Qian Shanyi’s uneasy sleep was plagued with nightmares. She woke up with a start, hacking cough racking her lungs as she spit out coagulated blood. Her heart was still beating quickly in her chest, slowly slowing down. She rubbed her face and got up, not feeling like she had rested at all. Her body did feel somewhat better, and the swelling in her face went down enough that she managed to open her second eye.

“What the hell is wrong with my body,” she sighed. “I hope I am healing faster than it is falling apart.”

Her stomach rumbled, and she headed over to what little food she had stored. Her aching, healing body desperately needed calories. When she was sorting the pile yesterday, she put a small water-type metal brick wrapped in silvered devil moth silk in the middle of her storage, keeping it cool and safe from spoilage.

Qian Shanyi looked over her stores of nutrition. She had plenty to drink in the form of spirit wine: a very expensive drink made from specially treated spiritual grapes. It contained trace amounts of spiritual energy, and would even slightly improve the constitution of cultivators who drank it. No celebration in the cultivation world was complete without it.

Qian Shanyi uncorked the bottle she used yesterday and took a sip. The label on the bottle helpfully informed her this vintage was a good hundred years old, well on the far end of spirit wine ages. It tasted like liquid bliss. There were two full crates of the stuff here: solid wooden constructions, filled with straw and tied together with rope. Each of them fit fifteen bottles, so she would have enough to drink for quite a while.

Yesterday the idea of drinking nothing but spirit wine would have made Qian Shanyi laugh, but she was starting to adapt to the casual wealth on display around her.

In terms of actual food, her supplies were certainly lacking. There was a box of candy, which she finished off immediately; it barely made her feel better. Aside from that, there were spirit plants she could cook in a pinch, and an egg larger than her head of unknown origins.

The problem was that Qian Shanyi could feel spiritual energy inside the plants and the egg, denser than the spiritual energy within Qian Shanyi’s own body. Without careful preparation, these ingredients could be as dangerous as unknown medical pills. If her realm was higher, she could simply overpower the side effects of eating the dishes, but she had only reached the middle level of the refinement stage. It would take her many months to progress to a higher realm. A professional immortal chef could have prepared the dishes and carefully reduced the density of spiritual energy within the ingredients to an acceptable level, but she had never learned those techniques.

“Starving on top of a mountain of wealth…”, Qian Shanyi sighed. She’d figure out what to do with food later. For now, she needed a clock.

To accelerate recovery, Big Mo’s tablets were supposed to be taken once every eight hours. Taking them more often would, over time, mildly poison the organism. Given Qian Shanyi’s condition, she really needed to be careful with those eight hour time windows. There was just one problem: she had no way to measure time. The feeling of doom was stronger today: she knew that if she waited for the owner of the world fragment to let her out, she would be dead.

This meant she had to build a clock.

She went over to where the weapons were stored, and picked up a metal shield. With its concave shape, it could serve as a very large pan. She built a small circle out of several Ice Crystal Bars and put the shield on top, poured the rest of her wine into it, and settled in to wait.

Natural spiritual energy had no particular type, but it could be “polarized”, acquiring special properties. There were five main “types” or “polarities” of spiritual energy: fire, earth, metal, water and wood. Some heavenly materials and earthly treasures could polarize spiritual energy on contact, and thus were also said to have a corresponding “type” or “affinity”.

The different polarities of spiritual energy had a variety of properties, but what Qian Shanyi was interested in was the ability of water and fire types to change the temperature of the environment. Water-type spiritual energy would reduce the temperature, while fire-type spiritual energy would increase it.

With the shield surrounded by water-type spiritual energy, the wine quickly froze. Qian Shanyi waited until it was completely frozen, and then broke it apart into smaller chunks with her sword, putting it aside. She only needed an empty bottle, but she wasn’t about to waste the wine.

Now that she had a bottle, she went back to the wine crates. She untied the rope holding the crate’s lid in place, and carefully frayed the rope until she managed to pull out a long thin thread. Then she went over to the spool of Silvered Devil Moth Silk, cut off a small square of material, and put it on top of the neck of the bottle, tying it down with the thread to seal it around the bottle neck. The silk felt taught when she tested it with her finger. Finally, she took her sword and carefully sawed at the bottom of the bottle, breaking it off.

Fundamentally, a water clock was a very simple construction. All you needed was a basin of water that would leak out at a set rate. The level of water in that basin would tell you the time.

This bottle of hers would serve as that exact basin. Water would seep through the silk, and drip out. All she needed was measure out how quickly the dripping happened, and mark the bottle accordingly.

