DC 58

“Alright, I think we should move on. Sorry for the break, I’ve been the only one on duty all day and there were many more step nines today than there usually are. I don’t know what you all ate on your five-month trek, but I should really try that diet.” Pye Lee stretched before walking back to the spot where he controlled the formation. 

Tai Sai also retook her seat, opposite the other Outer Sect Disciple, and Bai Fu sat between them, forming a sort of triangle along the outer-circle of the formation. Feng Jiao shrugged and took a seat opposite Bai Fu, forming a square of four disciples.

“If you don’t mind, Junior Sister Jiao, we are going to skip straight to the mid-tier techniques to conserve energy.” Feng Jiao ignored the sister once more, biting down his remarks in favor of gains, and nodded his head. The lower tiered techniques were exactly that, lower tiered. Jiao could not imagine a world in which he found a weaker technique more agreeable and therefore consented to skipping them in favor of saving time.

Pye Lee closed his eyes and the blindingly-white room slowly dimmed once more. Just as Lee’s shoulders started shaking from the strain, Feng Jiao could feel Tai Sai picking up the slack. He didn’t feel it like you would feel something with your hands, or like the wind on your skin, but like a change in pressure from diving to deep too quickly. He could feel the pressure moving around outside of his body, spreading between Tai Sai and Pye Lee and eventually, although less so, Bai Fu. 

As each of them joined in, Pye Lee’s load got lighter and the room dimmer more quickly. After fading to a very dark gray, small blots of light slowly faded into view. Unlike the previous formation, the lights were varying shades of muted greens and browns whereas the Ice motes were bright white and blue, like the stars in the sky. The second thing that Feng Jiao noticed was that there was a near infinite amount more of the wood stars than there were ice stars. Presumably this was due to the rarity of the Ice affinity.

“Senior Brother Pye, there are so many more wood techniques. What happens if I am unable to make a decision today? Can I return tomorrow when you are more rested?” Feng Jiao felt a little overwhelmed. Although some might say a decision between two things that were equally liked was the most difficult decision, Feng Jiao thought otherwise. The worst kind of decision was one that you had to make without knowing every option, be that due to time constraints or obfuscated information.

“I’m afraid not. You’re only allowed to be sponsored by a single Knowledge Hall Disciple and you’ve accepted my sponsor. You’d need to wait until I was working again and I’d personally need at least a week off to recover from today’s mess. I’d suggest you just find one that works for you and accept it for now. You’ll want to upgrade your cultivation technique eventually anyways.” Pye Lee droned out between clamped teeth sounding very unsympathetic to Feng Jiao’s plight. “I’ll try to hold out for at least half an hour.”

Feng Jiao’s eyebrows furrowed and he bit his lower lip, half-expecting the answer but dreading it none-the-less. Being given a third of the time that Bai Fu had taken was a bit annoying but he didn’t think that anyone had expected her to be so thorough as to read through every single technique, some more than once, and take up almost all of their time. With no other option, Feng Jiao began by reaching out to one of the techniques with his mind. 

The tiny little star whizzed over into Feng Jiao’s hand at a speed that far surpassed the movement of the Ice stars. Since he missed the twitching of Pye Lee’s eye, as well as his astonished look, Feng Jiao just assumed that the Ice type cultivation techniques had a slower movement speed due to their element. The low-tier ice technique he’d viewed previously, the Yin Rabbit’s Ballad, had been close to him in the first place so he’d not really noticed the difference in speed. 

‘Oak’s First Flight. Lower Mid-tier Wood Cultivation Technique. Creator unknown, manual was obtained in a trade deal. Based on the Acro Flying Squirrels, this cultivation technique stresses the flexibility of wood, enabling the cultivator to harness the power of wood in a similar fashion as the Acro Flying Squirrel. Although cultivation technique does not allow for actual flight, cultivator will find their bones harder to break and their jumping reaching to new heights, at least within the mortal realm. Recommended for those with the affinity of Earth or Wood.”

‘A wood technique based on an animal rather than a plant’, Jiao thought to himself. Due to Feng Jiao’s martial spirit being a tree, albeit not a species of tree from this world, he wanted to find a cultivation technique closer to a plant. He released the technique not-too-long after he’d read it and reached for another, not really registering that the head pain he’d received from the Ice technique did not repeat itself. 

