It took two more days for Ponma to get an audience with the quartermaster, as he was too busy with all of the imports and exports of the sect, but once he did the man quickly decided that he needed to see the merchandise. Ponma took him to the warehouse where Shen had stored the higher quality Blossoms in an area marked ‘off limits’, including all that she had managed to gather over the last two days, though she kept the jar of Foundation ones on her. While she wasn’t worried about thieves, she couldn’t risk someone mistaking it for a normal jar and one of the sect’s people taking it away. Thankfully they hadn’t bothered the jars in the ‘off limits’ section either, so that worry was likely unfounded.
After verifying their quality, Ponma started negotiating with the man. In the end they settled on five stones per jar for the Late quality ones and ten per jar for the Peak quality ones. As for the Foundation quality ones, neither of them had any idea what they were worth, as neither hadn’t seen them on the market for over two decades. The quartermaster promised to ask about it the next time he met a merchant, though. With no idea what to do with it, Shen took it home and put it in the corner of her room.
They split the money that they got from the flowers 90/10, just as they used to when Ponma negotiated with the merchants on her behalf, as Shen had done all the work. For the next two days all Shen did after getting to Fisher was gather all of the Late and Peak stage blossoms she could.
As the sun was going down she returned to the shore with another six jars of special blossoms and loaded them into her cart. They were all marked with a plus or double-plus sign behind the flower picture so that everyone would know they were the better quality ones. She saw the fisher couple returning and helped them offload the vines before pulling their boat ashore.
“I have a question for you two.” said Shen after they were done. “Do you happen to have an extra boat you can sell me?”
They looked at each other confused. “Looking to take a boat out on your next trip?” the man asked. “We do have a backup, in case this one springs a leak.”
“Actually, I was thinking about making a flying relic that wasn’t a sword so I can haul people or cargo with me. I saw someone with a flying boat and thought that might work, so I decided to make one. Maybe I’ll even add the Water Flying formation to it so it goes even faster over the lake.”
“It would certainly help you on your trips.” the man said. “Sure, I can sell it to you. How about two stones?” Shen was certain that she could negotiate him lower on the price, but she accepted it and paid him. After all, even the low quality wooden flying sword she carried sold for four stones, and she could probably turn the boat into a relic worth at least ten times that.
After the two of them brought the boat out of their shed Shen helped them load it onto her cart and tie it down. She helped the other boys finish loading their carts and they all returned to the sect town where they unloaded their carts into the warehouse, Shen unloading hers into the special area at the back. After that Shen invited the other two boys to go to the cafeteria with them, but they wanted to get back to Fisher, so they turned her down. Apparently they thought their mother’s cooking was better.
Shen and Ponma went to the cafeteria together and told the other two about their day. Once everyone was done Shen mentioned wanting desert. “I don’t know.” said Danka. “I’ve never been a fan of pastries.” Most of the deserts in town were basically breads filled or topped with jelly and sometimes sprinkled with sugar.
“In that case, have you ever tried ice cream?” she asked. None of them had ever heard of it so she invited them all to the restaurant. She had earned a lot of money by selling those special Water Blossoms, so she could afford to buy some for everyone.
Once there they sat down and ordered two ice creams to share, Shen and Danka on one side of the table and Ponma and Mae on the other. They were all pretty full from Last Meal, so they couldn’t eat one by themselves. They chatted for the next hour as they shared an ice cream with the person beside them, then said goodbye as they left, Shen leaving the stones on the table.
Once they were back home Shen started drawing out the formations for her two ideas. The first was simple. The boat would have a chi gathering array connected to the Water Flying formation through a switch so that the user wouldn’t have to provide it with chi but could, and could make it stop working when they wanted to. If this worked she would would need to upgrade the boat later, maybe adding a box under one seat once she learned to make magic storage.
The second was basically a huge gathering array with no limits to what type of chi it would draw in, just the ability to keep them all separate so they wouldn’t blend together. As the floor of the training area was stone, it would probably be mostly Earth chi, but that didn’t matter. The array would then feed that chi evenly to up to twelve formations which recharged the person, creature, or item in them, only feeding a formation if it contained one of those things and needed the chi. She would connect the two parts once she got the basic shape down.
It wouldn’t need a compression circuit, as chi which was fed into a lifeform naturally became the same pressure as the lifeform’s internal chi. She optimized a few parts of the formations so that they would be more efficient, then pulled apart the two halves of the chi light on the desk and laid down. Mae was already asleep, so she decided to end her work there rather than risk waking Mae up.
The next day she went by the warehouse and picked up her boat before going to work. She told Master Chen about her plan to turn it into a flying boat, suggesting that he could use it to pick up a new recruit. It would normally take him ten hours to fly to the nearest city on a sword, but with the boat he could probably make it in eight, four if he followed the river thanks to the water formation. And because it was a boat he could fly someone back with him and not lose a lot of speed.
He still hadn’t decided if he wanted to go or not, but the boat definitely made him want to do so. After all, it would cut his trip down to two days, including the time spent recruiting, instead of the ten hours there, a day to recruit someone, and several days back if the other person couldn’t use a flying sword.