First, she needed water. She built a second circle out of Igneocopper bars, put the shield on top, and put a Blue Tear Stone on top of the shield.

Some treasures reacted to spiritual energy in ways besides changing its polarity: it was common for fire-type treasures to burst into flames or create lightning around them. When it came to water-type treasures like Blue Tear Stone, they would consume spiritual energy to create water out of the air. Combined with the drop in temperature from being surrounded by water-type spiritual energy, this water tended to freeze into a block of ice surrounding the stone.

Fire-type Igneocopper bricks kept the shield hot, and Blue Tear Stone leaked pure water. While she was waiting for enough of the water to gather, Qian Shanyi went over to the wine crates. She took all the bottles out of one of the crates, put the crate on the side, and drew a circle on the top side of the crate, using her wine bottle as a stencil. She then cut out a slightly narrower opening through the side of the crate. When the bottle was put inside, it would stand vertically.

After enough water gathered, she carefully poured the water into the open side of the water bottle. The bottle filled up, and started dripping through the silk. The drops seemed to fall too quickly for Qian Shanyi’s tastes: she poured the water back into the shield and added several more layers of silk to the top of the bottle, before trying again. This time, the rate was just right: about one drop every three breaths.

The last thing left to do was to graduate the clock by marking various levels of water on its side to track time. Eyeballing it, the bottle should take many hours to drip out: Qian Shanyi just needed to know exactly how many. Fortunately, she already had a measure of time.

Back in the sect, she practiced her cultivation technique, Seven Flowers Bloom, for many hours every day. To keep track of the time, she used to count how many times she could finish the standard set of moves between two sounds of the sect gong. After many years of practice, her moves were precise down to a millimeter, and the count was sixty-seven times every time. The gong was rung once every two hours: this meant that her standard practice moves took exactly one hundred and seven point four seconds.

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Of course, she wasn’t about to practice until the entire bottle was empty: with how her body was right now, she would probably faint from the pain after less than an hour. Instead, she took the piece of wood she cut out of the wine crate and slowly hollowed it out, turning it into a little cup. She would mark the bottle before and after this cup was filled, and then repeatedly pour out the same amount of water out of the bottle, marking the level of water each time. If one cup took twenty minutes to leak out, and there were sixty cups in the bottle, then the entire bottle should take twenty hours.

Qian Shanyi topped off the bottle with water, marked the water level, put the cup under the water drops, and started moving through the steps of Seven Flowers Bloom. It was an elegant and refined cultivation technique, based on an ancient dance. She felt spiritual energy within her body circulate through her meridians, flowing into her sword through her arms. As her sword sliced through the air, small illusions of flowers were left in its wake. The more spiritual energy circulated throughout her body, the more energy it pulled out of the air and into her body through the fourty thousand energy pores on her skin, constantly strengthening her constitution.

For some reason, she felt stilted and bitter as she practiced. Just minutes ago, she was feeling excited about cultivating - it’s not every day that you get to practice inside of a secret realm! But something about the Seven Flowers Bloom put her on edge. Her memory stirred…

Qian Shanyi was practicing in the sect’s moonlit gardens when Elder Striding Phoenix came to see her. He sat down on a nearby bench, and leaned on his walking stick.

“It’s getting late, Ah Shanyi,” he said, “you should go to sleep.”

“There is a bit more spiritual energy in the gardens at night, teacher,” she responded, her words curt, timed to her rhythmic breaths. “When other cultivators do not draw it out. It is not much, but every little bit counts.”

Elder Striding Phoenix sighed. “You are pushing yourself too much.”

“I want to become a sect Elder,” she responded, flicking sweat out of her eyes with a burst of spiritual energy. “I want to slay devils and serve justice. Weaklings do not become elders.”

Elder Striding Phoenix sighed again, and leaned forwards. “Ah Shanyi, again you bring this dream up? I told you this already, women do not become elders in our sect.”

“Then I will have to be the first one.”

“The other Elders would never agree. Besides, our sect is small: we don’t even have any good cultivation techniques for women. Your Seven Flowers Bloom is already the best that we have, but it’s incomplete, and doesn’t fit your spiritual energy affinity. You will have to work twice as hard for half the results - why bother? You are one of the finest jade beauties in the city. You could easily find a good husband. Why fight against the current?”

Qian Shanyi ground her teeth. “To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! Even if the only thing left of me was my teeth, I would still leap and bite the heavens on the ass rather than give up on my dreams. If my technique is inadequate, then I will find a better one. If I can’t find it, I will buy it, and if I can’t buy it, then I can only work even harder. Whenever there is a problem, there is always a solution if you look hard enough!”

