Over the next half month, Wu Ling settled into a routine that felt both strange and wonderful. Each morning, he dedicated himself to his painting, calligraphy, and other arts that fueled his cultivation. Slowly but surely he'd been expanding his collection of techniques which brought him to midday when Su Xiang arrived for a few hours of practice.
In the evening, he reserved his time for entertainment whether playing the zither for his mother, visiting a park with Yao Meifeng to work on their duet, or taking the evening to browse the night markets with Su Xiang as he tried to convince her to expand her wardrobe beyond the sect robes of the Shining Blade Hall.
Each day he moved a little bit closer to his goal of becoming the kind of cultivator who could fight his own battles and at the same time, each day included time to spend with the people who gave his life richness.
If Wu Ling had one complaint it's that his practice sessions with Su Xiang continued to demonstrate how wide the gap in power was between the two of them in a standup fight. She had been entirely correct about his Blade Wing Birds, they were useful in large numbers but at the moment, he couldn't truly make them dangerous to anyone. As a distraction for Hou or Yue to do something more impactful, they were moderately useful but once a person knew how little harm they inflicted, it became pointless to use them.
Rather than keep repeating what wouldn't work, he and Su Xiang adapted their daily practice to scenarios, testing different applications in an attempt to discover what kinds of sect missions she might be able to bring him along on where his skills could be more useful. She didn't want to diminish the hard combat power offered by Hou and Yue but even those two didn't compare to the strength of a real trained combatant.
The next thing Wu Ling learned to paint was Giant Eyed Bullfrogs. While they each took several minutes to paint, the almost cartoonishly exaggerated eyes of the frogs were meant to act as sentries and lookouts. Anything approaching their field of view would result in deep resonant croaking, loud enough to wake anyone sleeping nearby. It was useful, but it still didn't result in any kind of increased combat power.
His next painting came closer. The Giant Purple Spore Shroom looked like it had been conjured from the fever dreams of an opium addict but when something impacted against its soft flesh it erupted in a cloud of dense purple spores that made it harder for cultivators to circulate their energy.
The weakening effect had brought Su Xiang down from the middle stage of Brawler to the level of power she'd had as a newly awakened early-stage Brawler which made shrugging off the attacks of the Blade Wing Birds more difficult and made Hou and Yue even more frightening. Even better, the Blade Wing Birds proved strong enough to explode the mushrooms, allowing him to trigger several of them at once without the enemy needing to directly encounter them.
All of it, however, left him deeply frustrated. The potential to create strong and useful phantoms from his painting was clear, it was his power that was lacking. Without more power to fuel his creations, or more time to create them, the best he could currently manage was to play a supporting role.
Faced with what felt like an insurmountable barrier to obtaining the results he wanted from painting, Wu Ling set down his paints and turned to his calligraphy. It was clear from the design of the Myriad Petals Lotus Art Sutra that anyone cultivating it should look to the unique strengths of multiple arts rather than relying on a single art to fuel their cultivation.
While he didn't think that he was wrong for wanting to make painting an effective tool in combat, he felt that he'd begun to force his art rather than follow it. Instead, he looked for what he could do with the other arts available to him and calligraphy felt like the best next step.
While he was eager to learn Carving and Inscriptions to prepare brushes that could write on air, all of that would take time to learn. Rather than focus on what he couldn't do, he looked at what he could do. Calligraphy was one of the Four Arts, it formed part of the foundation upon which many other arts were built.
Like Painting, it had to have utility beyond what could be done when empowered with special tools. Here, the Myriad Petals Lotus Art Sutra didn't fail him. Paper talismans were effectively consumable but they could be prepared far in advance and would add to his list of options. Combined with Hou and Yue, he should be able to add enough raw power to get through a short fight and then replenish his talismans afterward.
Or at least that had been the original idea. The first limitation he discovered was that he could only write a single character on a talisman. According to the manual, as his cultivation progressed, he'd be able to write more complex talismans, but as an Aesthete, he would have to draw on the power of a single word.
The second limitation he discovered lay in the complexity of characters he could write. When writing a talisman, he had to invest a significant amount of spiritual energy into each stroke of the brush. At the moment, his concentration and energy reserves both failed him if he tried to write a character with more than four strokes.
