Lin Siyuan woke up to the sight of the wooden ceiling of the sect’s infirmary right above him.
For a moment, he silently stared at it as he tried to regain his bearings and remember what he was doing to get there in the first place.
Oh right. I was trying to turn myself into a relic.
Siyuan, being a relic smith, wasn’t all too familiar with the infirmary. The only reason he’d ever need to come here was if he got hurt while out on missions in order to meet his monthly quota or, in some very rare cases, got injured from the backlash of failing to forge a relic with a particularly dangerous core.
The particular relic that he was trying to forge, however, was much, much more dangerous to forge than whatever he had tried before.
Speaking of which, how did that go?
He slowly sat up and raised a hand up to right before his eyes.
I don’t feel different, he thought. But then again, I’m still alive. So, does that mean...
“I succeeded?” he asked nobody in particular.
“Well, you’re still here, aren’t you?” he heard a familiar voice then say from right beside him.
Siyuan almost jumped out of the bed as he turned very quickly to the right side of his cot.
Where his teacher was sitting on a chair, casually reading a book with an empty cover.
“Oh, greetings, shifu,” Siyuan said, sighing as he bowed his head respectfully in his direction.
“The doctor couldn’t find out why you were unconscious in the first place,” the teacher continued. “He told me that the most difficult patients to treat were the ones that he couldn’t diagnose, y’know. Caused me quite a fright, especially since you’re my prize student. Quite a surprise at that. I catch you out of your room for the first time in nearly fifty days and it’s when you’re knocked unconscious trying to forge something.”
“Uh, my apologies, shifu,” he said with a sheepish chuckle. “Y’know, doesn’t happen very often but it does happen.”
“I’m aware,” the teacher replied. “Especially when you’re forging particularly dangerous relics, right?”
“Yes,” Siyuan said, nodding.
“Though that didn’t seem like enough reason to stop you from trying something downright idiotic.”
Siyuan stared at his shifu. It took him a moment to realize that his shifu knew.
The older cultivator just smiled as he turned the book in his hand around, allowing Siyuan to see its contents.
On the pages were lines upon lines of text from a beginner’s relic smith manual, details on a relic’s core and the role it played in maintaining the relic’s structure and purpose. However, all along the sides, the only spaces on the pages that weren’t filled with words, were notes and scribbles, all of Siyuan’s own making.
Notes and scribbles that made what Siyuan had been studying for so long clear as day.
The student stared at the pages for a moment more before looking back up at his teacher.
“Y’know, Siyuan, this idea, turning your body into a relic, isn’t a unique idea,” the teacher continued as he closed the book. “I doubt there are more people who’ve thought of trying something like this than fingers on my hands. However, the people who do usually abandon the idea as soon as they really begin to think about it. They are all experts who know all the small, inner workings and details of the craft of relic smithing. And because of their knowledge, they can see that although the yield may be worth it, the chances of success are too low and the consequences of failure too high to warrant an attempt.
“So, what gave you, a simple student, the audacity to perform what experts much, much wiser and more knowledgeable than you didn’t even dare to begin?”
Siyuan’s eyes squinted slightly as met his shifu’s glare. His chest began to heat as he felt anger begin to get to his head.
“I apologize, shifu,” he said, his usually respectful tone now holding a slight sharpness to it “But I have worked very, very hard for the last sixty days to make sure nothing could go wrong. I even neglected my cultivation on some nights so I could put my effort into this work. And just because I am a student, so what if I had the audacity? I was willing to put in the time and my efforts to make sure I did everything right. And it obviously worked because I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
The teacher stared at his student, his eyes a bit wide at Siyuan’s outburst. Meanwhile, the student glared back, conviction visible in his eyes.
A part of Siyuan thought that he had heavily overstepped his boundaries. The man he was talking to wasn’t his peer, he was his superior, his authority past that of a senior disciple. Despite that, he felt the need to speak up in his own defense. After all, he spent more than a month and a half locked in his own room, neglecting his own entertainment and even his cultivation (to a lesser extent) in order to pursue his idea. So what if he was just a student? Of course he would have the audacity to do it, he worked for it!
