The street they were looking for was considerably far. The slight hill Meteor Court was built on occupied the heart of Sunshower City, and the address written on the scroll seemed to be near the very edge of the city, near where he knew the wards protecting the city ran. The house was deserted as they approached; the yard was barren and empty of crops and no one could be seen in any of the windows. Only one person came to the door when they knocked, an older man who looked tired and a little sallow. Gyuvin figured he was the one who had submitted the request.
“Oh, good morning young masters,” he greeted. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more hospitable. My wife and children have moved away ever since our dog suddenly passed away for no reason. Something’s very wrong in this house, and I can’t tell what it is. Young masters, I’m afraid I’ll be leaving this to you.”
Gyuvin assured him politely that they would do their best and see what they could do. The two of them stepped inside to take a look around the house. The house was nicely decorated, clearly handed down through generations but generally well upkept, only it had been so empty as of late that a thin layer of dust had settled over most of the untouched furniture.
“He’s not wrong,” Ricky started quietly, eyebrows furrowed.
“Hm? Wrong about what?”
“I could feel it as we came near. There is a very strong energy imbalance in this vicinity. Something isn’t right,” he said. “Can’t you feel it?”
Gyuvin closed his eyes and tried to focus on the latent energy flow in the surrounding air. “A little bit. But the question is, if even I couldn’t really tell from the start, how did he know?” he gestured to the owner of the house. He hadn’t given his name when they came to the door, but the scrolled was signed off by a Mr Yoon. “He’s not even a cultivator. Can commoners even be sensitive enough to sense things like this?”
Ricky thought for a moment. “I don’t think he could feel it. It was probably a logical conclusion considering all the unfortunate things that have happened here. There are no other houses anywhere near here, so he had no reason to believe it was because of human intervention.”
Ricky was right. The heart of the city was the most densely populated, and as they headed in the direction of the city limits, the amount of houses and buildings became more and more sparse. Very few people lived at the very borders because of how inconvenient it was to get anywhere, but Gyuvin could tell this Mr Yoon had attached some sentimental meaning to this house, and wasn’t willing to just up and move away.
“The energy flow at the front of the house and the back of the house is different,” Gyuvin observed suddenly, as they emerged from the back door of the house into the backyard. “It’s very subtle, but the dark energy felt stronger when we were at the front door. I can hardly feel it now.”
Ricky nodded. “I noticed it too.”
The house was built facing outwards from the city, meaning the front door faced the dirt-packed path and the distant forest that surrounded Sunshower City. “Let’s go back to the front of the house and retrace our steps. In any case, I didn’t notice anything in the house that seemed like it could be the cause of the dark energy. It’s likely to be some outside cause.”
The two of them circled back around to the front of the house. Gyuvin took ten steps away from the front door and stopped, then took ten steps back.
“The difference isn’t just between the front and back of the house,” he said, beckoning Ricky over to where he was. “It gets stronger the closer we get to the forest. Let’s get closer and see what it is.”
They crossed the dirt path and entered the forest. It didn’t take long for them to discover the source of the dark energy permeating the air; several metres into the forest line lay a thin, fissure-like crack in the dirt, dark energy pouring out of the thin crack like smoke. Ricky yanked Gyuvin back by the wrist, and in the next instant a barrier enclosed them both, and Gyuvin felt the energy around him clear.
“Stop walking right into things like that,” Ricky chided, narrowing his eyes at Gyuvin, who thought belatedly that he looked very much like a cat. “Don’t you have any self-preservation instincts at all?”
“I’m not that easy to get rid of,” Gyuvin retorted lightheartedly. “I’m still alive, so that says something.”
He leaned down to examine the fissure in the ground. It seemed to stretch horizontally outwards for a few feet before the crack disappeared. Gyuvin walked a little further, but there were no other signs of any cracks in the ground. He felt a tap on his shoulder, and Ricky used the tip of his sword to point upwards.
“Look up.”
The wards surrounding the city were not particularly strong barriers, since it took too much energy to sustain such strong protections all year round. They were just basic ones, to protect from low-level demonic entities and threats. Stronger demonic beings entering the city would pass through the wards with some difficulty, but not break it. But as he looked up now, he could see the faint, frayed edges of the barrier glowing in the filtered rays of mid-mornng sun. The wards had almost entirely worn through.
