Xiao Li had gone past his expected week of seclusion, so I spent the next week and a half studying calligraphy, reading books on talisman artistry and practising my swordsmanship in private. The latter I was warming up to, just a little.
I had been thinking about it in multiclass terms, but realistically, wasn't the most OP wizard subclass the Bladesinger? Besides, studying swordsmanship or some other weapons skill was expected here, and I wanted to fit in a little better.
Only maybe one per cent of cultivators, or less, were considered "sword cultivators," yet at the same time, more than a third of cultivators used a sword. So there was a vast difference between being a sword cultivator and a cultivator that merely used a sword now and then, and I was just aiming for the latter.
My tutor in calligraphy had thought me, at first, a lost cause. I had never held a brush designed for writing before, and he exclaimed, furious, that I looked like I was about to put a layer of paint on the fences outside. He was an old man, and one of the little veins in his forehead was clearly visible.
I don't think any amount of specie could have convinced him to teach me after that point, but when he didn't immediately throw me out, I realised I had something that he might want. His grandson, a newly minted master of calligraphy himself, was also a Martial Artist, having stepped onto the Martial Warrior stage and unlocking his internal force.
Grandpa knew I was a cultivator; it was the only reason he invited me inside or let me pick up one of his brushes in the first place. He wanted more for his grandson, so he claimed he could fix my deficits in exchange for a cultivation manual for his grandson and setting him at least onto the path. Apparently, he had already been tested and had, allegedly, average aptitude for spiritual matters, and his body favoured the Wood element.
It had to be said that this was a ridiculous request—especially for a regular person to make of a cultivator. Or it would be if I didn't have a few copies of the first chapters of the Five Phase Method, wasting space. The value of the Five Phase Method wasn't high. It was only the chapters for the Qi Gathering realm, first of all, and it was a very middling method. Buying a copy could be as cheap as five to ten spirit stones.
This was already a ridiculous amount for a mortal artist to charge someone, but it didn't factor in that just having the method wouldn't be enough. If you could just read a book and be a cultivator, anyone could do it. The only reason that worked for me was that I already had the foundation of a wizard and could sense and manipulate Qi, or the energy of heaven and earth—what I called magical energy back then.
I asked around, and the old geezer really seemed to be the best in the city, not just in the pure attainments of calligraphy but in teaching it to disciples, too.
So I agreed, with the caveat that I would be leaving the city in a couple of months and that if his grandson hadn't awakened his mind to sense Qi in that time, then tough luck. Privately, I also wanted to use the guy as a bit of a guinea pig. Otherwise, I think I would have shifted to the second-best calligrapher in the city, who merely wanted several hundred taels of gold.
The prospective new cultivator was, even now, in one of the rooms of the villa, sitting criss-cross applesauce in the middle of one of my ritual circles. I wasn't quite good enough with Abjurations to create a field or shield that trapped Qi outside to create a true low Qi zone, but I was trying to cheat by using Magic Aura to hide the presence of all Qi in the room.
All the Qi in the room was hidden, except for any in a tiny secondary ritual circle which used a low-grade spirit stone to pulsate, slowly ejecting Qi every few seconds. He was supposed to focus his senses on this tiny circle, trying to sense the Qi being ejected. My experiment was... could you illusion someone into enlightenment? I thought you definitely could.
The ultimate attainment in the Dao of Illusion, I felt, would be creating reality itself! Haha, that felt profound just thinking about it.
My temporary calligraphy teacher had been surprised at how well I had improved in just a few lessons, and I had sniffed delicately and told him that I was just unfamiliar with brushes. That didn't make any sense to him, but he let it go.
In my last couple of lessons, he stopped praising me and said that while my mechanical skill was improving and even approaching good, the things I wrote lacked heart. That I was like a scribe, merely attempting to copy everything exactly.
That caused me to grind my teeth a bit because I was a scribe! That had been exactly how I was treating it. Still, he said that I might have the mechanical skills of a master of calligraphy in a couple of months before we left the city, but he would never be able to actually certify me as that unless I could make a work that wasn't, in his words, "dead."
I was alright with that since just skills were mainly what I was looking for, but I decided to try to surprise the old geezer if I could, doubling the time I spent closeted in a room with the four treasures of the study, namely brush, ink, paper and stones used to make traditional calligraphy.
I shifted my sleep schedule some, too, in order to cultivate in the middle of the night, either in the courtyard of the villa or even on the villa's roof. I got much better results when I cultivated in actual moonlight. It would be even better if I were naked and dancing like I was Eilistraee, but I wouldn't be willing to do that unless I had a large illusion formation or ritual hiding myself from prying eyes.
