The cry itself was not imbued with any technique, nor did it appear to be intended to influence anyone other than the intended recipient, yet the sudden change forced everyone to take a step back and look in the same direction that Chen Shujin looked, wondering exactly what her call could summon.
Some were convinced that they had misheard her, and that this was something more complicated than what it appeared to be, but, when it did indeed appear, they knew they were entirely mistaken.
A figure surrounded by vibrant light and countless pouring petals of white flowers appeared in the sky, standing many metres above the ground atop a thick layer of flower petals that were spread just far enough to support her naked feet. Another layer of petals hovered beside her, ensuring that no observers could make use of their perspective to see anything that they should not be able to.
“My child, since you have finally called upon your mother after more than a year, tell me – what has upset you so?”
Even Chen Shujin herself appeared to be too surprised to speak at first, perhaps not expecting that kind of entrance so quickly, but she collected herself and, with tears pooling in her eyes, she called out to her mother, “Please, these two have ganged up on me to take our techniques!”
“Is that so?” her mother turned to Chu Huazhi and Wei Yi, eyeing the latter for a few moments longer before continuing, “I assume our local manager and this woman were involved. Tell me, you two, what exactly is the situation, and is it connected to that earlier annoyance that I had observed? If one of you had caused it, I will not hesitate to remove you from the district.”
As she said that, some of the petals around her melted into pure planar energy, glistening like gold as they formed a pair of arrays, one on each side of the woman, nineteen thin threads of raw might connecting them to her body.
She was in the Linked Channels realm, that much was obvious by the threads, for once a cultivator surpassed the fifth realm of Marked Core, all of their searing marks would be connected with the planar anchor, and would thus permanently affect one’s planar energy and everything they did, often manifesting in reality if one invested a significant degree of power into an attack without similar focus to hide the channels from appearing beside them.
Typically, a cultivator would possess only about twenty searing marks, but a little bit of talent or a good, suitable technique would bring that up to twenty five, then both would raise it to thirty and thirty five, like in the case of Chu Huazhi, who appeared to be heading for roughly thirty marks at the peak of his realm. Judging by the number of the thin threads, it appeared that Chen Shujin’s mother had successfully cultivated a total of thirty-eight searing marks, the power of which wasn’t split in half amongst the two arrays, created through the power of solidifying planar energy that one obtained within the fourth realm, but were instead empowering everything equally, with the threads being a purely visual factor that appeared due to some innate factor of the world.
“I…”
“Manager Chu Huazhi, allow me,” Wei Yi said, taking a step forward as she looked up at the superior cultivator without displaying any fear. Although this woman was far more powerful than the lowest-realm Great Family members were, she lacked any of the same terrifying presence and the mirage-like anchors around her, making her entirely unthreatening in Wei Yi’s eyes. “After a dispute regarding the prices of my products, which were set just a little lower than my common competitors to give me a chance to be noticed by the district and gain some customers, a Refiner’s Duel had been organised with the bet of one’s primary refining technique, fifteen two-star recipes and five three-star recipes from both losers to the victor. Judging by your daughter’s reaction, I assume that she and Ning Fangtie had decided me to be the victor and is now worried about repaying her debt.”
The woman looked down upon her for a moment, then her expression loosened and she rolled her eyes as the arrays of energy dispersed and the majority of petals returned to her body as she dropped from the sky, landing upon the ground without the support of any techniques to support her body despite the great height.
She landed before the four them, manager and competitors, and looked sternly into her daughter’s eyes before looking back at Wei Yi, “Since this appears to be the case, I shall not punish you for doing what you needed to do. Business works like that. I understand. However, give me some face and spare my daughter from passing on our family’s secret refining techniques over a simple bet made in the heat of the moment, if you would?”
“Although your daughter was the first to agree to that specific bet, I am satisfied with any technique that can refine the recipes that I will receive.”
“In that case, daughter, give her what you owe her, and learn from this in the future so that you do not make the same mistake,” Chen Shujin’s mother stated, waiting for her daughter to nod and head off to retrieve what was asked of her, “My name is Chen Jushu, and I hope that you can forgive my daughter’s unfortunate behaviour. She is still young and needs far more experience in the world to build up the skill and resilience that someone of the Chen family must have. If you have spoken with anyone from my extended family, you are bound to know what I mean.”
