Chapter 36
Chapter 36: All Kinds of Things
Jiang Li Sheng hurried back to her room and, without even catching her breath, dumped everything in her storage pouch onto the floor.
Talisman paper. A brush. Forging tools and materials. A bagua plate. And a ridiculous mountain of snacks.
She stared at the pile, deeply satisfied. Senior Brother An always said cultivation was boring. She couldn’t disagree more. With all of this in front of her, cultivation suddenly felt like the most interesting thing in the world.
Pill refining, artifact forging, talisman inscription—she wanted to poke at everything. The only problem was her spiritual power. It was too mixed, too chaotic. Every attempt went sideways. Every attempt caused trouble.
And yet, that didn’t stop her from loving it.
With these things, her days wouldn’t drag. They wouldn’t feel long and empty.
So, for the next seven days, she shut herself inside and got to work.
Her materials were common, nothing special, so she couldn’t really cause a true catastrophe. At most, she would blow the roof off. But before the Discipline Hall could come looking, she’d already fix it—quick, efficient, like someone with far too much experience repairing her own disasters.
Still, she startled An Ru Xu next door more than once.
The first time it happened, An Ru Xu heard a thunderous bang—far too heavy to be a door. He bolted outside, heart jumping, and froze.
Junior Sister Jiang’s roof was gone. Not cracked, not damaged—gone. The center had collapsed clean through.
Jiang Li Sheng burst out of the room, soot-faced and dusty. An Ru Xu rushed to her. “Junior Sister Jiang! What happened? Are you hurt? Why did your house collapse?”
She wiped her face with her sleeve, patted the dirt off her clothes, and looked mortified. “Senior Brother An… sorry. I disturbed you.” She scratched her head. “I didn’t control the heat properly while forging. I broke the room. I’m sorry.”
Understanding dawned on him. He stared at the ruined roof, still stunned. “I heard you could dabble in a bit of everything back in Qing Xu Sect. But I didn’t think you’d make this kind of noise. If you lost control, does that mean it failed?”
“It succeeded,” Jiang Li Sheng said, shaking her head.
That made him blink. “It still worked? Then what did you make? Let me see.”
“Sure.” She dashed back inside and returned a moment later with something round, uneven, and lumpy—like a bracelet that had lost a fight with a hammer. “This.”
“A bracelet?” An Ru Xu stared at it, searching for something kind to say and failing. “You made this to wear?”
Jiang Li Sheng corrected him solemnly. “It’s not a bracelet. It’s a sleeve crossbow.”
An Ru Xu fell silent. He’d never seen a sleeve crossbow this ugly. If she hadn’t said it, he never would have guessed.
Jiang Li Sheng slid it onto her wrist and pressed a raised notch with her finger.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
Three razor-sharp bolts snapped out and buried themselves in a pine tree not far away.
An Ru Xu’s eyes went wide. “What…!”
All three bolts had sunk into the trunk to the fletching. Just like that, his earlier disdain evaporated. “Junior Sister Jiang—three shots in a row? That’s incredible!”
Jiang Li Sheng looked embarrassed by the praise. “Only those three.”
He turned to her slowly. “Only three? You mean… it can only fire three bolts?”
“It can,” she said, matter-of-fact.
An Ru Xu stared at the pine, then back at the ugly “bracelet,” suddenly pained. He’d been imagining something that could spit out dozens.
Jiang Li Sheng walked to the tree, pried the bolts out with her fingers, and slid them back into the sleeve crossbow. Then she sighed. “It’s because I’m poor. I didn’t have enough materials. I could only make three.”
“That’s still amazing,” An Ru Xu said at once. He meant it. He couldn’t forge a single thing.
He leaned in, curiosity bright. “If you had enough materials, how many could you make?”
“I don’t know,” Jiang Li Sheng admitted. “It depends on whether I can control it. If I fail, I won’t make even one. If it goes well… eight or ten shouldn’t be a problem.”
An Ru Xu nodded hard, impressed all over again. “That’s already extremely good. Artifact forging isn’t something just anyone can do.”
His gaze drifted to the half-collapsed house, and his expression turned awkward. “But your room… you can’t live in it like this. And it belongs to the Discipline Hall. You’ll have to compensate for the damage.”
“I can fix it,” Jiang Li Sheng said immediately. “I’ll repair the roof right now.”
She ushered him back to rest, then climbed up and started working.
An Ru Xu watched her rebuild the roof with practiced hands. Timber hauled from the forest. Bark stripped and layered as cover. Mud mixed and packed smooth. She worked for nearly half a day, and when she was finished, the roof looked so proper you’d never guess it had collapsed.
When people from the Discipline Hall came by, they gave the repair a brief glance and left without complaint. No compensation needed.
Zhou Zhen Yan also came to take a look. One glance told him the same thing: her hands moved like someone who’d done this far too many times. He hadn’t expected this girl to have such a skill. Toss her into a village at the foot of the mountain, and with workmanship like that, she’d never starve.
“You’ve fixed a lot of roofs over the years, haven’t you?” he asked, amused.
Jiang Li Sheng nodded, cheeks pink.
Zhou Zhen Yan laughed. “Fine. As long as you can repair what you break, do whatever you want.” He waved a hand, casual as breathing. “There are countless paths to cultivation. No one says you can only walk one. And no one says you can only cultivate a single way.”
Cultivation itself was already defying heaven. A collapsed roof was nothing—so long as she didn’t split Kun Lun Sect’s mountain in half.
With Zhou Zhen Yan’s approval, Jiang Li Sheng felt as if she’d been handed a license. She stopped attending the Discipline Hall lessons. Zhou Zhen Yan told the disciples to prepare early for the Qi Shan Secret Realm.
She had seven days. Seven days to burn through the materials Wei Qing Lan had asked Yun Duan to buy, and to ready herself for the trip.
And for An Ru Xu, those seven days became a spectacle.
Every morning, while he was recovering, thunderous banging came from next door. He couldn’t help himself—he’d climb out of bed, limp outside, and peer over the wall.
Some days she was forging. Some days she was inscribing talismans. Some days she was refining pills. The methods changed constantly, but the result was always the same: something blew apart. A roof beam. A window. A door. A wall.
Then, half the morning would be destruction, and half the afternoon would be repairs. She stayed so busy they barely managed a few words.
An Ru Xu could only stare.
In all his life, he had never seen a girl cultivate the way Junior Sister Jiang did.
And she was having the time of her life.
Seven days passed in a blink. The day came to depart for the Qi Shan Secret Realm.
An Ru Xu’s injuries had recovered to seven or eight tenths. There was still time on the road to finish healing. That day, he and Jiang Li Sheng packed their belongings, bright-eyed and eager, and set off with the Kun Lun Sect group heading to the Qi Shan Secret Realm.