower grade crystals into higher grade ones.
The man that sold the book of basic Formations wanted one hundred low grade spirit stones for it. Five hundred points. Not wanting to alert Ponma to what she was doing, as he was one to always follow the rules, she couldn’t negotiate the man down. She asked the Formation man about it and he agreed that it was expensive, as most sects would only charge seventy five or eighty stones, but that it would help her learn to do Formations. She thought about it for over a day before cashing in her points for one hundred stones and visiting the man, buying the book on the last day he was in town.
This book proved to be well worth it. It contained arrays for gathering all of the five elements which were far more efficient than anything she had discovered so far. It even contained purification formations so that one could make the five elements purer. There were some minor bits missing from what she wanted to do, but she knew that this would drastically improve her abilities.
She spent three hundred points from her profits on low quality Jade plates, a basic manual on stone carving from the Formation shop, and the tools to carve the Jade. The Jade the sect mined on this mountain was only good for up to Foundation grade relics and formations, but the five Masters had used large quantities of it to compensate for that when building the town, including using jade bricks without mortar to build the pathways when you would only need jade tiles if you used Nascent level materials. Purple Jade, the Nascent level type of Jade, was expensive and hard to find, however, so most people used green, the Cleansing quality version, blue, the Gathering quality version, or occasionally White, the Foundation level version. What Shen had bought were all green, the dark green kind that were usually overlooked for being too low quality for proper goods. They did, however, work perfectly well for making practice formations.
When her thirteenth birthday arrived and she was required to find a job, she talked to the Formation master and handed him a stack of plates which contained the sample device she had been working on. Each one was a dark green jade tablet that either gathered a type of chi or concentrated it. She had carved the outside so that they would fit together in a pentagon shape, and in the middle sat a gathering tile where one could place a beast core. Though she hadn’t been able to find one for sell, she had seen a few around the sect. They grew inside some Foundation or higher ranked spirit beasts, the more powerful ones being more likely to have them and having better quality cores. They had one interesting feature: they could store chi. You could put chi into them or remove it with little more effort than inserting it into and removing it from your own body.
The Formation Master, who now introduced himself at Wei Chen, put the pieces together and, when he saw that it would slowly feed a balance of the five elements into a beast core that was placed in the middle of the formation, gladly accepted her as an apprentice. The only problem with that was that she couldn’t demonstrate her skills for others. He ended up teaching her how to make single use talismans and how to engrave metal in order to make use of her skills and cover up what she preferred doing. She started spending most of her days putting the formations on flying swords that let them fly more efficiently than simply using telekinesis on them. This was one of the formations that almost all sects learned, and were over ten thousand years old, and therefore extremely efficient. She wasn’t allowed to learn to make magic bags or storage rings yet, as they were quite expensive, but this level of sword was mass produced by the apprentices of the forgers in the Fire district, so they were cheap enough to practice on.
Occasionally she would assemble her practice array, set an object from each element on the correct element, and touch the center. This would give her 6% pure chi of all five elements at once. She had to carefully balance the quantity and quality of all of the elements when making the array, even having to remake several of the tiles in the attempt, but now she had succeeded in making a proof of concept device.