Daoists who married, established households, and grew into clans, as the Jiang family had, were actually not uncommon. The most famous example was the Zhang family of the Celestial Master Residence, where the position of Celestial Master was hereditary.
Yunqi was treated as an honored guest and given a charming little courtyard.
It was called the Wind Lotus Retreat.
The retreat stood beside a forest of lotuses.
A lotus forest was the only way Yunqi could describe it.
He dared say that even the largest lotus pond in the mortal world could not compare. Every lotus leaf was as large as a paper parasol, jade-green and lustrous. Here, the line "lotus leaves stretched to the sky in endless green" truly came to life.
The little courtyard stood at the edge of the lotus forest, with swaying leaves in view. If he felt they blocked his sight, he needed only turn his head slightly to see ten thousand miles of placid lake beneath a sky filled with frost.
Best of all, it was June, the season when lotuses bloomed in profusion. The flowers here were especially vivid red, each as large as a Buddha's pedestal, fulfilling that other line: "beneath the sun, lotus blossoms glowed a red beyond compare."
The servants who led Yunqi into the courtyard thanked him over and over, saying their young master was the finest person under heaven, and anyone who could save him must naturally be a very good person too.
They also said that this retreat, which the family head had arranged for him, was ideal for a short stay in the current season. If it were rented out, a single day would cost quite a sum.
Yunqi thanked them as well. He was indeed very pleased with the courtyard: the scenery was boundless, the spiritual energy abundant. Besides, he had never lived on the water before, and found it novel.
After the servants left, Yunqi put his bundle in the room. Rather than rest, he immediately went out to the wooden walkway outside the courtyard and sat cross-legged. With the delicate fragrance of lotuses in his nose and the vast lake before his eyes, he found this scenery quite different from what he had seen earlier on the South Shore.
He closed his eyes and emptied his mind. Only after roughly the time it took to drink a cup of tea did he slowly open them again.
Then he drew something from inside his robe. It was about half a foot long, black as ink, shaped like an arrow but shorter, with a head and no fletching. It was the talisman arrow he had snatched from the thin Daoist's hand earlier.
He had heard of talisman arrows before, and had even seen them in the mountains, but only today had he encountered someone intending to use one to commit murder.
Among cultivators, talismans and magical treasures were two very common forms of external aid, whether for fighting others or protecting oneself.
Magical treasures were costly and time-consuming to refine, but once completed, they were extremely convenient to use.
Talismans were cheap to draw and took little time, while their power was not to be underestimated. Yet they were single-use items, and their most criticized shortcoming was that they required mental power to guide them and incantations to activate them.
For low-level cultivators with shallow mental power that could not reach far, certain talismans that needed close range to show their strength were difficult to use effectively. These included the fire-element Bone-Eroding Talisman, the metal-element Blades-and-Axes Talisman, as well as Poison Talismans and Immobility Talismans.
Insufficient mental power meant two things: they could not fly far, and they flew slowly.
If an offensive paper talisman came drifting lightly toward someone, it would only make a laughingstock of its user.
There was another point, though it was somewhat embarrassing to mention: sneak attacks. Unless the target was within arm's reach, attempting a sneak attack with a talisman was a joke even if one had strong mental power. After all, once the incantation was spoken, who would not know what was happening?
Of course, these two drawbacks only applied to low-level cultivators. If a grandmaster of the talisman arts fought someone, why would they need to worry about such things?
Take the Three Talisman Mountains-Dragon-Tiger Mountain, Gezao Mountain, and Maoshan. A grandmaster from any of them could send a Thunder Talisman into the sky and utter a command, and heavenly lightning would fall like rain. There could be no talk of insufficient mental power or ineffective sneak attacks then.
But in the end, low-level cultivators made up most of the world, and even grandmasters had cultivated their way upward one step at a time from those same humble beginnings.
Thus, some brilliantly gifted individuals devised a clever shortcut: enclosing the talisman in a casing. This casing had to be made using artifact-refining methods and inscribed with restrictions for concealing spiritual energy, riding the wind, hiding its trail, muffling sound, and the like.
Once it was refined, an offensive talisman was placed inside, along with a Recording Conch capable of preserving the spell's essence.
A simple triggering restriction was then left on the outer casing. If it struck something, it would trigger the Recording Conch, which would play a prerecorded incantation and activate the talisman.
To make it easier to throw or shoot, the casing was shaped like an arrow. That was a talisman arrow.
