She almost screeched in rage, another failure.
She threw away the useless scrap metal she just examined, she had been hopeful for this one.
Her assistant didn't react to it, already getting frustrated herself, but writing the results on her tablet.
And she flew up, going in circles around the ceiling to blow off steam.
And rightfully so, for the last year they had been trying to properly refine materials to improve her qi battery and failed.
The project of refining the battery had been simple enough at the start, expanding on ancient durability runes, already majorly improved by the institution was simple enough.
But eventually they hit a snag, a cap in which development started slowing down significantly, they needed better construction material.
And than she had a thought, if she can make qi battery, a dantian, why can't she refine something the same ways cultivators refined themselves, a body for her battery.
It didn't work, or more like, their results were limited.
Her first attempt was trying to forge metal with intent invested in, it showed promise, but was all around a failure.
She landed after her anger cooled and gone to a perch, taking her own tablet to write her thoughts.
If she didn't knew her assistant for years, she would have never lost her cool like that, but at some point, she started treating her like an extension of herself.
She didn't know how she could experiment before she found Korkor, she was sad to say that her own sect sisters and students fell short as assistances, but most weren't of the second step, so perhaps it was given.
Where was she? She looked back at the tablet.
The mental exercises for growing herbs proved incompatible with those of forging metals, the connotations too different and the process too dissimilar.
There might be something down that path, but she didn't have the workforce to go there, she was familiar with the arts if imbuing intent in materials, as well as working metals.
Forging tribulation rods were amongst the first runes she learnt, and the making of weapons were some of the most common tasks a young runemaster could do.
She wasn't a young rune master.
But she wasn't trying to make the materials do something, she was trying to make spiritual metal.
Which proved far more difficult than she imagined.
When mortal metals proved too dead to take to the qi, she had started trying to use metals with mystical connotations, most such connotations were mere superstitions, but not all, and the power of intent already proven itself.
It can be found all through the natural world, if one knew how to look and when qi was introduced, most such legends provided barely any results, the power so minor that the power of metals like titanium was academic at best.
But it was only true for some.
She does not know why, but brass took to physical enhancements far more than it should have, gold likewise also have great power, but that power was not always in line with the legends.
Useless for her purpose, for as useful as it was for the refinements of simple runes, she was looking higher.
"Lady Haku" Kiekra, a student of her that followed her from the sect, said, entering the room through the curtains leading outside, landing as she does.
She scrunched her eyes and bristled some feathers to show annoyance for being interrupted, but she calmed herself quickly, it was unsightly for someone like her to act like that, no matter how upset she was "yes?".
"There are news, another group of demonic cultivator captured".
At that she grew interested, if Kiekra mentioned it, it could only mean one things, at least one of them had a runic artifact.
"How many" she asked.
"One cloak, but their base also seem to have some ritualistic inscriptions"
She nodded absentmindedly.
The artifacts of demonic cultivators were garbage, barely worthy of being called artifacts.
But they were new, outside the short war in which a demon was summoned, she had heard of one demonic cultivator who managed to get his hands on proper imperial equipment, and empower those with his own methods.
But most make their runes completely by themselves, or with the help of their books and whispers, she had yet to see something impressive, but between all the flesh and blood, one can sometimes find a tiny piece of genius, a tiny innovation that could give a new perspective.
Even if the objects are somewhat distasteful.
"The cloak?" She asked.
"Keku skins" of course it was keku skin, it was always Keku skin "anything else" she asked.
Kiekra looked conflicted before she answered "the skin show signs of tumour growth, he had also been using feathers of more than Keku to make it".
Haku nodded "bring it to me, I will give it a look before passing it on".
She didn't have the time to truly explore the works of demonic cultivators, to riffle through the dirt in the hopes of finding a treasure, she would make sure there was nothing overtly suspicious about it, pass some tests to ensure it is safe and than pass it to some second step with experience on the subject.
She stopped for a moment, there was one such artifact she was hoping to truly explore though.
The sword.
A weapon carried by the demon summoned in the war.
It was a masterpiece, the technology far more advanced than their own weapons.
She had been itching to put a decade or two studying it's secrets, the emperor has offered.
But she had instead tried to develop spiritual metal.
But maybe it held the secrets she was looking for?
She had been really hopeful this experiment would work too, am alloy of spiritual herbs and brass, she had hoped that the wood qi will introduce enough life for the refinement to take, but instead the metal qi had consumed the wood qi, breaking the process.
She contemplated, could she stop it? Make sure to isolate the wood and metal during the creation process, to hold them apart but together.
She wrote this down, both of the ideas.
The principals of fire, a study written by the emperor a few decades back about the laws that governed fire qi already gave her the right matrixes to isolate the destructive aspects, and introduce anything from growth renewal and change.
She wasn't looking to make something so ambitious, but could she make a similar matrix from yin qi?
No, too complex, pure yin was almost impossible to work with, she would need to decay it to simple forms, she was already incredibly familiar with ice and stillness, but wood usually reacted badly with both…
She closed her eyes and put down her tablet.
She let her qi hum in her body, cool energy, slow but steady.
One of the greatest problems with cultivating yin qi is that it could never be pure, for if it was, she would be dead, her energy and qi incapable of movement, the energy of death and stillness filling her body.
But the rules could be broken.
A mote of divine qi merged with her own, and yang was expelled.
She let the energy flow out of her skin, paradoxically, it was stillness and nothingness, death and darkness, but it moved.
Could she use that to close to gap? Divine qi was a rare resource, most of it spent on keeping kuvara safe, the rest gone to her grandmaster or sold to some god.
But the third steps were still given enough, enough to do anything short of cultivation with it.
She had not used it yet, not wanting to corrupt her experiments with energy that no lesser runemasters can use.
But maybe, already her mind jumped to the different uses it can have in breaking the limits of runes, with her own insights...
Maybe she would experiment with it more, letting her mind freshen up could only do good for her qi battery project, especially if she wanted to continue using expensive herbs in her experiments.
