“Teacher Sun,” Cha Ming said, “what would happen if an earthquake caused this chamber to collapse while I’m inside the Clear Sky World?” If he was going to cultivate, he wasn’t going to do it in normal time. Time contraction was one of the few advantages he had, and he was going to use it.
The ghostly figure of the Monkey King appeared beside him. His hand on his chin, he walked over to a wall and knocked it with its staff. Surprisingly, a chunk of rock broke off. “It’s stable, but who knows how long it will last? If the chamber collapses on your entrance, we would still be able to open it again. Unfortunately, the rock accumulated outside would rush in. You’d need to attack the rocky layer outside the portal with your staff from within the Clear Sky World, but that’s a dangerous thing to do, since spatial passageways can be unstable. Causing one to collapse would devastate the Clear Sky World.”
Cha Ming nodded. He looked around and threw out hundreds of formation flags, setting a careful perimeter around the crystalized gold evanescence. He didn’t reinforce the chamber— that would be foolhardy. He might be a strong cultivator, but fighting against the mighty forces of shifting tectonic plates was an exercise in futility.
Instead, he created a protective bubble. Thousands of top-grade spirit stones crumbled to fine dust, feeding the formation and its protective runic characters. If the room did fall on them, at least the space around the portal would be clear. He doubted loose rocks and gravel would be able to force their way into the spherical shield, which could fend off several blows from even a half-step-rune-carving cultivator.
After inspecting the runic bubble one final time, Cha Ming hopped into the gray portal leading to the world of white. Jade Moon Garden floated where it usually did. A thin, transparent bubble surrounded it, separating the time-accelerated interior from the endless whiteness outside. He floated to the mountaintop where he often trained. There, he found the qi-gathering formation he’d set up months ago.
A pile of top-grade spirit stones—which he’d replenished with the stock he’d obtained from exchanging ore over the past several weeks—would be crushed and converted by the formation into the five basic elements. These pure and concentrated elemental energies would be easy to absorb by his now-healed core.
Cha Ming sat down and breathed deeply, sinking into a trance. He observed his core, which floated in his Dantian, its runic structure taking up eight tenths of the space within. Then he began to draw in five-element energy and pushed against the confines of the core. The solid structure, completely healed from damage save for five small imperfections, began to creak slightly as it expanded.
He fed it, bit by bit, expanding against the tight restriction of his core. Whenever the bubble gave way, he increased the amount of qi he stored within it, forcing the runic structure outward little by little. This happened several times. The tiny increases pressed up against the invisible but firm barrier. Then, when cracks began to appear all over the exterior shell and showed no signs of healing, Cha Ming finally sucked in sharply, drawing in all the elemental energy he could from the top-grade spirit stones. His core drank greedily. It expanded.
Crystal dust piled up around him as energy surged into the formation. Unsurprisingly, the crystals he’d prepared weren’t enough. Cha Ming summoned the rest of his top-grade spirit stones and placed them on the formation. His prolonged “inhalation” sucked a third of the remaining crystals dry as the formation rushed to convert them to the appropriate elemental energies. They hovered around him like a colored mosaic, his body restricting their inflow as his core, which had just broken through, began building upon itself.
The core expanded. The runic structure expanded. As it did, the patches of five colors grew. The black and white lines on his core did as well. They formed larger solid islands on the perfect sphere. Where there were no colors, where there were no black and white islands, there was gray, filling in the gaps where nothing else fit in. The gray was a mixture of all five colors, a mixture of black and white. It was the beginning and the end.
Building this final layer took far longer than it had in the past. It grew by the same diameter as last time, but the increased diameter meant a much greater surface area and volume. Then, when the runic structure was built, and the gaps were filled, the core began to hum in satisfaction. The surface vibrated and began to meld with his Dantian, which was now fully occupied.
The melding was slow and gradual, like a pill that took time to take effect. In a way, it reminded Cha Ming of the process of crafting a runic pill. At first, everything was melted down, like liquid qi. The qi was formed into shapes, like foundational pillars, which he built up into a complex array. Then everything would collapse on itself and form a spherical pill.
Like any pill, it needed an outer shell. No pill seemed to be complete without it. The melding of his Dantian membrane was much like slowly roasting a pill at its melting point, creating a lustrous surface free of imperfections, ideal for inscribing a pill seal. In a sense, rune carving was to his core what pill seals were to pills. And like pills, there were likely grades to these carvings. He wondered what quality of seal he would end up with, if such a thing really did exist for rune carving.
Weeks
