At lunch she went to the Library to look for a book on Illusions, intent on being able to see through them so that she wasn’t caught by Demon spies. Then she remembered a book she had seen there but never purchased. ‘The Complete Dragon Technique Guide’. If she wanted to emulate the dragons, what better source book could she have?
She paid for both, the went to the cafeteria to quickly eat something before returning to work. As she ate she read over the first chapters of the Illusion book. It described illusions as the ability to trick the mind into thinking it sensed something which it didn’t. She got so caught up in the book that she barely returned to work in time.
For the next several days she would read anytime she was eating and for two hours at night. She also spent two of the next three nights in meditation, relying on Mae to wake her up in time and skipping First Meal, instead eating field rations at work.
Shortly after getting there she was working on a shield for one of the town guards, adding the protection array to it. The main problem she was facing when creating better formations was insufficient energy. The chi gathering arrays on her bracelet could only work as well as would be required for a medium Gathering grade barrier, though a gathering array of that size on the armor would only be able to manage an earlier Gathering grade barrier at best, if not initial due to the fact that spirit beast leather was an inferior material to jade, especially white jade. In comparison, the entire back of the armor’s chest piece was covered in a gathering array and it was only able to gather slightly above the energy needed for a late Gathering barrier. A shield, which was larger than the chest piece and circular, so there was little wasted space, could be given a Peak Gathering grade barrier. The energy required by the barrier increased exponentially, while the energy gathered by the array increased proportional to the diameter, so the array needed to almost be exponentially larger to gather enough chi to power formations.
For this reason few devices at the Foundation stage or above only used an array to power them, instead using spirit stones or crystals which could store chi for bursts of power. Her magic bag, for example, while being a Gathering phase Space element item, had spirit stones sowed into it, and only needed to draw on large amounts of chi when things entered or leaved it. Outside of those times, the natural rate at which slightly depleted spirit stones would recharge themselves was enough to keep it powered indefinitely. As this option was expensive, however, most devices at that level were powered by the chi of the user, which is why a storage ring wasn’t provided to a sect member until they reached Foundation. It required Foundation levels of chi to open it so that things could be inserted or removed.
As she finished the Chi Gathering array on the shield someone entered the store. She heard him talking to Breen at the counter, and he sounded familiar, so she set the shield down and went to the front of the shop. The man turned out to be the mercenary captain from the restaurant. “Hey, it’s miss money bags. You work here?”
Shen nodded while dusting some metal shavings off of her shirt. “Yeah. I’m in charge of imbuing the armor that comes in, though any Foundation level arrays have to be made by the boss.”
“In that case, you are probably who I need to speak with. Some of the guards I talked to mentioned that this place was the one that did the engraving on their armor, so I figured I would come by and have the same thing done to mine.” He opened a magic bag and pulled out a suit of armor, laying it on the counter.
Shen picked up the chest piece. It appeared to be two pieces, a leather inner layer and a mail outer layer. “Well, I can’t really do much with the mail.” she said before folding it and putting it to the side. “It’s pretty much impossible to engrave. You’ll need to have that imbued with some sort of essence from a monster if you want it to have special properties. I’d see if any of the blacksmiths in the Metal district can do it. The leather, though is fine. Nice, thick spirit beast leather. I should be able to give it a high level Gathering grade barrier.”
The Mercenary nodded. “I was hoping for something in the Foundation stage, if possible. Name’s Dav by the way.”
“Shen.” she said, then thought about it. “I’m not sure if the boss can make a Foundation level barrier formation. It’s a bit tricky. I’ll have to ask him.” She went to ask Master Chen about it, then came back to the front a few minutes later, shaking her head. “He says that he’s never been able to pull it off, so he won’t risk ruining your armor and having to replace it. The formation is pretty tricky, though, so you would probably need experience with a Foundation level barrier technique to pull it off, so I can see why he failed. He isn’t a fighter.”
“You are, right?” the man said, “You seem to have a lot of muscle for a little girl.”
“Little girl? Weren’t you hitting on me when we first met?” she teased.
“I was drunk and wasn’t seeing clearly.” he quickly responded. “Besides, the lighting was bad, and you looked older.”
“Right.” said Shen, clearly not accepting the pervert’s excuse. “Yes, I’m a fighter. Never really learned the normal barrier spells, but I have a technique that does the same thing, so I can make the Gathering level barriers.”
“Why not the Foundation ones?” he asked, confused.
“Mostly because you have to understand the formation before you can make it. As I’ve never been at Foundation stage, I have no understanding of the things Foundation stage techniques can do, and therefore can’t defend against them. I can, however, make you a False Foundation grade barrier formation in the early level, maybe even the middle level.”
“What’s the difference?”
