Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion

Qian Shanyi poked her finger at the clay in between the stone slabs. She made sure to seal the gaps in the new walls of the chiclotron before going to bed, and disappointingly, the clay had cracked as it dried overnight. Furthermore, a short test showed that even though the material was bone dry, it would quickly begin to dissolve in water.

She sighed. Her hopes of waterproofing the trenches this way were clearly not to be. Neither she nor Wang Yonghao had any experience with pottery, but she believed that furnaces were involved at some point: perhaps that was the key element she was missing.

She could easily fire the clay using a variety of fire-type spiritual treasures, but the problem was that she didn’t know the specifics of the process: wherever the firing should happen before or after regular drying and at what temperature, if some other elements had to be mixed in, and so on. This called for experimentation.

She went over to where they had stored the river clay. The small pile had dried unevenly: outsides were cracked and dry, while the insides were still quite wet, so she had a lot of material in different degrees of wetness to work with. She rolled the clay into small balls, then put them aside.

To test the firing temperatures, she took apart the fire nodes of the chiclotron, dug several holes in the ground, and put different amounts of fire treasures inside. After adding the clay balls, she had a solid set of tests: all combinations of dry and wet clay with a variety of firing temperatures.

Seeing how she was already tinkering with the fire nodes, she decided to move the fire trench modifications up in their schedule, and called Wang Yonghao over. The trenches were covered in a thick layer of black dust, and as they were dragging the trench covers away, it puffed up into the air in clouds of darkness. Wang Yonghao frowned, and reached inside of the trenches, touching the dust on one of the walls.

“What’s this?” he showed her his fingers, black and glistening where they got covered in the black powder, “Soot? I didn’t think we were burning anything here.”

“It’s solidified fire,” she said, “otherwise known as coal dust or, yes, soot. It appears whenever fire spiritual energy reaches a critical concentration point. Careful, don’t breathe on it - it’s very light, I don’t want to spread it around, or we’d never be rid of it.”

“If it’s so light, wouldn’t it cause problems for your air circulation plans?” he raised an eyebrow at her, “Don’t want coal dust all over our bear jerky.”

“No,” she shook her head, “it usually burns up as soon as it appears - that’s the source of the fires you often see around fire treasures. The only reason there is so much of it here is that I’ve artificially lowered the temperature of the fire node by placing the water node alongside it, preventing it from igniting. We’d need to collapse these trenches very carefully to cover it up without spreading it more, but the new design wouldn’t have this problem.”

“If it’s flammable, can’t I just set it on fire?” He smiled smugly at her, “I’m surprised you didn’t think of this.”

For a moment, she considered just letting him, but her sense won out in the end. A prank like that would not be worth further soiling their relations, no matter how amusing it would be.

“Stop,” she called after him, seeing that he moved closer to the tench while she was deliberating. He turned back to her with a questioning expression.

“It’s called solidified fire,” she said, giving him a blunt stare, “what did you think it turns into when ignited? If you do that from up close, you won’t have a face left.”

“But I really do not want to dig,” he sighed, and started rising into the air. As soon as she saw him move, she headed towards a metal trench on the opposite side of the world fragment and hopped inside. He looked at her curiously.

“What are you doing out there?”

“I don’t have your legendary luck to save my body from horrific, full-body burns,” she responded, ready to duck her head below the lip of the trench, “So I am making sure I am as safe as possible before you do this very dangerous experiment.”

“...you think this is a bad idea?”

“I think it’s a fine idea,” she snorted, “I don’t like unnecessary labor any more than you do. But it is also dangerous. Your choice on how to proceed.”

He didn’t respond, but retreated a couple steps more, and then sent a series of sword slashes at different parts of the fire trench.

As he finished his last sword move, his foot happened to slip, ending the fire dragonfly technique, and sending him down to the ground with a yelp.

BOOM!

Coal dust, disturbed by the movement of the sword slashes, mixed with the air and immediately exploded into a fiery cloud. Wang Yonghao fell just a hair faster than the cloud expanded, managing to only skirt the edge of it. His surprised yelp turned into a panicked yell as he rolled on the ground, trying to put out the small fires sticking to his clothes.

“Fascinating,” Qing Shanyi said, hopping out of the trench, and heading over to help him, “I’ve never seen such extreme luck from up close. It’s quite entertaining to watch.”

He glared at her.

