A couple minutes later, she managed to fight through her sense of ennui, and began to read the jade slate. Even if she would need to force herself through the sort of philosophy she wouldn’t ordinarily even spit on, it was still a genuine yin/metal cultivation law, a rare treasure that she has long been searching for.
On top of being aligned with one of the five main polarities of spiritual energy, high-quality cultivation laws were also aligned with either yin or yang spiritual energy. Men had a yang constitution, while women had yin, and each of them required specially tailored cultivation laws.
Most cultivators were male, and the sects would naturally only put forth the significant effort needed to develop a new cultivation law if it would serve most of their members. To make things worse, during the previous imperial dynasty women were forbidden from cultivating any combat cultivation law. Thirty six years ago, the new emperor had put an end to this policy, but the cultivation world was slow to adapt to the changes. To this day, finding a good yin cultivation law was very hard.
As she focused on the jade slate, she quickly discovered how to control it. By pushing her spiritual energy into it in special ways, she could flip through the “pages” of the book in any order.
Despite her fears, she got through the first chapter quickly. It couched its presentation in flowery language, but largely went straight to the point of explaining the base method of spiritual energy circulation, with well-drawn diagrams and detailed advice on cultivation. From a cursory glance, she was extremely satisfied with this cultivation law.
As soon as she had the time, she would start to adapt to this new spiritual energy recirculation technique. It would leave her body and soul in a weakened state for a couple weeks, as the spiritual energy would try to flow according to two different patterns at once, but the end result would make it all worth it.
Out of curiosity, she decided to check out the other chapters of the book. Even if she couldn’t properly study the following techniques until she adjusted to the base cultivation law, she was still giddy to know what else she could get out of this slate.
The next chapter was centered around feminine conduct, interweaving excerpts from classic literature and author commentary. Qian Shanyi slowly started to frown as she read through the chapter.
Of course, every woman should defer to her father, her husband, her sons, or failing that, to her teacher on the path of cultivation. However, how often should she defer? What should happen if she needs to make a decision while they are away? What if she knows that a decision has to be made, but it would cause trouble to get her superiors to agree? Here are some of the basic strategies on getting the men to prescribe the actions that have to be taken.
She skipped further ahead.
A woman must remain chaste in her bearing, and guard her actions with a sense of shame. Here, it is instructive to look at the case of the conflict between the Heavenly Mountain Alliance and the Three Thunderous Demonic Sects, when the Lady of the Six Vipers challenged the Grand Elder of the Heavenly Mountain Alliance to a duel. As they fought, the Lady happened to lose all her clothing, and the Grand Elder, ashamed of looking at a woman’s uncovered body, lost his composure and averted his eyes for a moment. This was all it took for the Lady of the Six Vipers to slice his head off in a single slash. Take care to preserve your chastity, lest you distract the men in your life at a critical moment!
What kind of “womanly conduct” was Tang Qunying endorsing?
Never utter slanderous words. Your conduct should be exemplary here: this is an especially important principle for cultivators, for carelessly spoken words, imbued with spiritual energy, could lead to catastrophe. Even a single curse could kill a man, if spoken at the right moment. The second of the Three Thunderous Demonic Sects was infamous for their malign speech: seek to avoid repeating their sins.
The rest of the chapter covered cursing techniques. The author outlined, in great detail, exactly which words, at which cadences, and imbued with which particular pattern of spiritual energy should never be spoken under any circumstances.
Qian Shanyi flipped over to the next chapter, which covered dressmaking. It started slowly, by explaining the basics of weaving, knitting, sewing and so on, before Tang Qunying claimed that there was never enough time in the day to sew everything that was necessary for a household, and proposed some “humble needle control techniques” that could be mastered by anyone in the middle refinement stage or above.
Qing Shanyi turned the page over, and her eyes boggled. This was the single most complicated spiritual energy diagram she had ever seen in her life.
“How am I supposed to pack all of this into the size of a needle?”, she wondered faintly, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “You would need to be at least in the building foundation stage to be capable of this level of precision.”
She shook her head, skipped the rest of the sewing chapter, and looked at the chapter on cooking techniques. Just like the sewing chapter, it began with the basics: heat control, basic knife skills, six key classifications of cooking methods, and so on. And just like in the sewing chapter, she soon encountered strange things.
