Chương 31: Volume 2 Chapter 4

Though somewhat lagging behind in terms of footprint, Technique Hall was certainly one of the tallest and most imposing buildings in the Outer sect, a veritable obelisk of gray stone shot through with veins of red, green, and silver that loomed over the surrounding buildings like a dark giant.

During the mornings and evenings, its shadow stretched across a significant portion of the surrounding streets, and it made the nearby Outer Sect Archive—an austere edifice of unadorned silver granite and doric columns—look positively welcoming in comparison. It stood isolated at the center of a large square, and though the doors were kept wide open during the day and there was nothing stopping anyone from approaching, passing disciples instinctively seemed to give the hall a wide berth.

Despite its importance, Calvin could count the number of times he'd been inside on one hand with fingers left over. One of those occasions had been during his very first day at the sect, when an older disciple had led him and a group of his freshly accepted peers on a tour of Outer Village and its many Halls and amenities. Another had been when he'd given the very same tour to Gwen and her cohort several years later. There were a number of reasons for that, some better than others. The most obvious was cost.

Just entering the first level of the hall cost a staggering fifty contribution points. For each level you went above that—where rarer, stronger, and more niche techniques were stored—you were charged again. Then of course each hour spent inside cost yet more points, and you still had to pay to receive the actual techniques you selected rather than the overviews and descriptions available to browse!

A single visit could easily burn through hundreds of points in an afternoon, and you might not even find anything that truly suited your needs! The other big reason was that, in addition to the staff of Inner disciples that manned the hall, Technique Hall was constantly host to an Elder or Hall Master in at least the Soul realm, their unveiled aura a constant pressure that weighed down on the mind and spirit of everyone that passed too close to the hall.

At first, Calvin had avoided such places like the plague, fearing that such an advanced cultivator might detect and seize the Scroll at any moment. These days, he was less worried about that, but he still found it vaguely uncomfortable to be so explicitly watched by someone so powerful.

Sure he knew intellectually that a cultivator's aura and spiritual senses were unrelated—a Soul realm elder did not need to announce their presence to observe your every action—but it was like the difference between being inside a large building versus a tiny mountain cave. In both cases you might be crushed if the ceiling collapsed, but within a spacious building there was rarely the sense of the countless tons of earth above pressing in on you.

The last time he'd visited the hall was nearly a year ago, when he'd received a limited time access pass in his goody bag. He'd been reasonably flush with points at the time and had decided to take a look around rather than try to trade it away. The pass had only been good for the lowest level of the hall, and only for two hours, but it had been interesting to look around. He hadn't purchased any techniques, but it had certainly expanded his horizons and opened his eyes to some of what was possible with qi.

In general, Calvin much preferred to spend his time and contribution points in the nearby archive. The books, scrolls, tablets, manuals, and memory jades available there covered a far greater range of topics than the more focused selection of technique manuals in Technique Hall, and some of them you could even peruse without needing to pay an additional fee—at least so long as you did not try to remove them from the archive.

Spending time there did still cost contribution points, but every disciple received eight hours of free archive time each month, and Calvin always tried to make the most of it. As much as the Scroll had taught him, there was so much he didn't know. Each month he only seemed to discover fresh gaps in his understanding of cultivation and the wider world, each book and scroll spawning new questions as he slowly discovered how much more there was still to learn.

Today however, he had a specific goal, one that could not be met at the archive. While it did include some general information about cultivation methods, martial arts, techniques, and so forth, specific details of how to learn and perform such things were reserved for Technique Hall. Thus, if he wanted to cover for some of the weaknesses he'd discovered during the emergency mission, there was only one place for him to go.

Thus, with the rising sun at his back and his sect robes immaculate, Calvin climbed the steps up to the entrance to Technique Hall. He could feel the elder's presence like a gentle touch on his shoulders and a shadow on his face, unobtrusive but utterly unmistakable. It made the back of his neck itch. He stopped just outside, the two great doors—thick stone slabs that when closed fit so snugly together that it made the building appear to not even have an entrance—open to let in the morning sun and breeze.

