Siyuan sighed as he collapsed back into his bed, tossing the blade somewhere else in the room, not minding a single bit as it noisily clattered to the ground.
His current housing was a fairly spacious, one-room house surrounded by a small plot of fertile land, land which he had yet to use. It had a whole side to it dedicated to cultivation practice, where he could sit and meditate for however long he wanted without worrying about being disturbed, with the other being for restful purposes, including a bed that he barely even used. Set up against the walls were shelves with various books lining them.
He closes his eyes for a moment. His sensei’s words bounced around in his head.
“‘My ambitions overstep my capabilities?’ The hell does he expect me to do about that?” he muttered. “No way I’m going to become anything other than my own boss. Working under somebody else sounds super stressful.”
He sighs. He turns his head towards the rest of the interior of his room.
Strewn all over the floor were books and manuals, a few of them being simple cultivation manuals but the other large majority of them all being about relic smithing.
“I guess I should begin finally looking at those advanced relic smithing techniques. But they’re all so difficult to learn…”
He gets up from his bed and begins picking up the books on the floor.
The first book that he had come upon, one on the floor right beside his bed and one of the many that were open. On it were various images and labeled diagrams with text all over the pages.
Every relic is composed of three very vital components. A vessel, a core, and a purpose.
The object that gives a relic its outwards appearance, and in most cases its use as a utility. Most relics to date have been weapons, both because weapons are, by default, tools of combat and because relics made of weapons appear most majestically to cultivators compared to relics made from other objects.
The core of a relic is arguably its most important component. It is what circulates qi throughout the entirety of the vessel, elevating it from the level of a simple weapon or tool. As long as a relic’s core is intact, its vessel can be repaired no matter how many times it has been broken or damaged. In performing relic enhancements, the core is what is directly being enhanced. Relics can be crafted without a core, but those are impossible to enhance and usually very easy to destroy. Only certain objects can be used for cores, a comprehensive list of which can be found in chapter 7 of this manual.
The purpose of a relic is what gives a relic its special trait, which it will carry out without fail unless it is suppressed somehow. The purpose of a relic is largely a result of the core that is used to craft the relic. Due to this, granting a relic the preferred purpose is usually not difficult, but still largely unexplored. A relic can have multiple purposes forged onto it with the smith having the option to forge one new purpose with each enhancement as long as he has the necessary catalyst. .
Siyuan suddenly stopped as he stared at the contents on the page.
They were, by no means, new to him. He’d read something like that many, many times, as they were the most basic components of relic smithing, yet also crucially vital to the understanding of the craft. The details of the text, however, wasn’t what had caused him to stop.
His eyes went to a specific part of the paragraph concerning purpose.
The purpose of a relic is what gives a relic its special trait, which it will carry out without fail unless somehow suppressed.
As a relic smith, he couldn’t help but wonder if there was a way to use a relic to guarantee success in relic smithing, as did so many other relic smiths. So far, nobody has managed to produce a relic that even managed to raise the success rate of forging or enhancing relics. For some reason, experts have yet to find a way to bestow the purpose of “increasing relic smithing enhance rates” onto a relic. The most popular theory at the moment was that cultivators had just simply yet to find the necessary catalyst or core that could bestow such a purpose. Another theory that was growing in popularity was that the vessel of a relic had something to do with this inability. More and more people were starting to find this plausible, especially after the recent discovery that the material that a relic was made of determined just how much it could go against the will of heaven. It was suspected that this was the secret behind the infamous relic smith Tan Ke’s death-defying relic, an arrow that could revive any person from the dead by having its arrowtip driven through the corpse’s heart. Although it
Going against the will of heaven, it was the whole reason why people cultivated.
“If only I could find something like that,” he muttered. “Then all my problems would be solved. But who am I kidding? If it were that easy, somebody would’ve done it by now.”
Siyuan sighed again as he finished tidying up his room.
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“Geez fellow disciple Lin, you really do work too much!”
Night had descended upon the Mystic River Sect. To the disciples, it was a treasured moment of relaxation after a long day of practice and studying. There was a certain period of time right after the last classes of the day ended that the disciples dubbed “the Period of Indulgence,” in which the sect-sponsored bars and restaurants outside the sect’s walls were full to the brim with cultivators.
Siyuan was at one such bar, sitting around a table with three other disciples with plates of food and jars of wine on it.
