Pure Jade

by Patrick Laplante

  Cha Ming sifted through the thousand runes in his mind. “Without experiments, I can think of sixty-four that could be compatible. Seventeen would have characteristics of stability. In fact, it could also be possible to paint several different runes simultaneously to obtain a combined effect.”

  “Hm…” the alchemist said, stroking his beard. “Let’s try it, then. Do you have everything you need?”

  “Yes,” Cha Ming said, taking out the Clear Sky Brush. At the alchemist’s direction, he tried all seventeen runes with varying dosages and concentrations of medicinal “ink.” He performed two hundred and forty-six trials, of which forty-two formed a stable runic coating, conveniently leaving most of the surface area of the pill exposed for simultaneous dissolution.

  “How many elements can you paint?” Mo Tianshen asked, looking at the forty-two potential successes.

  “Wood, fire, earth, metal, water, wind, lightning, creation, destruction,” Cha Ming said. Mo Tianshen raised an eyebrow. “Strictly speaking, I can’t paint in pure creation or destruction,” Cha Ming added.

  “Well, regardless of your skill, that’s the perfect mix for experimentation,” Mo Tianshen said. He returned his gaze to the forty-two stabilized pills. “I don’t dare divert too much time away from my experiments, but I’ll tell you what. How about you help me make nine more duplicates of these forty-two. Then I’ll perform trials in the upcoming week. If the results look promising, I’ll make pills for you. At cost. However, you must continue to help me with my experiments in the future.”

  Cha Ming stayed for another two hours before finally returning to practice formations. His future cultivation speed would depend on the success of the upcoming experiments.

  Cha Ming walked down a deserted street in the wee hours of the night. He wore white robes and sported long black hair. His face was pale and skinny but had an overall cheerful disposition. He was also six inches taller than normal due to the size-manipulating abilities of the Seventy-Two Transformations Technique.

  As he walked, various beggars, thieves, and prostitutes made way for him. The city guards watched him with suspicion but didn’t dare say anything. Cha Ming constantly emanated the pressure of his half-step resplendent soul. Such a pressure was suffocating to anyone under middle-foundation establishment.

  The reason he walked in the middle of the night was to procure sigil focuses. Sigil focuses were made of soul steel and other expensive ingredients. They were always made to order, as the cost of each set was astronomical. Unfortunately, the only spiritual blacksmith in the Alabaster Group didn’t have enough skill to craft them. This left only one blacksmith in the city capable of crafting them, and he belonged to a shop that was under the influence of the Wang family.

  Cha Ming walked slowly for a full hour before arriving at the blacksmith in question. The main storefront’s lights were off, but Cha Ming could hear a beating hammer and a roaring furnace in the back of the shop.

  Cha Ming didn’t knock. Instead he gently reached out with his incandescent force, making the blacksmith instantly aware of his presence. The spiritual blacksmith didn’t acknowledge him but continued hammering away at a searing-hot, sword-shaped chunk of metal. The strange material glowed white as he beat it hundreds of times. Sparks showered onto the heat-resistant surroundings. The smith wore no shirt, but his skin was hard like steel and yet also supple like copper. The white-hot sparks didn’t leave a single mark.

  You can let yourself in, the man sent as he worked. Cha Ming did as he was told and walked through the unlocked front door. He headed to the back of the store where the forge was located and sat on a small wooden bench. He watched in rapt attention as the smith worked. The man’s skin glistened in the firelight.

  The smith’s pounding hammer was music to Cha Ming’s ears. Every strike seemed in tune with heaven and earth. The symphony of metal and flame eventually ended with a sharp quenching sound, accompanied by a sharp rise in heaven and earth qi. He had no idea what the quenching medium was, but it wasn’t water.

  “How can I help you this fine evening?” the smith said as he walked over. His eyes flickered briefly to the white medallion pinned on Cha Ming’s white robes.

  “I require a full set of sigil focuses,” Cha Ming said. “One hundred and eight in total.”