His hand drifted to his left wrist, confirming that the bracelet from which hung his sect token was still there. It obviously was, and he hid the nervous gesture by adjusting his sleeve. Then he resolutely stepped inside, gritting his teeth against the distinctly unpleasant feeling of stepping through an ice-cold cascading waterfall filled with hands, the powerful formation set up over the building probing his token and spirit.

It vanished after only a moment and he was through, the bustle of the village outside replaced by the silent stillness of the hall. Despite the stark exterior, the hall's entryway was warmly lit by hovering spheres of pale yellow light that hung in clusters near the ceiling or moved in slow spirals along the walls.

The floor was bare stone, but the walls were paneled with countless elongated, palm sized wooden hexagons, many of them carved with reliefs depicting everything from detailed faces to landscapes to excerpts from famous texts. They came in a wide range of colors, not just the typical rainbow shades but also honey-brown, rich ebony, and a vibrant green like the first buds of spring.

The bored-looking Inner disciple sitting behind the counter that ran the full length of the far wall looked up as he entered, studying Calvin through half-lidded eyes. His long pink hair was pulled tightly back into a high ponytail and a pair of silver rings adorned the corner of his left eyebrow. He waited silently for Calvin to approach, only opening his mouth when Calvin stopped a few steps away from the desk and bowed politely.

"Name?" he requested dully, sounding like he was holding back a yawn.

"Calvin of Six-Swan Pond," he answered calmly.

"Realm?"

"Foundation." The pink-haired disciple marked something out of sight behind the counter without looking down.

"Have you previously visited a Technique Hall location within the past six months?" Calvin shook his head. The Inner disciple raised an eyebrow—the unpierced one—and he quickly corrected himself.

"No, senior brother." He made another mark.

"And, last question. Will you be paying with contribution points or tickets today?"

"Contribution points." The man sighed heavily, wistfully looking past Calvin's shoulder at the open doors. He spoke slowly and carefully, pronouncing each syllable of every word with all the enthusiasm of a dead man walking.

"By entering the first floor of the Technique Repository, the disciple agrees for the Hall to withdraw fifty contribution points from the disciple's account. This charge shall be repeated for each subsequent floor ascended beyond the first. Descending from and returning to a floor previously charged for during the course of the singular visit to the Technique Repository shall not constitute ascending additional floors.

For each hour spent within the Technique Repository beyond the first, ten points shall be withdrawn from the disciple's account, increasing by ten additional points for each floor ascended beyond the first." He took a deep breath and closed his eyes before continuing in the same dull monotone.

"Should you choose to purchase a technique from a floor within the Technique Repository, please speak with the floor's attending disciple. Prices are marked on all shelves and sample displays. Should you be unsure of a technique's price, that may be verified or determined by the attending disciple. Unmarked techniques are not free. Please do not remove sample displays from the Technique Repository. All purchased techniques will be provided in the form of single-use jade slips."

He opened his eyes and for the first time his voice gained a fragment of inflection, "Please remember, techniques purchased from the Technique Repository fall under Sect Code 791. b and may not be shared freely with others. See your sect guidebook for more details." He slumped forward like a puppet with its strings cut, arms bracing heavily against the smooth stone countertop and eyes downcast.

"Any questions?" Calvin stared at the Inner disciple for several long moments. The man's eyes looked…empty.

"Please forgive this junior's impertinence, senior, but…are you alright, senior brother?" The pink haired Inner disciple slowly looked up. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and looked back down at the counter.

"Do I look alright, junior?" he asked through clenched teeth? Calvin nervously wet his lips.

"Not really?" The man's head dropped to the counter, forehead smacking loudly against the polished stone.

"Door's on the right, floor directory on the door. Fees for each floor start when you open the next door. There's a clock over the door in every room. There, that's all of your questions answered, you can go up now." Calvin looked between the disciple and the door he'd indicated. He'd seen plenty of his fellow Outer sect disciples look like this senior, or worse, but there was something deeply troubling about seeing an Inner disciple so… despondent.

Especially in the middle of the Outer sect where anyone could see them. Typically, they cared far too much about their standing and dignity to let their lessers see them in such a state.