“Hey, I told you this might happen,” she said, “At the very least, if what you said about your adventures was true, you were in no real danger. And if you exaggerated, like cultivators tend to do…Well, let’s not think about that.”

She helped him up, and motioned to the other four trenches.

“Let’s do this a bit more carefully next time, shall we?”

She kept the clay balls in their furnaces for a good six hours, and in the end, all of them had cracked.

Several dozen small clay balls littered the ground around her. The first thing she did was carefully inspect all of her samples, and chip off pieces of fired clay into water to test wherever they would dissolve. The high temperatures clearly did something different to the clay as all but the two of her hottest furnaces ended up completely useless, the clay from them quickly softening in water, but those same temperatures also led to way more cracks.

Clay on the surface of the balls from the wet and dry clay seemed equally water-proof, but the drier ones had fewer cracks: this meant that drying the clay before firing was a step in the right direction, but not a sufficient one. She needed something else.

She was laying down on the ground, throwing one of the cracked balls up in the air and catching it back in her hand, thinking about the problem. What was a crack, really?

At the end of the day, a crack was a gap, a hole in the smooth clay surface. But why would such a sharp geometric discontinuity appear?

The clay balls started out soft and pliable, and then, during the firing process, hardened into solid spheres. A crack on the surface of the ball could, logically, appear either while the ball was still soft, or once its surface hardened into a shell. The former seemed unlikely to her, as the soft clay should deform rather than cracking: this meant that first the surface hardened, and then a crack appeared.

Qian Shanyi caught the ball and squeezed it hard in her hand, watching it carefully. The ball stood strong, and she had to push spiritual energy into her fingers before it cracked in half, sending a small piece of clay bouncing off her forehead. She threw the remains of the ball aside, and picked up a different ball to play with.

Once the surface hardened, a crack could only appear if some significant force pulled it’s sides apart. This moved the central question to where this force would come from.

She briefly considered the temperature within the furnaces: many things would deform and crack when heated, after all - before dismissing the idea. The balls weren’t all that large: they must have heated up to a stable temperature mere minutes into the process, far before any cracks appeared. The force must have come from somewhere else.

As she was deliberating this question, Wang Yonghao came over and leaned over her head, meeting her eyes.

“What?” she asked, casually tossing her ball to him. He caught it, and she picked up a different one.

“You said you’d go and quickly check out the clay, but now you are just napping,” he accused her completely innocent self, “I am not going to dig alone.”

“I am not napping, I am thinking,” she said, tossing her ball from one hand to another.

“About what?”

“About why the clay cracks,” she said, “don’t distract me.”

“What’s there to think about?” he blinked, “it’s hot, so it cracks.”

She sighed, and started to explain her reasoning.

The key, she felt, was the water. She used the ingredient-testing technique from Three Obediences Four Virtues on the clay, and even though some of the unfired clay seemed completely dry to her eyes, there was still a fair amount of water inside of it. Fried clay, on the other hand, contained almost none. On top of that, wetter clay led to more cracks. This meant water must have been the real culprit, but the question was why.

“So here is what I am thinking,” she said. “Have you seen fried Jiaozi dumplings? There was this restaurant where the chef would fry them right in front of you, and the skin of the dumpling would shrink a little when they were dropped in oil. Once, I’ve even seen it burst apart when a clumsy apprentice put in too much filling - like a large man putting on robes five sizes too small. So I think the same thing happens with clay.”

Wang Yonghao sat down on the grass next to her, and she turned the ball in her hand over so that he could see the crack.

“Imagine clay as a stew,” she said, “there is water, and then there is everything that isn’t water. As the clay is fired, water evaporates, leaving everything else behind. But water takes up volume, right? Just like a stew reduces in size as you boil it, clay must also shrink. As water leaves the outer shell of a clay ball, it hardens and shrinks at the same time. But water can’t leave the insides of the ball as easily - just like within a juicy dumpling, it is trapped. So the inner ball shrinks slower than the outer shell, and that makes the outer shell crack. This is why wetter clay cracks more - the difference is more pronounced. And this is why clay cracks in between the stone plates of the chiclotron - the plates do not move, and the clay shrinks too much to fill the gap.”

“Wow,” he said, “You figured all of this out from a couple clay balls?”

“I didn’t figure out shit,” she snorted, “this is merely a theory, a just-so story. Exactly like your hypothesis about my skill at shatranj, it’s worthless unless I can prove it. There are a dozen assumptions I am making here that are, practically speaking, based on nothing.”