And like the swole bros in the gym, I had achieved gains, reaching the second level last night. I could now easily lift my own body weight with one hand, which was pretty impressive, even if my body didn't weigh that much.
I continued to repeat each move with the sword, moving as fluidly through the set of katas as I could. Xiao Li claimed that there were thirteen fundamental sword moves. That any of the hundreds of thousands or millions of sword moves in the world could be boiled down to a variant of one of these thirteen, and that was what I was practising over and over.
I wasn't sure he was right, although he had a very high confidence about him. To me, it seemed like an axiomatic claim. I thought if you could boil all ways to move a sword down to thirteen fundamental moves, you could also boil the thirteen fundamental moves down to a single "ultimate move", which encapsulated all possible sword moves, namely, hold the sword in your hand and move your arm.
Granted, that "ultimate" move wasn't very useful, so he might be correct. These thirteen were at least individually useful.
In mid-cut, Xiao Li ran into the courtyard, looking exuberant. Rather than stopping immediately, I finished that set of katas. Rather than look offended, he seemed approving. I finished the last move, exhaled and then sheathed the weapon before setting it aside.
I took a look at him and smiled, "Congratulations!" I offered, genuinely. I could detect his fourth-level cultivation from here. Also, his energies felt different. While before, he felt like a raging bonfire that might burn out of control, now it was a bit more nuanced, like the hot flames inside a jet engine's combustion can, constrained yet ready to be put to useful purpose.
I nodded, satisfied. It was a good change. He grinned and said, "Same to you!" I had been practising the same kata for over two hours, and while I might be a lady now, I still sweat—especially in the rays of the hot mid-day sun, which I didn't like as much as I used to. I decided I needed a shower.
"Who's the dude in the empty servant's quarters?" Xiao Li asked curiously but continued, "I want to talk about when we want to leave this city too."
I held my hand up, "He's the grandson of my calligraphy tutor. He's the best Grandmaster in calligraphy around; everyone agrees. I said I would try to help him open his senses to Qi in exchange for him helping my deficiencies in this art. I want to study talismans. However, let me go clean up and change clothes. Then we can talk."
He nodded, and I proceeded into my room. There was running water in the villa, but it came from a cistern on the roof. This would have been a perfect place to use the strong right humerus of skeleton-provided free labour, but instead, I found the man, a mortal, who managed the properties and paid him some gold to get strapping young men to fill it daily.
Still, the water was cold, as was the shower. However, I found it quite brisk and refreshing, which was also different from my past life, where you wouldn't be able to pay me to take a cold shower. It was just one more datum, along with many more that I had noticed, like the variable effects of some of my spells, that showed me ways this world and even myself were different.
I didn't think I would be uncomfortable outside in the snow, even if all I was wearing were these thin silk gowns—I really was the Icy Beauty now! I didn't know much about Chinese culture before I started living in this new universe, but I seemed to recall from anime and manga that I had read that I could pretend to be a Yuki-onna with fairly good results.
After finishing drying and rebraiding my hair, I found Xiao Li in one of the large rooms near the kitchen. He was scarfing down a rice dish like he hadn't eaten in days. Perhaps he hadn't.
He looked up at me and asked, grinning mischievously, "So, how was it?"
"How was ... what?" I replied, arching a single eyebrow in a gesture that I had practised in front of the mirror for a while. I had gotten deeply jealous at the zither MILF's ability to make practically any facial expression she wanted at will. I wasn't at her level, but now, at least, I could do the fundamental Spock expression.
He sat his chopsticks down and said, "The Frolics! Specifically, the girls at the Frolics!"
I tried to stop myself, but my mouth twitched into an amused smile before I could get it under control. I affected a fairly good glide over to the table and sat nearby as he continued, "I still don't see why I shouldn't go there."
Mrs Mei popped up, exasperated, "You're an exceptional talent with no backing; they'll turn you into a Furnace!"
He snorted, "The same could be said about Wen. Why is she safe and I am not?"
"Although she has made a lot of progress in changing the aspect of her qi to something that is pure and based on the Lunar star, she still has and always will have a strong well of ghostly yin qi in her essence. That's not compatible with life. At best, it would be a hindrance to anyone who wanted to make her a Furnace. At worst, it might kill them," Mrs Mei replied evenly with a tone that expressed that she would be rolling her eyes if she had any.
Xiao Li didn't have anything to say to that, merely, "Oh."
I chuckled and smirked, teasing him, "I'm not sure what you think I did there, but the women are everything you're thinking and more probably." I then considered what Mrs Mei had said and commented, "I suppose that means I have a pretty good chance to become an actual ghost cultivator if I die sometime." Also, the fact that the zither MILF couldn't drain me like a Capri Sun gave me ideas that I immediately suppressed.
