It was a short walk from the tower to where his brother stood in the middle of the road, scoring lines into the ground without a single care in the world. His progress became slower and slower with each step but the power he wielded only continued to increase. The odd thing for Yun was that he had no idea what Laurence was trying to do. He could make neither head nor tail of what his brother was constructing with glyphs or arrays, let alone the odd law that he denied to be imbuing into every single movement he made. Laurence was doing something a step beyond what Yun could comprehend with a law of nature entirely foreign to him. He could not help but be surprised.
As Yun looked on in awe, Piao caught up to the two of them and joined his father in watching Laurence work. They just stared for several minutes before Piao finally spoke.
“What... is even going on?”
“Did you know that spiderwebs are absolutely fascinating? Not only is the string effectively the best naturally forming method of making any kind of sturdy sinew, the construction of the webs lend themselves perfectly to certain Creations. Honestly I’m surprised that there’s not more of a study of them in the Book”. Laurence smiled as he continued to cut patterns into the stones below his feet, stopping every-so-often to readjust his direction before continuing to add glyph after glyph. At a set distance that only Laurence seemed to know, he would place a small stone that acted as an array marker to the coiling path he was constructing. The array marker sealed the glyphs in form and allowed him to pick up the ground that contained the scored in glyphs. Pushing his own mana into the thick strip of earth, Laurence seemed to cause a ripple to spread out through it. He simply held it while the ripples continued, but once they stopped, he opened his palm and split the strip into thousands of wafer thin bands before twisting them together like spiderwebs with a flick of his wrist. Planting the end back in the ground, Laurence turned back to Yun and Piao as the ground surrounding the coil closed up and began producing a soft blue glow. “The process is long, but the result will be something quite special”.
“But you haven’t actually told us anything,” Piao said, his head cocked to one side. “What will it do? Is there a prototype in the Book that we could compare it to? I don’t even recognise the process of what you’re doing”. Yun smiled as Piao blabbered incessantly. He could understand why. Whatever Laurence was doing; it terrified him.
“So you know how the base of any Creation has the three ‘M’s right? Materials, method, markings? When you get to mine or Yun's level of skill, the material becomes the least important part because your compensation through other fields heavily outweighs everything the materials could give. That said this doesn’t mean we have no need for the best materials. Given equivalent skill, the better the materials the better the tool but because of how rigid the ranking of weapons, tools or whatever else is once you get over a certain threshold of power your ability to compensate for shortcomings and cut corners becomes more important for reaching these ranks. This is why I can use light or the air we breathe to make weapons that can harm immortals. My skill is high enough that the materials don't matter anymore”.
“It feels like your lecturing me,” Piao replied, slightly taken aback by Laurence's tirade.
“I am, so shut up for a second and listen. You might learn something”. Laurence paused for a moment before continuing, “The method I am using is an Anotean compression cant retooled for mana rather than belief or prayer power or whatever energy source religious entities actually use. I then combined this with the spiderweb charging concept I came up with a few years ago. ... Maybe it was a decade ago? I was looking at my manifestation and I kept wondering why it was in the form of a web. I’m still not entirely sure why, but in my study I learned a lot about the nature of mana in general and the best way to conduct, compress and transfer power. It turns out that if you use the spiral to collect power, and the radial lines to ferry the compressed energy to the core then you can compress energy to an incredible purity with minimal charge time. If you follow the glyphs with your truesenese and get past my slightly obtuse syntax you’ll notice that everything within my glyphs refer to this single concept that I have been grasping since I became an Immortal. Yun’s equivalent of this is his understanding of space, while mine is time. I don’t know why yet, but I am pretty sure that there is some link between something about these damnable webs and the concept of time that is just escaping my grasp. I reckon I might already know the answer if I wasn’t so driven for Cleo, but... Back to my point. The concepts, the laws that we learn when we ascend to Immortality are not the only things we have to conceive of during our journey. The next step seems to be combining your laws with an aspect of enlightenment and this path that I have made behind me is the product of that”.
“When will it be ready?” Yun asked. He looked back over the coiling path behind his brother and frowned.
“Are you not going to ask what it does? He didn’t even tell us!”
“Son, he did. It compresses time. To what end, I don’t know, but that is what it does”.
They both stopped talking as they continued to watch Laurence work. After completing three more sections of his coiling path he moved back over it and inscribed large, extravagant runes over all his previous work. Unlike the runes that made up the body of his creation, these were ones that Yun and Piao knew. They were commonly used sealing glyphs, primarily for protecting things from being broken. Yun frowned in distaste at the sight of them. While they were commonly used, they had a well known drawback; they required time to charge. He was about to comment when he realised what Laurence was attempting to do with the protections. Mulling over his brother’s idea, Yun wondered how long they could hold out against the thousand sects if they all truly began sieging the city.
Finally, Laurence stood up. “I need a week. One more week and I can get this all set up... but I need the full time and no less. Can you hold out for that long?”
“If this does what I think it will... we’ll just have to”.
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