Some went even further, stuffing more than one talisman into the shaft. They paired the five elements, brought water and fire into union, combined wind and thunder, and linked one stage to the next in all manner of elaborate arrangements. After all, they were far away-even if they pushed things until spiritual essence was annihilated and the void trembled, they would not hurt themselves.
With this in mind, the methods of launching talisman arrows developed from throwing them to using bows and crossbows, their range growing ever longer. They could truly be said to stop at nothing. Some even claimed that, taken to its ultimate extreme, a talisman arrow was simply a Self-Destructing Flying Sword that needed no mental power to guide it.
The thin Daoist from earlier had pretended to flee, distracting the young hero with conversation while holding this talisman arrow in his hand. Whether he lacked a hand crossbow or wished to avoid discovery, he had not used one. Instead, he had planned to throw the arrow in a sneak attack on the young hero, only for Yunqi to expose him.
Yunqi intended to study talisman arrows carefully.
First of all, Yunqi believed there was nothing wrong with his aptitude. Spells, talismans, and incantations had always been interconnected: one took form through magical power, another through patterns, and the third through syllables. At their core, all were ways of summoning and commanding the spiritual energy of heaven and earth.
He was skilled at all of these.
Alchemy and artifact refining were also broad roads to the Dao, but both consumed too much money and time. Refining a batch of good pills or a precious artifact could easily take years. Yunqi felt he did not currently have that much time; there were too many things he needed to learn.
Having only just begun cultivating, he believed it was better to cultivate more and spend more time pondering the great Dao that led directly to the origins of the five elements and yin and yang. At least, that was true for the first two realms. He had heard that breakthroughs in the third and fourth realms were difficult, while one's remaining lifespan was ample. It would not be too late to explore alchemy and artifact refining then, and he would be better able to apply insights from one field to another.
If he did not live that long, there was even less reason to think about it.
That was Yunqi's view.
For his present needs, talismans were simple to draw, saved materials and time, and helped him comprehend the essence of spells, connect with spiritual energy, and correct his incantations. As for insufficient power, he could win through sheer quantity and use talisman arrows to activate them. Nothing could be more suitable.
Refining the casing of a talisman arrow was not particularly difficult. This step did not even require a furnace.
He only needed to hammer metal carefully into a thin sheet, roll it into an arrow shaft, grind an arrowhead, and then heat them in flames until they fused into one piece.
If he truly did not mind the trouble, he could make a mold with a cavity shaped like the arrow casing and pour molten metal straight into it. Once it took shape, he could hollow out the shaft. That would work too.
Of course, however simple the process was, he could not actually use some piece of ordinary scrap metal for the shaft. It had to possess some spiritual nature-at the very least, enough for the restrictions inscribed on it to work, did it not?
The slightly troublesome part was precisely that: the restrictions on the shaft.
Although talismans, restrictions, and formations shared a common lineage, they differed in where their strokes were laid. Talismans were drawn on paper, restrictions on artifacts, and formations between heaven and earth.
To inscribe restrictions on an artifact, one used not a brush but an engraving knife. The force applied and the spell intent infused into it differed as well. Moreover, the arrow shaft was hollow, making it even harder to engrave restrictions onto that thin layer of metal.
As for the restrictions themselves, there were only those few kinds, and their underlying principles were no different from those of talisman arts.
The truly difficult part was the magical conch that recorded the incantation. It had to preserve the spell essence carried within the spoken words, making it different from the one Yunqi had given the Green Chi-Dragon.
Nor could the magical conch be too large. Large ones were for siege crossbows.
A magical conch called the "Little Coiled-Ear Nail Snail" was very suitable.
Was it hard to find? Certainly. It only grew in the deepest reaches of waterways rich in water energy, so deep that no daylight penetrated and everything was pitch-black.
At such depths, even gathering them was troublesome. After they were caught, the flesh had to be removed and the shells refined through a secret method.
But just how rare was it? As far as Yunqi knew, three of the Five Great Lakes produced them, and Poyang Lake happened to be one of those three.
It was said that more than one family on this lake dealt in this trade, and there was bad blood between them. He simply did not know whether the Jiang family was involved.
1. This book is currently holding steady in the top five of the xianxia category on the new releases ranking, with a best placement in the top three. It has also been consistently making the overall ranking, peaking at number 40. Thank you all for your support!
2. Please keep voting and recommending the book. Comments and messages are always welcome!
Before you continue