Compared to the circular diagram that had manifested during the duel between Tang Shiqi and Fang Man, the intricate inscription before An Fei was of a pale cyan color.
The circular diagram emitted a faint radiance of sky-blue, eliciting a slightly chilly sensation upon contact.
Combine. Manifest. Eject.
The three words could be found below the outer circumference of the cyan diagram, but their peculiarity caused the young girl to blink in surprise.
An Fei prodded her exhausted mind to probe even further, allowing for the blurred feedback obtained from the drained sea of perception to cast off its obscure shackles.
Compared to the orange diagram from the two youths… hers did not separate the words into the individual strokes of calligraphy, but instead… maintained them as entire characters?
“Odd…” the young girl murmured, her fingers rapidly sketching the appearance of the second diagram onto a free sheet of paper.
When she allowed her sea of perception to depart from its harrowing task of investigating her memories in such clear detail, An Fei was able to spot the differences in the mysterious sigil manifested from the spiritual essence within her body.
The differences were not drastic, but perhaps conveyed a significant implication.
The cyan diagram’s words did not span the entirety of the inner circumference, instead occupying a slight portion of the disk’s surface area.
The three words were unable to loop throughout the circumference, permitted to occupy only a sixth of the entire arc.
Other than the color of the diagram and the perplexity of the words, the young girl did not notice anything of significant value.
The supplementary inscriptions with their obscure patterns and symbols were relatively similar between the two diagrams, enough to the extent that they proved her conjecture regarding the existence and implementation of a different language.
If she could discover what it’s implements were, An Fei would immediately leap in joy.
Having accomplished her task, the young girl rolled over on the crystalline ground to rest against the comfortable surface of the bedchamber, gradually dragging her body under the blankets.
“…but why was it a different color?”
An Fei murmured, her fingers tracing obscure patterns in the air as she relaxed her body and mind in the bed.
The young girl’s fingers itched to have another go, but soon convinced herself to fall into a deep slumber.
Her mind was screaming in pain and fatigue, after all!
–
The next day, experimentation was all An Fei could think of.
The young girl even skimped on her usually long and hearty breakfast, simply carrying over a bowl’s worth of vegetables and herbs as she dashed into the Archive of Time.
Thus, with half a carrot stick thinly supported by her trembling lips, An Fei read over her hastily written notes from the day before.
“Collision of spiritual essence of different polarity…,” the young girl murmured in deep thought.
“I already tried that… perhaps I should try with only utilizing Yin attributed spiritual essence…”
An Fei settled her quivering sea of perception with a deep breath, before closing her eyes in a peaceful mood.
As the powerful diagram of the internals of her body reappeared within her mind, the young girl took the leisure to carefully select two acupuncture points in her body that were tinged with a purple light.
The Yinxi acupuncture point of her Heart Meridian and the Meichong acupuncture point were the two selected from her perusal, and the spiritual essence within her heart boiled as several threads traversed throughout her body to stream into the two miniscule whirlpools of purple.
Since she didn’t wish to circulate the spiritual essence as per the methodology of the <Golden Lotus of Establishment>, An Fei merely permitted the whirlpools to absorb spiritual essence until their volume had expanded to twice their original size.
Hmph!
The young girl grunted as her will forced the swirling threads of spiritual essence out from the two acupuncture points, before directing them towards the palms of her hands as she had done so yesterday.
Half suffused with fear and the other tinged with anticipation and excitement, the young girl parted her hands to be parallel with the boundaries of her frame.
One, two…
“Three!”
Clap!
An Fei whispered as her palms slapped against the other in a momentum of fury and spite, before pressing together without a single sound of dissent.
The young girl squeezed her hands as tightly as she could, hoping to force the spiritual essence within her hands to merge at an accelerated rate.
“Now all I need to do is wait for a little while,” An Fei whispered to herself, beads of sweat dotting her delicate brow.
“It took three breaths of time earlier. It should… there!”
A faint vibration blazed through her hands and limbs as the mysterious reservoir unbound to any frame of space or time manifested once again, and the young girl separated her hands as swiftly as she could.
An Fei directed a substantial quantity of spiritual essence to intermingle with her eyes, attempting to see into the phenomenon that was about to flourish in the are of which her palms had intersected.
Without her palms interfering with her sight, the young girl was able to clearly gaze at the scene that occurred before her.
Though the phenomenon remained for several seconds, An Fei’s heart shook with a brief tinge of excitement.
The diagram had manifested for the third time, and in this iteration, she didn’t need to browse through her memory and drown the sea of perception throughout the entire ordeal!
The two pools of purple light did not hesitate to merge into a unified solution as the orange and cyan light had struggled; on the contrary, the reservoir was mostly empty throughout the process of contraction and compression, for the two pools had streamed into a small bead in a matter of seconds.
As the reservoir’s dimensional walls contacted the sphere of purple, the ball quaked with an intense fluctuation before erupting into visible light, and a circular diagram reared its head to glare at the Sanctum.
Compared to the diagram that was conjured by Tang Shiqi and Fang Man, or An Fei’s previous attempt, the third diagram was of a rich violet color, with dense emissions of pale blue light expanding from its surface.
The golden light of the Sanctum appeared to be repulsed by the diagram’s radiance during its existence, creating a small gap to appear within the bastion of light.
The purple, circular diagram flared its radiance into the Sanctum’s Archive of Time for a total of three breaths, before embracing nihility with a single spatial gasp.
“It… takes three breaths to manifest, and three breaths to dissipate,” the young girl breathed as her fingers did not cease their diligent movements in recording the observed scene.
“Furthermore, it was of a different color than the others by a significant margin… why is that so?”
The next two hours were thus squandered by An Fei conducting experiment after experiment without pause.
She seemed to have forgotten that she was supposed to depart from the Sanctum at this time and reunite with the little raven and the small fox, and remained within the seventeenth Archive of Time, surrounded by an increasing number of stacks of paper marred by violet ink.
Squandered as they may, the two hours of experimentation had earned the young girl a significant boon to her initially pitiful knowledge regarding cultivation and spiritual essence.
An Fei’s legs kicked back against the backsides of her thighs as she hummed an indistinct tune under her breath, laying down on the comfortable surface of the sky-blue crystal floor with a sheet of paper grasped in her right hand.
In total, she had conducted ninety-seven experiments regarding the mysterious diagram that appeared following the compression and merging of spiritual essence belonging to similar sources.
Thankfully, out of the ninety-seven experiments, she had been hurled against the wall only once, which was yesterday night.
Furthermore, whilst the diagrams generated from each experiment contained the same three words etched directly below the outer circumference, the general color of the structure and the underlying obscure inscriptions differed between each result.
The general principle An Fei discovered was that the color emitted by the acupuncture point displayed in the mental visualization of her body served as an apt prediction of the result – though certain results were clear outliers.
Pairing two Yin attributed acupuncture points as the initial process granted the result of a diagram that emitted a slightly chilly sensation upon the brief contact the young girl could achieve.
An Fei, in a rather clueless but ingenious move, had jammed her finger against a manifested diagram to simply experiment; the result had left her groaning as her fingertip nearly froze over.
However… she seemed unable to create a diagram that flared an orange brilliance as though the result produced from Tang Shiqi and Fang Man…
“I still managed to spot it once,” An Fei huffed, massaging the sore muscles of her neck.
She had managed to create a diagram that was not visible to the eye, though her sea of perception clearly notified her of its presence.
