“Out of Spirit Ink and Jade Slips in forty minutes?”
Pei Xuan walked down the steps from the school gatehouse into the main courtyard of Public Cultivation High School #1, where Abacus Su and Hong Ling were standing beside twenty empty wooden crates.
Inside the first-floor classrooms around them, hundreds of ten- and twelve-year-old farm children were sitting at their wooden desks holding dry wolf-hair brushes, staring sadly at sheets of burned yellow talisman paper.
“Look at the numbers, my Lord,” Abacus Su sighed, clicking his golden abacus with a pained expression on his face. “In traditional Immortal sects like the Heavenly-Lock Array Sect, only a handful of wealthy inner disciples are allowed to practice drawing Qi-arrays and spell runes. And why is that? Because one ounce of standard Vermilion Cinnabar Spirit Ink mixed with monster blood costs ten Low-Grade Spirit Stones, and a single blank Jade Slip costs five Spirit Stones! Whenever a beginner makes one crooked stroke with their brush, the whole sheet of talisman paper bursts into flames and five Spirit Stones go up in smoke!”
“It’s highway robbery!” Hong Ling complained loudly, waving an empty red ink-jar in her small hand. “We have five hundred thousand students enrolled across our one hundred provincial schools! If every kid practices drawing just ten basic Fireball or Iron-Shield runes a day using traditional Spirit Ink, it would cost our treasury fifty million Spirit Stones every single morning! Even if we sold Old Yellow’s new golden antlers, we couldn’t afford…
