Despite his diligent and grueling practice, Andy had only managed to reach the fourth layer of Qi Refinement by the time he turned fourteen. With just one year left before he turned fifteen, advancing to the fifth layer was out of the question. Cultivation was a pursuit that defied the natural order to begin with, and the higher one climbed, the harder the road became—difficulty multiplied at every step. At his current pace, even with a Spirit Gathering Pill every single month, it would take him at least seven or eight years to reach the fifth layer.
Since staying with the Jian clan was no longer an option, he set aside his cultivation practice altogether and began preparing for the "experience-seeking journey" that awaited him in a year's time. The Jian clan had a place not unlike a library, called the Archive Hall, which housed a considerable collection of writings gathered or personally penned by successive generations of Jian clan cultivators—records of notable affairs and curious tales from the cultivation world. If he was going out into that world, he would need to know a great deal more about it.
The Archive Hall was managed by a shriveled, heavyset middle-aged man. Andy bribed him with two of his saved Spirit Gathering Pills, and in exchange the man agreed to let Andy read freely within the hall for half a month—though nothing was to be taken out.
Ever since he had begun cultivating the Art of the Chasing Wave, Andy had noticed that his hearing, eyesight, and all other senses had grown remarkably sharp, and his mind seemed to grow keener by the day as well. The further his cultivation advanced, the more pronounced this sharpening became. Since reaching the fourth layer of Qi Refinement, if he focused his full attention, he could hear a cricket crawling across a dirt path over twenty meters away, or make out a single strand of hair lying in the grass a dozen-odd meters from him. As for his memory, he wouldn't claim it was truly perfect—but it wasn't far off. It was said that once a cultivator reached the sixth layer of Qi Refinement or above, most could achieve a truly perfect memory.
For this reason, even with over a thousand books in the Archive Hall, Andy moved through them quickly. He gave each book a brief pass first; if it contained useful information, he read it carefully—if not, he set it aside. Even so, working his way through the entire Archive Hall in half a month left his head aching from overuse. The half-month's harvest was nevertheless extraordinary. Andy finally gained a broad understanding of the outside world, and of the cultivation world of Jinyan Kingdom in particular, giving him at least a general direction for the journey that lay ahead.
He had no intention of deluding himself into thinking that the moment he stepped outside the Nanhua Mountain valley, fortune would simply rain down on him with piles of wonderful things waiting to be claimed. If he wanted to keep cultivating, he would need a reliable means of continuously obtaining pills and elixirs to advance his cultivation. Without that, given his aptitude, he would likely still be below the tenth layer of Qi Refinement even at a hundred years old—and with a lifespan little different from an ordinary mortal's, he would have no chance to pursue the cultivation path any further.
From what Andy had gathered in the texts, there were only two roads open to him. The first was to join a cultivation sect.
Jinyan Kingdom had no fewer than a thousand cultivation families and sects of every size, but the most powerful were the universally acknowledged Three Sects and Four Gates—seven great factions in all. These seven behemoths had nearly monopolized every cultivation resource in Jinyan Kingdom, from spirit herbs and elixirs to precious mineral deposits of every kind. All the smaller and mid-sized forces could only survive in their shadow, dependent on the goodwill of one great faction or another. Some smaller forces were branches of one of the seven; others paid annual tribute to a great sect in exchange for recognition and protection. Even independent cultivation families had ties to the seven factions running in every direction. Some families were formally affiliated with a particular sect and served primarily as a pipeline of talented cultivation prospects into the sect's ranks. Most cultivation families traced their founders back to high-stage members of one of the seven factions, cultivators who had rendered outstanding service and been permitted to establish their own lineages—such families typically maintained close cooperative relationships with their parent sect. Should a sect find itself in danger, these families, understanding full well that the lips grow cold when the teeth are gone, would step forward and fight in its defense.
Joining one of the great sects meant taking on assigned duties, and as long as those duties were fulfilled, one could enjoy a corresponding set of benefits—elixirs and pills among them. Everyone knew the wisdom of finding shade under a great tree, and so whenever one of the seven great factions opened its doors to new disciples, the young cultivators of Jinyan Kingdom flocked to compete for a spot. With his current fourth-layer Qi Refinement cultivation and a False Spirit Root of the Five-Element variety, there was not a single major cultivation sect that would accept Andy as a disciple—and most mid- and small-sized sects probably wouldn't want him either.
