บท 14: An Artist’s Endless Methods
Returning home several hours later, Wu Ling bid farewell to Su Xiang and tended to his mother's needs before withdrawing to his room to make some decisions about his cultivation path. Thankfully, the trip home itself had been largely uneventful now that he and Su Xiang no longer resembled a couple of helpless young fairies out for a stroll.
While Su Xiang had insisted on treating him to a few new outfits, Wu Ling had added an extra expense in the form of matching outfits befitting a young lord and lady of a prominent cultivation family. Su Xiang had protested at first, but Wu Ling insisted, using a portion of the money they had taken from the brutes they'd escaped, Wu Ling dressed them both up in new outfits and applied striking makeup to Su Xiang to further disguise her appearance.
He'd spent more of his recent ill-gotten gains than he'd liked, but his insistence on doing so had paid off when they encountered the battered group of cultivators from the Red Tiger's Den as they exited the shop.
The thuggish men might have given them a glance initially but seeing Wu Ling cutting a dashing figure like a well-to-do young lord draped in elegant white silk and azure brocade accompanied by a fierce beauty in a complimentary azure dress, the sworn siblings had been taken as a young couple out for an excursion rather than the escaping duo responsible for the men's current sorry state. The young Brawler called Wan had even asked if they'd seen the escaping duo, to which Wu Ling had replied - "Do you think my eyes have time to take in the sight of women less radiant than my darling Lady Su?" Whether they believed him or not, the men left the pair alone and barged into the shop instead, hoping to catch the very people whom they'd just bid farewell.
Now that Wu Ling had returned home, he sat down on his bed and closed his eyes, allowing his mind to sink deeper into his heart until he entered his Inner World to contemplate the very serious decisions he needed to make. The night he'd awakened Wu Ling hadn't been able to sleep after dinner and the ceremony to become Su Xiang's sworn brother so he'd returned to the cultivation manual to play a song the manual claimed should be played soon after awakening.
When he'd done so, however, the manual had burst into flames, turning into a cloud of multicolored smoke that flowed into his chest, wrapping around his heart before settling into his Inner World where it caused several changes.
It seemed like the manual really was an inheritance, meant for only one cultivator to acquire and containing only enough information to guide a potential inheritor to awakening. The scattering of techniques contained within the manual had hinted at its potential and they were real techniques that could be cultivated but in truth, they only served to give the manual a sense of legitimacy. The real intention and application of the manual had manifested in Wu Ling's Inner World as a set of shelves that flanked the wall on which he'd painted the eighteen-petaled lotus.
To the left of the painting, a tall, narrow shelf labeled 'Foundations' carried dozens of books about different forms of art. Carving, Sculpting, Pottery, Cooking, Origami, the list went on and on, each book containing dozens of techniques for not only practicing the art itself but also ways in which it could be used to accomplish a wide variety of results. Cooking went beyond just preparing meals, detailing the methods to prepare spirit herbs so their benefits could be consumed along with the meal. Origami taught not only the folding of paper but the folding of space itself, helping an artist to fold larger objects into much smaller forms and then restore them to their original shape by unfolding them! Each art seemed to have a specific set of applications that unlocked tremendous powers for the Artist practicing them.
Toward the center of that wall, beneath the painted Lotus itself, a smaller shelf held five books, each one matching a word that had been written on the four innermost petals of the lotus or the fifth and next petal out from the inner four. Painting, Zither, Chess, Calligraphy, and Tea. The Four Arts that he'd learned as a foundation of all art were already filled in along with the fifth art he'd chosen himself, Tea.
With the eighteen-petaled lotus he'd painted, that left him with room for up to thirteen additional arts which would have felt like an overwhelming number to learn if it wasn't for the final shelf to the right of the Lotus.
The final shelf carried the label 'Convergence' and each book on the shelf required some accomplishment in at least two arts before it could be learned. Wu Ling had wondered what kind of cultivation techniques he was supposed to learn with 'Chess' but seeing the set of advanced arts made it abundantly clear why an understanding of the game of strategy would be vital. At the intersection of Pottery and Chess lay a manual titled 'Countless Soldiers; Clay Army.' With sufficient mastery of ceramics and strategy, he could become the general of his own army of clay soldiers!