“Even if I had not, the reputation of the Chen family had spread quite far.”
“That is good to hear. Which district are you from, Wei Yi?”
“The Jiang District. I began my learning of the great art of refining there and moved on once I felt that it was suitable. I had not the pleasure of speaking with someone from your family, but you have left a far better first impression than your daughter.”
“Now, now, as her mother, I may criticise her as much as I must, but you should not do the same,” Chen Jushu said, although she still nodded in agreement with Wei Yi’s words.
‘Clearly, this woman is well aware of what it can be like to speak and interact with her daughter. At the moment, she does not seem too unreasonable, but from my past interaction with one of the Chen family, all I can conclude with confidence is that she doesn’t appear to have any trace of Great Family abilities, and that she is just as happy to spend money or resources to resolve her problems,’ Wei Yi thought, intentionally brushing her spiritual perception past Chen Jushu to check whether her energy could be perceived by someone in the sixth realm, finding that she did not appear to be able to detect it, “I’ll keep that in mind, if I ever need to interact with her again.”
“So, what was that disturbance earlier, then?” the woman asked, glancing into the air where the layer of mirrors once was, “I was working on something in my chambers when I sensed something incredibly peculiar, although it faded rather quickly.”
Chu Huazhi took the opportunity to speak, which Wei Yi also used to get away from the discussion and follow Chen Shujin to figure out where she kept all of her recipes and supplies, “It appears to be something relating to the Mirror Plane Aberrations, that group that had been attempting to close down the city. Whether or not they are actually part of the organisation, or if this is the result of a conflict between a real and fake group, they attacked the city with extreme yin and some kind of illusion.”
“It is like they are trying to force the guard’s hand…”
They began a similar discussion to Wei Yi’s earlier inquiry regarding the local manager’s opinions, so she did not bother listening in on them, speeding up to be able to pursue Chen Shujin at a closer distance. At first, the defeated alchemist had walked slowly, with tears still flowing from her eyes, but she sped up and appeared to recover by the time she had approached her house, which was a mansion in comparison to the miniscule structures in which Wei Yi and many others had to reside. It had two floors, several rooms that weren’t simply the bedroom, and even that offered enough space for a person to lie on either side of the bed without any difficulty.
One of these rooms was an alchemy chamber, with a furnace, many ingredients being stored in various conditions and states, presumably to allow for easier usage later on in Chen Shujin’s common recipes, and stored several tomes that listed basic notes and observations on her previous experiences in refining, with most of the notes being labelled between 512 and 517, meaning that they were written more than five years before this, possibly coinciding with her breakthrough in some mental technique or just her cultivation.
This was where she went to retrieve her recipes, approaching one of the corners of the room where she placed her hand on the wall as if to lean upon it. However, as she poured a little planar energy into it, one of the bricks in the wall shifted, revealing a small hidden compartment.
Within lay a single jade slip.
‘It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those,’ Wei Yi said to herself, standing at the very edge of the other woman’s spiritual perception range as to guarantee that she would not be discovered, ‘Multiple-use one, too, not to mention the rather stable condition. That’s impressive, to say the least, but contradicts the earlier statement by her mother about any of her arts being a familial secret technique, given that the secret compartment is set to only respond to Chen Shujin’s energy. Still, whatever the case is, I can learn everything within that jade, and pretend that I had never seen it, meaning that I would not need to meddle with whatever this situation is.’
“Why can’t I figure this jade out? I’m sure I should have beaten that scheming bitch!” the alchemist that was ungraceful in victory muttered, causing Wei Yi to pause her plan for a moment.
Jade slips were famous precisely for their ability to deliver all of the information within them straight to the head of the user, bypassing other knowledge and general understanding, so for someone to be unable to figure out the entirely of a regular jade slip was impossible, no matter how dense and incompetent they were.
Furthermore, although Chen Shujin was rather ill-tempered and incapable of handling loss without throwing unnecessary insults and accusing the other party of cheating, not to mention breaking into tears when her loss was clear, she was not stupid by any regular metric.