"Senior," he began hesitantly, not entirely certain what he wanted to say, but the Inner disciple interrupted him before he could come up with anything.

"Go. Upstairs or out. Your choice." Calvin closed his mouth. The Inner disciple wasn't looking at him, but he nodded anyway and went. Though he'd never personally gone up past the first floor of the Technique Repository, Calvin was generally familiar with how the space was organized. Lulu and Wallis had both purchased some number of techniques from the hall and had told him plenty of stories, and of course the overall directory was available even before entering the repository itself.

The first floor primarily contained techniques suitable for those in the Gathering realm, not that that made them useless to those of higher cultivation. Rather they were primarily the sort of techniques that required only internal control of one's qi rather than consumption, or were highly efficient in its usage. Qi was not an easily renewable resource to those in the Gathering realm as it was to higher realm cultivators, and thus they could not afford to be wasteful.

Most of the techniques found on the first floor were various martial arts, weapons techniques, footworks, breathing techniques, and so on. There was also a tiny selection of techniques related to poison and herbalism, as well as a few introductory level formation and talisman related techniques. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. The second floor was much like the first, except the techniques were somewhat more advanced.

The focus remained on martial arts and similar techniques, but ones more suitable for those in the early stages of the Foundation realm. Both Lulu and Wallis had visited the floor a number of times throughout their time at the sect, and he'd heard far too many wistful stories about some of the more expensive techniques on the floor they'd been unable to afford. The third floor was when things began to get interesting.

The techniques there were aimed at disciples in the middle stages of the Foundation realm and Calvin had heard that it was the floor with the greatest selection of techniques in the Outer sect. You could find a little bit of everything there, and that was the floor he was planning to visit today. Past the third floor, Calvin had heard that the repository became increasingly niche and esoteric. He did not know anyone who'd gone any further than the fourth, and so his knowledge was rather spotty.

The fourth floor supposedly focused primarily on techniques that aided with crafting—alchemy, refining, and so forth. The fifth floor similarly focused on techniques related to creating talismans and formations. The sixth was supposed to have techniques for peak Foundation realm disciples preparing to advance to the Core realm, but apparently the handful of manuals held there all had costs in the tens of thousands of points.

Finally the seventh floor was dedicated to unorthodox techniques and partially recovered techniques from other sects in the province and beyond, except apparently it was all just informational. Outer disciples could learn about the techniques, but not actually how to perform them. In all honesty, it all sounded rather underwhelming. That was another reason Calvin had never truly investigated the hall in any detail.

The Inner and Core sect were both said to have their own equivalent halls, ones with much lower prices, superior selections, and higher quality techniques. Before the most recent mission, he's never seen the point of investing so many contribution points into one or two techniques that would more than likely be rendered fully obsolete in just a handful of years. Heading up the steps, Calvin entirely bypassed the first and second floors, heading directly to the third floor and resolutely pushing open the door.

He could practically feel contribution points spill from his savings like sand through his fingers, spurring him forward. The third floor of the repository was every bit as grand as he'd heard, a square room with a soaring ceiling and bookshelves laden down with endless rows of thin booklets that stretched from the floor to the ceiling high above. Three levels of ornate walkways ringed the room, allowing access to the upper shelves.

There was no typical way to ascend up to the walkways, but they were only spaced some ten feet apart. Anyone who could not easily jump such a distance did not belong on this floor. At the center of the room stood a round desk, at the center of which sat another Inner disciple. She was a severe-looking young woman, her golden-blonde hair gathered into a pair of tight buns that almost looked like ears and a serious expression on her face.

She had her face buried in a thick, leather-bound tome and barely bothered to look up when he entered before returning to her reading. Calvin nodded to her out of courtesy, but was otherwise content to ignore her. Every minute wasted cost him half a contribution point. He had points to spend, but not so very wastefully. With that in mind, he wasted no time in beginning to look around the hall. Like Lulu had said, the place was a disorganized mess.

