I end up being forced to stand around the blackened crystal orb for a bit while the Pavilion Master inspects it and tries to get it to work. Unfortunately, after he wastes fifteen minutes poking and prodding it with tiny bursts of qi, the thing gives up the ghost and cracks down the middle before shattering into thousands of pieces.

The Pavilion Master looks at me, looks at the crystal debris, and back at me again.

He waves his hand, causing all the pieces to disappear, and then asks, his voice slow and measured, “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” I immediately respond.

“What do you want me to put as your bloodline?”

“If I have a bloodline, I don’t know about it,” I reply.

“No bloodline, then.” He nods his head, pulls out a thick, white-jade card about the size of my hand, and begins etching information into it with his qi. A few seconds later, he hands it to me and I look it over.

Name: Lan Jin

Age: 17

Cultivation: Unknown - Mortal Foundation

Dantian: Peak Silver +, Variant - Fire, Wood

Bloodline: None

After I finish reading the jade card over, the Pavilian Master clears his throat and says, “About the scrying orb—“

“What scrying orb?” I ask.

He smirks at me and pats his forehead, saying, “Ah, look at me in my old age, misremembering things. I forgot you were only here to be tested for the Talisman Hall, right?”

“Exactly,” I nod in agreement.

“Well then, if you’d follow me, I can take you to someone who can administer the test. It’s just a few simple things to be granted admittance, really. So long as you’ve put any effort into understanding talismans, I’m sure you’ll pass.”

I nod my head, not quite certain if what he’s saying is true or not, but regardless of the accuracy of his words, I intend to cheat with the Omega Browser anyways. I’ve come this far, I’d rather not have wasted the last half hour for nothing.

We leave the scene behind us, him seemingly content that I don’t plan on saying anything and me happy that the blame for this isn’t going to be pushed on me. I’m pretty sure he’s supposed to be responsible for the stuff here, considering he is called a Pavilion Master and we’re currently in a pavilion, so I doubt he could push it onto me if he tried.

Even still, it would probably be good to keep the whole thing quiet. I don’t know what all of the flashing meant with the orb, but the whole going black bit at the end was a little ominous. Though I’m certain I’m not related to any demonic path cultivators, I’d rather not have other people think I might be just due to a crystal ball. Demonic path cultivators seem to be the kind of outsiders that would probably be killed on sight.

Leaving the pavilion, the Pavilion Master takes me directly to the Talisman Hall. It is a large building that looks somewhat similar to two rectangle making a cross. The walls are made out of what appears to be stone painted red while the roof is tiled in countless copper plates hammered into small arches and layered over one another.

The doors leading into the building are over a meter thick, made of a dark wood, and are pierced throughout with studs of black iron. I’m sure if someone wanted to break into those doors, they’d need to go at it with a tank. Or maybe multiple tanks.

Guarding the doors are two guards in functional, but decorative, bronze armor. They have swords strapped to their hips and are bearing spears, but they only seem to be glorified door guards. Even their qi isn’t very thick— only a bit thicker than my own.

When we walk up to the doors, the guards come to attention and shout out in unison, “Greetings to the Pavilion Master!”

They don’t do or say anything else as the Pavilion Master waves his hand at them and they return to standing still and silent as he leads me into the building.

Inside is very, very nice. There are tapestries depicting talisman masters all over the place, their edges lined with numerous runes. Dozens of them cover the walls at ten-foot intervals.

The center of the floor is slightly recessed and covered by thick carpeting while a platform surrounds it at waist-height and makes up the majority of the floorspace in the room.

Interspersed throughout the recessed section are small sitting areas lit up by censers that have small oil lamps on top of them. The areas are partially blocked off from one another due to the surrounding platform, but I imagine they only really function as areas to have small, public conversations or to let someone relax for a little while. These sitting areas also have small staircases leading up to the platform that allows one to walk through various doorways in the wall.

All in all, the place seems to put a heavy emphasis on aesthetics.

We walk right through it, up onto the platform, and out a door in just over a minute. Then, I’m lead to a room where the Pavilion Master has a quick, near-silent conversation with someone who seems to work here. He brings the man with us as we go to a storage room where he picks up a blank scroll, a bottle of red liquid, and a brush that looks a lot nicer than the one I have back in my library.

Then I’m lead to yet another room, this one fairly small and containing a single table low to the ground and two cushions on either side of it.

“Normally,” the Pavilion Master explains, “tests to enter the Talisman Hall are performed in larger groups to avoid wasting time. However, some exceptions are occasionally made for various reasons. The man with us today will be your proctor. He will explain the process of the test for you.”

The man, more like a young-adult with an early receding hairline, sits in front of the table and gestures for me to sit on the other end. I do so and he immediately begins talking.

