Li Xin drew the Strength Talisman every day, and without even dipping the brush in ink, he familiarized himself with the flow of the Warm Heart Talisman through his fingertips. Once the embodiment of the Strength Talisman was finished, the next step would be the Warm Heart Talisman.

  However, there was one problem, the Strength Talisman could barely be completed based on the physical strength obtained from a one-stroke talisman, but the Warm Heart Talisman was different—it required delicate control of the flow of qi, and both mental strength and physical stamina had to support it.

  “First, I need to raise my realm.”

  Li Xin came to that conclusion. The method to raise one’s realm was simple—Pills. A shortcut that every cultivator went through at least once. The problem was the price. Even a single stalk of the most common spirit herb, Azure Bell Grass, cost fifty jeon. To make a pill, at least three kinds of spirit herbs were required, along with the skill of an alchemist capable of handling them.

  As for Condensation Qi Pills that forcibly raised one’s realm, there was no need to even mention them. They required spirit herbs a tier above Azure Bell Grass, such as White Water Grass or Blue Jade Flower, and they were not something one could casually buy from a street stall.

  Pills were items that were absorbed directly into the body. The moment a defective product entered the mouth, not only would one fail to advance in realm, the path ahead could be severed entirely. That was why cultivators only bought pills from trustworthy merchant associations. The pills sold by merchant associations carried quality assurance seals, with even the date of refinement and the alchemist’s name recorded. At that moment, Liu Guangjin’s words surfaced in Li Xin’s mind. The same item could have a different price depending on where it was sold and who sold it.

  If that was the case, then how much money would be needed to buy even a single pill from such a place? There was not absolutely no way. The Strength Talisman.

  To completely finish embodiment… I’ll probably need to draw about a hundred.

  If he sold all one hundred Strength Talismans, he could more than sufficiently prepare the money for a pill.

  One hundred sheets…

  At that moment, a question arose in Li Xin’s mind. How much had his physical strength increased compared to the beginning? And how much did his strength increase when he drew a single Strength Talisman? The description, ‘slightly increases physical strength,’ was not enough to grasp an exact figure. For the sake of future plans, he needed to check the extent of the embodiment’s effect.

  ***

  At dawn the next day, Li Xin headed to the small mountain behind his house. It was a quiet time before sunlight arrived, with dew settling on the rocks. Walking along the sloped trail, he selected a suitable rock, neither too small nor too large.

  When he lifted a rock of appropriate size, it felt lighter than he had expected.

  Normally, even this weight would have been burdensome…

  The feeling was new.

  Next, he tried lifting a slightly heavier rock. This time, he could barely raise it with both hands.

  He dropped the rock before even three seconds had passed.

  “Good. I’ll use this as the standard.”

  Li Xin set that rock as his limit weight. Then he returned home and drew a single Strength Talisman.

  The moment the talisman was completed, heat seeped from his shoulders to his fingertips. It was a familiar sensation. The feeling of qi permeating his muscles. It was proof that physical strength was being engraved into his body. He climbed the mountain again and lifted the same rock. The same rock, the same posture.

  Once again, he could not endure even three seconds. However, the sensitive perception of a talisman master caught a subtle difference.

  “1%…”

  That was exactly how much it felt like it had increased.

  Li Xin was astonished. To think that drawing just one talisman increased physical strength by a full 1%… But he soon realized something. This was not because the Strength Talisman was special. It was because his own physical strength had been extremely weak. The Strength Talisman was a talisman that added an absolute value. In other words, its structure added a fixed amount rather than scaling proportionally with current strength. Because of that, the weaker the person, the greater the effect felt.

  “If I completely embody the Strength Talisman, it wouldn’t be strange for my strength to nearly double.”

  Murmuring to himself, Li Xin looked at the rock again. The path of cultivation was still long, but he felt certain that he had taken a definite step forward.

  ***

  Time flowed quietly.

  Every day, Li Xin ground ink and took up the brush. He had thought the Strength Talisman would be embodied first, but unexpectedly, the one that finished first was the Lightness Talisman. Li Xin did not particularly enjoy drawing the Lightness Talisman. Demand was low, so it took a long time to sell them.

