IMPORTANT AUTHOR NOTE: As it has become harder to mange publishing in different sites, I have decided to only publish on royalroad for now, even though I might return to publish the chapters here at a later time. You can find this novel here:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/146892/i-brought-the-internet-to-the-cultivation-world
Thank you everyone for your support here!
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Inside the space again, which Chen Yu decided to just call the Inner Void even though he doubted it was inner in any way, nothing seemed to have changed at first glance. The void was still full with emptiness, that same white-black nothingness stretching out in all directions.
His clone was sitting there meditating with the Mind method he'd developed, its form perfectly still and radiating a subtle power that hadn't been there before.
The only difference Chen Yu could distinguish was that the space itself seemed to have expanded in some way, as if the boundaries had pushed outward slightly though there were no boundaries to begin with.
Leaving the Inner Void, Chen Yu finally got up from his bed. As he headed to the Inn's shared washroom, he passed by the front counter and saw a crowd gathered there, voices raised in heated discussion. Chen Yu stopped at the edge of the crowd, listening to their loud and interlacing arguments.
"...I saw it myself! One part of the sky started snowing, half of the town is already covered with snow!" A scrawny man yelled, his face flushed red with excitement as if he'd created that phenomenon himself.
Continuing between gasping breaths, he started yelling again, spittle flying from his lips. "The other half! The other half was filled with lightning, red lightning! Just like the tribulation of the high cultivators!"
"It must be some hidden master crossing the tribulation in our small area," a young man said excitedly, his eyes wide with wonder.
A middle-aged man looked at him with undisguised disdain and spat, "What nonsense are you speaking? Did you see anyone cross the tribulation? What about the snow half, what does that signify? Use your dog brain!"
The young man's face flushed red with embarrassment and anger, his fists clenching at his sides. "You and your ancestors are the dog brains! It's obviously a great master!"
As the argument got more heated, more and more people joined in, shouting and spitting at each other's faces with accusations and theories flying back and forth. Just as a brawl was about to start, someone grabbing another's collar, a voice seemed to break through everyone's clamor like a knife through butter.
"Dear guests, if you want to discuss this matter further, please find a better place." An older man standing behind the counter spoke calmly, but his half-step Qi Refining stage cultivation pressed down on everyone present like an invisible weight.
The crowd, feeling his cultivation and seeing the warning in his eyes, slowly shuffled out of the Inn with grumbles and backward glances.
Chen Yu could guess that the phenomenon was most likely caused by the clash of those two beings from earlier, the otherworldly presence and the Heavenly Consciousness confronting each other.
Not thinking about it further since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he went to the washroom. He took a quick shower to refresh himself, washing away the sweat and grime from yesterday's near-death experience, then headed back to his room.
Finally, sitting at his desk, Chen Yu started drawing his usual talismans. As he worked, brush moving across the paper with practiced strokes, his mind wandered back to his past life. He remembered when he used to try and draw for fun, though he'd never had the talent to make anything look even slightly better than what a teenager would sketch during boring classes.
He remembered his favorite fineliner pen that he'd bought for a steep price after months of saving, how it had made his little doodling in meetings just a little finer and more satisfying even if the results were still mediocre.
As he was thinking about his past life, Chen Yu suddenly dropped the brush in his hand and looked up with a face full of excitement, eyes wide and lips parted slightly. The talisman he was working on instantly failed as the line went crooked, but he couldn't care less about the wasted materials.
Creating a fineliner pen would change his whole talisman creation process completely. Unlike his current brush with its uneven line thickness and constant need for adjustment, so hard to control that every stroke required careful attention, a fineliner would solve so many problems.
Chen Yu's mind raced as he thought back to how those pens had worked on Earth. The fineliner from his past life had relied on a firm felt core encased in a metal tip, the design deceptively simple but incredibly effective.
The felt acted as both ink reservoir and regulator, holding the liquid through capillary action while releasing it in controlled amounts. The metal tip, usually made of stainless steel or some other rigid material, had a tiny channel carved through its center that was precisely calibrated to allow only a specific amount of ink through at any given moment. The combination meant that whether you pressed hard or light, whether you moved fast or slow, the line thickness remained absolutely consistent.
That consistency was what had made fineliners revolutionary for technical drawing and illustration on Earth. Artists could create perfectly uniform lines without worrying about ink flow or pressure control, could work faster without sacrificing quality. The pen did all the regulating automatically through simple physics.
