CHAPTER 79: 79

"Structure identified. Please align to on-screen alignment grid."

I took a step back and adjusted how I was holding the phone to make the image the camera was seeing line up with the perspective lines the app was showing. It took a full minute for the phone to work through the process but eventually it beeped and I was able to lower my arm.

I turned and, rubbing my bicep with my other hand, went over to see how progress was going on Yidi’s end.

"Is it enough?" I asked as I crouched down next to him.

Yidi was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his laptop on his lap. He gave me a thumbs up without looking up. "Analysing the structure of the temple is a big job, but for something smaller I bet you could do the whole process just on the phone."

I looked at your decade old phone with renewed respect. "If I get a SIM card with data, can I offload some of the processing to the cloud, or...?"

Yidi stopped typing. "That’s exactly the idea I proposed to my supervisor before coming up here! Once I go down the mountain, I’ll get it running and hook up your ID to it."

"Brilliant."

I sat down next to Yidi and watched as he used the data I’d just collected with the phone to feed Shengnü to get a better understanding of the temple.

Cheungyi was standing guard at the main entrance of the building but that didn’t mean there weren’t other avenues in.

Yidi tapped the screen. "There’s a gap between the anti-mould and anti-trespasser spells here." He moved his hand to point to another point. "And here. If we inserted a spell in just the right place..." He trailed of as his typing intensified, but he’d said enough for me to understand.

I unlocked the phone and brought up the main Shengnü app. It was a pretty ugly looking thing - Yidi had personally created all the visual assets for it and he is no artist - but it worked great as a dictionary of sorts to look up spells, magic, beasts and the like. It even had some abilities in fuzzy logic so I could type in what I generally wanted a spell to do, or the general appearance of a creature, and it would try to find something that fit.

"Hey, Yidi. Is there a way to take the spell here," I showed him a screen with the inscription of a spell that I was interested in, "and get Shengnü to combine it with this one so I can copy it out into the real world?"

Yidi leaned over to look, then took my phone and flicked between the two inscriptions.

"It should be possible... But I can’t guarantee there won’t be bugs."

"Don’t worry about that," I said. "I know I’m just a beta tester."

Yidi handed the phone back to me. "More like alpha tester..."

I fell silent as Yidi got to coding up the feature I’d suggested. As I watched, I decided that once this was all over, I’d go back to studying computer science. Maybe I would even be able to get an internship with Yidi or his team then...

For the first time in what felt like ages, I suddenly had a plan, a direction that I wanted to head towards.

Ever since going to university I’d felt lost and unsure of everything I was doing. I knew that, on paper, what I was doing was worth something and would probably net me a job in the end (or at least an internship at my father’s company) but business and finance just wasn’t something I was interested in and, even then, I’d doubted whether I could finish it.

Had my father known? We’d been close before he took the job in Pearl City and if this had happened then, I was pretty sure he’d be able to guess what I was thinking.

What had changed?

Initially I’d just assumed it was the distance between us that had caused this rift, but what if that wasn’t the case? Had something happened after he came to Pearl City? Something at work, something out of work? I realised now just how little I’d known about what he was doing in his day-to-day back then and I now had to wonder, had that been on purpose?

When had he decided to... put an end to me? Was it before or after he decided to fake my mother’s death to me?

As usual my mind was full of questions and no one to ask them to. It made me miss you even more but I kept these thoughts to myself and tried not to long for you too much.

"Okay, I think that should work. Here." Yidi handed me the phone. "It’s a bit of a hack job and there are weird artifacts around the edges, but-"

"This is great! I’ll try it out now!" I grabbed the chalk, ink, and paper I’d found in your old room and headed towards the outer wall of the temple, intent on focusing purely on the here and now.

We were currently in the outside area just on the other side of the temple that served as a shortcut if you wanted to go from the kitchens to the temple but didn’t mind jumping over a few bits of railing to get there. On the outside, the temple looked rather small, but having spent a good amount of time in there on the night of the attack, I knew for a fact that it was a lot larger on the inside.

I pointed at a spot about a foot in from the corner of the building where a tuft of hardy grass was growing. "Here?"

Yidi looked up, then looked at his computer, then look up again and nodded.

Location confirmed, I took a sheet of paper and started to copy out the spell from my phone screen. My idea was to see if I could set up some kind of doorway or portal into the temple. Yidi had no idea if it would work but thought it would be a good test of Shengnü’s abilities. I thought it was a good test of my own.

Paper firmly attached to the wall, I used a piece of chalk to draw a largish square on the bit of wall a metre away then drew a line between this box and the spell paper. It looked... silly, to say the least.

Time to see if it’ll’d work.

I placed my hand on top of the paper and channeled a bit of qi into it and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

Almost immediately the white chalk lines glowed bright and the bit of wall inside of the chalk square rippled. I reached toward it with my other hand and gingerly tried to touch the wall.

My fingers went straight through.

"Yidi!" I shouted.

"I can see it!" he shouted back, equally excited.

I pulled back my hand and let go of the paper and the chalk lines and wall gradually returned to normal. Time to set up the battery.

--

The corners at the very top of the walls were peeling though Zhan couldn’t quite tell if the walls underneath were grey or a dull purple - it was too dim in the room. Not that it mattered, but it still bothered him that he couldn’t quite figure it out. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that everything bothered him.

The room was close to being a square but wasn’t quite with the wall with the window in it being slightly longer than the one opposite and this made the large tiles on the floor even more obviously mismatched. Or at least, obvious to Zhan.

He stopped looking at the ceiling and, in order to avoid looking at the floor, looked out the window instead. He was sitting on a rug next to the bed and, honestly, the digs were nice enough to not be out of place in a three or four star hotel. The only problem was not being able to leave when he liked.

No, there was another problem, a bigger problem: Zhan was bored. Incredibly bored.

He’d thought that, after getting caught, that at least he’d get to have some fun with the interrogation, maybe annoy a few people or something, but since being put in his ’cell’ the only person he’d seen was the woman who brought him food. He didn’t think himself a self-centered person, but his annoyance at being set aside like this forced him to reconsider this assumption.

But that thought was soon thrust from his mind when a head suddenly poked through the wall. Then a hand, then a whole body.

Misha crawled up onto his knees and looked around then jumped when he saw Zhan sitting there in the dark.

"You scared me..." Misha gasped as he sat back on the ground, hand over his heart.

"I’m not the one sneaking into other people’s rooms," replied Zhan.

Misha smiled and nodded. "Good point."