Chương 147: Chapter 146: The Jade Slips

Yang entered his cave residence with the jade chest tucked under one arm. He set it on the table, and went to draw a bath, while he hadn't done anything physically exerting, he was still feeling in need of a good soak after the competition. He stepped into the water and relaxed back, letting out a deep sigh as he felt his whole body loosen up. He really had been working on too many things recently. Once the other two talisman events were over, he decided that he would take a few days off from working on talismans.

Once he felt he had spent sufficient time and was about to fall asleep, he stood up and left the bath. Yang dried himself off and then put on a clean set of robes, loosely tied, deciding to forgo the outer layer since he was not planning on going anywhere. He dried and combed his hair and let it fall freely on his back and carried the chest to his bed. He set it beside him, and arranged two pillows against the wall to lean against. He was in an indolent mood and intended to go through the jade slips relaxing back.

He lifted the lid and peeked inside. He decided to start with the newer slips. The primordial language ones were not going anywhere, and it's not like he could read them yet anyway. He removed all the newer jade slips and spread them across the bed, then picked one up randomly and looked at it properly for the first time.

At the Crystal Water Pavilion, he had not had the chance to examine them carefully, being too occupied with the conversation and with what was inside the slips rather than the jade slips themselves. Now, with time and no one to distract him, he turned the piece over slowly in his hands. Then he sat up and reached back into the chest for one of the older ones. He held both, one in each hand for a while, and let out a short laugh. He understood now why the older ones were considered precious.

The newer jade slip was a tool, well-engineered and clearly effective, but unmistakably a tool. Looking closely, he could see it was not even a single piece of jade. Two thin layers had been sandwiched together, a faint seam visible between the plates if he looked at the right angle. The front face was carved with elaborate inscriptions, almost identical across all the slips but not exactly, and as a talisman crafter, Yang could see what a casual observer might miss.

The inscription letters were perhaps eighty percent consistent across the set, and the style of the carving, what amounted to the handwriting, was also different from slip to slip. Multiple hands had made these. He also realized, with a slight jolt, that a talisman crafter storing information in a jade slip did not mean they had made it. Jade slips were tools made by tool refiners.

The elders, or rather the sect, had almost certainly purchased or commissioned the blank jade slips and added their own knowledge afterward. He felt a small jolt of excitement. Even if it was the most basic tool, he was holding something made by a tool refiner. The older slip on the other hand, was something else entirely. It was a single piece of jade, roughly shaped into a small rectangular form. The inscriptions carved into it were shallow and difficult to see in the cave light.

But when he held it, he felt what he had not had the presence of mind to notice at the restaurant. It felt alive. Not like a living being, rather it felt closer to a spirit plant, something that carried its own thrum of qi rather than simply storing it. The older jade had a pulse to it, faint but steady, like a circuit that had never stopped running. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Yang had no doubt how these slips had survived for so long.

Whatever jade the primordial cultivators had used, it was not the same jade that was used to make the newer jade slips. This jade was something that no longer existed, the deposits long since exhausted by those same ancient cultivators who had shaped the world through their experiments. Yang was too inexperienced to understand the mechanism, but holding both versions side by side made the difference clear enough.

He turned both over in his hands once more, comparing, and then set the older one carefully aside and returned to the newer slips. He picked one at random and brought it to his forehead. The first one was filled with what looked like mathematical equations. He spent a long time with it before he understood what he was looking at. It was an elder's extensive notes on the correlations between Primordial Script and the inscription language currently used in talisman crafting.

Dense, technical, and almost entirely beyond him at his current level. He placed it back in the chest. He picked another. It was a reference collection. Thousands of talisman inscriptions arranged by category. Water-related, fire-related, earth-related, air-related, and sections for more esoteric and advanced elements beyond those four. Not all of them were useful to him now.

Many were closely related to each other, minor variations on the same base inscription, and he recognised this methodology because he had employed it himself. Learning closely related inscriptions helped a crafter develop an intuitive understanding of how individual components could be added, removed, or substituted. It was how you learned the language of talisman crafting rather than merely memorising individual pieces. It's impossible to learn every talisman that existed.

But if you understood why and how each inscription worked, you could create anything. Yang skimmed through several hundred inscriptions and set it down. He would return to it before the defensive and offensive events. There was not enough time to go through all of it, but even a small addition to what he knew could help. He had no illusions about winning those two events. But he wanted to make a good showing. The next one he picked up opened his eyes wide.

He had been closing them automatically while using jade slips, he realised. It was a dictionary. An enormous one. Primordial Script on one side, the current talisman inscription language on the other. But there were more languages besides. Scripts he did not recognise at all were mapped alongside the others. He was blind to most of what was there, knowing of only two of the scripts involved, but he filed away the existence of the others to look into later on.

He picked up the pace after that, going through the remaining slips more quickly. Spending too long on each one would take days. Several hours later he was done. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. Senior Brother Jiang Zhen Hao had been right. Most of the new slips were the elders' extensive notes on talisman craft and reference materials for learning the primordial script.

There were also a few slips containing information on other inscription languages entirely, though Yang had not yet worked out why those were included. It was really a treasure. Not something that would immediately make him better at talisman work. But the deeper he had gone into the collection, the more he had understood what it was actually for. These elders had not given him talismans to copy. They had given him the tools to eventually design his own.

That was something he had wanted for a long time and had not known how to reach. The chest had given him a full path toward it. He had been circling it for months, experimenting with card-logic applied to talisman inscriptions, burning his hands, producing original results that sometimes worked and sometimes went dramatically wrong. Everything in this chest pointed toward a more rigorous foundation for exactly that kind of work.

And looking at the correlation notes, at the dictionary, at the reference collection of inscriptions, he thought for the first time with clarity about what he wanted to eventually build. Reusable talismans. Inscribed objects that held a function and could be activated more than once. Closer in principle to the cards of the Cardwright World than to the single-use paper talismans used in the cultivation world. He did not know yet if such a thing was possible within the rules of talisman craft. He had no one to ask.

But he had, now, the materials that might eventually let him find out. He looked at the chest and reached for one of the older primordial slips. He could not read it. He held it anyway, feeling the low thrum of it against his palm, and stayed there in the quiet of the late afternoon, thinking about where all of this was eventually going.