Finally, success.
Years of work came down to this moment.
All her calculations were perfect as far as she could tell, but they were perfect the last time as well, and her project still collapsed.
She took almost a decade finding the mistakes, looking over and parts where their theory turned out wrong, but in the end, it worked.
She signaled her subordinates to power it down.
They were all first step, and as such couldn't power the array to it's full potential, which might mean that when pushed it will collapse, but as far as she can tell, if it worked at lower output, it should work at higher output as well.
Now she only needed to send the construct for the empire to check over before they can disturbute the methods of it's construction.
At full power it would require three seconds steps to power, and while her sect could gather the resources for raising that number, that would require taking her master and sister from their own plans, and she definitely couldn't bother master.
She flew to her working room, which stood close by to the site (protected by a small hill from any potential destabilization) and started grooming her feathers in worry.
She couldn't help but preen when thinking about her sister, so proud that she successfully passed her tribulation, passing into the second step like her, but her master still worried her, she was getting closer to her own tribulation after all.
Her sect may have been the strongest of the five, if not for lord Terkahu's ascension, now, with every passing decade her master was heading closer to her own tribulation.
She knew she should be thinking of her own tribulation more, she was also getting closer after all, but since the beginning she always felt assurance in her success, and so worrying about it as long as she made the correct preparations seems pointless.
She looked at the paper in her table, something adapted by the empire a few decades back from some odd tribe far away from her mountain and thought.
Her cultivation array was a success, but she still had more ideas, more ideas than she could possibly bring into fruition, she was already hearing words of new methods of advancement.
Some imperial kid managed to make a type of pill that can heal others, distinguishing himself amongst the thousands of other cultivators.
Meanwhile, another group of disciplines, mostly imperial cultivators, successfully imitated the emperor's own insight and created spiritual cooking.
She wouldn't admit she was thankful for the combination of it and runes for allowing her to get down from the top of the mountain, a proper cultivator wouldn't care about such things after all, not beyond the fact that it helped speeding her cultivation up, if only slightly.
And while she was truly grateful for those discoveries, she knew she can't be left behind, pride might be unbecoming of her, but she couldn't help but feel competitive at the behalf of rune crafting, what started her on her path was the cultivation aid given by runes after all.
She would put more focus into her own upcoming tribulation, but she always found herself coming back to this room, writing down new ideas, new formulas.
As long as she didn't let it distract her too much, surely coming back here from time to time will pay back after all, runes already gave her more time than she lost after all, can they give her more.