The teacher had lived a very long life. He seemed merely like a middle-aged man, yet he had already lived long enough to outlive a couple generations of mortal men, and he expects to live even longer. He had interacted with many students over his years as a teacher.
Thus, he could tell Siyuan’s thoughts from just his glare.
And, despite Siyuan’s expressed disrespect, the teacher couldn’t help but smile.
Such ambition.
Siyuan was caught off guard by the sudden smile. He had been expecting to be reprimanded from his teacher, who was usually stoic concerning the rules and the hierarchy of authority in the Mystic River Sect.
“Well, whether you have the audacity or not, it doesn’t change the fact that what you did was very, very dangerous,” the teacher says. He holds up the book in his hand. “According to your calculations here, your chances of success were more than 60%, which may seem good but is far too low when your own nascent soul is on the line. Plus, I’ve reviewed your calculations and, well, you made a couple mistakes. Not too bad, but they were terrible mistakes. In fact, just by skimming through this, I can tell that you have overblown your chances of success by a very large margin. My own shallow deduction alone tells me that your chances of success should’ve barely reached 10%.”
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Siyuan’s eyes widened.
“So, this is why I scolded you for the audacity to try something as ambitious as this,” his teacher continued. “As a relic smith, you may be inherently good, but you’re not even a babbling toddler compared to a truly competent relic smith. You can barely forge relics out of regular objects, what made you think you could try it with a nascent soul? Much less your own nascent soul?”
Siyuan looked down at his hands, not daring to look his teacher in the eyes any longer. Despite his biting words, his tone was soft and calm. Through his words, Siyuan could tell his teacher was angry, but through his tone, he could also tell he was concerned. With that deduction, how could he be mad at his shifu any longer?
The teacher sighed. He leaned forward slightly, laying a hand on Siyuan’s shoulder.
“Siyuan, you are surrounded by good people,” he says. “Although your fellow disciples in our class may not consider you their friend, they care about your well being just as much as they care about each other’s. I care for all of my students, with you being no exception, of course. And there is that friend of yours, Luo Han. Although I understand why you wouldn’t come to any of us about something like this, you have no reason to be apprehensive around us.”
Siyuan stared at his shifu.
A feeling of warmth began to bloom in him.
“I understand, shifu,” he said with a smile.
“Good.”
With one last pat on his shoulder, the teacher withdrew his arm and relaxed back onto his chair beside Siyuan’s cot.
“When you fell unconscious after you succeeded with the…forging, I had your friend come pick up your papers and bring it to your room,” he said. “Which you left unlocked. I haven’t confiscated any of your papers so you can do whatever you want with them, but I advise you not publish them. The fact that your method worked in the first place was due to no less than extreme luck and because you had just started with your cultivation. You would be sending a lot of people to their deaths by doing publishing them.”
“Haha, yeah,” Siyuan says with a sheepish smile.
“At a later time, we need to discuss the issues that might come with your success. However, if you don’t mind…”
The teacher smiled.
“Shall we run some tests with your newfound abilities?”
“Sure,” Siyuan responded.
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An hour later, after the teacher finished settling things with the sect’s doctor, Siyuan and he found themselves at his classroom, the door shut, the windows closed, and the lock formation set up in front of the door to assure that nobody could glean into what was going on in the room.
“Amazing. Absolutely amazing.”
In front of Siyuan were several various objects. A sword, a sheath, a rock, a potted plant, and a pen, among other things. They all held the glow of newly forged relics.
“That makes twenty three relics,” the teacher said. “Twenty three relics in a row forged with a 100% success rate. Not even the most famous relic smiths from the most infamous relic smith sects can break the 90% success rate mark. You don’t even need a forging array, just the vessel and the core in each hand. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating! You don’t seem to have trouble enhancing relics either, though it seems you’re still limited to three.”
“Yeah, looks like I still need to meet the qi requirement to initiate the forging,” Siyuan says, panting slightly. Doing twenty three forgings in a row proved more than slightly taxing on his stamina for a cultivator in the Qi Manifestation Realm. “Though I think I could do four. That one time-”
“That one time you somehow succeeded performing four enhancements, you almost died of qi deviation. Luo Han even said three was enough, but you just had to go ahead and try a fourth one regardless. Maybe I should’ve known how much luck you had at that point because I didn’t even know it was possible for a Qi Manifestation Realm cultivator like you to pull off a successful fourth enhancement. You’re not trying that again until you breakthrough into the next realm.”