“False rank barriers are basically just an overcharged version of a lower stage spell. Like this.” She held her hands in front of her and made a massive fire ball the size of her head, putting enough Fire chi into it to break through a simple Foundation rank barrier with brute force. After a few seconds she reabsorbed the chi. “It won’t be able to protect against any actual Foundation stage techniques, but since so many people just do what I did and overcharge Cleansing or Gathering stage techniques, it should be useful.”
He nodded. “And it would just be powered from ambient chi, like the guard armor? If so, why didn’t you do that for the guards? Is it hard to do?”
“Kind of, but that’s not the reason. It draws too much chi to be powered from a gathering array without some sort of storage, which is expensive, needing a spirit beast core.” She remembered that she had bought one but never used it. She should probably do something with it. “I would need to power it off of the person, but if they aren’t at least Foundation stage, I doubt they would be able to keep it on all day long without exhausting themselves.”
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“So, I’d face the same issue, as I’m Peak Gathering, like you?”
Shen nodded. “I might be able to work around that by making it so that the barrier isn’t always on. I have two ways I can do that. The first is that it only comes on when your chi reserve is above a certain level. Assuming your chi refills quickly enough, at Peak Gathering it would probably be able to operate in standby without wearing you out too much, but would deplete your reserves while in battle. I just don’t know where it would balance out, as chi restores faster the more it’s depleted. If you were constantly at 70% of your full reserve, you would only be at 70% of your strength, reaction time, endurance, etcetera, and thus wouldn’t be able to perform as well. Plus you would be closer to it turning off in battle because it reached the cut off point.
The second requires a bit more effort from you. I could put a switch in it, so you could turn it off and on as you needed it. Like this.” She grabbed a Mark 2 light amulet from the shelf and showed it to him. “If you put a tiny bit of chi into this formation here, where my finger is, it turns the light on.” she demonstrated and the light came on. “And if you do it again, it turns off.” She sent another bit of chi and it turned off.
She handed him the amulet and he turned it off and on a few times to get used to it. “So I would just need to turn the armor on before battle, and off afterwards.”
“Yep. Of course, if you forget it could knock you out from chi depletion, but you have probably trained to withstand that and would just be stuck at the level of a mortal. I could, of course, add the low chi formation as well if you want to prevent that, say cutting it off when your pressure reaches Cleansing level, but that would cost extra.”
He nodded and handed the amulet back. “Speaking of that, how expensive will it be, and how long would it take?”
“Well, I could have it finished by the end of the day, but it will be expensive as I need to use better materials. Say, fifty stones at least, plus another five for the low chi cutoff, as that’s a bit complicated to do.”
He rubbed his chin for a few seconds while thinking. “Honestly, fifty five stones is more than a month’s wages, but if it saves my life it’s worth it. Fine. Do both the switch and the cutoff, plus the strongest barrier you can make.”
Shen nodded and started taking his chest piece to the back. That’s when she realized she forgot the other parts of the armor. “Oh, the barrier will only cover your chest, by the way. I’m not sure I can make as strong of a barrier on the bracers or greaves, and they would cost fifty five each as well.”
“It’s fine if it’s just the chest piece. Losing a limb is preferable to losing your life. Just put the standard formation on them. Ten stones each for them, right?” Shen nodded and grabbed the rest to take to the back.
“You need to pay half in advance.” she heard Breen say as she went through the curtain separating the two sections, and heard the man start to place stones on the counter. Eighty five stones was an expensive job, but Shen would gladly pay that much if it meant saving her life.
She set the shield to the side, as she had several days to complete it, and started on the mercenary’s armor, first drawing the patterns in ink so she was certain she didn’t make any mistakes. The Formation consisted of several parts, all of which needed to be balanced for maximum efficiency. After all, all arrays leaked power, and the larger they were the worse the leak would be, so they needed to be as small as possible for the job they did.
The first component was simple, the switch. It simply cut off the flow of chi through the circuit based on if it was closed or open. It was easy enough to make that even Timp could make it, though he only actually used the circuit when making the mark 2 amulets. The second component was the collection array. This one was small, as it was collecting from a person and therefore didn’t need the extra size to work better. Third was the low energy cutoff. It was also small, though the size of her thumbnail instead of the pinky nail like the others. Fourth was the compression circuit. In order to project a stronger barrier it would need to bring the pressure of the chi up to the middle Foundation stage’s level of pressure. It was about the size of the palm, as it require a large amount of energy to compress peak Gathering level chi into middle Foundation level chi. Last was the barrier formation. This one needed to be as big as possible to do the best job.