Due to the information being almost instantly downloaded to his brain and his immediate rejection of the technique, only a breath or so had passed in the amount of time it took him to grab the mote and release it. Feng Jiao and Bai Fu did not know that his ‘reading speed’ was directly correlated with one’s spiritual strength. Feng Jiao thought that Bai Fu had been overanalyzing the bare-bones summaries and Bai Fu thought that Feng Jiao was only reading the first line or so in an attempt to speed up his search at the cost of potentially missing a great technique. Both of them were slightly disappointed in the other but Pye Lee’s eye twitch was getting severely stronger. 

Feng Jiao continued his game of grab and release and discovered something a tad bit annoying. Nearly every technique he grabbed, regardless of the color of the star, were derived from one animal or another and were a mixture of either Earth and Wood or Water and Wood. He could not, for the life of him, find anything that was specifically Wood or plant based, regardless of how hard he searched. His frown deepened because, as he’d assumed from reading the Yin Rabbit technique, each of the cultivation technique was more accommodating with similar martial spirits. Rabbit spirits were able to cultivate rabbit-based techniques better, bugs were better with bugs, wolves with wolves, and so on and so forth. 

“Senior Brother Pye, I’ve got another question. Do you mind?” Feng Jiao decided to speak up in case there was a way to filter out the unwanted techniques to save time.

“Was that the question?” Pye Lee seemed to get more impatient the longer he was supporting the formation. Feng Jiao tried not to take it personally and ignore the rhetorical question, continuing with his inquiry. 

“Why is it that I can only find beast-based wood techniques? Shouldn’t there be more plant techniques here?” Feng Jiao left off his question about finding specifically plant techniques, figuring it was best left unsaid. He couldn’t see someone working at a ‘Knowledge Hall’ being unable to read between the lines.

“That is because animals have bodies that we can observe and dissect. If you want to know how a beast cultivates, you need only breed a heard of the bests and experiment on them. Observe the way the react to herbs, pills, and the like. Although their meridians are not the same as a human’s, they are observable and comparable. They also cultivate quickly and are therefore more desirable to derive techniques from.

“Plants, however, are different. You can find plant derived wood techniques but they will either be low tier, or very high tiered. This is because either the plant is very easy to understand, which is only true of low-quality plants and herbs, or it is of a high enough tier that it has demonized. Before you ask, that is how cultivators refer to plants that manage to take human form. Once they are there, if you can capture them and experiment on them, it is even easier to create a technique due to the similarities between their human form and actual humans. Of course, it is very frowned upon to capture anything that has obtained a human form without good cause, such as them being evil.”

“So, there aren’t any plant-based mid-tier techniques?”

“I didn’t say that. The world is mysterious and evolving, of course there would exist a few plant techniques that were incomplete, or stronger than average, or weaker. There are probably several such techniques with even a few of them here, but as for finding them, that is on you.” Pye Lee, obviously annoyed at being asked yet another question while doing his best to concentrate on supporting the formation, barked out his response. 

Feng Jiao was honestly slightly annoyed at the boy’s behavior. In Feng Jiao’s mind, there was no way that the formation could be so taxing that he had to act the way he was acting. On second thought, Feng Jiao didn’t see a reason he couldn’t help support the formation with the other three. At the very least, he should see if it could extend the amount of time he was allowed to search through techniques. 

Without saying anything, Feng Jiao reached his spiritual energy out, similar to how he did when he was searching his surroundings, and touched the formation circle below him. Instantly, Feng Jiao could feel his consciousness slightly merging with, and supporting, the formation that displayed all the various cultivation techniques. He could even vaguely feel the word ‘wood’ somehow pulsating from his feet.

The load on the other’s shoulders lightened again as the strain was split four ways, but Feng Jiao didn’t think that they knew why it had lightened. At that point, all three of them were strained enough that it was akin to the rain slowing down just a bit while they were already soaking wet, they had to be paying attention to the rain specifically to notice. At the same time, Feng Jiao didn’t really notice all that much effort, it was just like a dull pressure in the back of his head. It kind of reminded him of the feeling he got when he overslept and he just assumed that the formation was much easier to support with four people than three.