  “What kind?” the smith asked, grabbing a towel to wipe off the sweat and grime.

  “Unaligned,” Cha Ming specified.

  The smith nodded. “And you’re aware that unaligned sigil focuses are twice as expensive as normal ones?”

  “Of course,” Cha Ming replied. Unaligned focuses were versatile and could be changed from one alignment to another on demand. It was an uncommon choice, but not unheard of. He was wary of revealing his five-element alignment in a place owned by the Wang family.

  “I have work lined up for the week,” the spiritual blacksmith said. “Please come back then.”

  “I need these within forty-eight hours,” Cha Ming said. “Will this be possible?”

  The blacksmith shrugged. “The base price is four thousand high-grade spirit stones. If you can give me five thousand, I can push off my other projects for a couple of days.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Cha Ming said, placing a crystal card on the table. “Do you mind if I wait here until it’s complete?”

  “Not at all,” the blacksmith said. “What can I call you?”

  “Lin Mu,” Cha Ming said.

  The blacksmith nodded before sitting down to recuperate his energy.

  Chapter 25: Sigilcraft

  Lao Mo, the grandmaster smith, exhaled deeply, removing the remaining tension from his taut muscles. He was tired due to having forged all day. In his youth, he could have forged for weeks without fatiguing. But hundreds of years had taken their toll on the aging blacksmith. Now, he constantly struggled to make enough money for his arthritis medication.

  Fortunately, a rich customer had requested a rush job. The nice thing about rush jobs for non-contracted customers was that he didn’t need to sell below market price. An item like a set of sigil focuses normally sold at a market price of four thousand high-grade spirit stones. This specific transaction would net him two thousand spirit stones.

  Heavens, I hate arthritis, he thought, flexing his strong but stiff fingers. By all rights, a marrow-refining cultivator like himself shouldn’t be affected by such a base affliction. The entire situation had baffled the local medical community, and his special treatment required a small fortune every month.

  Lao Mo retrieved a heavy box from under his workbench. It was chock full of thick standardized rods made of pure soul steel, the only material that could be used for making unaligned focuses. He had used the same material to make his magic-grade hammer focus many centuries ago. He had only worked with the material five times since then.

  The aged blacksmith took the heavy rods and brought them over to the workbench for pretreatment. He then took out a vat of universal solvent, an alchemical substance that dissolved just about anything given enough time. Anything but soul steel. He isolated his mouth and nose as he dumped a bundle of rods into the vat. It hissed and sizzled, a clear indication of the impurities remaining on the outside of the rods. These impurities were the result of the imperfect manufacturing process. Lao Mo had always wondered how they could be so thoughtless as to leave impurities on such an expensive metal.

  The pretreatment was quick, lasting only a single hour, after which Lao Mo removed the rods and drip-dried them. He then evaporated the remainder of the solvent with a burst of fire qi and placed the purified rods on a tray made of refractory, a stone material that was extremely resistant to high temperatures. They quickly heated up to the melting point of steel. Once they were cooking nicely, he doubled the temperature of the furnace using his core qi, then doubled it again for good measure.

  Soul steel was undoubtedly one of the most difficult materials to work with. Fortunately, he didn’t need to hammer it. Hammering didn’t create very nice sigil focuses, w
hose base forms were polished spheres. No, they needed an entirely different process. While he didn’t need to melt the metal, he still needed to soften it until it was as malleable as stainless steel.

  After properly heating them, he carefully placed one of the rods through a hole in a black device he’d taken out while they heated. It was made from the purest void steel, an unaligned material that was unfathomably hard and resistant to heat. Lao Mo materialized his spiritual hammer and smashed down onto the rod, forcing it through a smaller opening on the other side. To make the sigil focuses the proper size, he needed to extrude the rod and make it thinner. This was the very reason why he said it was too big in the first place.

