Chapter 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.