“Good morning! How are you doing there professor?” Jianmen pushed open the door to Professor Atkison’s lab and saw that the professor and Dolores were operating on a huge machine with a huge transparent hollow crystal ball. And at the center of the crystal ball, was a piece of the iridescent hail which they collected from their last trip to the underground temple on some remote realm. Right now, eight probing metal rods inside the giant crystal ball were shooting lightnings of different colors at the piece of hail, and the hail was emitting steady and colorful energy shockwaves, which were then absorbed by the crystal ball. “Still analyzing the piece of hail? Did you guys pull an all-nighter? What did you find? Can I help with anything?”

“Yes, turned out this piece of hail has some kind of regenerative outer shell, which blocks our probes from drilling in and extracting its internal content and looks like it can only be disabled by strong suppressive rays.” Professor Atkinson wiped off the sweat from his forehead: “And from my calculation, the energy flows within this piece of hail has reached some kind of equilibrium - if we are not careful, it could break the entire piece and could explode and damage the lab.”

“There were some signs of instability earlier, but we managed to keep it down.” Dolores nodded at Professor Atkinson and Jianmen: “We would’ve asked you for help but we haven’t got the chance to reach you.”

“Hmm yeah, probably it’s nice that I’ve finally completed this piece of true craftsmanship then.” Jianmen laughed out loud and showed Professor Atkinson and Dolores something in his hand - it looked like something decorative made of interwoven red threads.

“An enchanted Chinese Knot? What can it do?” Professor Atkinson asked.

“Looks like some kind of lock?” Dolores asked: “Something to seal power and energy.”

“Precisely.” Jianmen went to the side of the giant hollow crystal ball with the Chinese Knot in his hands: “It should help your case as well, just let me know when you want me to do it. Looks like your machine is reaching some kind of balance, I don’t wanna just put this in and mess it up for you.”

“Okay, how much do you think your lock can suppress the energy shell?” Professor Atkinson asked: “Right now we are at around seventy percent full output, which is just enough to gradually chip away the outer shell without letting the internal energy flood out, if you can gradually ease your lock in, we can put more energy into absorbing the internal energy signatures and analyzing them. And please let us know what kind of energy output your lock has - so that we don’t mix the signals.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Okay, just be careful. And the wonderful thing about this lock is, it barely has any energy signature - I can tell you what to watch for later but unless you are doing some super detailed observation you have nothing to worry about.” Jianmen cast a protective spell around the hollow crystal ball, then he extended his hand forward and let the Chinese Knot float into the inside of the crystal ball. Some of the red threads unwove themselves and wrapped around the piece of hail at the center.

A few waves of stronger shockwave were released from the hail, but they were absorbed by the crystal ball.

“Decreasing power output to the suppressive ray by ten percent, shifting five percent to the protective and absorption layer.” Dolores exhaled in relief and said: “This is good. We are saving on our energy reserves while doing the same kind of analysis.”

“If you want I can increase the power. ” Jianmen said: “ In fact I insist - this is only a teensy tiny bit of its power - it took me quite some time to make this. So I am perfectly happy to show you what it can do.”

“Okay. Can you increase the suppressing power by five percent at a time? We don’t want to do anything too drastic.” Professor Atkinson could tell that Jianmen was in a good mood and wanted to show off a bit.

“Noted. Be careful now.” Jianmen gently controlled the Chinese Knot with his hand.

The process went smoothly, but it still took them around half a day to complete this round of analysis. The good thing for Professor Atkinson and Dolores was that they saved a lot of cost on energy, since they stopped using their suppressive rays to disable the protective energy layer around the piece of shield pretty soon and just relied on Jianmen’s Chinese Knot to do the work for them. And all of their energy cost was on the absorption of the energy shock waves emitted by the piece of hail, which they then used to analyze the energy signatures.

“Let’s take a break.” Professor Atkinson told Dolores and Jianmen as he slowly turned down the machine: “Thank you Mr. Yu. It’d be a lot harder without you.”

“Glad I could help.” Jianmen chuckled and stretched his shoulders and his neck: “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off for a bit today. If you need me, you can just call or text me.”

“You’re not joining us for lunch? We’d really like to pick your brains on some of the interesting energy signatures.” Dolores asked.

“Maybe after - I have to go watch the first student duel of this semester. ” Jianmen laughed: “I’ve heard so much about the tradition of student duels in the Grant Academy, never thought I’d have a chance to actually see one this early on.”

“Oh, yikes.” Dolores shook her head: “I thought for someone that had godhood before, these kinds of things would seem too childish and meaningless.”

“Well, it sounds intriguing enough to me - a couple of civilian born students versus arrogant teenagers from known families? That would be quite interesting.” Jianmen answered: “Also, not to bad mouth anyone, but some insufferable brutish gods did enjoy duels, especially to the death and in their names.”