My trip to the bath is more expensive and informative than I had thought it would be, but not very eventful.
It is expensive because I found out that, just like with the restaurant I went to twice today, there is what amounts to a membership for using the bathhouse at all hours. It also explains why the bathhouse was ‘open’ much earlier despite having no one to staff it; the baths are available to those who have already paid. Of course, this also means that you have to purchase a lot of bathing supplies in advance, so I did. About a week’s worth of them.
The reason why it was so informative is because I spent my time bathing researching into a few things. Foremost, I wanted to learn about dao scars because I figured I should know about something that I inadvertently did. I also looked further into the Golden Sun Auction House to make sure everything I could find online matched up with what Physician Bing told me.
Dao scars are actually just as simple as I thought they’d be when Physician Bing first mentioned the one I’d made. They are remnant laws that affect the natural flow of qi in an area.
In order to form naturally, they require a set of three circumstances. First, they need a profound source of a specific law. Second, they require time. Third, they require an immense amount of qi over the entire period of time that the law is present in order to saturate the area with its influence.
When these three circumstances are met together, a dao scar begins to form. The longer the dao scar has to form under these circumstances, the longer it lasts.
Of course, this makes me wonder how I managed to make a dao scar in seconds and without any qi. When I search for answers, I find none. There are literally no results. This leads me to presume it has to do with the projection function of the Omega Browser itself, but without testing it I have no way to be certain.
Naturally, that just means I can’t test it until I can do it in a controlled way, but that’s not happening right now. Something about starting a war that could end an empire seems like a not-so-good idea.
On the other hand, the Golden Sun Auction House has a lot of search results. In fact, there are so many of them that I went straight from looking for general information about the Golden Sun Auction House to their history. Turns out, Physician Bing was right when he said they had a long history. It’s just that he didn’t even scratch the surface of the truth.
The Golden Sun Auction House is a single branch of an organization known as the Golden Sun Divine Palace. It has existed for close to seventeen million years now and the Auction House itself was created by a disciple of the Divine Palace who believed following the Dao of Business was the best way to reach the peak of martial arts.
The auction house is, in an almost objective sense, a truly neutral organization to outsiders. They will do business with anyone and will sell almost anything, but all of the Auction House’s disciples, including the one who founded it, are governed by a set of laws instituted by the first disciple. In essence, it is a laissez-faire system of economics that lets all of the disciples choose their own path of the Dao of Business.
The only caveat to that are the repercussions from going against the laws of the Auction House. Foremost, each disciple is evaluated both by the profits they earn as well as their mental state. If their profits earned are too low, they are ‘demoted’. Theoretically, someone could be at a higher cultivation realm and still be beneath someone with a lower cultivation realm if the difference in profit is too much.
The other end of the stick is their mental state; if a disciple shows that they have put their personal greed over longterm profits, there is only one, brutal consequence. Death. The Golden Sun Auction House holds the view that the only profits that matter in the end are longterm, sustainable profits. Abandoning the future growth of the sect is seen as a weird form of murder.
According to what I can find online, the Auction House actually enforces this law fairly frequently. While it isn’t some autocratic bullshit that punishes everyone for the slightest mistake, they do draw a clear line in the sand and make an example of anyone who violates their foundational principles.
As a weird point of trivia, it turns out that Qian Duo even pushed the Divine Palace’s leader into promising that he’d kill him if he ever violated the principles of the Auction House.
“What a weird group, but at least I shouldn’t have to worry about anything as long as I’m not dumb,” I say while getting out of the bath.
I take a look at my clothes and sneer at them as I think of wearing the dirty clothes I had taken off not so long ago.
“Not happening,” I mutter before gathering up all of my clothes and chucking them into the private bathtub. I spin them all around with my hand as though the tub and I were a washing machine and, when I feel as though they’re clean, I pluck them out.
They are all completely drenched now, but they are steaming hot so it isn’t as though they bother me.
“Now let’s just hope this works… and doesn’t burn them,” I say as I begin to circulate fire qi through my skin.
It works just as I hoped as my wet clothes quickly begin to let off a lot more steam. The room quickly goes from private bath to sauna as the water in my clothes sizzles and my clothes go from soaked to slightly damp from steam.
I’m not willing to try drying them any further because I’m pretty sure frying my clothes on the human equivalent of a griddle would be dumb, but at least I’m not uncomfortable and I will have clean clothes to walk back to my house in.
***
When I get back, I go straight to my library and sit at a short table with my practice scroll, ink and brush. For a moment I consider practicing in the cultivation room, but I think it would be awkward to ask a physician for something like writing advice.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I open up the Omega Browser to look through several different cultivation manuals that fit the criteria Physician Bing set for me. Part of me wants to start with the basics of drawing each character over and over to gain familiarity with writing as a whole, but I realize that being able to write actual sentences might not be beneficial to me here. Most Mortal Grade cultivation manuals only contain a few words drawn in certain ways that embody feelings someone should have when cultivating the manual.
My understanding of this means that I don’t want to learn how to write, I want to copy the characters of people who can write cultivation manuals. I can already understand their writing, so now I need to replicate it.
My first step is to open up several tabs in the Omega Browser with different manuals as well as the same manuals written by several people. I maneuver the Omega Browser and my practice scroll so they are overlapped and begin tracing out the characters one by one with a dry brush.
I repeat this several dozen times with each character until I feel as though I have the motions correct to draw them. Then, I open my bottle of ink and dip my brush into it as I prepare myself to write the characters down for real.