Other books on the shelf called out to him with whispers of great power waiting to be unleashed. The intersection of Caligraphy and Carving opened the door to Inscriptions, offering him the ability to carve words of power into objects or tools. The very first tool it described was a Calligrapher's Brush of Invocation. Once the brush was inscribed with the right words of power it would allow him to draw words in the air without the need of ink or paper and then invoke the power of those words. When his Master mentioned conjuring a firestorm she had likely meant using this very kind of tool!
The intersections didn't end there either. While the book on Painting held numerous techniques for creating manifestations of energy that could help in battle, combining Painting with other arts unlocked the ability to create truly elevated constructs. A Sculpture could be brought to life and follow simple commands but a Painted Sculpture could be given a heart and will of its own with a purpose and more independent capabilities. Storytelling could likewise conjure energy phantoms or pull an audience into a phantom world, but combined with the music of a Zither it could become Spellbinding, allowing him to enthrall an audience and give them commands that they would obey without conscious thought!
While that kind of application felt both devious and corrupt when he first read about it, when he thought about commanding the thugs who had cornered them today to apologize and admit their wrongs in public, the notion of Spellbinding didn't sound so bad.
Even the simple art of Tea could open doors he hadn't imagined. Combined with a study of Cooking it opened the door to Medicinal Cuisine, creating food and beverages with powerful healing capabilities that could, in some cases, rival the medicines of alchemists.
When his master had said he wouldn't need to be anything other than an Artist to fight for his loved ones, he had believed her because he'd seen the introductory techniques in the cultivation manual. Seeing the vast library and the near endless possibilities it offered, however, he became completely convinced. The Artists of Silver Sword City truly were missing the power of their professions. If they'd been taught to cultivate like this, the men who chased after the power of the sword or the prestige of alchemy would never have turned up their noses at the arts!
As it stood, however, this suited Wu Ling just fine. If people didn't know what Artists could really do, they wouldn't know what he was really capable of. That would give him the advantage of surprise on top of any other advantage he could get and he intended to make use of every advantage he had. Today had been a reminder of what it felt like to be powerless before superior cultivation and he NEVER wanted to feel that powerless again. From today forward, things will change.
All he had to do now was decide which of the many paths before him, he would begin with. It was tempting to rush forward and to fill the shelves with everything that caught his fancy but when he started counting off all of the things that sounded useful, powerful, or just interesting, he quickly realized that eighteen petals was far from enough to accommodate everything he might choose.
Instead, he considered looking for the things that would grant him maximum flexibility for his foundation arts and maximum impact for the 'convergence' arts. As a skilled chess player, thinking a few moves ahead to ensure that he could obtain what he wanted from convergence was fairly trivial. The problem was that there were too many appealing options and as soon as he started treating it like a mathematical problem, counting out the combinations and the possibilities offered by each book, his artist's heart began to ache. He was an Artist, not a Scholar. The decisions he made needed to come from the heart, not the head.
"Do you have any advice for me, Master?" Wu Ling asked, bowing toward the painting of the Immortal Empress. Unfortunately, after waiting several minutes, the painting remained exactly as it had been, beautiful but nothing more than a painting.
"You probably don't want me running to you with every single question," he said when he realized that he'd turned to her for advice at his very first stumbling block. "You've already brought me this far, I should be able to figure out the next step from here on my own. I'm sorry if I disturbed you," he said with a polite bow.
Looking back over the books, he read through each of the ones he already had. Right now, what he wanted was combat power, but maybe he didn't need to rush to the books on the shelf of convergence to obtain that power. He'd been studying Painting, Calligraphy, Zither, Chess, and Tea for half his life. While he hadn't been cultivating any techniques with them, his artistic foundations in all of them were very strong. If he wanted to add a new art, he would not only need to learn the techniques that interested him but the foundations of a whole new art form as well.
If he was going to add anything, it should be something that worked with one of the arts he already had and he shouldn't add more than one or two arts. While he could have set more of his path in advance, Wu Ling also felt that if he filled up too many of the petals of his lotus with things he would need to go learn, he might lose the option to add something vital later. For now, he would limit himself to things he could learn as he went and not more than one or two at a time.
As a mortal, most Spirit Folk could live for a century or slightly longer, but as a first-stage cultivator, that time instantly doubled. If he could reach the second stage and become an Understudy, he could easily live for five hundred years and Independent Artists could live for a full millennium. He had plenty of years ahead of him, there was no reason to rush into all of this at once. First, he'd select one or two things to add to his foundation, the rest could come later.
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