"That will be 3 slate pieces," Nadran monotoned, handing the herb to the customer and receiving three flat pieces of slate in return.
In this world, the currency mirrored the realms of cultivation, with a difference of 1,000 times between each tier. So, one piece of marble, the second tier, was worth 1,000 pieces of slate.
After the customer left, Nadran held the slate pieces in his hand while slowly tracing lines with the other, making sure to do it behind the stall so it wasn't visible to passerbys. This was more complicated than even the shadow sigil cast by Kalio earlier, but it was clearly a struggle for Nadran to complete, his fingers faltering over and over as he tried to remember the large number of seemingly random steps. After nearly half a minute, he finally completed the sigil, wiping the sweat off his brow. He let go of the stone coins, and they vanished into the air.
It had taken him over 2 years of hard work to learn the dimensional storage sigil after he had managed to copy it down on paper when he snuck into a more advanced sigil lecture. But despite its difficulty, it had proven to be an invaluable tool.
Nadran's gaze suddenly sharpened as he saw an approaching figure, knowing instinctively that trouble was coming. The man looked to be about as old as Nadran, but he was dressed in fine clothing and had an inherent air of wealth and arrogance to him. "Do you have any red fern?" he asked in a tone that was more command than question.
"Yes, we have a piece of red fern," Nadran replied in a flat tone, picking up one of the more valuable herbs on the stand. "It is worth 10 slate pieces."
"Ha, you think I'm paying you for this?" the man asked mockingly. "I don't think you understand what position you are in." With that, he lifted his hand and began tracing lines in the air, leaving a milky white trail in their wake. This was a hallmark of the marble tier, the second major cultivation tier. All five of his fingers moved in concert, each one tracing its own independent path, looking much like a spider doing a complex dance. Within a second, a complex sigil had formed in the air. Sneering, the man released the sigil, releasing a wave of force that smashed into Nadran, launching him into the air.
He hit the ground hard, bruising his upper back, but managed to curl his head upwards before it could hit the hard dirt road, avoiding worse injuries. Nadran rolled over, ignoring the excruciating pain, then coughed violently, blood dripping out of his mouth. [This is bad, I must have suffered internal injuries too,] Nadran thought with concern. Bracing himself with his arms, he tried to get up, but instead felt a sharp kick to his ribs, causing him to get sent rolling across the ground. After a second, he stopped rolling, now lying face down in the dirt.
Next, he felt a heavy weight descend on the back of his head, and his face was shoved heavily into the dirt, his mouth filled with the mixed taste of dirt and blood. "You think a weakling like YOU can demand money from ME? You can't even defend yourself, you should be glad I don't just kill you now," a voice called out smugly from above him. "Lucky for you, I am a considerate and generous person, so I will leave it at this. Hahahaha!" He laughed uproariously as though he had just told an incredible joke.
Nadran felt the man lift their boot off his head, then heard footsteps as the man walked away. Nadran slowly pulled himself to his feet, shaking his head to try to dispel the ringing in his ears. He blinked his eyes a few times to clear his vision, then looked up at his herb stand, only to find that all of his herbs were gone. He saw the man swaggering away as two attendants walked over, taking flanking positions next to the young noble as they departed. Nadran managed to hear them talking as they slowly and calmly walked down the street.
"Young master, why waste your time on such a weak cultivator? We need to be at the meeting in fifteen minutes," one of the attendants said disapprovingly.
"We'll still make it in plenty of time," the man responded casually. "Crushing people underfoot is just so exhilarating, I had to do it. Besides, red fern has a nice smell when burned, so I figured I might as well get a little extra something for tonight's bath."
"Alright, just try to avoid more detours please," the attendant pleaded. "The master will be unhappy if you are late again."
"Whatever, it's not my problem if you get punished by my father again," the man said flippantly, and they moved out of sight around a corner.
Nadran sighed and moved slowly toward the barren stand, wincing as he moved a particularly injured muscle. He made it back to the stand and looked out over the still-busy street. He got a few sympathetic looks, especially from other stall owners, but nothing else. Nadran wasn't surprised, though. In a world where strength was everything, cruelty was often rewarded, and compassion punished. Selfless people were truly few and far between.