Even if luck somehow smiled on him and he managed to join some minor sect, such a sect would possess extremely limited cultivation resources, concentrating all of them on its more talented elite disciples. There was no way Andy would benefit from any of it—more likely, he'd find himself burdened with endless miscellaneous chores, with barely any time left for cultivation. That road was closed to him for now. There was, however, a second path—one that offered at least a slim possibility. That was to master a specialized skill, something that could earn him a living in the cultivation world.
When speaking of specialized skills, one inevitably came back to the four most coveted professions in the cultivation world. Besides the Alchemist, ranked first, there were the Artifact Forger, the Formation Master, and the Talisman Maker.
An Artifact Forger was a craftsman who forged the special magical artifacts used exclusively by cultivators. Like Alchemists, they required the full backing of a sect before they could be cultivated—nobody became an Artifact Forger without having personally ruined dozens of artifacts first, building up the necessary experience. The materials required were likewise precious spirit objects, and ordinary cultivators had no opportunity to get their hands on such things, let alone forge with them repeatedly. As for Formation Masters, in addition to a solid foundation in artifact forging, they also needed to command an extensive and esoteric knowledge of formation principles. Such people were rarer still—a mid-sized sect might have just one Formation Master to its name, and smaller sects had no hope of possessing one at all.
Last in the ranking was the Talisman Maker—the crafter of talismans. Talismans were something cultivators made frequent use of. In simple terms, a talisman was created when a Talisman Maker sealed a particular spell and its associated spiritual power into a specially prepared paper medium, producing an object that held that spell's full potency. When a cultivator needed to use it, a few short incantation words and a small infusion of their own spiritual power into the paper was all it took to instantly trigger the sealed spell—far quicker and more convenient than casting the spell directly. More importantly, once made, a talisman could be sold or given to other cultivators, who could use it just as easily.
Take the Fireball Talisman as an example—a talisman with the low-grade Fireball Technique sealed inside. The Fourth Elder of the Jian clan had once given one to a child of his own bloodline, a small girl from the same cohort as Andy who possessed spirit roots of the metal, wood, and water attributes. Having no fire spirit root, she would normally have had no way of casting the Fireball Technique at all. But one day she had produced a yellow slip of paper roughly ten centimeters long and five or six centimeters wide, covered in a flame-shaped marking and a series of strange red symbols that resembled wriggling earthworms, and with a flick of her wrist had sent it hurtling forward right in front of Andy and several others—where it instantly transformed into a blazing fireball, giving them all quite a shock.
The little girl, seeing their dumbfounded expressions, seemed perfectly satisfied, clapped her hands with a smug look, and walked away. Andy spent a long time afterward asking around before he finally understood that the peculiar paper covered in strange symbols had been a talisman. The uses of talismans went well beyond mere convenience—they had a variety of remarkable applications that made them, alongside pills and elixirs, among the most commonly used objects in a cultivator's arsenal.
If talismans had shortcomings, there were two. The first was that talismans were consumables. Offensive talismans like the Fireball Talisman were single-use—once activated, the talisman burned to ash. Defensive or supplementary talismans could be used several times over, but once the spiritual power sealed within was exhausted, they too would spontaneously combust and turn to ash. As a result, among talismans of the same grade, defensive ones always cost a little more than offensive ones. Given that each use meant one less talisman, most cultivators were reluctant to reach for a talisman unless the situation was pressing.
The second shortcoming was the abysmally low success rate in making them. Even the most basic early Qi Refinement talismans—the Fireball Talisman, the Diamond Talisman, and the like—would typically require a novice to fail dozens or even hundreds of times before producing a single successful one. Even experienced Talisman Makers with thousands of attempts behind them rarely succeeded more than three times out of ten. Higher-grade talismans demanded better talisman paper, cinnabar, and inscribing brushes, on top of a success rate that dropped sharply from there.