By the Silver River, a group of Daoist prodigies first searched for potentially suitable locations, then began building bridges, testing over a thousand places where a bridge might possibly be built.
Most of the time, they could manage no more than a dozen or so zhang before it either collapsed or became impossible to continue ahead.
Now, at last, they had built half an arched bridge.
All the materials were stones from the riverbank. The stones here were the only things that would not be dissolved by the Silver River, and they had no other materials available.
They used immense pressure to compress them, blazing fire to temper them, and sheer force to shape them as needed. Then they joined everything with mortise-and-tenon structures. Once complete, it formed a seamless whole, without even a crack in sight.
Standing at the end of the half-built stone bridge, they could already see the opposite shore. If the conditions in the latter half of the river proved no more surprising than their tests suggested, this stone bridge—which had cost a group of prodigies untold years and effort—should be completed.
Not a single rune could be seen on the stone bridge. It was the purest form of craftsmanship, and craftsmanship was completely unaffected here.
What craftsmanship employed were the most fundamental rules upon which the entire world was built. They were the framework of the world's foundation, the basis of existence itself.
Ordinary cultivators would neither notice nor care about such things—for example, why everything fell to the ground, and what its essential nature was.
Questions that seemed as self-evident as that.
By the Silver River, the novelist lay in a reclining chair. He had stopped reading and was instead watching the Daoists build their bridge.
"Truly breathtaking. As expected of the Daoist sect."