My expectations quickly distinguish themselves from reality as I draw some of the ugliest ink blotches I have ever seen. I’m pretty sure what I’ve created qualifies as a particularly disturbing Rorschach Test and I laugh at how horrendous my handwriting is.
“Oh, man. This isn’t going to be as easy as I thought,” I chuckle.
Instead of wasting space on the scroll, I continue practicing on the exact same spot. It isn’t as though I can make the ink blot even worse, so I do a wet-run of my practice strokes a few more times before shifting the scroll a little to the left and trying again.
Much the same as the first time, my handwriting is god-awful. I’ve never been particularly bad at penmanship, but despite knowing the language, this is closer to drawing than any form of writing I’ve ever done. Unfortunately, drawing is not something I’m good at, and it shows here.
I repeat my wet practice strokes over the exact same spots dozens of times before moving my scroll a tiny bit and trying again right next to an ever-growing field of failure. I’m actually impressed anyone learns to write like this.
While I don’t remember the characters, I do remember the impression Chinese had on me back on Earth so I know that Chinese writing would probably be more difficult than what I’m used to, but this is much harder than that.
Each character contains between five to ten pictographs in a space no greater than if I were to place the pads of my thumbs right next to each other.
That alone is bad enough because I need to replicate the pictographs in such a small space, but it’s even worse when I have to figure out how each pictograph flows into one another in order to make them part of the character as a whole.
There are tiny pictures that look like and represent suns that flow downward into a single broad stroke meant to represent the downward slash of a sword. This slash cuts through two whirling wisps, or maybe it creates two whirling wisps, as it flows downward into a craggy expanse that is meant to represent the earth. Traveling along this character and leading into the distance, represented by a quick stroke resembling a crevice travelling from the craggy expanse and leading toward the ‘horizon’ of the character, is a strange stroke that is supposed to be written with one stroke but clearly has two strokes split and travelling in the same direction until they meet at the end.
Sadly, this is one of the easier characters that I’ve seen for a high-grade Mortal cultivation manual. This particular character is also only one of thirteen stances of an auxiliary method of cultivation that goes along with the main methods of the cultivation manual.
I try practicing each stroke on their own so I can get a handle on them, but no matter how I try, I cannot replicate that last stroke that divides the one stroke into two with the same movement.
What’s worse, no one seems to have recorded this particular stroke with whatever people seem to use for video recording around here so I have no clue how to replicate it.
Part of me wants to give up and move on to an easier character, but I know that I’m more likely to find characters just as complicated in different ways than anything truly easy.
I open up a new tab on the Omega Browser and search for ‘how to draw two strokes with one movement’ and end up with quite a few results. None of them are exactly what I want, but I do find a video of an old man showing a group of students how to properly draw something far more complicated— it looks like a whirlpool with seven different lines leading from the outside to the center point.
In the video, the man stands completely still with his brush in hand as he examines a larger scroll in front of him. This continues for several minutes so I start increasing the video’s speed until, magically, a whirlpool appears on the scroll.
I rewind the video by several seconds and slow it down to normal speed so I can watch it, but just as before the whirlpool appears on the scroll without the man moving.
“Okay, that’s some bullshit,” I grumble as I slow down the video to half speed.
Once again, the whirlpool just magically appears without me being able to figure out what happens.
I slow the video to quarter speed, one-tenth speed, one-hundredth speed, and finally one-thousandth speed before I see a brief flicker of something in the video.
I decrease the speed more and more until I am watching at one-millionth speed and see as the man calmly raises his brush, flicks it toward the scrolls, and a single drop of ink flies off it toward the scroll.
As the ink grows closer to the scroll, it divides into seven smaller drops that collide with the scroll and spin around in seven separate spirals until they all meet in the center of the scroll to form a whirlpool nearly three feet in diameter.
It makes absolutely no sense to me, but I watched it happen in super -slow motion so I know it either did actually happen, or someone is really good with their editing software.
After I’m convinced that the old man is the one who made the whirlpool, I return the video speed to normal to see if he has an explanation. Thankfully, he does.
He tells his students that what he did was not just to wave his brush around, but to infuse the ink on his brush with his spiritual energy so it would obey his will. He also says that, theoretically, someone could calculate the exact set of conditions necessary to recreate his whirlpool without spiritual energy, but it would be nearly impossible to replicate it perfectly.
I call bullshit on that because no one is going to replicate that shit without spiritual energy. In fact, even with spiritual energy there’s almost no chance that anyone is doing that. What he did was insane!
That he can casually explain it away as being his spiritual energy that allowed him to do it means he is either a really good teacher or a massive cunt for raising everyone’s hopes up like that.
“Let’s see if you’re just fucking me over, old man!” I want to see which one it is, so I grab my brush and dip it into the ink before channeling a tiny stream of my already near-insignificant amount of soul energy into my pen.
I infuse the ink with my energy as I hold it above the scroll and slowly sweep my brush in five strokes to create the character I’ve been failing at this entire time.
Surprisingly, I see immediate improvement in my character. Of course, I take this with several grains of salt as the technique is not so simple as dip and flick. In fact, because my spiritual energy, or soul energy, wasn’t used consistently throughout the entire process, there are spots on the scroll where there is absolutely no ink despite there being plenty of ink on the brush.
“Well, I failed,” I say. “But at least I failed less than when I started.”
The best news is that there is a tiny part of the last stroke that is divided in two. The rest of it is garbage, but that tiny part is a success.