Once Andy had the Fireball Technique thoroughly down, he returned to the Skill Transmission Hall to find Uncle Li. For some reason there were few others around that day, and he was able to spend the better part of an afternoon asking questions—a genuinely valuable session. He came away with the incantation for a defensive spell, the Diamond Shield, a metal-attribute technique, along with confirmation of several insights he had developed during his Fireball practice. Uncle Li also shared a handful of practical tips on spell usage along the way. It was, by any measure, an afternoon well spent.
Over the following months, Andy devoted himself to learning four or five low-grade Qi Refinement spells he was capable of mastering, then turned his attention to the business of talisman making. Painting required at minimum three tools: paper, a brush, and pigment. Talisman crafting likewise depended on three indispensable materials: talisman paper, a talisman brush, and cinnabar. Ordinary paper from the mundane world carried no spiritual energy and could not withstand it, making it unsuitable for talismans. Talisman paper was typically made from spiritually resonant plants, such as Seven Star Grass. The talisman brush was ideally made from spirit materials as well—at minimum, the bristles were usually taken from the mane or fur of a spirit beast. As for cinnabar, it was refined from the spiritual blood of low-grade spirit beasts.
Andy had none of these. What he did have was a rough knowledge of several low-grade talisman designs, gleaned from a book he had come across in the Archive Hall called Remnant Compendium of Basic Talismans. He had long since been practicing the symbols and formations on ordinary paper with an ordinary brush, going over them until they were second nature. The three materials were not particularly rare in the cultivation world, and a number of people in the Jian clan had them. After asking around for a while, Andy settled on a target: a child of eight or nine named Jian Li.
Jian Li had a clan uncle who held a mid-level position within the Jian clan and happened to be fond of talisman making in his spare time—he was certain to have low-grade supplies on hand. Jian Li himself was only at the third layer of Qi Refinement, at a stage where he needed a large supply of low-grade pills to advance. Andy offered three Spirit Gathering Pills in exchange for Jian Li's help procuring some low-grade talisman paper and cinnabar, and borrowing a talisman brush for a short while. Jian Li agreed without a moment's hesitation—his uncle doted on him, and what Andy was asking for was only the most basic-grade supplies, so that part would be no problem at all.
A few days later, Jian Li came to Andy on his own initiative, handing over two dozen sheets of low-grade talisman paper, a small vial containing a modest amount of cinnabar, and an ordinary-looking talisman brush. On his way out, he added that if Andy needed more in the future, the same rate would apply—three Spirit Gathering Pills per exchange. Andy could only smile bitterly to himself. Those pills had been saved up during his months away from cultivation practice—he'd been receiving one per month, and his entire half-year's supply was already gone. He had nothing left to exchange with.
……
Just under half a year later, on the day Andy turned fifteen, a bundle arrived for him as expected. Inside were two Diamond Shield talismans and three egg-sized stones of different colors. The following day, Andy was duly escorted out of the Nanhua Mountain valley, bundle and all.
Everything he had in the world at that moment amounted to the bundle the clan had given him, a dozen-odd talismans he had made himself, a small knife-shaped low-grade magical artifact, and the little medicine vial that Jian Xin'er had pressed into his hands at the last moment, containing seven or eight Spirit Gathering Pills. Jian Xin'er was already at the eighth layer of Qi Refinement, one of the clan's core disciples, well past the point where low-grade pills like these were of any use to her. She must have set them aside especially for him. Thinking about it, Andy accepted without putting up much of an argument.
He and Xin'er had grown up together, practically from the cradle. He still remembered when she had first been brought into the Jian clan at two or three years old, crying every night for her parents, unable to sleep—it had fallen to Andy to tell her stories until she drifted off. Night after night, the boy who was hardly older than her would talk on and on, spinning tales she had never heard before: the Yellow Emperor's great battle with Chiyou, the goddess Nüwa repairing the heavens and shaping humanity from clay, and on and on. This went on for over a year, stopping only once the two of them began their cultivation. To Xin'er, this "Brother Wugen" was family in every sense of the word.
Later, as Andy poured himself into cultivation, he spent less and less time with his little sister. Then Xin'er, blessed with exceptional aptitude and rapid progress, was singled out by the clan elders as a core disciple and given special instruction, and meetings became even rarer—although they lived within the same valley, an entire year might pass without them crossing paths. Yet every time Xin'er did see him, she would grab his arm and call out "Brother Wugen, Brother Wugen" in an endless stream, and every time it brought a flicker of warmth to a heart that had grown used to mockery.
She had praised him for having a talent in talisman making—and there might actually be something to that. The first time Andy attempted a Fireball Talisman, he had succeeded after only a dozen or so failures, and his success rate had never dropped below two in ten afterward. He had ultimately produced five or six Fireball Talismans from that first batch. After that, he traded all his remaining Spirit Gathering Pills for more talisman paper and kept practicing both the Fireball Talisman and the Diamond Shield Talisman. After burning through more than a hundred and several tens of sheets in total, he had managed to produce two Diamond Shield Talismans and over a dozen Fireball Talismans—a result he was quite satisfied with. His success rate was already considerably higher than what the rumors suggested; whether the rumors exaggerated the difficulty or he genuinely had some aptitude for it, he wasn't sure.
