Chapter 23- Building an Arsenal

“I need a ranged weapon, Sister Li, so I thought I would come to you.”

“How ranged?”

Tian blinked. “I don’t think I understand, Senior Sister.”

“How much range do you need? A few yards? A few miles?” Sister Li spun her hand, clearly wanting Tian to get on with things.

“Well… I don’t think I could use anything that shot for miles.”

“You could. We can make siege weapons if you want. Costs a fortune, but a little bird tells me you have been commerce raiding.”

“I got in last night. How?” Tian didn’t say it though. The gossiping powers of the Level Nines had become an unshakable legend in his heart.

“I didn’t make that much. Or use that much. I don’t really want to learn how to use a bow.” Bows were, to Tian, a sort of machinery. Once he found out that bits of bows were often held in place with glue, he firmly discarded them as something he wanted to rely on. It might be irrational, but he had a secret conviction that bows would fall apart at the worst possible moment, leaving him vulnerable to the enemy.

He wanted something simple. Direct. No moving parts. Ideally, no parts at all. Just violence. Tian groped for the right words to express what he felt fighting Hong Liren. “I need something more yang.”

“Yang.”

“Yes. I’m being less… Sister Li, I really don’t know how to explain it. I just think the way I fight is yin. Too flexible, too soft, too complicated. I need something direct, simple, hard, and with high penetrating power. Something Yang.”

“I guess you are that age, huh?” Sister Li muttered. “You seem like you are hitting a growth spurt.”

“Sorry?”

“More yang than a bow. Somehow. And yet, not the weirdest request I got this month. Let’s see…” Sister Li tapped her lip.

“Darts or javelins. Same concept, different sizes- a pointy stick you throw at people. Darts are small, fast, classified as hidden weapons. As is your rope dart, actually. Note the word ‘dart’ in the name. Throwing darts are much, much smaller and lighter than what’s on the end of your rope. They tend to be more of a distraction or disabling weapon, though they can be fatal if used well.” She measured out a section of air roughly as long as her hand and as wide as her pinky to give him the general idea.

“Javelins are very fatal, but need a lot more room to work with. You need space to wind up and throw. You can think of them as having a minimum range to be effective. On the other hand, anything inside that range you can just stab with the javelin, so it’s not really a problem.” Sister Li shrugged one shoulder. For a crafter, they were both pretty dull choices.

Tian dumped out his half of the collected needles from the caterpillar on a reasonably flat stack of cloth. “Could these be turned into darts or javelins?”

Sister Li looked at them carefully. “Thin, three feet long, flexible, sharp, almost completely transparent… no, that’s not quite it…” She picked up a pair of long tweezers and carefully lifted a single needle. She brought it to her work bench and examined it under the bright lights. “Not just very transparent, it’s highly refractive. It’s bending the light around it, is what that means Junior.”She looked back at the pile of long hairs, running a scarred finger gently over them.

“If it was up to me, these would be special use arrows. Valuable to the right buyer. You could sell the hairs for a decent chunk of money to the quartermasters. These are probably unique so they won’t give you the price they really deserve. Unique doesn’t necessarily mean useful, after all. Still, just about any of us crafters would buy them from you. But if you want to have a weapon instead of spirit crystals, I can turn them into darts for you. How many of these hairs do you have?”

“About a hundred.”

“How about this- I’ll make you ten darts. These hairs will be the core material and I will add the rest out of my own supplies. Each dart will probably use between three and five hairs after processing. Anything I don’t use on your dart, I take as my payment for the materials and labor.”

“Deal.”

She gave him a surprised look, then shook her head. “These aren’t worth a fortune, but there is a good market for them. Junior Brother Tian, never accept the first offer you hear. It might be the best one you get, or it might be a scam. Always shop around.”

“That makes sense, Senior Sister.”

“Good here-”

“No, I want you to do the work please. On the terms you suggested.”

“Junior Tian-”

“I don’t want to live in a world where everything is always about money, Senior Sister. It might be, but it’s not the world I want to live in. I will have to kill some people I should never have had to guard myself against because that’s how they think. But I don’t want to assume that the people I like are secretly planning to cheat me.” He smiled up at her. “Senior Sister, is that the world you want to live in?”

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