I heard a snort, "Yes, you could say that. If you had stayed in that village permanently as you had planned, you'd just have woken up one day as a ghost. You wouldn't have even died so much as just transmuted when you passed the tipping point."
While that sounded cool as hell, actually, I kind of liked having a physical body and being considered both alive and a human. One of my ears twitched like a tiny radar dish, tracking a sound. Well... human-ish, I allowed.
"How much longer do you have on the lease for this place?" I asked, curiously.
He hummed, did some math on his fingers and then said, "About nine weeks, I suppose." He then frowned, "I doubt they'll give me a refund of the unused time, either."
I nodded, "Then I propose we stay here for the rest of the lease term. We don't have anywhere to be until a year from now, right?" That got his nod, "Unless you think it will take longer than ten months to travel to the Silver Serenity school?"
He shook his head, "It's about fifty thousand li away, but it shouldn't take more than four months. We'll have to travel to the capital and then pay for passage on an airship going further. They travel really fast, so it shouldn't take long."
Only fifty thousand li, which was close enough to an imperial mile that they used to call this unit of measurement "Chinese miles" back on Earth before China switched almost entirely to the metric system.
When I tried to ask how big this realm was, I couldn't get any answer. The most useful answer was Mrs Mei, who said that I could explore it for a million years and still not see half of it.
The idea of what had to be hypersonic airships appealed to me, and I said wistfully, "I want an airship."
Xiao Li nodded earnestly, saying wistfully, "Yes. Many people say the best thing about establishing your violet palace and entering the Foundation establishment is the ability to utilise flying treasures." I had been amazed at the speed we ran when I was only at the first level of Qi Gathering. We must have averaged fifty kilometres an hour for most of the day. Back then, I wasn't too shocked at my initial strength and speed increases at first until I started running with a purpose, and even then, the increase in my purely physical endurance was out of this world. Still, it was nowhere near hypersonic airship speed!
He then paused and nodded, "Sure. Let's stay here. One city is as good as another, I 'spose. I can work on my cultivation and sword arts, too."
I nodded, glad I could continue seeing the calligraphy geezer for now. I produced a sheet of paper and slid it over to him, saying, "I've considered trying to teach you a few of my spells." I didn't think he would ever have the temperament to study wizardry seriously, but learning a few cantrips was something even regular people often did.
I had been producing a syllabus for two cantrips I wanted to teach him. Fire Bolt and Lightning Lure. The latter was a combination of damage and control cantrip, causing a lash of lightning energy to ensnare someone within a couple of dozen feet of you, which will then yank them towards you like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. It was a surprisingly good spell for someone who used a sword, as you could combo it by stabbing or chopping them in twain as they flew towards you.
They were also both evocations, which would make the syllabus smaller. Further, both fire and lightning were considered very yang-heavy energies, which definitely suited both him and his cultivation method.
However, at the last moment, I thought about how Mrs Mei told me that Xiao Li had an unusual talent with the sword, and I considered other cantrips that could utilise his monstrous sword talent. It would serve as an experiment, too. Would he learn these sword-based cantrips first? I thought he might. So, at the last minute, I added on Booming Blade, Sword Burst and Blade Ward. As a final whim, I also added True Strike.
On the list I had written Xiao Li, I had changed the name of two of the cantrips to Booming Sword and Sword Ward, too, just in case that would affect his comprehension of them.
In the actual tabletop game, True Strike was one of, if not the worst, cantrips in the game, and this was mainly because of the turn-based combat system. It allowed you to use your action to indicate a target, and then, on your next turn, you would get Advantage to attack them. There was no way that wasting one turn only for Advantage on the next was useful. Mathematically, just attacking twice, once each turn, let you roll the same number of attack dice and also gave you the chance to hit twice if you succeeded in each roll.
However, reality was different. In Merildwen's world, and also I suspected here, True Strike was very useful because if you were good, you could cast it so fast that you could use it as you were attacking. The mechanics of the way it worked were also different. We obviously didn't roll dice here. Unless the Heavenly Dao did it for me, I supposed.
When cast, for a short period of time, the spell gave you a one-second's glimpse into the future, but only the future of where your sword will be.
A second is not a lot, but when you're in the midst of an attack, a second is a lot. Not only that but knowing how your blade might be parried in a second is usually enough to twist out of it and score a hit. I had the feeling this cantrip would be OP enough that I had started practising with it more myself and included it in my sword katas.