Although every part of his body felt like it was on fire with pain, Nadran grimaced, clutching his side, and slowly began to create a sigil behind the stall. The intense pain made it hard to concentrate, and a large jolt of pain from his side caused his hand to tremble, causing the sigil to fail, fizzling into nothing. Nadran grimaced, clenching his teeth, and when the burst of pain subsided, he started again from the beginning. Nearly a minute later, he managed to succeed, and his dimensional storage space opened up.
Nadran reached into the air in front of him, and his hand disappeared into the space. He pulled out a couple bandages, which he wrapped around some of the openly bleeding wounds. Next, he reached in again and began pulling out herbs, which he began placing on the stand to replace the ones that had been stolen. [This is exactly why dimensional storage spaces are so useful,] Nadran thought dryly. [At least I still have herbs to sell.]
The dimensional storage space that Nadran had created was the lowest tier of storage space, and there was only one cubic foot of space within it. A surprising number of things can fit in such a small space, though, and Nadran had it packed to the brim with backup herbs, bandages and other daily necessities, and whatever money he managed to earn in that day. After he was done, although there weren't as many herbs as before, he was able to keep selling herbs, earning more money so that his family could eat as he tried to let his wounds heal.
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"This is the diagram for a basic defensive sigil, called the chi shield," the lecturer explained, showing a picture displayed on the wall behind him by using a projection sigil. The picture was complex, being composed of over 30 different line segments, some straight, some curved, all connected end-to-end in a single, very long path. "This technique creates a transparent barrier around your body, and it is able to block both physical and energy attacks. Of course, its simplicity means that while it can be created very quickly, it is not very strong, and is generally used as a reaction to lessen the impact of a blow. With a bit of training, you should be able to execute this in less than half of a second. After all, that may be all the time you have to defend yourself in a fight." The lecturer continued to talk about the uses of the technique and its pros and cons as Nadran worked to copy down the picture on a piece of paper.
Nadran was watching the lecture from up in the rafters, holding a support beam as he drew. Although he was still injured, his internal energy had helped to heal the worst of the injuries, and he wasn't in any danger, so he decided he would still attend the lecture. [I'm not about to let some random noble stop me from learning more about sigils,] Nadran thought with resolve, ignoring the pain that still coursed throughout his body.
Getting into the rafters was actually quite easy for Nadran, who had been climbing cliffs to gather herbs ever since he was a young boy. In this way, he could easily avoid having to pay the fee for entering the lecture. After all, there wasn't anyone to collect the attendance fee at the rear window 30 feet in the air.
Nadran had secretly attended many of these lectures, and actually knew quite a bit about sigils. The only problem he had was his difficulty in remembering the complex figures needed to create them. Whenever he thought he knew how to do something, it would slip away again, and he would need to strain to remember the next step.
[Why do sigils have to be so hard to remember?] Nadran thought to himself for the twelfth time that day alone. [Why are they so random, why is there no logic behind their structure? Why…]
At this point, Nadran had a sudden revelation. [What if… they aren't actually random? What if I can find an underlying logic to them that ties them together?] The more he thought, the more excited he became, and he hastily used a sigil to open his storage space, pulling out a thick folder. This folder had hundreds, if not thousands, of different sigils drawn on different pages, with each of the sigils sorted by type. This folder was the fruits of years of effort of sneaking into lectures daily to record all of the different sigils he could. Out of those, he had chosen the ones that were most useful to helping his family and earning money through their stall, and had spent hundreds of painstaking hours learning them, even when he felt he would never remember it right. This cache of techniques was so comprehensive that even instructors would be impressed with its scope. Of course, this was all useless to Nadran if he couldn't use them, but he had them nonetheless.
His work now was paying off as he took out dozens of papers with defensive techniques and placed them side by side, balancing them carefully on a support beam. He scanned through all of the barrier techniques, and after looking for only a few seconds, he saw a repeated section in every single one of them. [It seemed that this shape, only a few lines long, was the core of the barrier. The rest probably creates the unique identity of the barrier, giving it different traits,] he thought.
Nadran couldn't help but get more and more excited. [If this is true, maybe I can actually remember how to make sigils, if I'm just able to break it up into pieces I recognize, then put them back together. Why did none of the lecturers ever describe sigils like this? It makes so much sense now! And how did I only just realize this now, after learning about them for so many years?] Nadran wondered, not knowing that before that day, such a revelation had been impossible for him.