  But now things were different. Liu Guangjin had clearly said it, that he would buy every talisman Li Xin drew. Li Xin believed those words, so regardless of whether they sold or not, he steadily continued drawing Lightness Talismans as well.

  A few days ago, when he laid out a large batch of Lightness Talismans, he even saw Liu Guangjin’s expression briefly twist in ambiguity. But he did not pay it any mind—there was no need to, because he was drawing at least one Strength Talisman every day. He did what he needed to do, and he thought that alone was enough.

  Three Lightness Talismans per day. Even if they did not sell, he drew them. The sensation of speed seeping into his body through the talismans was faint at first, but it gradually accumulated.

  And then one day.

  [You have completed a 1-stroke Lightness Talisman.]

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  [Your footwork has become slightly faster.]

  [The 1-stroke Lightness Talisman has fully settled into your body.]

  [No further increase in speed will occur.]

  Li Xin stopped his hand. His gaze drifted out the window without realizing it. Dawn mist lay thick, and moonlight faintly covered the mountain shadows.

  The Lightness Talisman finished first.

  It was unexpected, but not all that surprising. Judging purely by the amount he had drawn so far, it made sense that the Lightness Talisman would be embodied first.

  A strange lightness settled in one corner of his heart. A talisman he had thought useless had ultimately produced results. And immediately after that, an enormous wave surged like a storm from beyond his consciousness.

  [You have completely embodied the ‘1-stroke Lightness Talisman’.]

  [Conditions fulfilled.]

  [You comprehend the movement technique ‘Azure Smoke Step’.]

  “Uuk…”

  A sensation difficult to put into words. The feeling of someone pushing a hand into his brain and planting knowledge there was something he never got used to. Completely new sensations and theories, which he had not known at all just moments ago, settled deep within his mind.

  [Azure Smoke Step]

  A movement technique that applies the principles of lightness when taking a step, momentarily dispersing the body’s weight. It does not dramatically increase speed, but it produces almost no noise, reduces friction with the ground, and allows one to smoothly traverse uneven terrain.

  The explanation was concise, but it did not click all at once. What did it mean to disperse weight?

  Li Xin chose a familiar place, the back mountain—a place he often visited to test the effects of the Strength Talisman. It was full of rocks, and the ground was uneven.

  After carefully regulating his breathing, he slowly took a step forward.

  “Light.”

  Where his foot landed, not even a rustling sound was produced. Though he was stepping on soil, the sensation was as if he were walking atop thin mist. Contact with the ground had not disappeared, the pressure was simply spread evenly. Since no weight concentrated on a single point, there was almost no friction or noise.

  He took another step.

  It was quiet—lght and smooth, flowing along while touching the earth. Azure Smoke Step was far from explosive sprinting, but what made it special was that no trace was left behind with each movement—no dust rose, and even the footprints left behind were faint.

  He slightly bent his knees and passed through a gap between rocks. Even when crossing minute slopes between stones, his toes slid forward as if bouncing. He stopped and quietly exhaled. This movement technique embodied under the name Azure Smoke Step was not merely a secret art for increasing speed, it was a technique that changed the very way the feet touched the ground and how the center of gravity was handled.

  “So lightness… isn’t about being fast, but about being light.”

  Only now did Li Xin understand the true meaning of the word ‘lightness’ with his entire body. At that moment, fragments scattered in his mind connected into one—the talismans he had drawn until now, the meanings of the strokes he had memorized with a focus on effects.

  Until now, he had accepted talismans merely as ‘functions’. But in this moment, he had reached the ‘principles’ that made those functions possible for the first time.

  After returning from testing Azure Smoke Step, Li Xin sat at his desk for a long time. His breathing gradually grew quiet, and his thoughts deepened. And then, when he suddenly came to his senses, the room was already submerged in darkness.