  After completely extruding one rod, he processed the remaining eight. One rod made twelve focuses, and the rods were reheated after extrusion. He increased the temperature by another fifty percent to further increase the malleability of the material. He then took out two more pieces of void steel as they heated. One was a cylindrical base meant to hold the rod in place, while the other was an interlocking piece with a sharp void-steel blade. Lao Mo grasped a clear rod with a pair of black tongs and placed it between both pieces. Then, with a loud smack of his spiritual hammer, he cut a twelfth of the rod off. He repeated the process ninety-nine times to produce a hundred and eight bits, which were kept in the hot furnace after being severed.

  Once again, he increased the heat by fifty percent. The rod pieces began glowing with a soft white light, standing in sharp contrast to the dark-blue flames used to heat them to this temperature. Blue flames were something only a master smith could produce. Green flames came next, and he had no idea what came after. Not that he would live to see the next grade. He blamed arthritis.

  Another black box was placed on the bench. This time, it contained two spherical halves. He placed a bit of soul steel, flat tip downward, into the spherical template. After placing the other half over the top of the rod bit, he smacked his hammer onto the top plate. This resulted in a ball of soul steel with a circular ring called a “flash,” which he would remove in the next step. He kept the newly formed sphere in the furnace as he finished making the others.

  After completing all hundred and eight preliminary spheres, Lao Mo retrieved the first one with a pair of short tongs and gloved hands and took out a sharp void-steel carving knife. He used it to expertly shave off the unnecessary layer of flash. Only a small amount of residual soul steel was left on the otherwise perfect sphere. He processed them one at a time, carefully removing as much flash as possible. Too much excess flash would make the next step extremely difficult. Hours passed as Lao Mo methodically scraped. Every time the temperature dipped too low, he exchanged the cool sphere with a hot one and continued shaving away.

  Lao Mo soon finished removing the flash from the last sphere. After carefully removing all of them from the furnace, he formed one hundred and eight hand seals, and a black cloud made from void-steel dust formed in front of him. He threw the spheres inside it and tediously controlled the black dust, using it to wear away at the tiny imperfections remaining on each clear ball. This step alone took half a day. Had he left any more flash, the processing time would have doubled or tripled.

  He was halfway done. Stoking the flames of the furnace, he brought the spheres to an extreme temperature where the balls burned with a blinding white color. Lao Mo took out a small barrel of liquified elemental essence and a small case. From the case, he withdrew five vials of elemental evanescence, which he used to carefully dope the liquified elemental essence.

  Truth be told, all the previous steps were cosmetic. The spherical shape somewhat helped when forming the sigils, but the reason that soul steel could be shaped in the first place was due to this imbuement with elemental essence and evanescence. Lao Mo carefully gathered all hundred and eight spheres in a black basket and immersed them in the quenching bath all at once. It boiled, but he used his careful control over heat to drive excess energy into a black box in a corner of the room. The item was called a heat sink, and he could store heat in it as he pleased.

  An hour later, the spheres were fully quenched. The quenching was necessary for imbuing them, but it had made them hard and brittle. One additional step was required to complete the sigil focus: tempering. Lao Mo placed the balls into a red fire, which he carefully supervised for six hours. The properties of the soul steel slowly changed over this period of time. The hardness created by the quenching process slowly melted away. He continued until he saw a qualitative change in the metal. Then he withdrew the crystal spheres from the fire and let them cool down to room temperature.

  Now for the final test, he thought. He carefully guided a wisp of his resplendent force into each of the metal orbs. They squirmed like blobs of quicksilver as he willed them to take whatever shape he desired. This property was what allowed a sigil to be imbued and runic lines to be drawn using nothing but qi.

  His task completed, he placed the quarter-inch balls of malleable metal into a low-level bag of holding and handed it to his client, who hadn’t moved the entire time. Then he retrieved the man’s change from the cash register. “Thank you for your swift services,” the man said before leaving the premises.

  “What a mysterious fellow,” the blacksmith muttered. He wanted to lie down and rest, but he had a huge backlog of paperwork to take care of since his assistant had resigned. With a sigh, he retreated to his office to tackle anything important that might have come up. His desk was piled with letters and reports. Most of them were bills.