“Like seriously, you haven’t been to a bar in a month?” one of them said. “You’re just a beginner relic smith! You don’t need to study so hard just yet…”
Siyuan just scoffed.
“I work too much?” he asks. “More like you work too little, fellow disciple Han! You know what they say, ‘if you work hard today, you won’t have to a decade later’.”
“You’re still so young, yet you already heed the words of those geezers way too much!” the disciple, Han, says.
Siyuan sighed as he took a sip from his cup of wine.
Luo Han was a recently appointed sect disciple, just like Siyuan. Except, instead of going into relic smithing, he went all-into being a practiced battle cultivator. Out of a hundred battles, Siyuan wagered he could possibly win maybe two or three of those, even though they were around the same in terms of cultivation level.
They managed to find and strike a good dynamic though. As a battle cultivator, Luo Han regularly needed to maintain his sword relic and as a relic smith, Siyuan could do so while also enhancing it. In exchange, Luo Han provided him with some catalysts and cores that he collected from his quests. In fact, their friendship currently exists solely because of this exchange.
“For somebody who claims to want to be a top fighter one day, you’re awfully lazy,” Siyuan says.
“Hey, I work very hard every day, y’know?” Han says indignantly. “I dare say harder than you sometimes!”
“Ha! In your dreams, maybe.”
Luo Han turned his attention to the other two cultivators sitting around the table he and Siyuan were at. Siyuan just closed his eyes and gulped down some more freshly brewed wine, mildly enjoying the liquid searing his throat. He didn’t really know the other two cultivators, as they were Han’s friends and not really his, so what they conversed about didn’t concern him all that much.
“Oh yeah, Siyuan, I don’t believe I mentioned this before, but I’m joining this year’s Tempered Blades tournament!” Luo Han suddenly exclaims, breaking Siyuan out of his pleasant quiet.
Siyuan raised an eyebrow. The Tempered Blades tournament was a once-a-year fighting tournament where disciples from sects from all over the world gathered to fight or watch other people fight, with the only rule being that there was a limit to which cultivation level participants could be. It wasn’t exactly hard to qualify into, Siyuan wagered even though he could probably get in, but it was hard to get noticed, very hard. The tournament was an opportunity for sects to potentially find any hidden talents that had somehow gone unnoticed. In Siyuan’s opinion, the tournament was a waste of time unless you were some kind of super talent.
“That’s cool and all, but how exactly do you plan on getting past the preliminaries?” he asked. “Even completely disregarding your level of cultivation, the difference in skill level needed for that and yours is just as boundless as the distance between heaven and earth.”
“Feh, so what!” Luo shouted.
Wow, he’s not even gonna try defending himself, Siyuan thought.
“Plus, you never know what might happen!” Luo says. “Even if the chances of that happening are less than 0.01%, I must still try! The sole reason why we cultivators cultivate is to go against the will of heaven! It’s what we are meant to do!”
“Yeah yeah, sure, just make sure not to get your sword relic completely destroyed in the process,” Siyuan says. “Because I’m not gonna make you another one. I don’t see how it can be though considering that all of your competitors shouldn’t be above the Foundation Establishment stage and because I’ve enhanced it four times. I didn’t even know that fourth enhancement was possible for me. I expended so much qi that I went into qi deviation for five whole days!”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I know I know,” Luo Han says with a sigh. He pats the sword sheathed at his side. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of it! Plus, I’m sure this blade has gone through worse. A mere tournament ain’t gonna be enough to even dent it!”
“I hope so,” Siyuan says. “And you’d better to.”
“Now now, there’s no need to be like that!” Han says. He raises a cup of wine into the air. “Come, let’s drink! This is supposed to be a time of relaxation, especially since you almost never come by!”
Siyuan just sighs and smiles as he raises his own cup in Luo Han’s direction. Luo Han did so with the other two cultivators as well before they all brought their cups to their lips.
However, just as Siyuan was about to pour the liquid into his mouth, he suddenly stopped. His eyes widened slightly.
As Luo Han’s words replayed in his head, a sudden thought struck him like a bolt of lightning.
Luo Han and the other two cultivators downed both of their cups before setting them back down onto the table.
“Ah, good wine as usual!” he says, smacking his lips. Then he turns to Siyuan, opening his mouth to say something before he stops. Siyuan sat there, his eyes staring forward into nothing in particular with his cup raised to his mouth but not quite angled down enough to empty it of its contents.
“Hey, Siyuan, what’s wrong?”
