Chapter 261: The Spirit Nurturing Envoy
Chapter 261: The Spirit Nurturing Envoy
The days that followed blurred into a single, unbroken rhythm: farm work in the morning, rune study by night.
Jiang Chen had memorized the structure of the Puppetry Rune, but memorizing it and understanding it were two entirely different mountains to climb. He spent the first month simply staring at the pattern he'd copied onto rice paper, tracing each stroke with his finger, trying to make sense of how a script could bind a soul to a body of wood and metal.
It was, without exaggeration, the most complex piece of formation work he had ever encountered.
He tried, cautiously, to replicate a miniature version of it on a dead branch from the poplar tree—not to bind anything, just to see if the etching itself would hold together. The first eleven attempts fizzled into ordinary charcoal scratches. The twelfth attempt cracked the branch clean in half.
"Well," he muttered, brushing splinters off his sleeve, "at least it did something."
Fortress, tucked away in its dormant, toy-sized form on his windowsill, offered no commentary. Jiang Chen had considered, more than once, waking it and asking it directly what it remembered of its own binding. But every time he reached for it, the same warning intuition from that night in the courtyard prickled at the back of his neck. Whatever soul was sealed inside that Tree Gall, it hadn't attacked him when given the chance to resist a self-destruct order. That restraint could mean gratitude, patience, or something far more calculating. He wasn't ready to gamble on which.
So he let it sleep, and he kept studying.
By the second month, he'd stopped trying to brute-force the rune and started treating it the way he treated everything else in his life: like a crop that needed the right conditions before it would grow.
He returned to the sect archives, this time not for the entry on Spirit Plant Puppetry, but for anything adjacent to it—soul-anchoring formations, Wood Attribute scripts, even the rudimentary talismans taught to outer disciples for storing Qi. None of it matched the rune's complexity, but piece by piece, he began recognizing fragments of familiar logic buried inside the tangle. A soul-anchor here. A Qi-regulating knot there. It was less like reading a foreign language and more like realizing the foreign language had borrowed grammar from three others he already knew.
He didn't dare ask Bai Xiaotian directly—not yet. A rune this advanced, this clearly forbidden, was the kind of knowledge that invited dangerous questions about where he'd found it. Instead, he framed his inquiries as idle curiosity: What happens when a soul-anchor is layered over a growth script? Is there precedent for organic matter serving as a formation's core? Bai Xiaotian, delighted to have someone humor his obscure passions, answered freely, never once suspecting the true source of the question.
Piece by piece, the fog began to clear.
In the meantime, the farm did not wait for him to finish his research.
His Spirit Fields, expanded twice over the past year, now produced enough surplus that he'd begun quietly supplying rare cultivation herbs to two apothecaries in Mystic Heart City—herbs that, grown anywhere else, would have taken twice as long to mature and yielded half the potency. Word of a farmer whose crops seemed to defy the natural growth cycle inevitably reached ears higher up the sect hierarchy than he'd intended.
The summons came on an unremarkable afternoon, delivered by a junior disciple who looked far more nervous about the errand than Jiang Chen was about receiving it.
"The Sect wishes to formally evaluate your cultivation techniques," the disciple recited, clearly repeating words memorized rather than understood. "You are to present three samples of Spirit Plant cultivation and undergo assessment for rank elevation."
Jiang Chen raised an eyebrow. "Rank elevation to what, exactly?"
"Spirit Nurturing Envoy, Senior Brother."
He hadn't been chasing the title. If anything, titles had always struck him as more burden than benefit—more eyes watching, more expectations to manage. But an Envoy's rank came with privileges too useful to dismiss outright: expanded access to restricted archives, formal standing equal to a Mine Manager in the sect's satellite operations, and—more importantly for his current research—legitimate grounds to inquire about advanced formation theory without raising suspicion.
The assessment itself was almost anticlimactic. He presented a trio of his finest cultivations: a batch of Spirit Rice grown three seasons ahead of schedule, a cluster of Blood Ginseng root with a purity rating the examiners double-checked twice, and, on something of a whim, a jar of the Ice Heart Jade Pot Wine he'd been quietly perfecting in his cellar—a brew infused with cold-attribute Spirit Qi, potent enough to numb fire poison on contact.
The examiners exchanged glances at that last one. Nobody asked where he'd learned to brew it. Jiang Chen didn't offer an explanation.
Three days later, the token arrived: a slim, dark green plaque bearing the sect's insignia and the character for Envoy etched along its edge. Jiang Chen turned it over in his palm, feeling the faint hum of Spirit Qi woven into the metal, and allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
Loose cultivator to Envoy in under two years, he thought. Not bad, for a farmer.
His cultivation kept pace with everything else. The dense Spirit Qi saturating his fields, combined with the disciplined rhythm of the Green Lotus Art, pushed him steadily through the middle stages of Foundation Establishment and, by early winter, into the late stage—a milestone that came with none of the fanfare of the Envoy ceremony, only a quiet night alone in his fields, watching frost gather on leaves that refused, stubbornly, to wilt.
Fortress remained on the windowsill, undisturbed, the Tree Gall inside it dormant but not forgotten. Jiang Chen still hadn't finished decoding the rune in full—only enough to understand its shape, not yet enough to safely alter it. That would take more time. More patience. He'd learned, over the years, that some harvests simply couldn't be rushed.
It was during one of those quiet winter evenings, sorting through correspondence he'd let pile up during the months of study, that he came across an old letter from Tie Zhu—months old now, cheerful and rambling in the way Tie Zhu's letters always were, full of complaints about the eighth level's humidity and a boastful mention of some upcoming "formal competition" the Earth Vein mines were holding among their Qi Condensation disciples.
Jiang Chen realized, with a small pang of guilt, that he hadn't written back. Hadn't visited, either—not once since the rank elevation had swallowed his attention whole.
A year, he counted. It had been nearly a year.
He set the letter down, glanced at the Envoy token resting beside it on the table, and made up his mind.
The mines could wait one more morning. But not much longer than that.