  He started with the topmost letter, the one delivered most recently. It contained various orders, the same as always. A few of the next ones were junk mail, which he burnt to a crisp without looking. He sifted through the long pile before reaching a red letter. Red letters were urgent, so he opened it right away.

  The letter spoke of the current embargo list. Several criminals and competitors were listed, but most of them had been on the list for decades. Soon, he saw the picture of a young man. Foundation establishment, five-element cultivation, bone-forging cultivator. Recently joined the Alabaster Group and was studying formations. Penalty for procuring goods was one thousand high-grade spirit stones. Due to his presence, the entire Alabaster Group was also on the embargo list.

  “God dammit,” Lao Mo yelled, smashing his fist onto the desk. He winced as pain ran through his joints.

  Well, what’s done is done, he thought. I never liked those embargos anyway. After thinking for a short while, he decided on a viable course of action.

  How do I explain the theft of my valuable stock of soul steel? Perhaps a vacation was in order. People got robbed while on vacation all the time. He figured the insurance should cover it.

  Cha Ming reverted to his original form after arriving at the Alabaster Group residence. His long black hair changed to wavy brown, and his black eyes turned jade. He also shrank six inches, making his movements considerably more comfortable. The world was built for short people. He’d lost count of the times he’d hit his head on low-hanging objects.

  His bones crunched as his frame transformed, becoming slightly more compact and a bit more heavyset. His gaunt face filled out, and his skin returned to its usual light-bronze coloring.

  “I didn’t know you had a shape-changing technique,” a gentle voice said from behind him.

  Cha Ming turned around, smiling. “I usually keep it a secret, but you’re a trustworthy person.”

  Luo Xuehua was once again wearing blue. Under the morning sunlight he could see a faint coloring around her eyes that seemed out of place.

  “Then it’s fair that I also share a secret with you,” she said, leading Cha Ming to a nearby bench. They watched rainbow-colored fish as they swam through a lily-laden pond. There was an artificial breeze in the residence that caused the water to ripple.

  “I lost my eyes when I was three years old,” Xuehua said, fiddling with a white lotus she had picked from the lake. “My town was attacked by devil cultivators, and many of us were killed in t
he process. Thankfully, we were lucky enough to have a formidable expert in the village that fought them off.

  “It was Master Lu who took me in when I was seven. I was begging on the streets of Quicksilver when he found me. It was a hard life, and there was no lack of lascivious people trying to take advantage of me. I was helpless. He took me in and trained me to use my soul to see instead of my eyes. He calls it the “mind’s eye.” Cultivators cannot cultivate qi until they are sixteen, but there is no such restriction on the soul.

  “Ever since then, I have dedicated my life to following Master and hunting devils. Master teaches me without reservation, and in turn, I go out and hunt whenever I’ve improved.”

  Luo Xuehua said nothing more, so they sat in silence, looking at the fish and feeling the morning breeze.

  “Thank you for sharing,” Cha Ming said quietly. Then he took out the bag of sigil focuses and began using his qi to shape the clear, malleable spheres.

  “Sigil focuses?” Xuehua asked.

  “Yes, unaligned ones,” Cha Ming replied.

  “They must have cost you a fortune,” Xuehua said. “To this date, I have only accumulated twenty-four. They are all water-aligned focuses based on ice.” She swept out her sleeve, revealing twenty-four light-blue sigils. There were many multiples among them, but for the most part, they incorporated features of ice. He saw them change shapes into characters like black ice, blue ice, heavy ice. It was this mutable feature that made sigils so valuable. They were much more flexible than formation flags.

  “It seems like I have a lot of work to do to catch up, then,” Cha Ming said, chuckling. He retrieved his sigil focuses and stood up to leave.

  “I heard a rumor,” Xuehua said. “Mo Tianshen has been performing some experiments. The results have been promising. Expect good news in a few days.”