“The process of the test is simple. It comes in three parts. First, you must demonstrate basic knowledge over runic identification. If you are successful, I will introduce you to the second part of the test. For now,” he pulls out a larger scroll and places it on the table before unfurling it slightly so I can see some runes, “please identify as many of these runes as you can.”

This is actually extremely easy for me because I didn’t have to do a single thing to already know exactly what all of the runes are and what they mean. They are far more simple than the runes I’ve seen in the cultivation manuals, so I raise my hand and point to the first one.

“That’s a rune meaning fire, the one to its right is wood, then earth, water, and metal. The line below that has the rune to absorb, the rune to expel, the rune to detect, the rune to diffuse energy into the air around it, and the rune to isolate energy.”

I continue going through each line of the scroll, the man unfurling it as we go, and end up pointing out and explaining two thousand different runes. Most of them aren’t completely unique, but even when two runes could serve similar purposes, their minute distinctions may make them slightly more specialized for certain things.

For example, one rune for diffusing energy into the air would do so evenly in a sphere around it. This is good if all you are trying to do is put out energy for some reason, say a water rune combined with the diffusing rune to water plants or something, but for more specialized purposes, you might want something like a rune that diffuses energy in straight lines. This would allow you to link up multiple talismans to create a larger area of effect if you knew what you were doing.

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I only pieced this much together as I was going through the test by doing a quick search online to see why there were so many runes that did the same thing.

In the end, I get a perfect score on the first test. To my amusement, I’m not the only one who has done that. Nor is it even too rare as thousands of people, from inside and outside of the city, will take the test each time it’s offered. In order to pass the first test, one needs to get ninety percent of the runes correct— that’s eighteen hundred runes! People apparently spend months, or even years of time, to study for entrance to the Talisman Hall and ninety percent of them fail each time on the first test alone.

Needless to say, people study very hard for this test and those people who have properly prepared know their shit and don’t often make mistakes on this portion.

“Very good,” the new guy praises me in a near-apathetic tone of voice. “Next will be the second test. In this test, I will hand you a spirit tool and you will project your soul energy into it while attempting to traverse a path inside it to determine whether you have an appropriate level of control to continue on.

‘Controlling soul energy?’ I grimace. I dislike any thought of doing that. While it isn’t hard to do it in my body, I learned very well over the last day-and-a-half that controlling my soul energy outside of my body is nowhere near as easy.

Regardless, I mentally brace myself for the test and reach out to place my hand on a silver rod with intricate carvings of runes and twisting lines etched into it as its presented to me.

The proctor tells me to begin, and that I’d have finished the test when I can no longer continue or when the tiny crystal at the end of the rod is illuminated. I don’t actually know how to cheat on this test, so I just go about it in the simplest way I know: blindly.

I start by creating a tiny tether of soul energy leading from my forehead to my right palm and then into the base of the rod. To my surprise, my soul energy travels far more smoothly into the silver material than it does into the pen I’ve been practicing with or even my surroundings in general. I assume there is something special about the rod, but I’m not sure what.

Focusing my soul energy, I begin exploring the inside of the rod. There are many paths for me to follow, so I just try to push my soul energy toward whichever path seems like it will take me to the end quickest. I immediately find myself facing increased pressure from the rod as my energy tries to continue onward so I pull back and try another path.

This path seems to go well for a short period of time, but before I can get too far I find that the pressure on this path also begins to rapidly increase.

I take a step back and try another path, but even though this path takes longer to start pressuring me, the pressure builds up regardless. Furthermore, the path itself is longer than the other two and seems as though it is just taking longer to supply the same level of pressure.

If it takes long enough to pressure me the same way that the first path did, then I might be able to get through this path without too much struggle. But if it starts pressuring me sooner than I'm hoping, then there’s a large possibility that I’ll waste all my effort trying to go down this path before realizing I have a longer path ahead of me at the same level of pressure.

With that thought in mind, I return my energy into the first path. If the pressure is going to increase no matter which path I take, then I want the path that is shortest. I’m already thinking that I’ll fail this test, so I’d rather give myself the best possible chance for success.

Pushing my energy into the path, I’m immediately met with pressure once more. It isn’t insurmountable, but it’s like pushing my fingers through thick clay; even though I can do it, it is slow and makes me ache.

The path itself is almost straight, so I keep pressing on as the pressure tries to stop the flow of my soul energy. Thankfully, I have the experience of trying to guide my soul fire through my body. That was harder than this, but I was also tired and nearly completely spent when I was doing that. This is hard just because it is really hard.

Several minutes pass with me slowly forcing my way down the shortest path. I can feel my soul energy draining, but it is manageable so I ignore the growing strain as I tear through the pressure. When it gets to the point where I have a hard time moving any further forward, I try to employ the trick the old guy I’d seen on the video perform: I spin my soul energy.