She lifted her legs up, and leaped up onto her feet in one smooth movement.

“If I am right - and only if”, she said, “ - then the way to solve our cracking problem is to mix clay with something that wouldn’t shrink when the water evaporates, such as the sand we have gathered from that beach. The more we mix in, the less the overall mixture would shrink, but the higher the chance it wouldn’t behave like clay in the first place… We’d need to do more experiments to figure out a good ratio.”

She headed over to a small pile of sand they brought into their world fragment.

“Come on,” she said, “Let’s take a break from digging and mix some clay.”

By the time their two-day stay in the world fragment came to an end, they had finished redesigning the chiclotron, lined the trenches with stone slabs, and sealed the gaps with clay. Her idea of mixing the sand in with the clay had worked perfectly, and she decided to fry it while they traveled. To do this, she had filled the nodes on one half of the chiclotron with fire and metal heavenly materials and earthly treasures, making sure that every trench there was filled with dense fire-type spiritual energy, heating them up to the proper temperature. The feng shui of the world fragment would suffer, but the other half of the chiclotron should compensate for it somewhat, and without them in it, it should be fine.

The river widened more and more as they traveled downstream, thinner streams flowing into it from the depths of the forest. They were still yet to see any sign of civilization, and this sent pangs of worry down her neck. What if the teleportation formation sent them so far away, that they would reach an ocean and still there would be nothing?

As they entered the world fragment to cook a midday meal, she felt the scorching air temperature inside: it seemed that the large amount of fire-type spiritual energy overpowered what little cooling came from the water nodes on the other half of the chiclotron. She popped the hatches on the water nodes to make them work harder, but neither of them felt like suffering in the heat, and they ended up cooking on the shore of the river. Wang Yonghao finally managed to slice a fish in half with a sword technique from a dozen meters away while they floated downsteam, and grilled fish made for a good break in their regular diet of bear, bear and more bear.

As the evening approached, they arrived at a place where the edge of the world formed a wide tunnel, leading away from the forest. The river flowed directly into it, but they couldn’t see where it ended, and without any shores to rest on, decided to put off exploration of the dimensional tunnel until the next day. Instead, they went back into the world fragment, and spent a good hour checking how well the clay firing had worked. The air in the world fragment felt stuffy, but she supposed that was to be expected due to the large number of open fires on display.

Some cracks were still there, but rare enough that Qian Shanyi felt good about the ability of the chiclotron to resist leaks, and so they spent another hour moving the heavenly materials and earthly treasures around to fry the other half of the chiclotron, sealing what little cracks were present, and working on constructing a drying chamber that would be put on top of the hot air outflow. Wang Yonghao went to sleep early, complaining of being tired and having a headache, while she decided to cultivate.

The hard work of the past days took its toll on her too. She stopped early to drink some water, and wiped the sweat off her forehead. Her skin was flushed red, and the blood was thumping in her head, making it hard to think.

She rubbed her forehead. This wasn’t like her. She would finish her cultivation, and then go to sleep. She just… Needed a break. Yeah, that’s what it was.

She sat down on the ground near her water clock, sipping water from a reused wine bottle. Why was she so tired?

She closed her eyes for just a moment. When she opened them, she was lying on her face on the ground, her head throbbing from a monumental headache. She rose up, slowly, and looked around in confusion, breathing heavily. Her eyes fell on the water clock, and her eyebrows closed together. Surely she couldn’t have been out for a whole hour?

Something was wrong here, but the damnable headache was making it hard to think. This was… What did this feel like?

She looked down on herself. Her skin was really red. Why would it still be red if she was fast asleep for so long?

Her heartbeat sped up. She wasn’t just tired, something was wrong with her.

She spun around, and saw Wang Yonghao still sleeping in his hammock. His skin looked quite red too, and his breathing was heavy.

Were they both poisoned?

Her mind slithered over the possibilities, far too sluggish to work properly. What did they have in common? Water? No, their water came from a Blue Tear Stone, it should have been safe. Food? They ate bear meat for a good week now - she doubted it was the problem. Even if it contained the sort of poison that slowly accumulated in their bodies, their weights, metabolisms and how much they ate were all different, so the chances of both of them being affected at once were quite low. Perhaps the fish they ate? No, she checked with Three Obediences Four Virtues, this species should have been completely safe…

She brought a hand to her throat, grimacing at her own heavy breathing, and an idea struck her.