‘This means that there had to be something wrong with this jade slip as well. The first few were temporary and short-lived, this one is locked off somehow, perhaps? That would explain how it came to be so long after Kong Shi Meng left Yi City, and why it hasn’t attracted greater attention,’ she concluded, deciding to scan it anyway, ‘The only question is how the lock functions, and why it does so. If it is an impassable obstacle that only allows one to view a certain quantity of information, that would be unfortunate, but if there is some way to bypass it, I could gain a great advantage in addition to whatever recipes Chen Shujin will provide me with regardless of the jade slip’s contents.’
Her spiritual will touched the jade slip before Chen Shujin’s could, and she found herself plunging into a great desolate void. Strange sparks of knowledge surrounded her, but all of them seemed to be just out of her reach.
‘Hm. Not how I experienced the previous jade slips, that much is obvious. Let’s see…’
Within this void, her mental energy appeared to coalesce into a reflection of herself, so she assumed that simply extending her spiritual perception would not do much, prompting her to instead mobilise her killing will and see what result that would achieve. It flowed out of her mental figure’s hand, seeping into the abyss as paint might leak into paper, doing so slowly, but surely.
As it slowly reached towards one of the spots of light, she realised that they were moving at an uneven pace, with some advancing through the void significantly faster than others, with their trajectories seeming to be entirely random. One set of sparks appeared to be moving together and past her, but some moved up, others down, and some even moved in an arc or spun around on the spot, seeming intent to be as confusing as they could possibly be.
One thing that was fortunate, however, was the fact that there appeared to be a limit to this mental void, after which these sparks would either have to turn around or simply reappear on the other side of the immense abyss, meaning that she would not miss anything just because she took too long to understand the secret of this particular jade slip.
The nearest spark was just out of reach, so her paint-like killing will reached it in less than a minute of the mental domain’s time.
When it touched it, she finally felt the proper effect of the slip that she had been awaiting. A great deal of knowledge surfed from the spark, flooding into her mind and forming into a hundred small tomes within the Ascendant’s Library, with no red characters needing to be devoured by the Truth of the Universe this time. In comparison to the time that she took in six jade slips at once, or any other infusions of knowledge, like those from the Thunder Lord, this amount of information was rather insignificant in quantity, but she considered it more than worthwhile due to its usefulness.
However, while her killing will was able to persist, the spark vanished, entirely being removed from the dark void. She could not be sure whether that applied to everyone who attempted to use the jade slip, at first, but when she released more killing will and acquired another few nearby sparks, she noticed a certain pattern to the appearance and knowledge that the sparks conveyed that suggested that she would not be able to find whichever technique Chen Shujin had made use of.
In addition, the mental books that she was able to recover were incomplete, with several significant elements being entirely absent while certain sentences simply cut off in the middle.
‘Once more, this library turns out to be immensely useful, as anyone without it would likely struggle far more to correctly remember and interpret these partial pieces of knowledge. This must be why Chen Shujin struggled so much, and why only a few of the pills turned out to be highly successful,’ Wei Yi understood, sending out even more killing will to take as much as she could before retreating.
She would have obviously liked to take everything for herself, given the immense boost that it would offer her general knowledge with even a single fully complete technique – especially since she could likely divine much of the rest via the Truth of the Universe – but if Chen Shujin had anywhere near the same ability to perceive the contents of the jade slip as Wei Yi did, then she would immediately notice that so many of the previous fragments of information had disappeared out of nowhere, certainly prompting some kind of investigation.
This was only for now, since there could be many things that cause an ancient jade slip to crumble, meaning that if she took advantage of a time where the item seemed to deteriorate and took more knowledge for herself, any suspicion would likely be averted or placed on someone capable of damaging a jade slip, rather than someone that can steal a lot of knowledge quickly.
‘Then again, I don’t have the reputation of browsing through many libraries here, like I did in the Yi District, so such a thing wouldn’t point at me even if I didn’t put effort into concealing my actions,’ she reasoned, picking up one last spark and retreating from the jade slip before the time in reality offered Chen Shujin the opportunity to locate her within this great void. She was well aware that her ability to read the jade slips was a little beyond normal, but she wished to be absolutely sure that she would not be discovered too early.
