Always Surpassing Yesterday
Nain lay in bed and scrolled a little further through the community boards.
Stuck in her corner of the room with no way out into the world, the communities were about the only place left where she could still dig up decent information.
Even in that very moment, the method path’s auto-cultivation was still turning.
Before long, Nain found a post.
It sat at the very top of the popular posts. The author was some expert with a permanent handle.
A permanent handle was one of the tremendous privileges granted to Foundation Establishment cultivators.
The name TalismanGrandmaster sent a wave of personal kinship surging through Nain. What an arrogant name. What presence. Someday she wanted a permanent handle just like that.
Then, unbidden, an ugly memory flickered past.
She had scrolled past it without a second thought at the time.
SwordPathEmperor. That lunatic had a permanent handle too.
Which meant the gentleman who never missed a day of camping the boards and dumping trash posts was a Foundation Establishment cultivator.
“Heh… genius and madness are only a step apart, I guess…”
Having forced herself to accept it, Nain scrubbed SwordPathEmperor’s name from her mind and clicked open TalismanGrandmaster’s hot post.
Anyone with half-opened eyes already knows this—the present crisis is not something to treat lightly.
It began with the lowest grade. Under government direction, talisman factories went up, and now the most basic talismans are worth less than paper. The government is deliberately flooding the market with them at rock-bottom prices.
And this time it is low-grade and mid-grade.
It varies by type and purpose, but most talismans have been carved down to a fifth of their former value. All of you are fixated on the fact that they fell. Does anyone actually know why they fell?
Of course you don’t. How could an ant grasp the will of heaven? Even I have only managed to read a faint outline…
Multiple causes are tangled together.
First: the colonization of outer star systems.
For the past five years, the value of Might Talismans—those that raise physical ability—has been in continuous decline. The mortal population has exploded, and there simply aren’t enough planets for them to live on. The government decided to expand the territory under human control.
Might Talismans do almost nothing for cultivators, but for mortals the efficiency is absurd. A frail body that could barely lift three hundred kilos becomes capable of hauling matter by the ton.
Spirit-stone mines. Off-world colonization. Combat against native life-forms. They’re convenient for everything, so demand outstrips supply.
Then why is the price falling instead of rising? I already told you. Cultivation technology keeps advancing, and lowest-grade talismans can now be stamped out in factories.
The second reason runs along the same line.
If any of you carefully checked which low- and mid-grade talismans lost value, you already know. Every talisman that crashed was combat-related. Lifestyle talismans and ones with specialized purposes actually rose in market price.
Fire-Bullet Talismans. Water-Bullet Talismans. Metal-Wall Talismans. Earth-Dragon Talismans… The only ones that plummeted were the basic combat talismans built on the Five Elements.
Word recently came out of a research lab under the government ministry where a fellow Daoist works. The technical bottleneck on mass-producing low- and mid-grade talismans has been broken. A great blessing for humanity—and a disaster for talisman hacks like us.
If any child out there still thinks the market will rebound, give it up. If you possess a brain, you know what that means.
……
Even beyond those two reasons, countless strands of cause and effect were knotted together. Nain grew a little tired of the endless scroll and still read the whole thing through with seriousness. Then she reached her conclusion.
“Th-this… doesn’t really have anything to do with me, does it?”
In other words: the prices that had fallen were lowest-grade, low-grade, and mid-grade. And every last one of them was a basic combat talisman.
Nain had the crisis pinned exactly.
“So it’s only a problem for talentless ordinary people?”
People who walked the Great Dao of Talismans without ever drawing a variety of talismans—people who only ever drew the combat types that made money. And the easiest ones at that: Five-Element attribute talismans.
Anyone who had learned a range of talisman methods and steadily built their foundation would not have taken a real hit. Profits might dip a little, but cultivation itself would not have been disrupted.
“What the hell is this…”
The talisman gallery she had once looked up to suddenly looked pathetic. The fantasy cracked, and the truth showed through. She shut the community at once and got down from the bed.
