Chapter 56: Risk Meets Reward
Yun ran her energy through the circulation route for each of her battle skills three times, making sure she had no trouble with them and that she hadn't remembered incorrectly how to do them, then reviewed the techniques for the three she hadn't succeeded in yet.
Finally, after a few hours of practice and reassurance, she prepared to attempt the Argent Flame Spear again. As she prepared she tested her skill at energy control to see if she felt ready.
Circulate the energy.
Imbue it with elemental properties.
Bring it to the hands.
Guide it out of the body.
Form a sphere.
Condense!
Condense!
Condense!
Yun felt almost no resistance in this process, and in surprise she nearly lost control of the fireball in her hands. As it began to fall it impacted with the ledge around the edges of the room and bounced off.
Wait. . .
Bounced!?
It bounced? That means it has physical form, not just energy!
Yun rejoiced inside, but again nearly lost control of the energy ball in her hands. She calmed herself down and tested the energy, stretching it out into an elongated staff shape. After, she grasped the staff and struck it against the stone wall, causing sparks and a small scorch mark! She quickly dissipated the weapon she had formed before retrieving the instructions for the technique and beginning to try to reach the initial mastery stage again.
First try, condense, condense condense. . . Success, now imbue spirit, grow, grow grow. . . Failure.
Yun was ecstatic about her success in creating the physical object according to the technique, but one of the greatest challenges in this technique lay in that you must imbue the energy with a spirit, meaning you had to use your own spirit to do it. The advantage being that, once accomplished, these shards of spiritual energy could draw upon your own energy to form themselves into the spears on their own, and also dissipate into a wisp of spirit and inhabit the spiritual sea of the user. These wisps could be nurtured over time to reach higher levels of mastery in the skill, eventually allowing them to become flaming avatars of the user.
Due to the spiritual nature of the ability there was a solid limit set on the number of spears one should create. This was to prevent users from overtaxing their spirit and damaging their life by splitting off too much of their source spirit. This limit was two. After the first spirit was created the user could at most risk creating one more before causing irreparable damage to their soul.
Slowly, over the course of the next three days, she poured her spiritual energy into the condensed energy form constantly, nourishing it and helping it develop a will. After three days of painstaking progress she finally had a minor breakthrough. She could sense a small spark of life in the core of the energy, but it was still flickering and weak.
Three more painstaking, nerve wracking, sleepless days later she felt the spark of life respond to her. It had finally achieved a level of self-sufficiency where she could feed it with spiritual energy periodically to help it grow, but no longer had to constantly stabilize it's existence. She quickly willed the spirit to take a rest in her soul sea as she nearly passed out from exhaustion before lying down to rest.
After nearly five days asleep Yun finally woke up again and forced herself to slowly eat a meal. She was ecstatic at her success in the first spirit for her technique, as this would significantly amplify her ability to combat multiple foes. She also decided that, as an experiment, she would try forming the second spear with lightning elemental energy instead of fire, so that she could have one of each, and possibly some kind of interesting interaction between them in the future.
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Outside, three days earlier.
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Zhu Cai had finally woken up in her own bed, apparently carried there by one of the other two. She made a mental note to thank them again for the great help.
Standing, she weakly went to the kitchen, only to discover again that food was already prepared and was simply in a storage container waiting for her to heat it up to eat. Yet another thing to thank them for.
The food wasn't amazing, but it was good for her empty stomach. After eating she took a few minutes to recover her energy before heading outside to see what was happening. She could still hear some noises from one of the rooms, but she couldn't be sure which until she arrived at the Rune Forging space. Within this space was the elder brother apprentice from the Rune Forging group, bent over the desk doing some extremely delicate work.
Next to the doorway was the other senior apprentice from the Gem Masters group, sitting relaxed with a container of a pungent liquid that was common among die-hard crafting groups. This was called Devil's Nectar because of the taste, but the effects were somewhat amazing. This wasn't something made by an alchemist, but something anyone could make with the right materials. Roughly speaking, it was sustenance. This was a brew made to fill your stomach and sustain the body while working on a project where you could not afford to stop.
After a few moments the senior apprentice by the door stood, walked to the bench, and gently placed the brew within sight of the Rune Forging worker, gently prodding him to consume some of the vulgar fluid. His free hand reached out and he downed the entire container in one gulp, not even pausing work.
Beneath his dexterous fingers was a piece of equipment that looked unremarkable, almost identical to the uniform that Zhu Cai had gifted Yun last time. The difference was that on those many, many threads of interwoven material were being carved runes of power. These runes didn't harm the structure of the fibers, but instead lay upon them as an energy construct, affecting space but not physical form.
This was an extremely difficult skill to master for a Rune Forging expert, and only one such expert existed within the Hunting Hall, and only two more existed within all of Myhrrwar itself, both of them within the Bone Tool Sect.
At some specific locations it could be seen that there were some sort of gemstones woven into secret spaces, only visible because the fibers designed to cover them had not been fully tightened so that the Rune Forging could occur. Once this task was complete these gems would be fully hidden within the body of the garments and the runic power would also fade from sight, instead relying on the hidden stones to activate.
This was called an Array Stone Formation, and was a high level application of material enhancement. Each gem was inlaid with a mystic array formation that could do any number of things, and when combined they could do incredible things.
Some stones held energy-gathering arrays, to help keep the system powered with heavenly energies.
Some stones held material enhancement arrays, to strengthen the fibers and make them harder to damage.
Some stones held elemental gathering arrays, to allow the storage of elemental energies to be used later.
Some stones held no arrays, but formed an energy matrix that allowed the storage of large quantities of Heavenly Qi.
And yet another few stones held arrays that were not easily explained, but contributed to a whole system of protection and supplementation. Between the top and bottom garments there would be a huge amount of cost, and the value would be astronomical.
But all of this cost nothing to these people but time, because the resources Yun had given the sect and Zhu Cai were simply too valuable.
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