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The pity of it was that he hadn't had enough time to refine his skill with either talisman further before hitting the age limit and being sent out. He could have asked Xin'er to put in a word for him—given how cherished she was within the clan, there was a good chance she could have bought him a little more time. But Andy had refused to consider it. Something in him resisted accepting her help; it made him feel useless, in need of protection from a girl younger than himself.
For now, his plan was to reach a cultivator gathering place in the northern part of Gun Prefecture as quickly as possible—a place called Liuyun Market. Liuyun Market was jointly operated by two local cultivation families, the Liu and Yun clans, along with a minor sect called the Leaving Fire Sect. The market was primarily open to early- and mid-stage Qi Refinement cultivators and served as a place to buy and sell goods. Andy intended to make and sell talismans there, and use any earnings to purchase pills to advance his cultivation.
The distance from the Nanhua Mountain valley to Liuyun Market was over two thousand kilometers, passing through a number of areas—all of which Andy had committed to memory in careful detail. He was currently on a slope along the outer edge of the Nanhua Mountains, having walked mountain roads for an entire day. Two routes lay before him. The closer one would take him over the hill ahead and into a fairly large forest, through which he would need to walk for three or four days before crossing several smaller ridges to finally emerge from the Nanhua range. At his current pace, traveling by day and resting at night, it would take roughly seven or eight days.
But the forest was not to be taken lightly. Multiple texts in the Jian clan's Archive Hall had mentioned that it was occasionally home to several types of low-grade spirit beasts, and that a second-grade one—a single-horned Kui Ox, seven or eight meters in length—had even been sighted there before. True, the Jian clan's higher-stage cultivators had spent years clearing out the spirit beasts in the vicinity, but given the creatures' formidable reproductive rates, there was no guarantee that some low-grade stragglers hadn't crept back in somewhere.
As for what exactly gave rise to spirit beasts, the cultivation world had no single agreed-upon explanation. Some held that ordinary animals, insects, and birds, having lived for a long time in areas of unusually dense spiritual energy or having consumed spirit herbs and spirit objects, underwent a sudden transformation into creatures possessing their own spiritual power. Others believed that spirit beasts had existed since the primordial age, when heaven and earth first separated from the void—predating humanity itself. In that view, the ancient spirit beasts had been beings of extraordinary power, and the spirit beasts of today were merely distant descendants carrying only a faint trace of that ancient bloodline.
Whichever account was true, one thing was certain: spirit beasts not only possessed spiritual power comparable to that of human cultivators, but also cultivated and grew according to their own instincts, and their power was even measured in a system remarkably similar to the one used for human cultivators. Based on the strength of their spiritual power, spirit beasts were classified from first-grade to seventh-grade. First-grade spirit beasts corresponded roughly to Qi Refinement cultivators; second- through fourth-grade beasts corresponded to early-, middle-, and late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators; and fifth- through seventh-grade beasts corresponded to Core Formation cultivators. There were even rumors of spirit beasts above the seventh grade, though the Jian clan's texts never mentioned them in any detail—such creatures were presumably beyond the reach of a small cultivation family like the Jian clan entirely.
Spirit beasts were not as intelligent as human cultivators, but they typically possessed innate supernatural abilities or simply bodies of formidable toughness—either way, their strength was not inferior to that of human cultivators at the equivalent level. Some species were even considerably stronger than their human counterparts at the same stage. Even so, every year a great many cultivators willingly risked their lives to venture into hidden spirit beast territories and hunt them down. A portion of those cultivators ultimately died in the claws and jaws of spirit beasts, though the beasts themselves suffered far greater losses in return—but with their remarkable reproductive rates, a short span of time was all they needed to replenish their numbers. What drove cultivators to keep coming, heedless of the danger, was the simple fact that spirit beasts were immensely valuable from head to tail.
Any spirit beast of the second grade or above would have cultivated something within its body known as a spirit core—analogous to the dantian in a human cultivator. A spirit beast's spiritual power was concentrated almost entirely within this core, and once lost, the beast would be stripped of its cultivation and would almost certainly die. For human cultivators, these spirit cores were extraordinarily precious. They could serve as materials for forging magical artifacts and even spirit treasures, and when used as the primary ingredient in pill-refining, the resulting elixirs were a crucial means of advancing cultivation and breaking through bottlenecks. But it wasn't just the spirit core—a beast's horns, scales, claws, and many other body parts were typically of exceptional hardness or naturally endowed with remarkable properties of their own, all suitable as raw materials for crafting magical artifacts and spirit treasures. The Archive Hall alone had dozens of books dedicated entirely to the subject of spirit beasts—a clear sign of both the creatures' sheer variety and the importance cultivators placed on them.