The air. It had to be the air. Something…from the fried clay, perhaps?

She shook her head. It didn’t matter, the first priority was to get the hell out of here.

She ran over to Wang Yonghao and shook him, trying to wake him up. He groaned, but remained asleep. Not standing on ceremony, she shook him out of his hammock, and slapped him across the face.

“Yonghao!” she shouted in his sleeping face, “Wake up! We are in danger!”

He simply groaned again.

She ground her teeth. Could she rely on his luck to survive?

No. Absolutely not. Even if his luck would save him - which wasn’t a guarantee by any means, no matter how many times he slipped in front of an explosion - there was absolutely no reason to expect it to save her. Perhaps one of the weapons in the treasury could create a bubble of safe air, or one of the many unidentified pills could deal with poisons, but by the time Wang Yonghao would sleepwalk over to one of them, she might be long dead.

She quickly ran over to one of the fire nodes, wrapped her arm in a spare robe, grabbed an igneocopper brick, and dropped it on Wang Yonghao’s hand. The brick, heated red hot after lying in the node for several days, sizzled on his skin until his hand jerked away. His eyes just barely fluttered open, and he sat up, still clearly out of it.

“Entrance to the world fragment,” she slapped him in the face again, speaking as clearly as she could, “Open it. Now.”

He didn’t respond, but she heard the entrance open up above her. As soon as it did, Wang Yonghao fell over on his side and started snoring.

She cursed. Even if she woke him up now, there was no way he could manage to get his spiritual energy under control enough to fly.

She quickly picked up a spear, tied a rope around it with her shaking hands, and pitched it through the entrance of the world fragment. The spear slipped, and she cursed again.

“Come on, you damnable thing,” she muttered, throwing it again, “serve your mistress.”

She got it to stick in five throws, which felt excruciatingly long, given the circumstances. As she grabbed onto her escape path, she glanced back at Wang Yonghao, still drooling down on the grass.

Surely he’d be fine.

With his luck? Barely even a question.

“Fuck luck,” she ground out, letting go of the escape rope and heading over to get a second one, “Fuck the heavens, and especially fuck me, for being such a bleeding heart.”

She tied the second rope tightly underneath his arms and his groin, turning it into a crude harness, tied the second end to her waist, dragged him over to the center of the world fragment, and started climbing the escape rope. She gasped when her head breached the entrance, breathing in clean forest air, sweet as sugar on her lips after the dead air of the world fragment. Her vision swam from the shock, and for a second, she almost felt her grip on the spear slip. She shut her eyes, and breathed slowly, letting the shock pass her by.

Once she felt herself come back to reality, she carefully inched her way to the side, hooked her leg over the edge of the entrance portal, and sprawled out on the forest moss, breathing deeply.

“Fuck you,” she breathed out, “fuck you. I am not dying here. Not today, not ever.”

She got up on her feet, shaking from adrenaline and whatever poison was affecting her, and looked around. She saw a sliver of the sun just out of the corner of her eye: the night was mere moments away, and with it, the Rosevines would come.

She grabbed the rope leading to Wang Yonghao, planted her feet in the ground, and slowly started to raise him out of the world fragment. She would only get one try of this: if her knots failed, the rope snapped, or he fell out of the harness, she wasn’t going to risk her life by going back in.

Once she saw his head poke out over the lip of the entrance portal, she tied the rope around a nearby tree, then went over to drag him fully out by the collar of his robes. Once he was out, she took another breather: her muscles were already burning, even though she barely did any work. Another symptom?

With the world fragment out of the question, she needed to find a safe space away from the rosevines, and she needed it fast. Her eyes ran feverishly over the forest around her, looking for something, anything. Wisps of spiritual energy were coming off the portal, like a lit up beacon for any Rosevines that might pass nearby.

She frowned. Maybe that was the key here. With the portal open and faintly spreading spiritual energy, they wouldn’t be searching for other prey.

It took another ten minutes for her to use her ropes to climb on top of a tall pine with a wide crown, secure herself to a wide branch, and then lift Wang Yonghao alongside her. He was still asleep, but mercifully quiet while he was sitting down. She tied him to the branch, took her sword out, and prepared to wait out the night.

No Wang Yonghao, no world fragment, and not even a primitive shelter. All she had was her sword, some ropes, and her painfully thumping head. She didn’t think she would sleep tonight.

Darkness of the forest closed in around her, leaving her alone with her ominous thoughts.