Some immortal chefs consider the capture and butchering of demon beasts to be the domain of hunters, and only learn how to process the sorts of animals it is safe to keep in a kitchen. This is a mistake: all ingredients are best when used fresh, and if you seek to prepare the best meal for your husband and their guests, you have to learn how to butcher every demon beast that might be needed for the recipe. Trinity Scorpion of the Fire River makes for a good target to learn basic butchering techniques, though mastering them might take you your entire life.
Qian Shanyi has never heard of a demon beast called the “Trinity Scorpion of the Fire River”, but based on the description, it was the size of a horse, wicked fast, with a carapace that was all but invulnerable to damage, and had three tails, each tipped with a stinger as sharp as a spear. To kill it, you had to strike at very small gaps where different carapace plates interlocked with one another, and pierce through to the vulnerable organs inside the body, all the while making sure your strikes wouldn’t ruin the meat.
The book went into a great deal of detail about the “knife techniques” needed to pacify the Trinity Scorpion, from defense, to offense, to pacing yourself to not become fatigued in the middle of combat. It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that she was reading a detailed guide on fencing with a sword.
She frowned, turned back to the needle spiritual energy diagram that baffled her before, and looked at it with new eyes. If taken literally, the precision of the diagram made no sense, as you would have to be a training genius to be capable of following it… But if the “needle” was a meter and a half long, then it would suddenly start to make sense.
This wasn’t a needle control diagram at all. This was a diagram for controlling a flying sword shaped like a needle.
She tapped her finger on the side of the jade slate. At first, she thought the Heavens had played a cruel joke on her, but perhaps she was wrong. This wasn’t a cultivation law for being a good wife; this was a ruthless cultivation law for slaying devils written to pass casual censorship.
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She turned the jade slate off and carefully put it inside her robes. She would have plenty of time to study this later.
For now, she had to find an exit out of this secret realm.
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By now, she had explored most of the sect, and she knew Wang Yonghao had explored the rest. She didn’t find any exit, and based on the corpses, suspected there was none. This meant she would need to go straight through the poison fog.
If her suspicions were correct, the fog must have come from dense poison-type spiritual energy brought into the cavern by a spirit vein. As the spiritual energy recirculated around the cavern, it would slowly produce poison, which would sink down to the floor and form a cloud. Over time, this poison would lose its potency, and gelatinize from the fog into the toxic slime covering everything around the cavern.
The pile of metal treasures she used as part of her pit trap was already slowly converting the poison-type spiritual energy in the air, slowly reducing the production of new poison. The cavern was quite large, so this process would take quite a while. While it was going on, she had to deal with the poison that was already here.
Qian Shanyi couldn’t simply blow it aside with the fly whisk - she couldn’t control the backflow of the air, so it would be down to luck if she could keep the poison at bay. She wasn’t Wang Yonghao - if she tried that, she would simply die. She needed a better idea.
There were two basic types of artifacts that could control the winds: ones that moved the air already in place, and ones that created more air to move. She went over to the sect kitchens, and tried activating the whisk inside an old barrel, and saw it explode into shards - this meant the whisk had to be creating new air. This gave her an opportunity.
The sect could not be a sealed system: somewhere, there needed to be an exit that could be used to let bad air ventilate out and bring goods into the sect. Since she hadn’t found this exit so far, it must have been somewhere under the poison, and the many ventilation channels linking back to the large poison cavern further supported this theory. If she created new air in the cavern, the increased air pressure would create airflow out of the sect, and this airflow should slowly bring the poison out with it.
At a guess, this fly whisk must have been creating several cubic meters of air. There were ways to estimate this more precisely: she knew that there were figures for the expected rates of conversion of spiritual energy into elemental matter, but she had never been taught them, and her sect Elders never gave her unrestricted access to the sect library. That even their past obstinance still threatened her life grated on her, but there was nothing to be done about it.
She did some crude estimations about the sect and cavern geometry, and if she was right, the level of poison should drop by several meters per hour. Within a day, she might create a path out of the sect, assuming she didn’t simply miss any other ventilation holes, and the exit didn’t collapse entirely as the time passed.
This left the question of where to generate the air. She could feel that the feng shui of this secret realm was bad - dilapidation, and the unburied corpses had all played their role. It wasn’t quite as bad as the Inner World before she made the chiclotron, but she still didn’t want to spend many hours circulating her spiritual energy and blasting air from the fly whisk in any random spot.