After leaving the boat in the back of the shop she added the formations to one more set of custom armor then went to the training fields. A few of them weren’t currently in use, so she offered to upgrade one of the ranges. She explained her idea to the field master of the empty field, but she still wasn’t convinced that it was safe to do. So Shen offered her a compromise. Shen would draw the entire thing out in chalk to prove that it would work, then if the woman and the field master elder was convinced, she would be able to make the modification permanent.
Shen spent the next two hours drawing out the main formation, covering as much of the training field as possible, then fifteen minutes each adding the feeding formations inside of it. By the time she connected all of them the sun had started to set, but she was ready to demonstrate. She stepped inside one of the feeder formations and started throwing elemental attacks as fast as she could. Based on the rate she was using her chi the field master knew she couldn’t last for more than two minutes, but five minutes later she was still going. The only change in her attack was the fact that they were getting far weaker, as the purity of the chi was extremely low, with Shen having to try and purify it as it entered her and only managing to achieve 4% purity on any element.
That’s when the chalk started to burn. The jade infused chalk that was meant for temporary formations couldn’t handle the prolonged use of chi and was starting to break down. About thirty seconds after it had started the line for Earth chi burned out and she stopped receiving any. The total amount of chi the formation was feeding her dropped drastically, and she once again started to deplete her internal reserves. Still, she continued, and it took another five minutes until her internal reserves of all elements had been depleted.
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She stepped out of the formation and walked to where a shocked field master was standing. “Obviously, that amount of chi will be split between all of the trainees that are using the field, so it will decrease, but not by a factor of twelve. I should be able to collect four to six times the chi once I replace the chalk with proper Jade based paint. I could use more expensive materials, but I doubt I’ll get that much of an improvement if I do, as I can use thicker lines with the Jade paint to make up the difference. At this scale, you don’t need to be that precise with your lines so lines as wide as your hand are fine.”
The woman nodded. “And how much is this going to cost the sect?” she asked. In her mind something this amazing would likely bankrupt the budget she had been given for the month and likely next month too.
“Well, I’ll do this one for free, to demonstrate the effectiveness. The next one, though, will probably cost a hundred or so stones. I’ll need to buy jade dust by the bag to make enough paint, but you don’t really need to be that good of a relic crafter to make it, as it’s just an oversized Gathering array and a few basic Gathering realm feeder formations, and at this size you don’t have to be any good at following a line as long as you take your time. Even a child could draw it, they just wouldn’t have the skill to Imbue it.”
One hundred stones was far less than she thought she would have to pay so she nodded. “In that case, I’ll ask the Field Elder in the morning. Come by then and if they approve I’ll give you the go ahead. After all, if it’s free we can’t complain about the price.”
Shen nodded, thanked the woman, and left. The next day she went to work only long enough to tell Master Chen about her latest project. He complained about the armor orders getting backed up, but she assured him that if she got the job she would send Timp out to do it, as it was just basic Imbueing and painting over her lines, two things she knew he could do.
She went to the field and talked to the elder. He also wanted to see a demonstration, so she fixed the broken line and asked him to step into one of the formations. He immediately felt a surge of chi try to enter him, but because his chi reserves were already full it just sat in the array under his feet. He gathered a bit of it, noticing the poor quality, and refined it to around seven percent with little effort. It was mostly Earth chi, so that was the element he refined. The chi in the formation beneath his feet almost immediately refilled itself. He then threw the Foundation realm Earth technique at the target, tearing it apart. The targets weren’t designed for that level of attack, so he switched to a different formation with a different target and that formation also filled with chi.
With this one he limited the power of his attack and used a gathering phase technique to attack. The target shook a bit on impact as the earth arrow struck its armored body. As the energy had already refilled itself before he had even thrown the arrow, he repeated himself, then did so again. Over and over he threw Earth Arrows at the target and other than its armor getting more and more dented with every attack nothing really changed. No matter how long he continued he couldn’t use up the chi. After six minutes, though, the Earth line once again burned out and he decided to stop.
She explained how that was actually the result of the formation being temporary and not permanent, as a permanent one would restrict itself so it didn’t burn out, and he nodded. After thinking about it for a few seconds he gave her permission to make her modification. This could be useful to those that wanted to practice their techniques, after all, especially if they wanted practice at refining chi. If nothing else it would just be one of many training fields, but if it was popular enough he could have Shen do the other fields later.
He shut down the field for three days, including today, so that she could do the job, and she thanked him. She immediately rushed to get Timp. He set the sword he was working on on the table and said goodbye to master Chen, then the two of them went to the general store. After fifteen minutes they left with all of the ingredients they would need to make the paint, including three large bags of Jade Powder that were the size of large rice bags but weighed more. Shen put everything in her magic bag and they went to the training field.
