129 Sigilcraf

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, whose 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 the 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."

The corner of Cha Ming's mouth curved into a smile as he walked back to his residence.

***

A clear, mutable sphere floated before Cha Ming as he contemplated the sigil he was about to draw. It only took the most miniscule amount of soul energy to manipulate it, but he found the motions comforting. He had only pondered for a short time before deciding to procure these focuses.

Magic formations, as a rule, had at least twelve major elements that composed their runic structures, and these elements were reuseable. The supporting formations could be inscribed on formation flags or other items like formation stones. They also required a large amount of liquified elemental essence and spirit stones to supply the required energy in the case of larger formations. This did not apply to combat formations, which were quick, economical formations that relied purely on prepared sigils and the user's qi.

There were far fewer combat formations than normal formations. Looking at the manufacturing process, he had also observed similarities between combat formations and his previous soul-pearl manifestations. Sigil focuses needed to be imbued with sigils like soul pearls needed to be imbued with runes. The major difference between the two techniques, however, was that combat formations were real formations while the manifestations were just pale imitations. Combat formations were very flexible in their effects.

The first step involved painting the base sigil. Cha Ming poured his foundation qi and liquified elemental essence into the Clear Sky Brush and produced a green thread. Green threads piled together into a three-dimensional rune that encompassed all of life and death, growth and decay. It was the same wood sigil he had used to form his foundation. As he painted, he faintly saw shapes that somewhat resembled the least-grade talismans he had created thus far.

Are talismans just derivatives of the original sigil? he wondered. He finished the last three strokes, causing the sigil to snap together due to its balanced nature. It was like a formation in a sense that it supported itself dynamically and was intrinsically stable.

The next step was fusion. Cha Ming gently brought the clear sigil focus and merged it gradually with the green sigil he had just painted. The process was much like encapsulating an object in a drop of water. Too fast, and it would cause the drop to split. It needed to be done slowly to allow the sigil focus time to adapt to the sigil's shape.

The fusion progressed quickly, imbuing the clear sphere with a dark shade of green. The next part was supplementation. Cha Ming quickly painted over a thousand runes onto the sphere. Every time, it glowed with a different shade of green as it "memorized" the rune and incorporated it into the sphere. The sigil could now replicate the rune and combine it with others by using the core sigil as a template.

This ability to utilize different runes enabled the sigil focus to form different formations on demand. However, the derivative characters that could be absorbed depended on their compatibility with the focus. Luo Xuehua's base sigil was ice. As a result, she could only incorporate the different derivatives of ice in her sigil focuses. Cha Ming, on the other hand, could incorporate all wood-related characters into this sigil, which gave him far more options.

The resulting sigil was a small emerald pearl. Not wanting to waste any time, Cha Ming repeated the process with eleven more pearls. He followed up with twelve ruby-colored pearls, twelve brown pearls, twelve gold pearls, and twelve light-blue pearls. Then he created twenty-four purple lightning pearls and twenty-four azure wind pearls, for a total of 108 pearls, which he joined together in a rosary that he wrapped around his right wrist.

The process took three days. Once he finished, he noticed a soft blue light at the door of his residence. He walked over to the blue light and touched it.

"Come see me when you have time," Mo Tianshen's recorded voice said.