She briefly considered re-using the chiclotron structure of the sect, before dismissing the idea. To restore its functionality, she would need to bring over tens or hundreds of kilograms of heavenly materials and earthly treasures by climbing over on a single rickety rope line. And then, once she was done, she would need to lug all of them back. There was no way she was going to do that, starving as she was. Digging a new chiclotron on top of the gazebo hill was also out of the question.
Creating the air within the Inner World would have been ideal, but even though the entrance was open, it remained separated from the outside: no steam of pure spiritual energy was gushing out from it. If she were to generate air inside the Inner World, all she would do is raise the internal pressure.
Fundamentally, the only thing she needed was to find a place with the least bad feng shui in the sect, and do her job there. She could vaguely feel that some areas were better than others, but she wanted more precision.
What she needed was a way to measure local feng shui.
She climbed back into the Inner World, grabbed an empty bottle of wine, a small dagger, and went looking for a good plank of wood.
The bookshelf blocking the entrance into the teleportation room proved to be a good source. She broke it apart with a few good kicks, took a small, solid piece, and started slowly whittling it down with her dagger into a set of wooden dice. Her woodcarving skills were quite crude, making all the dice come out different, but that was okay - she didn’t need extreme precision.
Feng shui affected your luck, and so if you could measure your luck you could measure feng shui. What she needed was a way to do these measurements reliably, on command, and hundreds of times in a row. After about an hour, she had sixty dice, and she decided it was good enough, scooped them into her wine bottle and plugged it with a cork.
Luck was a mysterious force in the world of cultivation, said to be affected by hundreds of different things, depending on the perceptions of the cultivator: a lucky cultivator would tend to see the outcomes they wanted, while an unlucky one would see the reverse.
Qian Shanyi shook the bottle, focusing on the number six. When she looked down, she saw three sixes and seven fives.
Statistically speaking, with sixty dice, about ten should land on each side. The more lucky she was, the more dice would come out close to six, and the more unlucky she was, the more would come out as ones. If about the same number of dice came out on each side, then she probably had neutral luck.
Her current place seemed quite unlucky. She got up, and headed through the sect, looking for good feng shui.
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The best place she found was the tunnel dropping down into the big cavern through the ceiling. Feng shui there seemed about neutral, which she supposed made sense. The tunnel was made of spiritually neutral rock, there were no corpses nearby, and no real dilapidation had happened there since the sect was established.
She settled on the edge of the hole, and started blasting air down into the cavern using the fly whisk. By the time she ran out of spiritual energy hours later, she was yawning from boredom.
She headed back to the Inner World to regenerate her spiritual energy. When she reached the gazebo hill, she went down to look at the level of the poison fog, and grinned. It had dropped significantly, at least by a meter. It was much slower than what she expected, but still, her idea was working.
When she descended into the Inner World, Wang Yonghao was still drooling on the grass, mumbling nonsense. She briefly wondered how long he would be hallucinating - he did eat quite a lot of the omelett.
When she took out her sword, prepared to briefly cultivate in order to absorb spiritual energy out of the air, she paused. Should she directly start cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues? It would weaken her temporarily, and she was still in a dangerous situation…
She grit her teeth. Damn it, it was an actual yin metal cultivation law, and she had been waiting for this moment for so long - she would start right away. She would deal with her weakness when it started causing problems.
The movements of Three Obediences Four Virtues were nothing like those of the Seven Flowers Bloom. They also flowed together like a dance, but individual steps were sharp and abrupt, filled with concealed, violent intent as if she was butchering a thousand oxes at once. As her feet stomped on the ground, and her sword sliced the air, she thought she could hear the sounds of skulls crushed under her feet and the curses of her enemies echoing in the air.
She didn’t push herself as hard as she could. Her goal was to regenerate spiritual energy, not to refine her body and soul. After fifteen minutes, she headed back up to work with the fly whisk.
It took her the entire day of work to drain the poison fog until she could see the ground below. Her stomach rumbled in protest, and she ate tiny portions of the omelett throughout to quiet it down. Circulating spiritual energy for hours took a toll on her body, even if it was not as strenuous as digging trenches.
Where the fog receded, it unveiled ground covered in a thick layer of green sludge. Her eyes shined in triumph. All she would need now was a way to deal with the sludge, and she could explore the rest of this cavern.
Hopefully, she would find the exit, and finally see the open skies once more.