For a moment, Siyuan didn’t respond. Then, suddenly, he slammed his cup back onto the table.
“Luo Han, please excuse me,” he said as he shot up from his chair.
With that, he suddenly took off, promptly disappearing from the inn as Luo Han and his two friends watched in bewilderment. Eventually, Luo Han just sighed.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else leave a bar so earnestly,” he says. “You really are too much of a workaholic.”
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It barely took a few minutes for Siyuan to reappear at his room. He swung the door open, almost ripping it off its hinges, and slammed it back closed, engaging a simple lock formation to ensure nobody else could get in and disturb him.
As a developing relic smith, he was very up-to-date with the latest developments in the craft. As years went by, there inevitably would be more and more techniques that could be used to increase the proficiency of relic smithing. As a beginner, these were of great use to Siyuan, even if they were too complicated or advanced for him to apply at the moment.
Over a century ago, a world-famous relic smith, Xue He, conducted what is known today as the “materialistic relic experiment.” In these two experiments, two swords, one made of simple mortal steel and the other made of spiritsteel, the metal used to make cultivators’ swords, were forged into relics, both with the exact same purpose: “to bolster strength,” or increase a user’s physical strength, in other words. Without enhancing either, he tested to which extent they served their purpose with the expectation of both of them doing so in the same magnitude. To his surprise, however, he found that holding the spiritsteel sword relic actually increased his strength to a larger degree than holding the steel sword relic.
This, and other concurring experiments, were what brought to life the idea that the material of a relic’s vessel affected how that relic served its purpose, as did concurrent experiments. It also finally shed a theory to just how Tan Ke’s relic, “The Arrow That Surpases Death,” was possible. Of course, the theory was fairly surface level since the methods that went into the smithing also heavily affected the relic’s utility, but it was still a revolutionary discovery.
As a relic smith, Siyuan made sure to permanently sear these concepts into the back of his mind. Although they weren’t in any official books about relic smithing basics, they might as well be with how important they are to the craft.
Which was why when he was listening to Luo Han talking, one specific line that he had uttered had sparked his mind.
“The sole reason why we cultivators cultivate is to go against the will of heaven! It’s what we are meant to do!”
“As we cultivate, we improve our bodies,” he muttered to himself. “Improve them past the point of mortality. We start off as weak mortals, but develop into divine beings. Isn’t that the same as relic smithing? When an item turns into a relic, it ascends from a mere mortal tool to a divine one. When we lay foundation, we turn from a mortal to something more than that. And with each breakthrough we go through...we enhance ourselves.
“So, what would happen if I mix the two activities together in a more literal sense?”
He went to the shelves against the walls of his room and began pulling them out of the shelf.
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That small gathering between Siyuan, Luo Han, and Luo Han’s friends was the last time anybody had seen him outside his room. For more than a whole month, nobody had caught the slightest trace of him, which was strange because he was known by his classmates to be very diligent when it came to attending his classes. When the few people that were familiar with his presence began to notice his prolonged disappearance, they were understandably concerned for their fellow disciple.
However, the several times Luo Han went to his room to check on him, he claimed that Siyuan had responded every time and even invited him into his room on a few occasions where they had tea and spent some time chatting with each other. According to him, however, the room was always a mess, with papers and books strewn all over the floor.
It was obvious, however, that he was working on something. For, on those papers strewn all over the floor, were clearly calculations. Calculations for something Luo Han didn’t know.
Another half month passed. Life went on, barely affected by Siyuan’s absence.
Siyuan’s relic smithing teacher prepared to leave the classroom, having finished assessing the last of his students’ most recent project. Their performance was fairly good, not as high as he had hoped but his students’ improvement since they started classes was obvious. However, there was one glaring element missing.
Siyuan was one of his best students. So, of course, he was as concerned as everyone else, if not more, by the fact that he hadn’t seen him in his classes for so long.
Hm, I meant for that speech before to possibly motivate him into working harder, he thought as he left the classroom. Perhaps he took it too seriously and lost his motivation to continue relic smithing?
He sighed as he started his way down the corridors within one of the Mystic River Sect’s many school buildings. It was a bit late into the day, well after the final classes were done with. Most of the sect disciples were cultivating within their cultivation chambers, with only a few disciples here and there roaming the halls.
