Chapter 149 - Stamp

Wang Master Fourth was not the most logical person.

Half of his notebook was filled with complaints against the better-born array masters with long-standing lineages. The other half was dedicated to his own esoteric ideas of how arrays should actually be used.

Wang Master Fourth cursed the sect for not recognising his brilliance. He had wanted to open a shape-array hall, and be inaugurated as the first hall master because he once found a torn page from a copy of a counterfeit of an ancient book on shape-arrays that could, according to what he had written in archaic prose, “Seal three immortals and empower the fourth, a mere mortal, to eternal heights.”

He was the fourth.

He gave himself the name “Master Fourth.” Nowhere on his notebook was his real name written. Three whole pages were of him ranting why his martial brothers and sisters refused to call him that.

Penned at the end of his life, the journal contained only two arrays. One was a shape-array of his own design that lowered the temperature of liquid.

After navigating through the complex corpus of flowery words and grandiose vocabulary, what Yu Han got was this.

Wang Master Fourth believed that the thermal aggression of a freshly brewed elixir was a form of spiritual trauma for the liquid. It lowered the potency.

He argued that by forcing an elixir to become lukewarm immediately, he was pacifying the chaotic fire qi and returning the concoction to its natural, humble state of peaceful equilibrium.

An example he used was tea.

He claimed that blowing on one’s tea was a plebeian insult to the laws of daoist cultivation and that a true master should exert his will to ensure his drink was neither cold nor hot, but precisely the temperature of a stagnant pond in autumn.

It worked, somewhat.

The array was incredibly complex and large, so it couldn’t be used on small pots, but had to be affixed to the original brewing vessel itself. It required only one mortal-grade spirit stone to power and could be run for many hours, but needed around twelve mortal-grade spirit stones to craft and affix.

After all that effort, it successfully rendered the liquid into a state of absolute thermal mediocrity.

However, the array’s mercy was limited.

If one used a mortal-grade spirit stone to power the array, it only worked on brews with mortal-grade ingredients. Wang Master Fourth had argued that it was a masterwork of scalable design. It would work all the way up to the nascent soul realm, where cultivators used royal-grade and higher spirit stones for their task.

A true testament to his genius, a common talent that had only reached the qi gathering realm well into his middle ages.

One of his colleagues had dared to insult him, pointing out that he had spent forty long years and a small fortune in spirit stones perfecting this Six-Fold Seal of Water Temper Tepidity to do what a five-minute wait could achieve for free. Wang Master Fourth had spent the next two pages of his journal explaining why that colleague’s soul was too agitated to understand the sublime peace of a room-temperature beverage.

The other array was the Snakemark array.

Wang Master Fourth had been bitten by a snake once while he was out adventuring in the northern islands of the southern archipelago. Their team had killed a gang of evil cultivators. Not demonic, but heretical nonetheless.

The villains had kept a strange snake that when it bit mortals, they would be poisoned by a chaotic cocktail of qi and lifeforce. If the mortal survived, they would awaken their spirit root, though it would be deformed and mutated, only suitable to practice methods which were barely a step away from demonic.

The Stormy Reef cultivators had taken care of the gang easily. But the snake was trickier. It almost escaped but it was no match for Wang Master Fourth who had planned eight steps ahead.

He had trapped the snake with nothing but his wits and stabbed what he thought was its neck. While he was rightfully declaring his contributions by holding up a snake that pretended to be dead, it bit him.

It had injected impure spiritual energy into the cultivator’s body. Though the poison had flooded into his bloodstream like molten iron, he easily purged it. The snake had a cultivation level near his own, but the sect had provided them with elite-grade antivenom pills. The chaotic spiritual energy could do nothing to his already formed spirit root. But Wang Master Fourth had a horrifying realisation.

Even though the foreign spiritual energy had been removed, an array pattern remained seared into his mind.

He later named it the Snake-Faced Tree-Marking array.

As the serpent truly died, it spoke to Wang Master Fourth telepathically. It whispered offers of power, wealth, authority. All at the tip of his fingers, now that he had the array. All he had to do was spread it.

Mark it on a tree, the leaves of a parasol. Focus the eye on the leaf’s stem, and draw the face outwards. It was a shape-array, so easy. Even Wang Master Fourth, being at the fourth level of body tempering, could do it. When the array was perfect, it would burn with green flame, flicker golden, and call out to the divine originator. If so permitted by the sovereign throne of the mortal heavens, a drop of distilled true nature of the plant’s spiritual energy would fall. Gather it, for it was not to be wasted. Feed it to a mortal, and if they live, they shall ascend.

Unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Wang Master Fourth thought he had stumbled upon a fortuitous encounter. He never told anyone what happened, only writing it in his notebook near death.

He wasn’t able to activate the shape-array even when he reached the qi gathering realm.

The conclusion? The snake had tricked him. A final spite before its life ended. It wasted too many years of Wang Master Fourth’s own life on a directionless hunt.

The words of the snake and Wang Master Fourth matched Yu Han’s level 3 trial text.

“Shapes unite, leaves enlarged,

Parasol stops, arrays converge.

An eye encircled, an ear of sphere,

A nose kited, and mouth of square.

Green flames lurk hidden, drawing close,

Lanterns touch and flicker golden, the ghost’s encroachment slows.”

A shape-array. He would need to go to the mirror earth and activate it. If Wang Master Fourth couldn’t do it throughout his life, what chances did Yu Han have even if he could draw the full thing?