When she saw how much time had passed, however, she realised that this fear was rather misplaced.
Chen Shujin’s spiritual perception was still only half-way to the jade, and slowly made its way over as Wei Yi’s perception of time slowly returned to normal.
It appeared that her reading speed was still absolutely incredible, and when the alchemist finally plunged her own spiritual perception into the jade slip and froze for quite some time, it finally confirmed that Great Dark had not been lying to her when he claimed that it would take a month to read through a normal jade slip.
With this particular slip, the process appeared to be somewhat different for most people, as Chen Shujin stood still for several minutes before she shook awake and clutched her head, clearly trying to recover from whichever spark she managed to catch.
Afterwards, she sealed the jade slip into the stone once more and headed over to one of her emptier notebooks, tearing out a few pages to write down some of the most basic recipes and the simplest technique that she appeared to be able to recall, with all but two of the three-star recipes already being known to Wei Yi, meaning that the overall gains from this competition were unlikely to be particularly great.
‘Ning Fangtie still needs to give me what I’m due, so perhaps he will try a little more,’ she thought, returning to the spot of the Refiner’s Duel before her absence could raise questions.
With how easy it had been so far to avoid negative attention so far, she was beginning to think that her overzealous insistence on being extremely cautious about everything was slightly unnecessary, but at the moment, this was not to her detriment. Perhaps in the future, if an opportunity required her to act in a less safe manner, she would leap onto it, but for now, her ability to continue her campaign against the Great Families, as insignificant as it was right now, was of far greater importance than anything that appeared to be within that jade slip, or anything that could be discovered by random exploration.
This line of thought did inspire her to attempt a certain approach to informing the people, however.
After taking some unused pieces of paper from a nearby home – where there were plenty more, so it did not appear that she would ruin someone’s life just like that – she wrote down various allusions to the Greats with the knowledge that she had of them, making sure to paint them in a terrible yet realistic image, so that, if someone was to read the account and then learn more on their own, they would not find much reason to reassess their view of the Great Families.
Then, she scattered these pieces of paper all over the place while travelling back, putting them in books, homes, alleys and all kinds of random nooks and crannies where they would likely be discovered by curious travellers or people simply going about their daily business.
Whether this would lead to an increase in the awareness of the Greats, a campaign by them to prevent such knowledge from appearing, or if these accounts would be taken as random nonsense or a work of fiction was not yet certain, as she knew that if she suddenly found something that described a terrible conspiracy like that of the Greats, she would be unlikely to believe it right away, and that was if the statements made were highly accurate and easily verifiable with other historical documents and recollections from those that had been at the relevant location. If the information was more vague and required access to knowledge that the regular person would not possess, she would likely dismiss it outright and focus on what she could confirm.
She couldn’t blame anyone for this behaviour, just like she couldn’t blame people for becoming weak after a long period of prosperity, or the strong using their power to take advantage of the weak, for these actions were reasonable, no matter how much she disliked them. This is what made her ideal, just world more of a fantasy than a feasible accomplishment, not that it would stop her from trying.
In the end, she returned to the site of the Refiner’s Duel only fifteen minutes after leaving, finding that even more of the spectators had left and that most of the judges had retreated to the same tavern, likely to get over the strange sight created by the Great Aberrant.
As Ning Fangtie was still there, going through a small journal that listed a number of pills and some of the more unique ingredients that they required, she appeared in a place that was not being observed and walked over to him, waiting for a few moments before getting closer and coughing audibly to get his attention.
“Ah, Wei Yi. I had simply been considering which recipes to pass on to you. In regards to the technique, I will not need to go the same route as Chen Shujin – my refining technique will be given to you in full, as promised,” he said, “As a descendant of the Ning, I must keep my word in matters of bets unless I wish to spoil the name of my family. If you are not opposed, I can take you straight to my workshop, where I will pass the technique directly onto you.”
“I would appreciate that, but only after Chen Shujin gives me her technique and recipes. Wouldn’t want to miss them.”
He nodded and waited with her.
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