Chapter 20: First Steel
Gao Ren didn't sleep the night we returned.
I know because I didn't either. I spent the hours after midnight behind the house with the spirit stone unwrapped on a cloth in front of me, studying it with my qi awareness the way I'd study a map of unfamiliar terrain.
The stone hummed. Even through the cloth, I could feel it pushing against my senses. Dense, coherent energy packed into a fist-sized rock, radiating outward in slow pulses that synced with nothing I could identify.
I'd wrapped it in four layers of cloth and stored it inside a ceramic jar underneath the floorboards of the house. The qi signature bled through everything I put around it, which meant anyone with sufficient sensing ability could feel it from a distance. Xu had felt it from two hundred meters through trees and ore packs. If anyone with comparable awareness passed within a li of Hekou, the stone would announce itself.
A problem for later. Right now, I needed to understand what I was dealing with before I did anything with it.
I ran through what I knew from the novels. Spirit stones in xianxia fiction served three primary functions. Cultivation acceleration, where practitioners meditated with the stone to absorb its energy and speed their advancement. Energy storage, where the stone acted as a battery that could be drawn from during combat or healing. And trade currency, where stones of known quality served as the universal medium of exchange in cultivation economies.
None of that told me how it actually worked in this world. I had no teacher, no manual, and no frame of reference beyond guesswork.
So I did what I'd done with every other unknown since transmigrating. I observed, I documented, and I kept my hands to myself until I understood the mechanics.
I wrote three pages of notes by candlelight. Qi density estimates. Radiation patterns. The resonance effect I'd observed in the cave chamber, where the stone's output had transformed the surrounding rock.