Elder Striding Phoenix shook his head. “I just don’t want to see you hurt yourself.”

Qian Shanyi was jerked out of her memory by the same sharp pain in her heart. It was the worst one yet: radiating all the way through her lungs, as if someone rammed a flying sword through her body. She fell on her knees, breathing rapidly. Her heart was thumping in her chest, beating faster than a spooked doe dashing through a forest. She knew: she was about to die.

“How did my health get worse? Something is wrong,” she breathed out, clutching her heart, “This sense of doom… Was I poisoned?”

Slowly, her heart rate slowed and her breathing stabilized. She got off the ground, her legs still shaking, and looked around the world fragment, searching for something that could explain her condition.

“No, this isn’t a poison,” she thought, shaking her head. “Rapid heart rate, sense of doom, nightmares when I slept… And the symptoms get worse when I rapidly circulate my spiritual energy. I should have thought of this earlier: I must be suffering from feng shui deviation.”

“But why would there be inauspicious feng shui here?” she wondered. “Perhaps this is a treasury of demonic cultivators?”

She swept her eyes over the treasury. She had never met a demonic cultivator, but she heard the stories, and looked for the usual signs: dripping blood, bones, wailing ghosts, and so on. She found nothing. Instead, her gaze fell on the pile of refining treasures, and her eyes widened in realization.

“The destructive cycle!”

Besides polarization, most heavenly materials and earthly treasures also naturally attracted pure spiritual energy: pure energy would flow in, and polarized energy would flow out. Once the energy was polarized, its behavior changed: instead of being attracted equally to all types of heavenly materials and earthly treasures, it started to follow the productive and destructive cycles of feng shui.

The two cycles of feng shui [https://i.postimg.cc/Qxbwy7X2/FengShui.png]

Productive cycle went from fire to earth, then to metal, then to water, then to wood, and finally looped back around to fire. Polarized spiritual energy would be attracted to the heavenly materials and earthly treasures of the next type on the productive cycle, and re-polarized on contact. For example, fire-type spiritual energy would be attracted to earth-type treasures, and become earth-type spiritual energy. Each re-polarisation would somewhat improve the quality of the spiritual energy, and make the environment more auspicious.

Destructive cycle went from fire to metal, then to wood, then to earth, then to water, and finally looped back around to fire. Polarized spiritual energy would be similarly attracted to the next step on the destructive cycle, and re-polarized on contact, with each re-polarisation worsening the overall quality of spiritual energy and making the environment less auspicious. Destructive cycle was somewhat stronger than the productive cycle: if spiritual energy had a choice where to flow, it would choose to flow according to the destructive cycle.

Auspicious environments would bring luck, make your wounds heal faster, improve the effectiveness of your cultivation, and bring dozens of other benefits. Inauspicious environments would do the opposite. Sufficiently inauspicious environments would even cause “feng shui deviation”: a condition that would cause the spiritual energy within the bodies of cultivators to go haywire. It would cause an impending sense of doom, rapid heartbeat, nightmares, and in the worst cases, sudden death from a heart explosion.

Normally, there was no need for a cultivator like Qian Shanyi to worry about the feng shui cycles. She was only in the middle of the refinement stage - in terms of cultivation, she was still at the start of the road. All cultivators like her had to worry about was practicing: her sect would employ geomancy to construct their buildings in accordance with the principles of feng shui, ensuring the entire territory of the sect remained auspicious, and would carefully control what kind of artifacts they would own. The vast majority of them would train with weapons that had no particular affinity, and so were safe to handle regardless of the environment. Even if, by luck, they happened to get their hands on a couple of items with affinity to particular types of spiritual energy, the chance of the combination being inauspicious was only one in five, and their sect Elders would quickly notice the problem. And even if, despite all the precautions, their Sect missed the problem, the concentration of spiritual energy was very low in most of the world, and so the effects of feng shui deviation would not be very pronounced.

The only case where feng shui deviation due to the destructive cycle would become a serious problem was if they happened to enter an environment with a massive amount of spiritual energy where all sorts of treasures were placed together haphazardly, but what were the chances of that?

“What do I do?” Qian Shanyi rubbed her face in despair. “If I don’t do something, I might just die the next time I go to sleep.”

She got up and walked over to the pile of refinement materials, looking it over.

“I guess I could bury the treasures,” she sighed, “the earth should block the spiritual energy from circulating for a while. But eventually the spiritual energy will saturate the ground, and then I will be back to my original problem.”

Qian Shanyi scowled, shaking her fist at the sky.

“Damn it, what kind of moron stores their riches like this?!”