It wasn’t a script-array. There wasn't any intention involved.

Could it be a sigil?

Yu Han’s understanding of different array schools was rudimentary at best. He had the foundational texts, but the authors had archaic ways of explanations. From what he could gather, scripts needed the most pure intentions, focused and aligned with the function of the array and the will of the array-master.

Shapes didn’t. Anyone could activate them as long as there was essence.

Sigils were somewhere in between. Unlike glyphs, they were artificial. Every sigil was created and imbued with meaning by the maker. A meaning which the dao and the world itself seemed to accept.

Sigils might need intention. Or they might not.

At level 2, Yu Han would need to stretch his limits if he wanted to draw the full Snakemark array. There were too many shapes. Circles, lines, curves, triangles within triangles and the self-imitating component that acted as the array’s eye.

He had a better idea now that he could move essence with the invocation.

As the chanting reached its first peak, the inkwell tendril spiralled tightly upon itself, flattening into a solid circular block. The overlapping rings left slight indentations on the surface, resembling a woven rattan plate.

He opened the notebook, careful not to shatter the zen state diffusing essence from his dream-body.

A blank page. The tendril-plate pressed against it.

Yu Han willed the ink to come out only through exact lines and points of the tendril-plate.

Stamp.

A sudden pain hit him. Like a tiny spike of chill draining a hint of warmth from his blood.

Lifeforce - 1

Oh shit---

The pain overwrote his thoughts and he collapsed. His face hit the clamscape floor. But he didn’t pass out, nor did he fall into true sleep.

Can’t ... faint ...

He actually lost lifeforce!

Weirdly enough, as fast as the pain had come, it left. He got up after barely half a minute. There was still a strange fatigue in his mind, but the hurt just wasn’t there. It was more like a soreness.

He had dropped the notebook, so he picked it up. The character for light in the imperial script of Great Xia shone ever so slightly.

Yu Han grinned.

“It ... WORKED!”

With his tendril-stamp, he could not perfectly stamp shape-arrays to the geometric precision needed, at least not yet. So he tried stamping script-arrays first.

It needed intention. Yu Han intensified his focus with Thousand Petals Synaptic Bloom. The calm needed for the invocation followed by the focus action of opening the notebook, pressing the tendril, thinking about the meaning of the word ‘light’ and what he wanted it to do.

Even if script-arrays weren’t drawn perfectly, they could work. They did not need absolute mathematical proportions.

A sudden high washed over him. An intense feeling of possibility and motivation.

“I can mass-produce arrays!” At least on paper. At least script-arrays, the simple ones. What did this mean?

Possibilities, one after another, flew through his head. For combat, for crafting, for his courtyard.

Inkwell tendril.

Fang Zhao, like Fei Rui, was a gift that kept on giving. He only got the mortal invocation of the divine through Li Yao’s relationship with Shu Boyan too.

Nurturing connections, Yu Han grinned. Then giggled. Then burst out laughing. Dad, you were right! In this eff’ed up world with questionable morals, with superhumans that care for nothing but selfish self-improvement, I’m actually nurturing genuine relationships. Profit isn’t even my first goal, but the returns are already breaking every quarterly record. And ... And it feels good.

Yu Han patted his cheeks and sat down again. He recited the mortal invocation of the divine and immediately felt a slight pain, like a needle prick.

Should he continue?

Better not.

It was essence strain. Not depletion. With his Inner Awareness, he sensed vast amounts of essence circulating in his body and through the clamscape.

He waited. Waited. Reviewed his notebooks. Then tried again after about ten minutes.

No pain.

This time, he stamped light in common script. He thought on the intention of light for longer, lined up the tendril surface better, and stamped.

A sudden pain. But this time he expected it. Even with his skull feeling like it had three more holes in it, he caught himself with his hand on the floor and eyes glued to the paper as the tendril unspooled around it with focus lost.

Light.

The character glowed.

Fifteen minutes of waiting.

He tried again.

And again.

And again.

He lost lifeforce, but that didn’t stop him.

Most were successful. Eight failed.

After each success, he was unable to absorb back the essence in the ink. But with failures, he could. Not fully, but enough that all wasn’t wasted.

Yu Han lined up the tendril again. This time he would try a shape-array. Again for light, since it was the easiest to see---

Wait, if water wet the paper I wouldn’t need to hurry. Or if fire burnt it. Hmm.

Would it though? The notebook was memorycast. If he damaged it, it would start fraying. When it was fully disintegrated, the pearl would appear again. He’d need to wait until it recovered its lime-green glow and Fei Rui would project it again.

They had done the tests.

The damage had to be significant enough. Just ripping a page wouldn’t work.

What if I ripped half the pages?

He took a blank notebook and tried it out. Pages fluttered around his feet. Even after shredding every sheet, it did not fray.

That’s interesting.

He then tore each paper individually into scraps. Only when he ripped the notebook’s parchment covers into pieces did the scraps start fraying. Soon enough, they disintegrated, and a dim pearl was left.

There was a threshold here. With fire, the threshold was lower. With normal physical damage, it was higher? It wasn’t Yu Han who set these thresholds.

Could I? Until now, he’d been memorycasting by only thinking of the object, as with Echoing Dreamscape. But what if he thought of the function of the object, what he wanted to do with them, while channelling Echoing Dreamscape into the pearl?

There were a few empty pearls but without Fei Rui, he wouldn’t be able to verify the results. No need to waste essence on it now, but he filed away the thought for later.

For now, he wanted to draw a shape-array.