Only one person stood at the peak of the tower when they arrived. It was the Sea God Emperor himself.
“Many thanks for allowing me to use the Heaven Ascension Platform,” Cha Ming said. “I won’t forget this favor.”
“You don’t owe us a favor,” the Sea God Emperor mused. “We simply saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Our family is now thirty Grandmist pills richer. And peak ones at that.”
“Many thanks regardless,” Cha Ming said. “I’ll ask that everyone here not enter the centermost nine hundred feet as I prepare.”
Everyone moved out and looked at him expectantly. Cha Ming attuned himself to the heavens and the earth and summoned the Clear Sky Brush. At the same time, he summoned Sun Wukong’s soul and superimposed it with his own body. The phantom of a crown appeared on his head, and so did the phantom of a tail on his body. The significance of these things escaped most on this peak. Huxian was unsurprised, but the Sea God Emperor’s eyes widened in realization.
Cha Ming gripped the Clear Sky Brush and summoned a massive amount of Grandmist Essence, the forced product of creation and destruction essence. He painted broad strokes at first, demarcating a boundary nine hundred feet in diameter. He lifted his hand and summoned 5,400 gray flags. They were each inscribed with a variety of five-element characters and formations, subroutines to the greater circle.
One after another, he formed hand seals and jammed the flags into the Heaven Ascension Platform. Everyone but the Sea God Emperor and Cha Ming were surprised to see that there were formation flag holders on the platform specially placed to accept them.
Straight line, hook, curve, dot. Vertical, horizontal. His brush weaved around the flags, using broad strokes at first, then filling the empty spaces with gentler, more detailed ones. Lines that resembled rivers blossomed with extra distribution streams and tributaries. Single trees blossomed into forests that came to life with every stroke of his brush.
Mountains gained stone after stone while metal rusted and crystalized, melted and hardened. Fires raged from a single wisp on a candle, while raging bonfires gained tiny details that most people missed while shielding their eyes.
The brush was wind incarnate, connecting and merging the flowing pattern together.
The brush was lightning, shattering and segmenting the formation into its key functions.
The brush was the beginning and the end.
A day passed while Cha Ming worked, and everyone could barely breathe as he did. Those who knew runic professions felt deep awe as they gazed upon the work of art they could never imitate. Finally, as the last line was drawn, Cha Ming poured a mountain of top-grade spirit stones onto the center. The formation howled as it soaked up the purest energy and glowed with gray light, shooting out lines of black, white, and all five colors of the elements.
Then… it stopped. It halted as though it had never been activated. Yet anyone who looked at it could see its frightening potential.
“Half-step-transcendent formation,” the Sea God Emperor finally said as Cha Ming sat down cross-legged to recover. “It looks like we have a new grand elder.”
Cha Ming’s crown and tail were still there, though they were much less substantial than before. He sat for a full twenty-four hours, recovering his state of mind before finally opening his eyes.
When he stood, he summoned a cauldron. It was a large ancient-looking cauldron made of jade, something he’d acquired on Jade Moon Planet. He seldom used it, for the power it consumed during activation was massive. But over the last few months, he’d seasoned it with medicinal ingredients and rainbow-fish scales.
The cauldron pulsed as Cha Ming fed it a thousand jin of Immortal Jade Core and brought it to life. These two preparations alone, the formation and the cauldron, were greater than anything other craftsmen had done in Haijing for the past ten thousand years.
After feeding the cauldron, Cha Ming summoned dozens of ingredients. He summoned his Grandmist flames to burn away what he didn’t need and stuck the rest inside the massive hundred-foot-wide cauldron. The surface was oddly transparent, so everyone could see what was happening within.
Gray flames chopped away mercilessly at the herbs inside it. They burned what they didn’t need and melted what they did. Some plants were untouched by the scorching heat, instead growing branches and sprouting as they combined and transformed.
Some places in the cauldron were stagnant, while others were perfectly mixed. Ingredients jumped around at the instruction of the all-purpose gray flame. It broke apart gems as Cha Ming tossed them in, while sometimes freezing and hardening other components. It was a dance of five elements, and the gray flame was leading.
Twelve hours passed before Cha Ming finally paused. He frowned and touched the cauldron, inspecting the ingredients with his transcendent soul. Then he shook his head. In an instant, the ingredients inside were reduced to less than ashes by the gray flame. Cha Ming sat down in meditation and pondered his failure.
Hours passed, and these hours felt like days. His audience was itching to see the outcome of this ferocious display of skill. After a full day passed, Cha Ming opened his eyes again; a faint twinkle of enlightenment lay within them.
He swiftly repeated the process, but this time, everyone could see a subtle change in the current of the flames. Some places were slightly cooler, and others slightly warmer. Everything seemed more tightly knit than before, making everyone wonder how all this was possible with a single flame.
Finally, when he reached the same point as