Chen Yu stood up and started pacing, his excitement building as he worked through how to adapt this to the cultivation world. The basic principle would remain the same, but the materials and execution would need to be completely different.
Instead of felt, he could use spirit beast fur or perhaps some kind of cultivated cotton that could handle the corrosive nature of spirit ink without degrading. The channels in normal ink pens were tiny, maybe half a millimeter or less, but for talisman work they'd need to be even smaller to achieve the fine lines required for complex arrays.
The metal tip would be the biggest challenge. Regular steel wouldn't work because spirit ink would eat through it in days, maybe hours depending on the ink's quality.
He'd need something more durable, more resistant. Spirit iron would be the minimum requirement, the kind used for low-grade weapons that could withstand qi without corroding.
But even better would be star copper, an alloy that some cultivators used for crafting tools that needed to channel spiritual energy regularly. It was expensive, probably too expensive for a proof of concept, but for a final product it would be worth it.
The real innovation though, the part that excited Chen Yu most, was how this could interact with spiritual energy. A normal brush required the talisman maker to manually control the flow of spirit ink through their qi, maintaining perfect consistency through sheer concentration and skill. It was exhausting and error-prone, especially for complex talismans with hundreds of interconnected lines.
But if he could design the pen to regulate ink flow mechanically, through the physical structure of the tip and reservoir, then he could focus all his attention on the spiritual energy patterns themselves instead of splitting his concentration between energy control and ink control.
Chen Yu sat back down at his desk and grabbed a blank piece of paper, starting to sketch out rough designs. The pen would need to be longer than a normal brush to accommodate the ink reservoir inside the barrel. Maybe five to seven inches total length, with the reservoir taking up about two-thirds of that space.
The tip assembly would screw into the front, allowing him to replace it when it eventually wore down or got clogged. He sketched a cross-section showing how the felt core would sit inside the barrel, how the metal tip would connect to it, how ink would flow from the wide reservoir through progressively narrower channels until it reached the writing point.
But there was a problem he hadn't considered initially. Normal fineliner pens on Earth relied on gravity and capillary action to pull ink toward the tip.
That worked fine for water-based ink on paper. But spirit ink wasn't water-based, it was spiritually charged liquid that behaved according to different rules. Sometimes it flowed upward if there was stronger spiritual energy above it. Sometimes it crystallized if left stagnant too long. Sometimes it reacted violently with certain materials.
Chen Yu tapped his pencil against the paper, thinking. He needed a way to ensure consistent flow regardless of the spiritual environment. What if he incorporated a tiny circulation array into the pen barrel?
Not a full array that would require constant spirit stone power, but a passive one that used ambient spiritual energy to keep the ink moving gently within the reservoir. Just enough movement to prevent crystallization and maintain even distribution, but not so much that it would spray everywhere.
The more he thought about it, the more excited he got. This wasn't just about making his work easier. If he could successfully create a spirit ink fineliner, he could sell them to other talisman makers.
The market would be huge because every talisman maker from Tier 1 to Tier 5 struggled with the same consistency problems he did. Sure, the truly skilled masters had practiced for decades and could maintain perfect brush control, but even they would appreciate a tool that let them work faster and with less mental strain.
Chen Yu started sketching more detailed designs, working through different tip configurations. A standard round tip would be easiest to manufacture and most versatile. But he could also create flat tips for making broader strokes, or angled tips for certain specialized techniques. If this worked, he could create an entire product line of different pen styles for different applications.
The cost would be the main barrier. Even using the cheapest viable materials, each pen would probably cost at least three spirit stones to manufacture, maybe more for the first prototypes as he worked out the kinks in the design.
And he'd need to commission a skilled craftsman to actually create the metal tips since he didn't have the tools or expertise to work metal at that level of precision himself. But if he could sell the finished pens for fifteen or twenty spirit stones each, and if other talisman makers found them as useful as he suspected they would...
This could be even bigger than the array heating concept for Xie Jun's tavern.
Chen Yu looked down at his sketches, at the various designs and notes he'd scrawled across the paper, and felt that familiar thrill of creation. This was what he'd missed most from his previous life, not the comfort or technology, but this feeling of building something new. Of seeing a problem and engineering a solution. Of taking an idea and making it real.
He had work to do.