He nodded. That was a fair fear, especially because she only had one of them… unfortunately, this was far too important to let mere monetary considerations get in the way of learning. “What do you think you would do? Or rather, considering what you know about the nature of the material, how do you think you would make a cooling formation?”

“Hm…” she was quiet for a long moment, tapping her fingers on her desk— but not out of fear, he was sure. Rather, there was burning focus to her as she set immediately to working on the problem. After a minute or two, she pulled out a notebook and began furiously scribbling down various ideas across the pages in an almost slapdash spontaneity that reminded him almost bitterly of Baixue’s calligraphy. Maybe he should give her a lesson a that sometime, even if it wasn’t entirely formations related, just to see how she would take the techniques of this lower realm in conjunction with—

No. Bad. She wasn’t his disciple. He would leave that sort of thing to her actual master, whoever that ended up being.

Lily snapped the book shut, leaning back with an explosive sigh. “I think… if I was to try and use

the material as a part of the formation itself, then it would be depleted like any other source of qi, right? Which means I have to do something different… resonance? I have to establish some sort of… non-interfering resonance between the material and the qi the formation will run on.”

“Close.” He gave her a warm smile, which became just a slight bit more real as she beamed right back. “You did a really good job sussing out the potential dangers of using spiritual materials as a fuel source. There are cases in which you would want to use spiritual materials as a source of power, but for now even a trash material like this heart tendon is far too valuable for you to throw away for any sort of formation you could make with it. You even touched on what you needed to do to ameliorate that problem, though I’d not choose resonance as the term I would use…”

Before Lily could respond, he gathered up the tendon in his hand and called on the sunlight streaming through the window, on the far flung qi of the world and all the million myriad parts, and wrought a stream of glowing, burning runes. Just out of sight, they pooled together like so many strands of a divine beast, thread once more intricately entwining, sunlight returning like unto like unto— as he unfolded his palms— the entire thing was caught up in a globe of golden thread.

“Woah…” Lily gasped, poking at the formation— then yanking her hand back with a yelp at how cold it was. “You were planning this all along, weren’t you?” Right, because he couldn’t just will formations into existence, of course… sure. Yeah. That could be the explanation.

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“Qi,” he said enigmatically and with all the pomp and circumstance of a hidden master who didn’t want Lily to question any of their choices, “is indefatigable, inexhaustible, endless in a manner that does not comport with a typical understanding of the material world. Qi is not part of the material world. Some worlds overflow with qi, while others lay barren despite being spatially adjacent to each other. Meanwhile, other worlds, universes apart, are connected closely in the Chaos Sea.”

Lily cocked her head. “What’s the Chaos Sea?”

“The space between worlds.”

“Oh.” Lily’s eyes widened. “Oh! I had thought that there were only tethers between worlds… but, yeah, that doesn’t make sense, because then how else would the Raphei companies be able to ship such larges amounts of stuff between worlds? Huh…”

“I imagine that this isn’t very well known on Aurelia, though depending on exactly where you are, some might know more or less,” he totally lied to cover his blunder. The reality was that he had no clue. “That’s not important though! The important part is that while qi is limited, if you know what you’re doing, you can go a long way with something that isn’t entirely qi like this spiritual material is. That’s what makes it so valuable—”

“It amplifies the qi! Or, it, you know— it takes the qi and in its structure it makes the qi… do stuff.” She finished lamely. “That was totally wrong, wasn’t it?”

“No, actually— that was pretty close by most respects. Here.” He summoned some cloth from his storage ring— which was to say, some more tattered remnants of that one coat he cut up— and wrapped the orb tight enough that most of its coldness wouldn’t leak through. Though, if the way Lily held it gingerly was any account, it was still plenty cold. “It's an interesting dimension to things. By themselves, both the formations art and the various crafting disciplines are interesting enough, but combine them… there is a reason most high level formations use special materials. There are things that are simply impossible without them.” He gave her a small smile. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do to get you some stuff to practice on, but in the meanwhile, analyse the other object Inner Disciple Suli gave you. Consider how you would use it in a formation” Which was to say, he’d have to go on a little adventure… but that wasn’t such a bad idea. It even sounded a little fun, going out and picking up some junk for Lily to play with.

Lily was practically vibrating as she leapt out of his room, so excited was she to get to work on the next formation— an admirable attitude to have. He smiled softly after her for a few moments longer, quiet…

Before, with a twinkle of sunlight, he vanished too.