It is much, much harder to do this than to just push my soul energy through the pressure, but it also cuts through more of the pressure in a shorter period of time than I accomplish by pushing.

Now, instead of pushing through the pressure centimeter by centimeter in a controlled fashion, I cut through it inch by inch while rapidly draining my soul energy. It becomes a race to see whether the pressure will hold me off long enough to stop me from getting to the end of the rod, but I find myself enjoying it because it feels like playing a game rather than taking a test.

Sure, it’s tiring and strains me out, but it’s measurable success rather than struggling to accomplish something with only minor changes to show for my efforts between failures.

Ultimately, I win this game. Spinning my qi simply cuts through the pressure too quickly compared to my first method.

With a sigh, I grin as the crystal on the end of the rod lightens up and I place it on the table in front of me.

The proctor looks slightly impressed, but also confused as he asks, “Why did you choose to go down the shortest path?”

“Because it was the shortest and I didn’t want to risk dealing with the pressure longer than I needed to,” I reply.

He squints at me and says, “The longer the path is, the less pressure they have. So long as your control is good, you could pass through the longer paths with ease, regardless of your spiritual energy reserves. The shorter paths are usually taken by people who don’t believe they can pass the third test and want to impress their peers because they’re harder to do.”

I blink at the proctor and say, “Well, fuck.”

I only bothered checking the three paths, and each path quickly built up similar amounts of pressure so I thought all of them would have that same level of pressure. Plus, I didn’t want to waste time and energy searching for an easier path that might not exist. I didn’t think there would be such an obnoxious mechanic built into the rod to make things so hard on me.

‘Dammit, I should have asked in advance!’

“Now then,” the proctor continues, “the third test is generally considered to be the most difficult. However, so long as you have a good baseline of understanding for the first two tests, your efforts should be passable.”

The Pavilion Master, who was still standing by the door, tosses the three objects he picked up earlier to the proctor who lays them out in front of me.

“Your test is simple: create a working rune with the Black-Horned Wood Ox blood.”

“That’s it?” I ask, surprised. I’ve never successfully created a rune before, but I’ve been practicing with things a lot harder than what I’ve seen on the scroll the proctor tested me from.

“That’s it,” he confirms.

I immediately look up ‘Black-Horned Wood Ox blood easy basic runes’ online and pick the first page that pops up.

I’m presented with a lot of squiggles attached to a shape looks something like a burning ox. It’s morbid, but it has a nice aesthetic to it and, more importantly, it looks stupid simple. Like, I’ve drawn harder things in connect-the-dots art books.

The only problem, insofar as I know about making talismans from the small amount of research I’ve done into them, is that I have to control my soul energy in order to draw lines using the beast’s blood. Soul energy that I just had a good time exhausting because I didn’t ask if there were any tricks to passing the rod because I thought it was a straight-forward test!

I let out a silent groan of annoyance at myself as I take a minute to catch my breath and soothe my nerves. I don’t think I will fail in drawing the rune itself— if I did I would feel bad for myself— but I am worried about the whole ‘working rune’ bit of the instructions.

Not willing to waste too much time, and realizing that there’s nothing I can really do to prepare, I line up the Omega Browser webpage with the part of the scroll I intend to write on. Then I pick up the brush, dip it into the opened vial of blood, and hold it above the paper while wrapping a thin coating of soul energy around the tip of the brush and the blood coating it.

Slowly, and carefully, I begin drawing the rune on the paper by tracing it through the webpage. I force myself to take more time than I actually need in order to make sure I don’t miss spots like what happened when I was practicing with the cultivation manual. As such, the rune, which I could probably draw half a dozen times in a minute with regular ink, takes me about five minutes of pain-staking effort to fully draw with the blood.

It is a testament to my horrendous art skills that the rune comes out looking slightly worse than what is on the webpage. This despite the fact that I traced it stroke for stroke. I feel pretty bad about it, but I’ve done what I can do and there aren’t any obvious mistakes that I can spot on the paper, so I hand it in to the proctor.

The proctor looks at my rune with open curiosity. He examines each brush stroke; their length, width, consistency, and even the amount of blood that pools up during the stroke. My lines are fairly consistent, but I don’t know if that equates to me passing.

“This rune should project a ram of wooden energy in the shape of an ox, correct?” The proctor asks, and I nod after quickly checking the information on the webpage.

“I will rate this is a first-grade talisman of low quality. Congratulations, you have passed.”

His voice is slightly more encouraging now, but I completely ignore it as I let out a sigh of exhaustion and relief. All I wanted to do was go to a fucking lecture to relax and see if the guy giving it had a good, basic writing style I could learn from. I had not expected all of this random bureaucracy to get in the way!