Nadran suddenly came back to the present as he realized everyone was already leaving. It seemed that the lecture was over. Grinning, Nadran packed the papers back into his folder, returning them to his storage space. He jumped up to leave, then froze as the sensation of pain loudly announced that he was still injured. Nadran had totally forgotten about his wounds in his excitement. [I hope I didn't make anything worse with that,] he thought as he carefully got up and moved toward the window, quickly leaving the building and heading home.
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"I'm home," Nadran declared as he stepped into his house, looking around to see his mother and sister working on making dinner, adding ingredients to a pot boiling over the fire. He tried to hide his injury, not wanting to worry his family, but as always, nothing got by his mother. With a quick glance, she noticed his posture and dropped her ingredients, rushing over.
"What happened?" she asked, looking him over for injuries. His face had visible bruising on it and was slightly swollen, and his posture was slightly bent in an attempt to relieve pressure from his injured side. "Did someone attack you again?" she guessed, looking at him in concern.
"I'm fine," Nadran replied, trying to dodge the question. "I just need to rest a bit and I'll be good as new." Nadran knew that, as someone who could create sigils, he had a larger pool of internal energy, which expediated the healing process, making an injury that would normally take weeks to heal instead heal in a day or two. Of course, he would have almost no internal energy to cast sigils with in the meantime, but at least he would be healthy soon.
"Let's get you into bed," his mother said, guiding him over to his bed and laying him down. "Just try to sleep for a bit so you can heal faster. I'll let you know when dinner is ready."
"Okay," Nadran agreed, then paused and asked, "Oh yeah, is dad still not here yet?"
"He is still out negotiating with the Floating Pill Garden, but he should be back any minute now," his mother responded. "Now get some sleep."
Nadran nodded and laid back fully, closing his eyes. Every day, his father would take some of the herbs they gathered and bring them to the big herb and alchemy shops of the city, then sell the herbs to them. This resulted in him being able to sell herbs in bulk, but generally at very low prices. It was still better than the herbs going to waste, though, and Nadran was almost never able to sell all of his own share at the roadside stall. It was a constant battle with the larger stores though, as the shopkeepers would always try to rip his father off, and he had very little leverage to work with, especially since he couldn't even use sigils to defend himself and he didn't have any powerful friends to defend him. Still though, Nadran's father was able to earn just as much as Nadran, if not more, despite how difficult it was to sell for good prices. This also lent a layer of security to their lives, as, while they earned very little, they were almost guaranteed to earn enough to survive, even if one of them had a bad day and earned nothing.
It was relatively quiet in the house, making it easier to relax. The only sounds he could hear were the faint clanking and bubbling from dinner being prepared, and the whistling of the wind through a crack in the wooden roof. Nadran lay on his bed for over an hour, letting his wounds slowly heal.
He was awoken from his half-asleep state by the sound of the front door opening. He rolled over, looking out the window to see that the sun was just beginning to set over the horizon, giving the sky a faint reddish tinge. He yawned, rubbing his eyes as he prepared to get up. At the sound of the concerned shouts of his family members, though, he quickly sat upright and rushed out of his room, ignoring his muscles that screamed in protest at the sudden movement.
Nadran dashed out of his room, running at full speed before he abruptly stopped in the doorway, his blood running cold. He saw Pinod, his father's longtime friend, holding Nadran's father in his arms. Nadran looked over in horror at his father, who was covered in blood and lying limply in Pinod's arms, one of his legs twisted at an unnatural angle. Nadran broke out of his trance and rushed over, and looking at his mother, he asked in an unsteady voice "I-is he…"
His mother wiped the tears in her eyes before responding "He's alive, but only just. What happened to him…?"
With trembling hands, Nadran traced a sigil in the air, taking three attempts before he finally succeeded due to his distress. The sigil drifted across his father's body, examining the extent of the damage. What he saw made him gasp.
With numerous broken bones, fractured ribs, torn muscles, extensive internal and external bleeding and damaged organs, it was a miracle that he was still alive. Furthermore, the damage did not seem to be healing at all, but rather was slowly getting worse as his vital organs slowly began to shut down due to the injuries. [At this rate, he can only last a few days at most before dying…] Nadran realized, the trembling in his hands intensifying. As Nadran looked at his father's bloody face, contorted in a grimace of pain despite his lack of consciousness, Nadran clenched his hands tightly into fists in an attempt to control his raging emotions, not even noticing the blood seeping from his palms.