Chapter 58: Living With Shifu
The next day, Anji followed her shifu to the secluded hut behind her family’s mountain. After hearing many stories about willpower, she had been thinking about it all night, resulting in a lack of sleep. The young princess had only four hours of proper sleep before Lizi woke her up.
"Good morning, shifu."
Hearing the sleepiness in Anji’s voice, Yan Ping laughed internally. She expected Anji to have trouble with the energy conversion problem. However, her student was too studious. The problem was not very difficult to solve. While she was away discussing new training plans for Yihao, Anji was playing with Bai Dajin, who spewed a lot of nonsense. If willpower were enough, there would be superheroes everywhere. Why didn’t all those demonic sect worshippers suddenly turn into powerful experts when they were faced with death during the war?
With everything that happened, there was always a logical reason. If the golden core could transform energy into different states with different qualities, surely spells could produce something similar. The seals and valves she designed vastly differed from the conman Taoists who exorcise ghosts and demons. The Mystical Qilin Sect prides itself on quantitative and qualitative analysis in its research field relating to cultivation. The only reason why Bai Dajin was able to pull off that cheap miracle was due to his uncanny beast-like intuition and luck. Although his golden core had been damaged, it wasn’t unusable like Anji’s, which had been sealed away tightly by her father. He simply employed a function of his golden core that he did not previously develop when he was close to death’s doors, and it ended up saving his life. For Bai Dajin, who was only focused on the way of the blade his entire life, he barely dabbled in other aspects of cultivation, such as spiritual recovery or mind and body strengthening spells.
"Here," she handed Anji the same bronze mirror from two days ago. "You have enough hints over the past few days. An external force is often required to convert energy from one form to another. Some energy sources, like fire, do not need to be converted to emit light. It already emits light while offering heat. However, energy sources like coal are not useful in their regular form. It is only useful when other elements, such as fire, are present to draw fuel from its existence. You can also change wood into charcoal by applying heat. The wood used to build a house can no longer do that in its charcoal form. However, it gains new properties, such as charcoal, that could nourish the barren fields, which it could never do with wood. Your job is to figure out how to convert them accordingly."
Pushing a book across the table, Yan Ping calmly boiled a new pot of tea. Anji took the book and realised her shifu did not expect her to solve the problem herself. Although her teacher was sometimes difficult to understand, Anji still smiled and thanked her for the beginner spell guidebook.
"I’ve never encountered any books like this in the library," Anji noted. "Can spells be used by people without qi?"
Chuckling mysteriously, Yan Ping slowly poured out two cups of tea unhurriedly. Anji waited patiently as her shifu poured the tea properly without spilling or overflowing it this time. She stared at the cup and wondered if this was also a different kind of lesson.
Using qi to cool the tea a little, Yan Ping smelled the fragrance of the new flowers she used. Instead of chrysanthemum, Doctor He sent her a new concoction of herbal tea made from spiritual herbs. It was still a prototype, but if this proved effective, she would also make her students cultivate a tea-drinking habit.
Taking a sip and waiting for Anji to follow her example, Yan Ping stealthily activated her enhanced senses using the newly learned soul arts to better study her student’s energy fluctuation.