Reaching his attention back out to the techniques, however, Feng Jiao felt something a bit different. He could feel their aura more acutely now that he was a part of the formation. Although he couldn’t tell what they were without reading them, he could, for lack of a better word, sense them. The Squirrel technique felt furry, the wolf technique felt beastly, and so on. Finally, while sweeping his spiritual sense over the many stars, he found one that felt sweet. Calling that to him, Feng Jiao found his first plant-based technique, an incomplete technique based on a mutated papaya tree. 

Additionally, Feng Jiao discovered something else. He felt, although he couldn’t be sure, that he could pull on the technique and forcefully gather the entire technique rather than just the summary made available through the formation. He immediately considering gathering as many wood techniques as he could in order to refine which ever one he selected, but reconsidered. 

Feng Jiao remembered the spectacle that the mote of light Bai Fu had selected made, as well as her blacking out for almost a minute, and decided that he would experiment on one he actually wanted. If his way of forcefully pulling the information wasn’t as flashy, he’d consider taking more than one technique for free. He slowly set the papaya tree technique down to the side, willing it to float next to him, and started sweeping out with his spiritual sense.

Meanwhile, Pye Lee began to get suspicious of Feng Jiao. Since his last question, almost ten minutes previously, Feng Jiao had gotten quiet again. The frown and furrowed brows had disappeared and he was now collecting techniques next to him and was almost into the double digits with them too! Additionally, although he hadn’t noticed at first, Pye Lee now realized that the formation was running much more smoothly. His previous guess of thirty-or-so minutes of support time had somehow doubled themselves.

Of course, Pye Lee didn’t think that Feng Jiao was going to steal any techniques and, even if he did, there weren’t any policies in place to stop him. With the amount of spiritual strength required to circumvent his control of the formation, any of the elders would be willing to sponsor the disciples capable of doing it for a high-tiered technique. In their minds, any amount of mid-tier techniques did not add up to a high-tiered technique so it did not make sense to punish the strong disciple for essentially copying homework for a class he did not attend. 

Actually, the disciples were silently encouraged to try which is why Pye Lee and the other Knowledge Hall workers silently assented to outsiders helping to support the formation. The number of techniques that one was capable of stealing before getting hit by spiritual backlash would also give a vague indication of the disciple’s spiritual strength and was one of the primary avenues that the Knowledge Hall recruited disciples from. 

Pye Lee merely thought that Feng Jiao had finally figured out the trick to ‘filter’ the techniques on his own, and he was partially right. He silently nodded to himself and made a note to make an extra effort to try and pull this Feng Jiao over to his faction during their dinner, even giving extra attention to Bai Fu who was obviously a close friend. 

Oblivious to the attention that he was receiving, Feng Jiao began the process of prioritizing the techniques he was going to rob. After heading Pye Lee’s remark about Bai Fu passing out due to backlash attributed to a lack of spiritual energy, Feng Jiao had no intention of getting caught due to carelessness. He started rating through the various plant techniques that he’d found and giving them a numerical ranking, that way he could loot until he felt that he’d reached his limit and stop. If he happened to black out on the first one, that was fine. He’d just say that he thought that he was following the process of claiming the one he wanted!

After sorting through his twenty-three different techniques, Feng Jiao was impressed with the collection. He had techniques that were traditional wood but with various sub aspects, such as poison, and all made from a variety of plants. Be it hardwood trees, trees of bounty like the papaya, vines, ginseng, wheat, and even a weed-based technique! Of course, due to his marital spirit being from a different world, just like Aideen and his own soul, nothing was a perfect match. The one he found that he favored was actually not a pure wooden technique at all.

‘Alatus Falling. Inheritance technique for a fallen clan that was acquired years ago. The technique is derived from an ancestral demon of the family, an Evolved Burning Bush. Stresses the cyclic nature of nature, a never-ending cycle of growth, an unending flame. Recommended for cultivation of either Wood of Fire affinity. Unsure of the cultivation technique is incomplete or just weak. Ranked high-mid tier.’

Feng Jiao looked down at the technique he’d deemed the most suitable for him within the mid-tier stored in the Knowledge Hall. His gaze floated over the other techniques he had with him before settling back on his hand. He took a deep breath and, on a last-minute impulse, pushed more of his spiritual energy into the formation below him. 

He took a deep breath.