Once we were finished listening to the story of the Sect’s history the Ambassador and Butterfly started talking about other things. First there were questions about history or legend, followed by local customs and eventually there relationship customs. They both seemed to really like this topic. At this point I got up. “If you don’t mind, Ambassador, I’m going for a walk. I’ll probably check out the library, learn more about the local cultivation.” I gave them a knowing smile, like I knew where their conversation was leading.
“Oh, sure. I’m sure I’m fine, here.”
“Yes, I’m sure you will be quite safe in a room alone with a sect elder. Just remember to put a sock on the doorknob so that I don’t interrupt you in case you are...indisposed.”
“The room locks from the inside, so that it can be used for closed door cultivation, and the door indicates if it is sealed or not.” Butterfly mentioned. Yeah, I wouldn’t be accidentally walking in on them like I did with Dave and Maria that one time.
I left, making sure to close the door behind me, and headed the library. I had to ask a disciple for directions twice, but eventually made it to the main sect library. Once inside I noticed that there were dozens of shelves. The shelves closest to the front door were labeled ‘Level One’, with nine shelves, for the five elements, non-orthodox paths, Alchemy, Formations, and Martial Techniques. I could tell that the next section was labeled ‘Level Two’, and behind that was a wall, meant to restrict the higher level, and likely higher quality, books from being seen by the lower members of the sect. None of the shelves were completely full, but the ones on non-orthodox and, strangely, Formations were mostly empty.
I walked to the front counter. “Hello.” I said to the late level two woman behind the desk, “I came to the sect with my employer, who is here to speak with the elders about some important matters. I was hoping to expand the foundation of my cultivation knowledge, and wanted to know if you could help me find a few texts.”
“Do you have any identification?” the woman asked. I then realized that I wasn’t given any sort of identification.
I quickly thought over what I had on me that might serve that purpose, then showed her the bracelet on my wrist. “Will this work?” I asked, showing the room key.
She looked it over. “A high quality level three room key? That should be good enough. The sect only loans the high quality rooms to visiting dignitaries, and the fact that it’s level three means that your employer is at least level three, since you aren’t.”
“Hopefully I can change that soon.” I said. “Assuming I can find a proper breakthrough technique for level three. I have one for the Fire path, and I have a Fire root, but it is only Low grade. I was hoping for at least an Average.” While I actually had the free Foundation technique from Earth, and the various elemental versions I had created from it, techniques that would likely count as High grade at least, as far as techniques from here were concerned, I only had petty and lesser techniques.
“I understand why you would want to do that.” she responded. “I broke through to level two with a low grade technique and struggled with my techniques and qi reserves until I found an Average grade one and fully repaired my base. Sure, I can help you find one. I’ll need to look in the back, though. Level two is the limit up front. Anything in particular you would like to look for? I assume a fire technique?”
“Or Metal if you don’t have one, though I understand that isn’t exactly common.”
“Yes, I know several people with metal roots that never bothered to train them outside of a bit of suppression training, as you can’t really get the materials to practice properly.”
I shrugged. “I hear that is starting to change. Don’t the people of this ‘United States’ like to trade metal with us?”
“Oh, yes, we are bringing in some, but not enough to meet the enormous amount of demand. The smiths in the sect produce what weapons they can from it, but it is still far too expensive for most of us to afford.”
“Then what if we combine the two roots? Do you have something that combines Fire and Metal?” A combined method could work with either, even if ideally you would want to have all of the roots involved.
The woman thought for a few seconds and then thought of something which might work. “Yes, I think I do. If you’ll wait here, I’ll go get it for you.” She left for the walled off section and a minute later returned with a book, placing it on the table in front of me.
“Slag?” I asked, reading the front cover. The book was called ‘Human Slag: the refinement of the body through Fire and Metal.’
“The book is about refining and reforging the body through the use of Fire and Metal qi, and the resulting impurities when you refine metal ore with fire is called slag.”
“That much makes sense, but the title actually worries me. Am I going to need to burn myself to refine my body?”
The woman shrugged. “I’m not sure. I haven’t actually read it, just the description. It was originally written by a smith and relic crafter with those two roots, so it probably just uses imagery from smelting to guide the meditation technique.”
“In that case, my dao companion would probably understand it better.” I joked.
“Dao Companion?” the woman asked.