Flutter~
Pou, who had recovered some energy beside her, slipped straight into the bed Nain had warmed. Nain glared at Pou with a look of pure disbelief, then decided not to care and sat back against the mattress.
Coldly considered, around a hundred thousand credits was enough for her current cultivation. The method she had learned was simply off the scale in price; an ordinary early Qi Refinement cultivator trained on funds of only a few tens of thousands of credits.
But Nain could not be satisfied with that. Ordinary? Average? Enough? Those were words for talentless commoners. Someone special like her had special methods of training.
“Haaa…”
She drew in a deep breath. Her chest rose and fell. It was the little ritual Nain always performed when she was about to make an important decision.
Strictly speaking, she had no right to sneer at the people in the talisman gallery. They could at least draw Five-Element talismans. Nain, right now, only knew the crafting methods for three lowest-grade basic talismans. So she decided to learn.
I was going to have to learn talisman methods that matched the grade of my true-name method anyway.
◈ Price: 700,000 Credits
For a high-grade, Law-tier method, the price was extremely low. The value of talisman methods was almost always this low. What was truly expensive was pill refinement for elixirs, artifact forging for magical tools, and formations.
That’s why everyone just spam-farms the easy talismans… damned cartel bastards.
Nain shed tears on the inside and fretted over the future of talismans. Then she made a vow: someday she would purge those entrenched parasites.
Balance: 140,000 Credits
She squeezed her eyes shut and bought talisman materials.
Three thousand sheets of lowest-grade paper for thirty thousand credits. Thirty bottles of lowest-grade ink for thirty thousand credits. Ten low-grade spirit stones for eighty thousand credits.
Balance: 0 Credits
Low-grade at one-third. Mid-grade at one-sixth. Profit margins were irrelevant to Nain. Using only lowest-grade materials, she could draw as recklessly as she liked without fretting over material costs.
The only change was that the credits she earned had shrunk a little. The moment the materials arrived, she began drawing talismans.
This time, too, it was Might Talismans. She had reached the point where she could draw them with her eyes closed. With one part of her mind she cultivated the Five Elements Spirit Ascension Enlightenment Method; with the other she moved her Talisman Dao spiritual power and filled paper after paper.
Once her Introduction to the Talisman Dao hit 10-Star Peak, the rate of mid-grade talismans climbing out of her brush rose sharply. Fully three out of every ten sheets came out mid-grade.
Shashashak!
Brilliant brushwork filled two sheets of paper at once. Nain was drawing talismans with both hands. A single sheet took less than a minute.
Doing that with both hands, three thousand sheets took less than two days. The tough body of a Qi Refinement cultivator could go two days without sleep and still be fine.
530,000 Credits have been deposited from Ryu Yeonhwa.
“Ah……”
Of course once wouldn’t be enough. Well. That was only natural. Nain let out a hollow little laugh and spent sixty thousand credits on another three thousand sheets’ worth of paper and ink alone. She still had spirit stones to spare.
She began drawing talismans like a machine again. Another two full days burned away, and sleep started to tug at her at last.
Balance: 1,000,000 Credits
The perfectly round number in her account was beautiful. But there was something more beautiful still…
“Pou.”
Nain called to Pou, who had passed out cold on the bed.
Pou~?
She unfolded the little creature as it made a strange noise and fluttered, and a proud smile rose on her face.
“Today’s me always surpasses yesterday’s me.”
Nain set Pou free and quietly closed her eyes. Familiar darkness settled over her lids. She laid her hands over her faintly pulsing heart.
Thump, thump—!
The pretty pink heart was filled to the brim with pure Talisman Dao spiritual power. Spiritual power that could expand no further, forced to lie there uncomfortably. Looking on it with pity, Nain whispered softly.
“Talisman Dao Sacred Body—breakthrough.”
Thud. Thud! THUD!!
Her heart began to pound violently. The pure symbol of life rose up inside her body and scattered pitch-black blood. As if declaring I am here, the roaring heart swelled as if it would burst.