Chapter 25 | A Homely Home Hidden High

It took weeks before they located an area that was suitable for the development of a proper sect.

Multiple weeks of Qi-enhanced travel through terrain that the column’s scouts navigated with increasing competence the more practice they got. Weeks of dawn-to-dark marching supplemented by Qi light constructs that Calid maintained overhead during the evening hours, pale spheres that bobbed above the column and turned the forest floor into something navigable.

In the meantime, he began teaching the fundamental nature of Qi as he knew it.

All of the disciples were struggling with the idea that they could make ambient Qi do anything at all, so much so, that Calid decided to delay further lessons until they were more settled and he could give them proper teach environments instead of creating a faulty base and foundation.

A concept that Shao Wen’s memories agreed with wholeheartedly.

They also avoided civilisation entirely.

Every city, town, village, hamlet, and isolated farmstead that the scouts detected was given a berth so wide that the inhabitants would never know that a small army of cultivators had passed within a few li of their homes. Calid had been explicit about this. They were a destroyed sect’s remnants carrying valuable equipment, spiritual herbs, Qi stones, and elite-grade formation flags. They had no allies, no political protection, no elder above Foundation Establishment stage, and no reputation that would make a passing Core Formation cultivator think twice about helping themselves to whatever they wanted.

They were, in the parlance of the cultivation world, prey.

Prey that happened to be carrying a very full pantry of valuables sects would start wars over.

The massive valley that had been the White Clover Flame Sect’s territorial claim took a week to cross. The terrain shifted from dense forest to rolling hills to a river valley that required two days to ford at a point where the current was manageable and the water shallow enough that the shortest disciples could cross without swimming, which was a threshold that excluded the youngest among them, who were carried across on shoulders.

Beyond the valley, the landscape changed from the flat forest surrounded by a few peaks.

Mountains rose in the south and west, growing from foothills to proper peaks over the course of days. The air thinned, cooled, and carried the crispness that high altitude gave to mornings. The forests transitioned from broad-leaved lowland canopy to pine and cedar, and the undergrowth thinned enough that the column could move without the constant battle against vegetation that had characterised the first week.

Calid, finding that lessons were currently not suitable to traveling disciples, began to study the formation flags used to imprison the Flying White Tiger instead.

He did this in the evenings, after the column had stopped and the perimeter formations were established. Meanwhile, the disciples were fed and the watches were set and the healing arrays were refreshed and the fourteen Foundation Establishment cultivators were rotated through their formation node shifts and every other item on the daily list of things that must be done to keep ninety-four people alive in hostile wilderness had been addressed.

In the remaining hours, he sat cross-legged with a formation flag across his knees and his Qi sense extended into the inscriptions.

The flags were extraordinary.

He had known this from Shao Wen’s memories, which classified them as masterwork and made by ancient ancestors, and from his own initial assessment, which classified them as I need to study these immediately and possibly for several years. What he had not appreciated, until he began the actual study, was the depth of the craftsmanship.

The inscriptions were not specific in the way he had expected.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Calid had wondered how he would use them to benefit the new sect he had formed considering cages were pretty… specific in their usage. This was the revelation that made him sit up straighter the first time he understood it, and then lean forward, and then forget to blink for a long duration as he studied and went over them multiple times to make sure he wasn’t making any mistakes.

The usual and standard formation flags, based on Shao Wen’s extensive memories on the subject, carried specific inscriptions for specific purposes. A concealment flag carried concealment patterns. A barrier flag carried barrier patterns. A killing array flag carried killing array patterns. Each flag was a tool designed for a single job, the way a hammer was designed for nails and a screwdriver was designed for screws and neither was designed for the other’s task regardless of how enthusiastically you attempted the substitution.

These flags were unlike those items.

The inscriptions on the Patriarch’s elite-grade flags were general-purpose amplification matrices.

They didn’t do anything specific.

But rather, they enhanced whatever formation you fed through them. Any pattern, purpose, design, or configuration of nodes, channels, and focal points that you inscribed on the ground or built in the air or scratched on a rock with a sharp stone, when routed through one of these flags, came out the other side stronger.