“The dark energy fissures align with where the wards are weakened,” Ricky asked, using the tip of his sword to poke at the dense reams of energy pouring out of the fissure. The smoke-like aura dissipated where Tianling’s blade came near, but that didn’t seem to stop it. “If the wards are breaking down at only certain areas around the border, it could lead to a concentration of dark energy entering at that weak point.”
“Right, that makes sense,” Gyuvin answered. “But the sect just underwent barrier reinforcement works right before the Festival. It doesn’t make sense that the wards are already breaking down. We usually only reinforce them once a year, and there were never any problems like this.”
“These wards might be old,” Ricky said. “How long has it been since it was first set up? Reinforcing an old barrier is a temporary fix, but there’s only so many times can something broken be patched up before it stops working.”
Gyuvin nodded, frowning. “That’s right, you would know about barriers…” he mused. “But Meteor Court is so busy with other things we really don’t have the time to set aside to completely rebuild the wards around the city. A task like that would take months to complete. I don’t even know if it’s realistically possible.”
“It’s just an assumption,” Ricky said. “Maybe it’s just that this area was missed out when they did the reinforcement works. Since you said there’s never been problems like this, it’s possible this is just an anomaly. Let’s focus on repairing the wards so we can complete the request.”
“You’re right. Let’s get to work.”
Gyuvin wasn’t any particular expert in the field of barrier techniques, let alone patching up a ward, but to his relief, Ricky got to work without saying anything more, using his sword to bring him several feet up into the air so he could inspect the frayed edges of the existing barrier.
“Do you think it’s fixable?” Gyuvin asked.
Ricky examined the tear for a moment. “Yes. It’s not difficult, so I’ll show you how to do it. Pay attention.”
Gyuvin knew the wards were held up by some central energy source, though he had no idea what that source was or where it was located. Ricky demonstrated to him, methodically, how to connect two sides of an existing barrier, and how to separate the barrier from himself so it was sustained by the central energy source instead of by his cultivation core. It wasn’t entirely too difficult, but it was a new experience for Gyuvin who’d never done anything similar.
“Actually, why would cultivators from Moonrise Palace even have to study barrier techniques?” Gyuvin asked mindlessly, as he checked the reinforced edges to make sure they’d fixed all the holes. “It doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with your sect’s objectives.”
Just like the entire cultivation world knew Seven Star Manor was the number one sect when it came to intelligence and theory, Moonrise Palace was the number one sect when it came to achievement and excellence. Out of the five greatest sects in the cultivation world, the number of disciples under their tutelage that had successfully cultivated to ascension far surpassed every other sect. It was a known fact that any disciple that the Palace produced could easily rank amongst the top ten of their generation. The only reason most of them weren’t in the official rankings was because the disciples hardly left the Palace at all, and even if they did, it was only for short periods of time. The entire sect was so reclusive that the cultivation world hardly knew a hundred people from the Palace by name.
“It doesn’t,” Ricky replied. “But when things like dimensional rifts and tears occur, those require people with very strong cultivation cores to repair the barriers without succumbing to the infernal energy. The other sects don’t usually produce cultivators with such strong spiritual cores because their jobs don’t require it, so those tasks usually fall to us. Everyone in the Palace is expected to be well-versed in barrier techniques. It’s the one thing the cultivation world calls upon us for, so we need to be able to do our part well.”
They finished up the last checks on the reinforced barrier and headed back to the house to let Mr Yoon know the repair works were finished. As they exited the forest and approached the house, Gyuvin could already feel the dark energy beginning to clear from the area, but just to speed up the process a little, he drew four light talismans and threw them in each cardinal direction. Light talismans were generally used to illuminate dark paths at night, but they also functioned as repellants for dark energy because the talisman was basically just a burst of spiritual energy from the user’s core.
Mr Yoon was extremely grateful and paid the asking fee of twenty silver pieces without hesitation, thanking and thanking them again for their work. As they turned to leave the house, Gyuvin wandered off into the front yard and pulled out a piece of talisman paper, scribbling something on it with cinnabar powder and burying it under a thin layer of soil.
“They’re crop-enriching talismans,” he explained. “Meteor Court created them for farmers to use when the harvest was poor, so the crops would grow a little better and people wouldn’t starve. Maybe Mr Yoon doesn’t know these exist, but they’ll help if he decides to plant anything else.”
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