There must have been tens of thousands of books surrounding him, but they were organized with all the care of a blind, deaf child. Their covers bore no labels, only prices, and as often as not those were situated such that you had to pull the book off the shelf to see it. The first few he checked were a perfect example of the disorder. The first was a niche water-based self healing technique priced at two-hundred contribution points.

The book beside it—superficially identical but for the price listed on the bottom corner of the back cover—was a thunder-based sword art intended to disorient surroundings enemies and cost nearly five times as much. Thankfully, Calvin had a secret weapon. One that made him confident that he'd find at least something useful before he burned through too many contribution points.

He was slightly leery of actually making use of it, but nothing had happened the last time he'd been here, so as long as he wasn't too obvious about it… Replacing the thin booklet describing the thunder technique in its place on the shelf, Calvin slowly ran his fingers along the spines of the next few books as though deciding which one to examine next. He eventually plucked one at random and flipped it open, but his true attention was on the information the Scroll had gently pressed into his mind.

An Overview of 'Six Steps of Venom Annihilation', Wretched quality. An Overview of 'Channel the Silver Spring', Wretched quality. An Overview of 'Shine a Light on the Moon', Wretched quality. The names alone were useful, but the additional details he could extract from the layered meaning within the symbols the Scroll used transformed a daunting, mind-numbing search into a much more streamlined, manageable task.

Without seeing the actual technique manuals he could not determine the true quality of the techniques, but he could certainly make an educated guess. The Scroll neatly summarized the information exhaustively detailed within the booklets, saving at least a handful of minutes per technique. Furthermore, judging from his previous experience on the first floor, it also offered some amount of commentary that he couldn't get just by reading the booklet itself.

It seemed to eagerly point out when techniques were flawed or incomplete, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and limitations. He quickly flipped through the booklet in his hand, then slipped it back onto the shelf and moved on. None of those seemed at all like what he was looking for, nor particularly useful in general if he was being honest.

Under what circumstances would someone with a sufficiently strong attunement to use a poison-based movement technique in the first place want their movement technique to counteract nearby poison? He picked a nearby shelf at random, making a mental note of the one he'd already looked over, and repeated his haphazard search, slowly running his finger all along the books on the shelf while stopping to briefly examine two random entries among them.

None of the techniques were anything close to what he was looking for, though one of them did seem like an interesting wood aligned defensive technique that might come in handy for Gwen someday. Unfortunately its nine-hundred point price tag was a bit much. Despite his advantages, it took nearly twenty minutes of slowly making his way around the room to find something that looked promising.

For all that the Scroll helped him identify what he was looking at quickly, it still took some amount of time and focus to interpret what it was telling him, and there were a lot of booklets to go through. In that time, he was joined by another disciple, one he vaguely recognized from the mid hundreds of the Outer disciple rankings. The two of them exchanged short greetings and then proceeded to ignore one another as they went about their business.

The technique was called the [Vermillion Tide Seal], and though it wasn't precisely what he was looking for, it was certainly an interesting one to consider. The technique summoned a rolling wave of liquid fire that behaved much like water would, flowing across the ground and following the contours of the surrounding terrain. Even after the initial wave had passed, the fire would linger even with nothing to burn, slowly dissipating over minutes instead of seconds like natural fire would.

By default, the wave would expand in all directions, but with training the user could learn to direct it. It was a far more generally destructive technique than anything he currently had in his arsenal. Both martial arts methods he practiced were better suited for engaging individuals, not groups, and a great deal of the [Vermillion Tide Seal]'s power would be wasted in a duel. However it certainly did have its advantages.

The technique could scale from a weak disruptive technique to a veritable flood of fire capable of wiping out a village in moments, and it seemed like it would still be useful at least in the early stages of the Core realm, and perhaps beyond. He set the booklet aside and continued searching. Another twenty minutes passed, and he was beginning to develop a headache. He rarely had a reason to use the Scroll's analytical abilities quite so frequently, and doing so was starting to become rather unpleasant.

He found himself accidentally missing some of the booklets he wanted to examine, or simply taking longer to go through a full shelf. He'd planned to spend as much as several hours searching, but perhaps that had been overly optimistic. Would it be better to spend some time meditating within the repository to recover and continue, or simply picking something adequate? He was loath to leave and come back, it felt like such a waste of points, but just sitting around doing nothing would also be a waste of points.

