The smell of scorched spirit paper was beginning to give Lin Ke a migraine.
Inside the back room of the drafting shed, small yellow flakes of charred ash drifted down like poisoned snow. Every forty seconds, a sharp SNAP echoed through the rafters. It was followed by a puff of rotten-egg purple smoke and a muffled, furious squeak from the far side of the low pine workbench.
“Again!” Shen Yue hissed, slamming a ruined horsehair brush onto the table.
Her petite face was nearly unrecognizable. Black pine soot was smeared across her nose and forehead, her ink-splattered outer sleeves were rolled to her elbows. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes were bloodshot from sixteen hours of unbroken mental concentration.
On the floor beside her stool lay a wicker basket filled with thirty-four crumpled, blackened scrolls. Each one representing four spirit stones’ worth of imported Mulberry-bark magic charm paper.
“It keeps bleeding,” Shen Yue groaned, tugging at her messy topknot with ink-stained fingers. “The ice-barrier rune needs eighteen strokes of pure Yin spirit ink. But every time my left hand begins the foundational frost lattice, my right hand’s trigger rune leaks spiritual charge across the parchment! They touch! They ignite! Boom! Another four stones gone!”