That was when she ran into an issue. For the formation to work the best, she would need to put two of these on the armor, as they could overlap their effects. But if she did that she would need two collection, limit, compression, and switch arrays. If she’d have thought about it before she would have asked the customer, but as she had marked up the price by quite a bit, she could still afford to do it, at least this once. She settled on making duplicates of the formations on the front and back, but with a single switch controlling both of the others, so he wouldn’t have to bother with switching both. This would mean that she didn’t have to run chi conduits under the arms, risking damage and leaking more chi.
Shen ended up finishing the chest piece after the normal closing time and decided to do the other three pieces tomorrow morning.
The next morning she arrived early and finished the other pieces. She had made enough of them that, at that size, she only took thirty minutes on each one. She then went back to the shield she was working on the day before.
The mercenary came in around lunch time to pick up his armor and was impressed by the work. “The switch is at the base of your neck on the back. It controls two other switches between your shoulder blades.” The gathering array was, of course, in the middle of his chest and at the bottom of his shoulder blades, where it was closest to his dantian and could therefore gather chi the quickest. “I realized when I was working on it that it would be best to do two formations for the barrier, so I had to do twice as many formations.”
“This isn’t going to cost me more, is it?” he asked, a bit concerned.
“No, it was my decision, after all, not yours. I would have been able to get it to full power without doing that, but it would have taken just as long to carve because I would have needed to make a much more complex formation. This way I was able to use only a slightly modified version of the one I normally use, which is optimized for energy use. They should use about the same amount of chi as each other, with similar performance, but this one is easier to make, so I should be able to do it faster in the future.” Shen didn’t mention the fact that she could have combined the two to make it use half the chi if not less, but that would have taken twice as long and greatly increased the price. Maybe she would do that on a custom job or project later.
He nodded and paid the rest of the money, putting his armor in his bag. “So, how do I know it’s good quality?”
“Put it on and activate the barrier.” Shen said. “In fact, if you want to test it, we can go to one of the training fields and I can demonstrate.” He remembered the Fire ball she had made yesterday and realized that she would be able to test it properly.
“Fine.” he said, nodding his head, “Let’s go.”
Shen went into the back to tell Master Chen that she was going out to demonstrate the quality of her work to a customer, and they left.
Once they got to the field they asked the field master if they could borrow one and were allowed to borrow a sparring platform. On the field beside them Commander Kril was running the youngest guards, including Danka, through a training routine. The guards had started doing more training and fewer patrols recently. The town was a pretty peaceful place, so this hadn’t significantly increased crime rates even with the mercenaries in town, as they mostly got drunk or spent time at the brothel rather than commit crimes, and as such rarely cause problems worse than a public brawl.
After Dav came out of the changing room the trainees stopped their practice swings and came over to watch. “Ok, then,” he said to Shen. “Do I just feel out where the switch is and send some chi there?” Shen nodded and a few seconds later he managed to touch just the right spot with his chi, activating the field. A yellow transparent layer covered his torso and he knew that even without the mail over the armor he was far better protected than before.
“Ready?” Shen asked and when he nodded she put her hands in front of her and began channeling her chi into a massive fire ball. Once it reached the size of her head she hurled it at his chest. The ball impacted and exploded, sending him flying backwards by five meters before hitting the ground. He stood up just seconds later, however, and the armor wasn’t even damaged, with only his hair getting a bit singed by the explosion. “So, what do you think?”
“Definitely worth the money.” he said. “How much chi did you put into that, anyway? It packed more of a punch than I was expecting.”
“About half my Fire chi, and it’s at about ten percent purity right now.”
Dav whistled. It wasn’t common for someone at Gathering to have such pure chi.
“Quite impressive.” said the field master, walking over to them. “I assume you are the Shen that’s been imbuing the guard’s armor?”
“Yep, that’s me.” she said.
The field master nodded. “In that case, do you mind if I test the armor with one of my techniques? I promise to pay for your treatment and armor repairs if it breaks through.”
Dav nodded. “Sure, you can test it. It should be able to block at least a middle Foundation strength attack, though not a true Foundation technique.”
The field Master nodded and once they were in position, drew his sword. It was a high grade Metal flying sword. He fed it Metal chi, then, once he was sure Dav was ready, pushed off the stone floor with Earth chi. He seemed to become a streak as he was at Dav’s position in less than a second, then stabbed his sword at just the right time to add the energy of his movement to the stab.
Once again Dave was knocked backwards, this time by ten meters, before rolling another five. When he got up, however, there was no blood or obvious damage to the armor. He was, however, holding his stomach. “That’s going to leave a bruise.” he said as he walked back to where he started.
“Impressive” said the field Master before addressing Shen. “I think you underestimated the strength of your barrier, little lady. No barrier below High Foundation has ever blocked that technique, and he got off with no more than some bruises.”