“Yes, shifu,” Siyuan said with a sigh.
“That said, it seems that you really are a relic now,” his shifu mused, tapping his chin. “I wonder how that affects your cultivation, though that’s not really any of my concern. Anyways, thank you for your time Siyuan, I’m plenty satisfied.”
“Of course, shifu,” Siyuan says. He bows his head before turning around and heading towards the door.
“Wait, one more thing, Siyuan,” the teacher says.
The student stops and turns around to look at him.
“Don’t tell anybody about what you’ve become,” he pointedly said. The easy-going, casual tone he had used before shifted to a serious one. “I have no need or desire to use your abilities for myself, but other people may not be so kind. If word gets out that you’re able to forge relics at a guaranteed success rate, then you’ll never find another moment of peace for the rest of your life. Especially since you’ve just begun your cultivation. It is of utmost importance that you stay low.”
“I understand,” Siyuan says with a bow of his head.
“Meanwhile, I’m going to help move you into the advanced smithing class. It will be hard for you to fake your prior success rate of 30% and the other students might start to get suspicious if you’re all of a sudden successfully forging a majority of your relics. In the advanced class though, if you can fake a 60 or so percent success rate, nobody will bat an eye at you as that’s the average rate of success there when forging. The only problem is that the class is full of students in the mid or late-stage Foundation Establishment and early to mid-stage Aura Manifestation realms, so you being in the Qi Manifestation realm will definitely stick out. It is preferable for you to breakthrough soon, but feel no need to rush. I will explain your situation to the teacher in the advanced class, leaving out the more crucial parts, of course.”
Siyuan nods. This action was completely understandable in his eyes. He was a bit tepid about being in a class full of students so much stronger than him, but he had his shifu’s support. The main thing he was worried about was how responsive his new teacher would be should he need her help.
“That is all.”
With that, Siyuan bowed his head and turned around, leaving the classroom.
The teacher stared at his back as he stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He smiled.
“The ambition of youth,” he said with a sigh, shaking his head.
He looked down at the relics on his desk, debating what to do with them.
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The rest of the day passed by quickly.
On his way back to his room, he ran into Luo Han. The two exchanged greetings and talked. Siyuan told him about his transfer to the advanced relic smithing class. Luo Han seemed amazed, but not all that surprised.
“You always had a talent for it compared to the other beginner smiths I know,” he said. “Oh man, their eyes are gonna pop once they hear about this.”
“Hey, don’t go around telling everyone you know,” Siyuan said with a slight scowl. “That’s gonna get me too much attention.”
“Siyuan, I don’t think anybody will find it surprising,” Luo Han continued. “Your talent’s the envy of the entirety of the beginner class. A 30% success rate is insane among the beginners.”
Huh, guess they don’t know 60%’s the average there, Siyuan thought. I wonder what the dropout rate is for beginners moving up to the advanced class.
“Anyways, I bid you luck and a fortunate future!” Luo Han said. “And I can expect to get stronger relics from you in the future, right?”
“Only if you begin paying me more.”
Luo Han just laughed. The two friends clasped their hands in each other’s directions courteously before going their separate ways.
Siyuan went right back to his room. Seeing that it was just as messy as he had left it when he went to forge himself, he spent some time tidying it up, putting books back into their spots on bookshelves and using some basic moves from the Mystic River sect’s martial arts to brush away the dust. Only after then did he pull out his cultivation cushion and sat cross-legged onto it.
He closed his eyes, laying the palms of his hands onto his knees. His whole body relaxed as he slowed his breathing.
Soon, he felt the very familiar feeling of qi begin to enter him and flood into his nascent soul. He felt a faint sensation of denseness begin to slowly settle, as if he was being very slowly filled.
At least cultivation still feels the same…
With that, he finally went into cultivation, slightly restless for what could possibly come next.
He wouldn’t open his eyes until the next morning, by the time the sun had already begun to rise.