"I'm going to try to teach you these six spells. I'm not sure you'll be able to learn all of them, but any that you do should be quite useful," I told him, "But there is a fair bit of things you need to learn first. So, we'll set aside some time for lessons. Also, I will combine my calligraphy practice with lectures. It will help me ignore distractions while practising my art."
There was also something that I knew that Merildwen hadn't quite grasped yet, and it was that there were few things that accelerated your learning about a subject, like attempting to teach it to another. This was one of the reasons these cantrips were mostly in schools that I struggled with, mostly Evocation and Divination for True Strike.
He read the list and details about each of the cantrips and looked stoked, saying wistfully, "True Strike and Booming Sword sound amazing." I nodded, figuring he'd be most impressed with the ones that directly affected his swordplay.
He was less enthused when I showed him the syllabus. He looked like a beat dog. I wasn't sure why. I didn't have any of these books, much less versions in a language he could read. I would have to read them from memory. All he had to do was listen, so this was a lot harder on me.
And woe to him if he wasted my time and didn't pay attention.
---xxxxxx---
I looked at the second version of my final piece of calligraphy that I was going to give to my calligraphy tutor and nodded.
He had said that my works were dead, so the first version of what I was privately thinking as my graduation thesis work was a single character. Not only did I attempt to empty my mind of everything except the concept I was thinking of, but I cheated by infusing ghostly yin qi into the ink.
The single character? Death.
I intended this to be ironic. Since he called my art pieces "dead", right? However, after looking at it when I finished, I realised that this work would be harmful to the health of regular people if they were continually exposed to it—kind of like low-level radiation.
It wasn't intense, but it gave off a cool, deathly aura. I felt that if the old codger approved of it, then he should immediately burn it. He might really die in his sleep if he hung it up in his bedroom.
So, instead, I tried to make a different one. I still cheated, but this time, I was very careful to only use the pure yin qi that I cultivated, not the qi that welled up inside me naturally, and I thought strongly of snow on the winter equinox.
I decided on a simple couplet-style poem. I hadn't heard of this style of poetry before arriving in this universe, but I found it kind of interesting. They could be devilishly hard to come up with.
This one said, "In our chill heaven, this young maiden comes hither in wind and snow." It also subtly radiated an energy, but this one was a healthy chill. If anything, it could serve as a useful air conditioning unit in these hot summer days.
I asked his grandson about it, who had succeeded in becoming aware of Qi and even had grasped three whisps of it within himself. It was good progress, all things considered, so I considered that experiment a success.
He grinned and said to bring both of them, including the Death one. I was curious but complied. He followed me to his Grandpa's house. The old man didn't even turn to look at us as we entered his study, as he sat in the middle of the floor with a brush and a blank sheet of rice paper.
"Are you finally gonna stop bothering me, you little brat?" he asked in a way that truly old people only could, not caring that I was a cultivator or my station at all or probably if he lived or died. Still, I quietly shifted the sheets of rice paper so that "death" was on top again. If he was going to be a shit, as usual, then he could look at the death calligraphy first.
I nodded, "Yes, soon. I brought you these two works as going away presents." The man snorted but finally turned and motioned that I should hand them over, which I did.
Seeing the giant character for Death and how unearthly it felt, he cackled, "I ain't dying any time soon, little girl! Sorry! This almost gets a pass. I'll keep it, though. I know just the old bastard to send this to; I hope he puts it up in his bedroom." He mirrored some of my earlier thoughts exactly there, which made my mouth twitch.
He shifted it to the side, looked at the next one, and nodded once, "A poet, you ain't. But it's still heads and shoulders above the claptrap I see all these silkpants write. That's not a high bar, though, girl. The skill is good, and I can almost detect a hint of emotion in it, hidden underneath whatever magical claptrap you did to cheat." He exhaled loudly and was quiet for a moment before sighing, "Alright. A pass. I'll hang it in my parlour as an example of one my disciples' work."
I grinned and said slyly, "Disciple greets Master."
He brandished his brush at me, waving it like a cavalry sabre over his head, "Git! Git!" He half-chased me out and slammed the door in both of our faces.
His grandson grinned, "He's actually quite impressed. It took me five years to reach the same level you did in two months." The young man had been on cloud nine since he had managed to seize the first whisp of Qi and start circulating it around.
I chuckled, embarrassed. However, I had nothing but free time and had attainments in what might be described as a similar field, scrivening. The mechanical techniques had been pretty simple to learn. It was just trying to "put my heart into it", as the old man said, that took effort. I wasn't even sure I had done so, to be honest.
But I had reached the stage where the five lessons I took from one of the talisman artists at the Frolics were not wasted, and I was pretty sure I could start creating the lowest-level talismans reliably and without wasting materials on my own. My ultimate goal was to try to create talismans that duplicated the effect of magic scrolls.
