"Old Luo, it sounds simple, but making it is a headache..." Xiao Xiangzi shook his head with a wry smile. The three stood in a hollow on Ningyao Mountain, a huge Illuminated Signboard before them. Xiao Xiangzi explained, "It took more than seven hundred pearls in different colors. The trouble was that each color had to match closely, so we lost quite a few after buying them. Any that didn't match had to be thrown out." Pearls, worth a fortune in the lower realm, had plummeted in value in the Immortal Realm. You could scoop up handfuls from almost any river. What mattered here were treasures imbued with the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, not things that only looked pretty.
Even pearls of such fine color, each the size of a pigeon's egg, cost only one High-Grade Immortal Jade apiece. To make this Illuminated Signboard, ten meters long and four meters wide, Xiao Xiangzi had bought over a thousand pearls and used more than seven hundred. The rest were unusable.
"Let's see what it does," Luo Qian said. Xiao Xiangzi merely smiled and inserted a piece of Immortal Jade into the Formation.
Even before the demonstration, Luo Qian and Du Lengning had high expectations. The Illuminated Signboard was covered entirely in pearls; even unlit, it shimmered with a soft, luxurious glow. But once the Formation began to run, light and shadow alternated and the pearls' radiance shifted, creating something beyond anything they had imagined. Only one word could describe this Illuminated Signboard, which had cost a thousand High-Grade Immortal Jades: dreamlike!
As the Buddhists said, all things were like dreams, illusions, bubbles and shadows, like dew and lightning. The saying spoke of the myriad changes of the vast world, yet it fit this illuminated signboard perfectly. Xiao Xiangzi's craftsmanship