She couldn’t really feel the qi as it flowed beneath her, not so subtle as it was, but she could see the effects of it as ripples on ripples washed out from talismans suddenly lit alight, ink burning brilliantly for a single moment before grey stone bled into the earth around them. Lone lines raced to intersect, strange patterns materializing, for a moment some grander order just barely visible in the turbulence of it all— and then it was gone, reduced once more to mere apophenic nonsense and chaos, and then nothing at all. Merely perfectly smooth stone, polished to a matte sheen.

She knelt, running her hand along its surface for a few long, luxurious seconds as she smiled. That was going to make doing… whatever she had to do to stabilize the qi flows of the area so much easier. She winced at the memory of all the work that’d gone into the qi gathering formation up in the dragonspines, all the little tweaks and constant adjustments… no, this would be much better. Had to be much better. She had disciples of the Bloody Saffron Sect watching, and she would offer them nothing but the best.

She stood there in silence for a few moments, watching as Suil moved his alchemy equipment back over to the center of the stone ring, humming appreciatively at something or another…

The snap of robes fluttering against the wind was her only warning that Zhihu had returned as she dropped down beside her. “Alright! Can’t believe you managed to hide these so well, but I got your stuff— the brushes, which are some insanely high quality stuff, the stylus, which… I don’t even know what it is. Dragonbone? And of course—” she paused, and then—

“Dragonbone?” Suli was beside them in a moment, intense—

“What did you do to my journal!” A tense silence fell over the clearing as the two cultivators stared at each other, the hostility in the air almost thick enough to cut with a knife… before Zhihu just laughed. “Did you use a ballpoint pen to make talismans? I mean, obviously but… color me impressed, girl.”

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She still had no idea why that was such a big deal. And she needed her stylus, which Suli was busy drooling over. “One second.” He didn’t even glance up at her as he studied the elegant white tool. Finally, he sighed and handed it over. “Not dragonbone. I can see why my Junior Martial Sister might have thought that— mainly because she’s an idiot—”

“Hey!”

“But it’s not dragonbone. I’m not sure what

it is, though… it matches nothing I’m aware of. The closest would probably be ridge-kraken inkbone, but it’s not dense enough for that, and of the few famous offworld materials I’ve learnt of, the only one it could be is maybe Catatapharan abyssal moonwhale bone, but it feels too rigid to be that… it would probably be quite valuable, if it hadn’t been made into something so utterly worthless. Why make a stylus? An arrowhead, or a sword core, or… frankly, almost anything would be better than a stylus.”

Lily couldn’t help but be a little. “I like it at least.”

“You would. It’s an incredible tool for mortal and Shedding students of the formations art… the scant, incredibly small handful of them that need something that can cut through stone, of course.” Which made it pretty much perfect for her… or for Mingtian. Lily resolved to make sure to thank him properly for giving up something so valuable for her later. “Now. The formation, if you would?” Right…

She flipped back to the first page she’d written on in Zhihu’s journal, before she’d started ripping out paper for talismans, and nervously presented it to Suli. “Do you think this would work?”

“It…” he paused, squinting at the design for a long moment. “Maybe. It's more complicated than the Ukkan-hai formation, I think, but… it seems to follow the exclusion principles well enough.” Right… principles that she’d had no idea existed until he’d mentioned them. She was so very screwed, wasn’t she… “give it a try, and just try again if you fail.” Well, there was that. She supposed she didn’t have any reason not to. If she failed she’d just… try again, and again, until she got it right.