I had already created two prototype magic scrolls that anyone with Qi could use, but they both took a lot of time and effort to accomplish. It was rather convoluted and wouldn't have had a very long shelf life. If Xiao Li hadn't used those scrolls, they would have become useless in a few weeks.
Talismans were designed from the ground up to be used by anyone, even if they didn't know the first thing about the effects generated, and would be kept on a shelf indefinitely.
The trick with creating a magic scroll was precision. If you made even a minor mistake, it wouldn't work. Talismans were kind of different, where the most important thing was understanding or comprehension, which you then impressed into the talisman. The names of the professions, scribes and artists could infer this. It wasn't that precision was something you could just throw away in talisman artistry, either, but it was much less important. Two talismans that did the same thing didn't need to look exactly the same as if they were an electrical circuit diagram.
They generally had to use the same characters, but how they were presented could be up to the individual talisman artist. That said, my book suggested that the publicly available talismans in its pages had already been refined over millions of years of experience and suggested that the way they were presented was the optimal presentation, all things being equal.
The effects of low-level talismans weren't as varied or useful as the spells I knew. There were talismans for attack, talismans for defence, and precious few for actual utility. Occasionally, there would be escape talismans, but at this low level, they were nothing to write home about.
Perhaps this changed when they got more complicated, as I hadn't really read about many talismans that were equivalent to Foundation establishment spells, but all of the ones I read about were either in my book or referenced in it, with a couple of exceptions, were just bigger attacks, or better defence.
While I was quite interested in the defensive talismans since I had the idea that they might be better than the arcane equivalent spells I had access to, I had the idea to master a number of utility talismans that I could construct using low-level materials that would have outsized effects or even some offensive ones where Weave spells might have a niche that was better than anything around.
Magic Missile, for example, never missed, and it did about as much damage as being shot with a crossbow. It's easy to look at it when you're playing a game with dice, but even just a first-level spell like that can make a disgusting ruin of a person, especially if it lands somewhere sensitive, like their head or throat. Indeed, it probably wouldn't hurt a cultivator too much, even in the middle of the Qi Gathering realm, but that was still quite useful.
Arriving back at Xiao Li's villa, I found that he had already packed up his mobile alchemy set. That reminded me that I would have to leave most of my wardrobe behind. I'd have to take at most one other outfit. We ran too fast to utilise the Big Chungus'. It hurt to leave them, but I was absolutely positive I could improve them in the future.
Necromancy was a deep well! It could always be improved. I hadn't even animated an actual cultivator's corpse yet, just the skeletons of zombies.
I found Xiao Li in the courtyard, and he was methodically going through the steps necessary to cast Booming Blade. He could actually do it now, but it took him about fifteen to twenty minutes, so it was entirely useless for the moment.
"Do you want to set off today, then?" he asked, curious, and looked outside, "It is a bit late in the afternoon already."
I shook my head, "No. The day after tomorrow. I have something to do all day tomorrow in the city."
He shrugged and said, "That's fine. We don't have to be out of here for four more days. What're you going to be busy with tomorrow?"
I narrowed my eyes, "Don't worry about that. I'll see you tomorrow night, probably, or maybe the next morning, and we can head out."
He looked rather curious but didn't inquire further. I left him there and moved purposefully to my next destination, walking past a group of rich-looking young men loitering in the antechamber. The hostess girl recognised me and asked curiously, "Another calligraphy lesson, Young Miss?" Here, in front of regular people, they wouldn't say talismans, obviously.
I shook my head and asked, "I was wondering if Liu Ruxue had the time to talk with me briefly."
The hostess squinted and handed me a small token, "I'll inquire if she is available. Here, go up to the same booth you visited the first time."
I nodded and retraced my way back upstairs into the opera house upper deck and found the private booth I had used a couple of months ago. They didn't offer me refreshments this time, so I assumed that the delay would be pretty short.
And I was right. Just a few minutes later, the zither MILF glided back into the booth with the same va-va-voom she had last time. A smile and half-lidded eyes regarded me, "Well, hello again, little flower. I hear you're leaving the city pretty soon."
I wasn't that surprised that she had really accurate intelligence assets in this city, especially focused on wandering cultivators. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the allegedly neutral housing Xiao Li bought was actually owned by her or one of the other two cultivation groups in the city.
I stopped digressing and fidgeting and nodded, deciding to just shoot my shot, "Yes... I was wondering, though... Is that offer for free... uhh.. training... still on the table?"
The zither MILF's laughter as she took my hand and guided me to her boudoir sounded like wind chimes.