  Moonlight seeped down from the roof, and a single small candle flickered, barely illuminating the space. In the midst of deep stillness, Li Xin turned his gaze to the desk. The diagram of the Warm Heart Talisman was spread out. Looking at the diagram, he slowly exhaled. The sense of blockage he felt every time he tried to draw the Warm Heart Talisman. He could trace the strokes, and he could control the flow of spiritual power to some extent, but he never felt confident that he could complete it to the end.

  Li Xin recalled Azure Smoke Step. That moment when he realized that lightness was not merely about speed, but about making the body light. Until now, he had only chased after effects—tracing strokes, memorizing diagrams, and injecting spiritual power, but talismans possessed a deeper principle than that. Each individual stroke had meaning, and in every connection where those strokes joined, a flow existed.

  Li Xin raised his head and looked at the first stroke of the Warm Heart Talisman. The beginning had to be light, soft, like gently lifting a single leaf, but the second line had to sink deep, like an abyss. In the past, he had thought this simply meant adjusting brush pressure—that it meant pressing lightly, then pushing deeply, but that was not it.

  The Warm Heart Talisman was a talisman that stabilized emotions, then the one drawing those emotions—

  In other words, himself—had to feel them first in order to draw it.

  Li Xin lifted the brush. Like wind brushing over a tranquil lake, emotions flowed, and within the stillness, a single center revealed itself. He calmed his mind—anger, sorrow, fear.

  Upon touching that center, his fingertips began to move naturally. The first stroke flowed softly, like a quiet breath, the second stroke sank slowly, like a ripple rising from the depths of an abyss.

  Now he could understand—it was not merely a line. It was the shape of the emotion called composure. Though he had only drawn lines in the air, the current within the room subtly changed. Within the heavy stillness, it felt as if even the smallest tremor had vanished.

  Li Xin set down the brush and quietly murmured, “So this… was the Warm Heart Talisman.”

  The diagram of the Warm Heart Talisman spread before his eyes no longer felt unfamiliar as before. The meaning of each stroke naturally surfaced, and above all, he began to see the principle behind why the talisman took on that form. Looking down at the paper, Li Xin organized his thoughts.

  Strokes are… words.

  Each individual stroke contained its own inherent meaning.

  The first stroke of the Strength Talisman meant ‘strength’, and the first stroke of the Lightness Talisman meant ‘lightness’. A ‘word’ holds meaning by itself, even without surrounding sentences. Just from the word ‘fire’, one could imagine something hot and burning. Strokes were the same, they possessed their own nature and direction, but words alone cannot convey all meaning.

  Fire.

  What did that mean? Did it mean a fire had broken out? Did it mean to light a fire? Or did it simply mean ‘hot’? Only when it became a ‘sentence’ could it be clear. Only then did Li Xin understand why talismans beyond eight strokes were called ‘one-character’.

  A talisman that contained a single completed sentence. That was a one-character talisman. Additional Strokes were simple. They were drawn by repeating the same stroke one more time.

  Fire, fire.

  It was like repeating a word to emphasize it. Emphasis had power, but that was all.

  But Child Strokes were different. For example, if to a talisman meaning ‘fire’, one added the Child Stroke ‘shoot’, meaning ‘to launch’… In that moment, ‘fire’ changed from something that merely existed into something that moved.

  “Additional Strokes are simple repetition. Emphasis of meaning. But Child Strokes are… combinations of words.”

  His thoughts flowed naturally onward. If one added ‘hot’ to the word ‘fire’, the temperature of the fire changed. It became fiercer and more threatening.

  If one added ‘hurl’ to the word ‘fire’, a static property transformed into a dynamic attack. Child Strokes were tools that turned words into sentences, they expanded existence into situations. They set targets, created directions, and imposed conditions. Even with the same ‘fire’, completely different effects could be produced.

  “Mother Stroke is the core, Child Strokes are application…”

  In reality, most talismans could exert a certain level of effectiveness with just the Mother Stroke, but what truly mattered was how that meaning was used—Will. Direction. Target. Effect.

  Conditions of manifestation. All of that was entrusted to the Child Strokes. The extensibility of meaning contained within each stroke.

  Quietly organizing his thoughts, Li Xin murmured to himself, “So there really was a reason the sect strictly blocked the leakage of Child Strokes.”