The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 26: Chapter 26

Read chapter 26 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

“The strength of the wall is not in the stone, but in the silence that keeps the river from knowing it is trapped.” I tried to ignore it as I worked, but the hollow was starting to smell horrible. The sharp, acidic tang of the crushed ferns was rapidly losing ground to the odor permeating the area from the sliced-up centipedes. In a forest where everything seemed to run on rot and hyper-dense blood, sitting next to a fresh kill was an open invitation to every apex predator within a five-mile radius. "Pendra," I said, keeping my arm perfectly still so I didn't drop the slick metal. "Bring me some scraps and stones I can etch on." As she did as I asked, I looked down at the needle in my hand. It was cool to the touch, but the steel was completely frosted over, practically glowing with the hyper-dense energy of the liquid Jing it had absorbed. It felt like holding a solid rod's worth of depleted uranium, hypercondensed, with all its weight. I couldn't transport it safely like this, but I also couldn't afford to waste the energy. A light came on in my head, and I rolled my eyes for not thinking of the solution as I unstoppered the second glass vial. It was one of two I had harvested from the headless giant to collect blood, but it was a much better vessel to hold the heavy needle. I was worried that sticking it in a root might drain all the Jing, but if the glass didn't work, I'd have to create more in the near future anyway. After pouring the heavy, metallic blood into my clay jug to consolidate the batch, I used the cleanest part of my shirt to wipe the vial out. Carefully, I lowered the golden-frosted needle into the somewhat clean glass tube, holding my breath. It hit the bottom with a soft clink, but the fragile glass held the concentrated weight effortlessly. Once done, I sealed the wax-coated cork back on top. Safe for now. I didn't plan on carrying this thing around, but I also couldn’t just tap the needle to the cleaver and expect the energy to transfer over; I didn't even know how it absorbed into the needle; it just happened. If I wanted to keep moving forward with my work, I needed a better understanding of how it worked, and how to apply it. Up until now, my crafting had been limited to talismans—crude arrays carved into chitin or stone that were explicitly designed to violently shatter and release their stored energy all at once. What I wanted to do with the liquid Jing was entirely different. I wanted to enchant the cleaver, not make it explode. Enchanting meant etching a permanent set of geometric instructions directly into a material, creating a closed-loop array that would only alter the item's physical properties when the wielder actively pushed their Qi into it. Sounded quite simple in my mind, but that was only because of the brain rot cultivation light novels had caused. I had never attempted an enchantment because it wasn't possible on earth, and I certainly wasn't going to risk bricking Pendra's primary weapon on a blind guess. I picked up a discarded splinter of petrified wood and a fragment of a Jötnar rib from the dirt. "Give me a few minutes," I murmured, setting my notebook back on the root. My first step was to find a proper conductive ink, but before that, I needed the right syntax. Enchanting wasn't about drawing mystical runes in my view; it was applied physics translated into geometry if the talismans were anything to go off of. If I wanted to create a thermal effect—to make the blade hot—I would need to etch radial fractals that instructed the Qi to mimic rapid particle friction. But I didn't want heat. I needed density and edge alignment. That required a circuit of tight, interlocking hexagonal lattices, bound by straight, converging lines that forced the weapon's mass down into a single, unbreakable plane. Unfortunately, there was a hard limit to the number of enchantments bones could hold. I found the limit after two hours of trial and error. At my current level of understanding, and what I