“Yes. She is a relic crafter. In fact…” I reached into the front of my robe and pulled out the seal plate she gave me. “She made this seal plate for me, to protect me in my travels.” Most of my belongings were in my bag, but as that could protect me I carried it inside my robes so that it could be activated in a few seconds, allowing me to use it like a barrier vest.
“Interesting.” the woman said. “Do you mind if I look at it more closely?” I nodded and handed it over to her. She turned it over in her hands, taking in all of the details. “Interesting design. I assume these flags are to extend the field. I don’t know what these disks are for, though, and it’s a bit strange that it contains so much metal.”
I nodded. “The disks let someone else serve as the spirit root of the device for one specific element, allowing it to use their root instead of mine. That way the plate can be even more efficient. The metal is because she was looking for a good source of material that could store qi, and happened to find a supply of scrap from the United States battle base. Before the barrier went up they fired their weapons many times, and each one shoots a tiny piece of metal that can store qi. Some of the villagers that lived there cleaned up after a battle and, because the base didn’t want to buy back their own scrap metal, she spent most of her saved spirit stones to buy the scrap from them.” In reality she spent a few thousand shipping it in bulk from a warehouse in Tennessee where ammunition companies sold some of their excess to people who used it in hobby crafted relics, but I couldn’t tell her the truth.
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“An interesting solution. One of the downsides of a five element barrier is that if one of the elements is weak or non-existent it can weaken the entire barrier, and leave it vulnerable. This can be solved with the techniques by simply casting it with others and letting them supply the needed element’s qi, but in a device it usually requires materials aligned with each element to compensate for the issue. She seemed to find a different solution, to allow you the benefits of both team casting and the stability of a formation. If you don’t mind me saying so, though, she seems to have provided an inadequate qi source for it, even with the exotic material its made of storing so much. While it may start at initial level four in strength, it can’t function at that level for long.”
I nodded, “yes, she told me about that flaw before she gave it to me, but unfortunately she couldn’t find a good solution before I set out. Hopefully, by the time I return home she’ll have found a solution. Though you seem to know a lot about formations for a librarian.”
“I read every day. Not much else to do here once you straighten the shelves. Over the last few months I’ve been reading over the Formation shelf books.”
I nodded and, after thanking her for her help, I started flipping through the book. It was similar to the Foundation books I had already read with a few minor improvements. For one, it had an improved form of the Mind Fire that I had used in my refinement, which could burn the impurities out of my body with liquid qi once I had adapted enough to not kill myself with it. Second, it had a means for purifying the qi. According to it, the qi which one draws from the environment is separated into over a dozen types, among them being yin and yang. Yin works best with wood and water roots and techniques, Yang works best with Fire and Metal techniques, and Earth is a balance of both. Because of this, the book had a technique for filtering out most of the other types of qi in order to allow the dantian and body to be filled with 50% or greater Yang qi, thus improving the effectiveness of all of its techniques.
I knew from a few scientific papers that there was actually several dozen known forms of qi, with some scientists speculating that there was a type of qi which corresponded to each element. There was also an early theory that qi might be the same thing as virtual particles, though the modern leading theory stated that they were a form of exotic matter, possibly from the beginning of the universe and possibly from higher dimensions, with the last theory being supported by the fact that portals created by Nascent Souls could be self sustaining after creation. That meant that the idea that there were multiple forms of qi was scientifically verified and the idea that some forms were better for certain types of techniques was at least plausible.
I cycled qi through my brain, burning qi and mental effort to enhance my memories and reread the book from the beginning. Several hours later the woman came over to me. “You know, while reading it here is free, you won’t be able to remember it all no matter how much you enhance your mind. The text is just too profound.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, finishing the last page.
She flipped it open and flipped to one of the techniques. “Well, starting at average quality authors will embed hidden meaning within the text by using characters which can mean multiple things instead of more common symbols. For example, I assume you read this passage as…” she read out the text exactly as I had read and memorized it.
“Of course.” I said, not seeing what she was getting at.
“Well, if you instead read it as…” She repeated the line, but with several different words, subtly changing the meaning in a way that helped me understand the purpose of the technique.
“But why would I read it like that?”