The field master on duty let them in and Shen unloaded her bag. She poured the oil and other liquid ingredients into a bucket, filling it about half way, then Timp added ten scoops of Jade dust, enough to almost fill the bucket and make the mixture thick like porridge instead of thin like soup. She then pulled out the two long handles for paint brushes and handed him one. These were for painting fences or tall buildings, and had an area on the end of a pole to hold onto an inserted paintbrush. She handed him a paintbrush with two holes in it and two pins, and they assembled the objects. Once they were done she carefully carried the bucket of blue-green paint over to the Earth collection part of the formation and started tracing the lines of chalk, only going off of them in the small area where the line had broken itself. Timp joined her in painting over the Metal collection part and they made quick work of the formation, having to mix more paint seven more times, the last one only being a half bucket full.
As it was time for Middle Meal when they finished the main array, they drew some water from the nearby well and filled their paint bucket, then sat their brushes in it to soak so that the paint wouldn’t dry on them as they went to the cafeteria.
After they ate they came back, dumped the water into the nearby gutter, and mixed another bucket of paint. Shen carried it to between the first and second Feeder formations and each of them got to work on a different formation. Eight and a quarter buckets later they were finished with the Feeder formations and used the last three quarters of a bucket on the less critical lines which connected the two, as these could be any thickness, simply feeding less chi if they weren’t thick enough. With the small amount that was left Shen looked it over for defects and fixed a few, then they cleaned up and put away their tools.
“We’re finished.” said Shen about the time the sun sank, “But it will need to dry overnight before we can test it. We’ll be back tomorrow morning to do that.”
Shen thanked Timp for his help, but he thanked her in return. He was extremely bored sitting in the shop doing the same thing every day. This had got him out and let him do something new.
They went back to the shop and told Master Chen that they were going home and would probably be an hour or two late tomorrow, then left for the day. The next morning they met at the field and the Field Elder tested the now-dry formation. It’s performance was even better than before and even with him, the field master, Shen, and Timp using the gathered chi it couldn’t be used fast enough to hit the array’s limit.
They left the happy customers and returned to the shop, where they spent the rest of the day doing their boring jobs, though Timp had far more energy than usual thanks to his break.
The next day the field opened up and over the next two days it became the most popular field in the sect. The people started coming in asking if the shop could do something similar in other locations, such as the person’s favorite meditation location. They hadn’t known that formations could be used in that manner and now that they knew many people wanted to do so.
The increase in business, and the request by the Field Elder for three more fields to have the new formation added to them, forced Master Chen to accept the idea of recruiting from a nearby city. He asked Shen to stay here until he returned to act as assistant manager. Once she had informed Ponma that she would be at work for the next two or three days and would be delaying when she joined him, Master Chen took the boat outside and set off into the sky, heading South down the nearby river. Apparently he had already added the formation to the boat himself. Shen had merely handed him the paper with the planned formations on it but not gotten around to doing the work yet.
Shen assigned Breen to making more complex and rare talismans. She had reached the limit of what repeated production of the basic ones could teach her and, while she might fail, the new talismans would be good practice. She also asked Temp to switch to making Lightning swords, teaching him the Fire to Lightning technique so that he could learn to handle lightning, and sending him to the field to practice it for an hour so that he could handle Lightning well enough to succeed. As she wasn’t sure if the popular field would have any openings, she sent him with the Fire tablet from her first project. If he had to he could set it on the ground and stand on it. It would only give him a trickle of fire chi instead of a stream like the special field, but it would be much purer than what that field gave him, possibly purer than what he normally used.
The special field was indeed full, but the tablet had let him get enough practice that he was able to practice the technique while only mostly depleting his chi reserves. She let him wear her bracelet for half an hour and it completely refilled him with chi that was purer than what he was used to. It took him another hour to get used to the purer chi, but once he had he started producing Lightning flying swords.
Two days later she had a different task for him. He was going to make a sword which burned without damaging the blade. She didn’t tell him how to do it, forcing him to think about what he had learned so far. Just as Middle Meal was being served he handed her his prototype. The formations were crude, and he would need to work on them, and the efficiency was lower than it should be even without the defects, but the blade worked. He had the blade coat itself in a thin layer of water chi, then form a layer of fire chi around that. If any of the fire chi leaked near the blade or handle it would be nullified by the water chi. To power it he had added two arrays to the handle. On the left side was one which turned the user’s chi into 4% water chi and on the right side was one that turned the user’s chi into 3.5% fire chi. His idea was good, but he definitely needed more practice with the elements before they tried to produce these blades for sell.
“Congratulations.” she said, handing him the sword. “You succeeded in the task.” She then gave him a detailed explanation of everything he needed to work on. She could tell that it felt more like a lecture than a congratulations, so she finished it early. “Actually, I’ll let you keep the blade. Study it, and after you eat you can try and refine your results. I know it sounds like I don’t appreciate your efforts, but a lot of our work is trying to constantly improve our craft. I’ve never actually made this type of blade before, so if it becomes popular I’ll see if Master Chen can put you in charge of making two-element swords.”
He nodded, a slight smile on his face, then ran off for the cafeteria, holding the sword in his arms like he was hugging it.
