Gyuvin finished his food and set it aside, looking around the sparse prison cell again. There didn’t seem to be much for him to do other than sleep or sit at the table, but at least there was a fresh calligraphy brush and a small stack of paper at the table for him to entertain himself with if need be. He wondered if Chungho would oblige if he asked for a book or two to keep himself occupied. He’d never been a very avid reader, but at this point anything was a better prospect than sitting in silence and letting his own thoughts drive him crazy. But at the moment he didn’t have anything else at hand, so all he could do was sit by his bed and let his thoughts run free.
By order of the Coalition, they’d said. So the Coalition had signed off on his imprisonment, which meant Sect Leader Baek and Minwoo had to be aware of it. Maybe they’d even voted on the decision, and been outvoted by the other members of the senior panel. Relief washed over him just then. If Sect Leader Baek and Minwoo knew about his situation, they would surely find a way to get him out of here before long. This all had to be a big misunderstanding; even if the seniors at the Peak wanted to frame him for something, they couldn’t possibly have any real evidence against him, as Minwoo had told him. They could throw as many accusations at him as they wanted, but none of them would stick because he was, in fact, innocent. He hadn’t had any part in the entire business with the willow suppression array, or the opening of the rifts that had caused such mass destruction at the Peak. He was a victim, like the rest of them, just collateral damage.
So why had he been the only one unaffected by the willow array? Other than Ricky, whom he’d pretty much ruled out in his head as just a weird anomaly, even the cultivators with the strongest cores present at the Peak had completely succumbed to the array’s effects. The seniors from Moonrise Palace were likely the ones with the most developed cores there, but even Ahn Yookyung and Kwan Hyunjae had had their spiritual power suppressed just like that. Clearly, it wasn’t anything related to the strength of their cultivation cores. He realized he was thinking himself in circles, going over the same sequence of events again and again without gaining any new insight, but he couldn’t bear to stop himself. Something in that sequence of events had incriminated him enough for the Coalition to order his imprisonment, and he’d be damned if he didn’t figure out what it was.
The walls of the Lost Fortress prevented any communication spells or arrays to enter or leave, but his spiritual energy was not suppressed in his cell. When he got sick of thinking, he got up from the bed and sat down at the table. Picking up the brush and dipping it into the inkwell with a practiced hand, he began to write.
Light. Warmth. Water. Fire. Air. Cleansing. Silence. Healing.
He didn’t put any spiritual power into it, and the talismans were just strokes soaking through the paper, but it didn’t matter. Anything to take his mind off things. As he wrote down those familiar talisman strokes he’d had drilled into him since childhood, he tried his best to forget that he was in a dim prison cell in a foreign city far away from everyone he knew, and tried his best to imagine he was back home, copying characters in the Aperture Library as his punishment for fooling around in class with Junhyeon. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Whatever it was, he kept on writing.
Chungho had brought him the plain robes as promised, and he’d returned with some books on talisman study soon after, as per Gyuvin’s request. “These were some I could find,” he’d said, a little ruefully. “They’re pretty basic and you’d probably know everything already, but it’s better than nothing. Tell me if you want other books, okay?”
Gyuvin had thanked him wholeheartedly, and accepted the books with gratitude. He spent the better part of the next two weeks reading; most of the information contained in those books were very basic, like Chungho had said, but there were little bits here and there that had information Gyuvin didn’t know. One of the books, titled The History and Basics of Talisman Craft Volume I, detailed foundational knowledge on how cultivators created new talismans. It was fascinating, really. Talismans were basically certain combinations of strokes imbued with spiritual power that created a certain result. The creation of a talisman for a specific purpose just required the creator to understand which combination of strokes would derive that end result, like a math equation or an alchemical reaction. Usually, only older and more experienced cultivators bothered to embark on the path of talisman creation, so the younger ones like him at the Court were never taught anything related to it.
He sat back down at the table and tried his hand at it. His first few attempts were rudimentary at most; he played at trial and error, combining the strokes of existing talismans to make new symbols, with limited success. After a few tries he managed to combine the talismans for ice and water to make a ball of water encased in ice, which he considered to be a decent achievement for a first attempt, but even he acknowledged that making glorified hailstones wasn’t really all that useful. He popped the ice ball into the cup he’d been given with his tray of food, waited for it to melt, then drank it.
The next time he saw Chungho, he asked if he could bring the next volume of The History and Basics of Talisman Craft. Chungho returned dutifully the next day with Volumes II and III, with apologies that there weren’t more volumes of it. “This is all I could find from this author,” he said, handing the two books over. “I hope you haven’t been having a hard time here, kid.”
Gyuvin took the books with a grateful bow. “Sometimes I close my eyes and try to convince myself I’m in a bad roadside inn,” he said dryly.
“Does that help?”
“No, not really.”
“Did you hear anything from the Coalition?” he remembered suddenly. “About when my trial’s gonna be?”
Chungho gave him a sad little smile, and shook his head. “Nothing yet, kid. I’ll tell you as soon as I find out, you know that.”
“Okay,” Gyuvin sighed, deflating a little. “Thanks, Chungho.”
Three weeks had already passed at the Lost Fortress, and there had yet to be any news. Did anyone even know he was in here, other than the seniors who’d obviously known they weren’t taking him home like they said? Did Ricky and Jiwoong know? Did Minwoo?
He was getting a little restless now, sitting around the same dank cell every day with nothing but books to occupy him. As far as he was concerned, he had no reason to be in there in the first place. An innocent person was being holed up in a prison cell for nothing, he thought, with some indignation. If the Coalition required a trial in order to get him out of the Fortress, then so be it, but shouldn’t they have the decency to get to it sooner?
Gyuvin flipped open the second volume of The History and Basics of Talisman Craft. The first volume was in worse condition and had clearly browsed through much more than the second one; the corners of the first volume’s cover had been so tattered Gyuvin couldn’t even tell who the author was, but there was a name printed neatly along the bottom: Beating Children on a Rainy Day.
Gyuvin held back a laugh. It was clearly a pseudonym, the first half of a common phrase used by farmers and laborers; the full phrase went something like “beating my child on a rainy day, I might as well do it since I’m idle anyway”.
What a silly pseudonym for someone who was apparently learned enough to be writing books, Gyuvin thought, but regardless, he started reading. The second volume built on the basic knowledge that had been laid out in the first volume, talking about things like the technical differences between directing spiritual power through talismans as opposed to enchantments, incantations, weaponry, even music. Gyuvin had never known this and presumably would never have known if he hadn’t read about it, but the act of imbuing a certain combination of strokes with spiritual power called upon ancient connections to the heavenly realm, the source from which all cultivators’ powers trickled down from. If used to its maximum potential, a talisman could be more powerful than any spoken incantation or weapon, rivaled only by holy weapons which were somewhat on the same level. It was just that, the author wrote, since Meteor Court was the only significant sect that pursued talisman study, and they had historically never been concerned with making great achievements but had always cared more about taking care of the commonfolk, none of their training ever came close to reaching the craft’s “maximum potential”.
Gyuvin thought about it a little. Thinking about home made him homesick, but it was true that everything they’d learned was in pursuit of the betterment of the commonfolk’s lives; burning talismans into wooden pendants that could be hung on doors and windows to keep spirits away, memorizing all talismans needed for the safe and proper exorcism of a possessed body, even teaching the farmers how to use cinnabar powder to draw their own simple talismans so they could reap better harvests.Â
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