“Ah,” she said, pulling up a cushion beside me. “I take it you have never heard of the concept of layered text?” I shook my head. “Understandable. Petty and Low ranked books don’t use it, and it is perfectly fine to only read the initial meaning into the text, thus making it so that copies of the text will come out lower quality without those layers, so most cultivators outside of sects don’t bother learning layered writing or layered reading. A few thousand years ago all texts were single layer, and thus far thicker to accommodate all of the depth, but then a great scholar, Profound Chaldis, by studying the dao of languages and communication, created a means of conveying multiple meanings within one character. Here, let me show you.”
I spent the next two hours learning how layered text worked. It was partly a qi technique, requiring certain movements of qi through the eyes. It was part magic eye puzzle, requiring precise eye movements to see the hidden characters, and it was part invisible ink, requiring you to look in specific colors outside the human norm to read them. All of those were a part of it, but there were more ways that she showed me which required that the function of the brain be altered in specific ways to reinterpret things from the other methods. Those were much more difficult to pull off. All of these could be combined in hundreds or thousands of different ways to add even more layers to the text.
“The mind alteration version really only occurs within High and above ranked techniques, and the soul alteration kind only occur in Master and Heavenly ranked techniques, though you have to be in at least the fifth level to use that one, so I haven’t learned it yet.”
I rubbed my eyes, feeling a headache start. “Still, just these methods are already giving me a headache, and I’m pretty sure just learning them tempered my brain and eyes.”
“I’m not surprised. They did that to me when I learned them. Just practice a bit more and you should be able to do it without the stress.”
I nodded. “So what’s the process for borrowing a book?”
“You don’t.” she answered. “Books aren’t allowed to leave here without being purchased. Even the elders only get to buy them on an account which they pay back later.”
“Oh, then how do I know the price?”
“It’s pinned on them.” she said, pointing to a wooden clip with a number written on it.
“Oh, I assumed that was some sort of catalog number, for sorting purposes.” Did they not have something like the Dewy Decimal System here? If not, how did they organize things, outside the main category? “So, I assume that is the number of stones it costs?”
“Contribution points, actually, but within the sect each stone donated by a member earns them ten points, so you can convert it into stones if you want. Not many outsiders buy them, but as you are a special guest you are allowed to do so.” The number on this book was 1240, so I put 124 stones worth of spirit stones, all of them being different sizes and shapes, on the table. She looked it over, and, after verifying the amount, put the stones in a magic box under the counter.
I put the book in my bag. “So, out of curiosity, do you have any really unusual cultivation techniques? I actually study different techniques as a hobby, so I was hoping to find something that was unorthodox and unusual. Perhaps the most unusual one I’ve every seen. Nothing demonic, of course, but I heard that any activity can be converted into a form of cultivation, so something like ‘grow and eat radishes to cultivate’ could be a valid one.”
“Well, I did see one that was all about growing spirit herbs which you then consumed to improve the effects, but are you interested in farming or alchemy?”
“Not really.” I said, shrugging. “My martial brother’s dao companion is an alchemist, so she might be interested, but I haven’t actually studied it.”
“In that case,” she said nodding, “Let me go into the back for a minute.” She went into the back and returned a minute later. “This book was found on an independent cultivator that was killed by bandits. No idea if he practiced it.” She laid it on the table.
“Chasing Tribulation?” I asked, reading the title. If I crossed my eyes just right, though, the title changed to ‘Negotiating Calamity’. A different way said ‘Feeding Lightning’. I wasn’t too sure about the last one, though I was starting to get the handle of this Layered Writing thing.
“Yes. Apparently it was written by a group called the Heavenly Tribulation sect that practiced lightning techniques. According to the book, they had a way to absorb tribulation lightning in order to cultivate, though I’m not sure how. I read the first section, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Apparently you need to draw on qi until it is negative qi, then control the flow of qi into you that is caused by that? I don’t understand what they meant, but it sounded far too dangerous.”
I tried to explain to her how the qi in the body tried to balance with the environment by keeping an amount roughly equal to your peak before the last breakthrough inside of you. I also explained the cause of tribulation ‘lightning’ was drawing on that qi so that your body was below the minimum amount, and that the qi rushing into you from the environment could cause lightning where it hit resistance, the surface of your skin, but she didn’t seem to understand. In the end I ended up giving her another eighty stones and took the book with me. This technique was definitely unusual enough to hold my interest.