He'd found one other potentially interesting technique, though once again it wasn't quite what he was looking for. The [Ascending Sovereign's Proclamation] was a technique he'd heard of previously, a much more offensive equivalent of the sect's [Sunlight Bathes the Peaks]. It was both an attack and a suppressive technique, a yang art that directly targeted the spirit and was extremely effective against yin-arts, ghosts, and similar opponents. It was an extremely potent technique, and came with a price tag to match.

Eleven-hundred points, when combined with what he'd already spent to enter the repository, was nearly everything he'd earned from the emergency mission, though this technique he knew for a fact would continue to be useful for years to come. It was a staple of orthodox sects all across the empire, a potent tool in the battle against demonic beasts and cultivators, and would almost certainly synergize extremely well with his attunement. Not wanting to call it quits just yet, Calvin continued searching.

He had two booklets tucked under his arm, but neither was really the basic ranged option he was looking for. Though he was far from done examining the first layer of shelves, he decided to switch things up. Two quick hops got him to the second layer of walkways, and he began a new ring around the room.

He wasn't really expecting much––forty minutes of mostly fruitless searching had left him rather discouraged––so he was especially surprised when the third shelf he scanned had something that looked rather interesting. He pulled out the booklet, fanning it open even as most of his attention was on the Scroll's description of the technique. The [Noonday Sparrow] was an interesting technique, and the two-hundred point price tag very economical.

It certainly fulfilled quite a few of his basic requirements––fast to use, very long range, and compatible with both fire and yang qi––and while it was not the most damaging technique, it could be used repeatedly to compensate and in fact worked better in multiples. Each usage of the technique summoned the namesake 'noonday sparrow', a small bird construct of fire and yang.

By default, the bird would fly in a straight line towards a target designated as it was created, exploding on impact, but it could also be altered with much more complex instructions. It could be commanded to track a target, fly in complex patterns, and even wait for an opening. When used in multiples, the birds could even coordinate to some extent, approaching from different directions or attack in sequence to break through defenses.

Even more interestingly, the Scroll implied that the technique was malleable in more ways than just imbuing commands into the birds. The technique did not include a way to do so directly, but it might be possible to alter it such that the birds would pierce through defensive techniques, intercept techniques aimed at him, and perhaps even serve as scouts through which he could project his spiritual senses.

That last one was perhaps something of a pipe dream, but it would certainly be an interesting idea to toy with after he advanced. Checking the time, he realized that he only had a few minutes left before he'd be charged for another hour. He flipped through the three booklets he'd gathered, silently weighing his options. The bird technique was cheap, the sovereign's proclamation was expensive, and the tide seal was on the pricier side but still very affordable.

Compared to some of the rubbish he'd seen (he understood the idea of forbidden techniques that sacrificed strength for short term power, but burning your own qi nodes as fuel for such a measly fireball was insane) all three techniques were rather useful, and he could always earn more contribution points… Calvin looked at the booklets. He looked at the empty space on the shelf beside him. He looked at the booklets again. Then he hopped down to the floor below and approached the desk.

The disciple sitting there looked up from her book as he neared, her expression yelling for him to get on with it.

"These three, please, senior sister," he said politely, bowing his head and offering the stack he'd selected. She rolled her eyes, marked her place in her book with a finger, and snatched the three thin booklets from his hand. She glanced at them briefly, then set them down on the desk beside her.

"Nineteen-fifty-five. Token?" He winced at the price, but offered his wrist. She picked up the silver disk beside her and tapped it against the jade token hanging from around his wrist.

"There. If that's everything, you can collect your jade slips from the counter downstairs. Shouldn't be more than twenty minutes."

"Thank you, senior sister!" He glanced at the clock behind him, and realized that he had just over a minute to get downstairs. Plenty of time. He ran anyway. Thirty contribution points didn't grow on trees! Well, unless you were cultivating spiritual fruit, but that didn't count!