He tried working around it by taking a break and writing a more complex character four strokes at a time but the spiritual power of the new strokes just sat on top of the power of the old strokes, they didn't meld with each other to form a complete character.
Still, he didn't believe that his problems were without solution, he just hadn't studied enough.
"Su Xiang," he said when his sworn sister arrived one afternoon for practice. "I think I finally found a solution to my problem but I don't like it," he told his sworn sister after a long night spent looking through several books that the inheritance placed in his inner world.
"Oh?" Su Xiang asked with a raised eyebrow. "And just what problem is little brother solving that has him so cross?"
"I think I know why my phantoms are so much weaker than they should be, and why my talismans don't seem to be that much stronger," he said, looking dejectedly at the stacks of talismans he'd made the past week. Most of them, he felt, were little more than garbage, but they were garbage that needed to be disposed of properly or they could hurt some mortal passerby. "It isn't that I don't have enough energy, it's that the mediums I'm pouring my energy into can't handle the amount of energy needed to produce real results. My art supplies are holding me back."
"Your art supplies? That doesn't sound right," Su Xiang said, not entirely believing Wu Ling's line of thinking. "It's true that there are techniques that need special materials to support them. Some of the Seniors in the sect can destroy a normal sword just with the strength of the technique they're executing. If the weapon can't handle the power flowing through it, the technique fails and the weapon is destroyed. But those are higher-level techniques. You shouldn't be hitting that problem yet."
"I think it's more like what Alchemists deal with," he explained, flipping through his notes and a shopping list he'd written out. "An alchemist can use common herbs to make a basic medicine that treats a very specific condition, right? Like making cough medicine or numbing paste. Or, the alchemist can use really expensive and rare ingredients to make a panacea that will cure many things."
"It's the same with my techniques," he continued. "My calligraphy book has recipes for inks that are better for some applications than others and when I went digging through my books on painting, I found similar things," he explained. He'd originally ignored the information about specialty inks, paints, and other supplies because he'd thought the same way Su Xiang did, that he wouldn't need those things until much later. Only after spending half a month trying to work without them did he realize that he'd misunderstood part of his own profession.
"So you need to make special inks and paints?" Su Xiang asked, starting to follow along.
"Yeah, and I need to make a lot of them if I want to use a broad assortment of techniques. I need at least six base pigments to paint that funky giant purple mushroom," he complained. "At least one of them has to be blended for affinity with plants, another has to have an affinity for wood, a third has to have an affinity for toxins, a fourth has to have an affinity for yin energy… If I can do all that, I should get a spore cloud that doesn't just reduce a cultivator's strength by a minor stage but by a major one, turning Soldiers into Brawlers, and it should last for hours instead of minutes."
"And how much would making that paint cost you?" Su Xiang asked, impressed by the power these higher-quality art supplies could unlock for Wu Ling but equally convinced that such power wouldn't be cheap.
"Ten spirit crystals per pigment," Wu Ling said, hanging his head. "Not that I would use all of the pigments in a single painting but I'll have to invest in building a palette and keep reinvesting in replenishing it. It's not as bad for calligraphy, the words I'm using are fairly simple and correspond with fundamental forces. The thing is, I also need better paper for my talismans. When it's all said and done I should be able to make between one and three talismans per spirit crystal, depending on which talismans I'm making."
"So, what you're saying is, you shouldn't have taken Yao Meifeng out to a fancy dinner the other day," Su Xiang teased with a light smile. She'd accompanied Wu Ling on enough of his trips to the park with his former classmate to have gained a growing approval of the doll-like young woman but that didn't mean she wouldn't tease Wu Ling about his budding relationship with her.
"What I'm saying is… I need to find work that pays in spirit crystals and not taels of gold and silver for playing zither at tea houses," he said, looking to Su Xiang for help. "Do you think we're up to taking on any missions for your sect? Or we could go looking at the Association for Loose Cultivators to see if there's any work there that we could do."
"There might be something," Su Xiang said. She'd been keeping an eye on the sect missions lately and there had been one she thought might be appropriate that the rest of her sect seemed to be ignoring because the conditions excluded most of the sect and the rewards weren't spectacular. "The mission I'm thinking about could be a perfect fit for us," she finally said. "There's just one catch…"