Oh well, if that’s all it took to demotivate him, he was never made for it in the first place, he thought. Much better that he gives up non-sensible ambitions now than in the future when it could leave him in a state beyond repair. Though I do hope that he still continues relic smithing. It would be such a waste of talent if he didn’t…
He continued down the halls, towards the school’s exit. He turned the next corner, out of the hall where the classrooms resided and into the central hallway.
Just in time to watch a very familiar face open the door of one of the many smithery chambers lining the sides of the hallway. A face that he would have no trouble recognizing any time soon.
The teacher stopped.
Siyuan?
The student looked to be in a rush, working quickly to undo the locking formation on the smithery’s door. He looked tired, his usually immaculate posture befitting of a cultivator now replaced by one that was slightly slouched. It was obvious to see that he was exhausted, but in his eyes were, as the teacher liked to call them, “sparks of inspiration.” In one hand were two relic smith’s hammer, the most essential tool to all relic smiths as it was what initialized the smithing process in the first place while in the other was a pile of papers.
Two relic smith hammers? Why would he need two? Also, what is he forging in the first place? Where is his vessel and core?
He watched as Siyuan disappeared into the smithery room. Just as he walked in however, right before he closed the door, a single sheet of paper slipped from his grip and fluttered to the ground, unbeknownst to him.
The teacher walked up to the closed door, staring at it for a moment before looking down at the floor. He bends down and picks up the paper, staring at it quizzically.
The paper was a simple, unmarked page from a beginner cultivation manual that he personally knew like the back of his hand. It was a detailed body diagram of a cultivator’s nascent soul and the many dantians that branched from it throughout the whole body.
The teacher was confused as he looked at the page.
“Why does Siyuan have this?” he asked himself. “What would he need this for?”
He stared at the paper in his hands, trying to wonder why a smith would need a paper like this while going to forge something. It took him a while, but…
Slowly, but surely, his mind began to connect the dots.
“Hold on, he couldn’t possibly be trying to…?” he muttered.
Just as the words left his mouth, a flash of light exploded from behind the door. The teacher’s head whipped to the door.
“Siyuan?!” he exclaimed. He banged a fist against the door, the fist sparking against the lock formation set right in front of it with an audible ping. “Siyuan, are you alright?!”
He waited for a response. It wasn’t until a few seconds of silence passed that he finally unsheathed his sword.
The blade held the obvious glow of a relic, a very powerful relic. This wasn’t just any powerful relic, it was the heart and soul work of somebody who dedicated his life to the work of relic smithing. It was a fourteen-fold-enhanced sword relic that anybody in the late-stage core formation realm had more than a lot of reason to be proud of. A very, very powerful weapon that could withstand attacks powerful enough to level towns and slice through skin tougher than mountains.
The teacher swung his blade at the formation. The blade easily sliced through the formation, tearing it open. Without another second of hesitation, he burst through the door, almost completely tearing it off its hinges.
The room was fairly standard for every small relic smithery room in the school. Within was an empty room save for a large, glowing, circular relic forging array.
Normally, when forging a relic, the smith would lay the vessel at the center of the circle with the core right on top of it. Then, while standing outside the array, the smith would slam his relic smith’s hammer onto the array’s activation point. The array would then forcefully bond the vessel and the core at the cost of the smith’s qi. If the forging went successfully, then a newly made glowing relic would be left in the center of the circle.
Anything else left in the array other than the vessel and core would be consumed by the array during the process. That was one of many ways that smith’s increased the chances of smithing being successful, by putting in items that did things such as increasing the amount of qi the formation put into the smithing process. That was also why cultivators needed to be outside the array when the forging process began. It was the first thing beat into every relic-smith-in-training.
However, Siyuan didn’t do that.
He was in the middle of the array, lying on his front and completely unconscious. Strewn all over the floor were his papers and one of his smithing hammers was nowhere to be seen.
None of that was what grabbed his attention, though. What did was the aura that now enveloped his body. It was an aura that the teacher was very, very familiar with.
It was the aura of a newly-forged relic.
He stared at the unconscious student as his mind for a moment, many, many questions popping into his head. That was at least until he began to skim the contents of some of the papers lying face-up on the ground. He crouched, getting a better look at what they contained.
And as he read through papers upon papers of theories, calculations, and fanatical-like scribbling, he finally began to realize what Siyuan had been doing. He realized what exactly Siyuan was doing that took him a whole month and a half.
He couldn’t stop a smile from pulling at the corners of his lips.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he said. “Maybe you really are a genius. Either that, or you are insane. Who knows? It all depends on if you wake up or not.”