Plate Ninety-One: The Creation Ended, Descending the Mountain

When she cast the fourth painting, the two-story villa, into the pool, Sang Sang felt a little tense.

The water began to gurgle and bubble. Slowly, the bubbles vanished. The painting was still there, but after a careful check she discovered that the energy paper had thinned slightly, with about one standard crystal's worth of energy gone, and the spiritual power originally infused into the painting had disappeared.

"Did the spiritual power cancel out the energy paper? Or did the spiritual power and the pool water join forces to devour the energy?"

Sang Sang thought it over, picked up the fifth painting, the rice ears, and poured in a great deal of spiritual power until the total matched the painting's energy exactly. Only then did she roughly estimate the pool's spiritual content and place the rice painting into the water.

The bubbling continued for quite a while. When the water finally settled, the painting was gone from the pool, but the spiritual power in the water had increased.

"So it was the spiritual power and the pool water working together to swallow the energy. Only the spiritual power from the Danxia painted realm is useful."

She did not put the sixth painting, the buns, into the water. Instead, she directly used time reversal to return it to blank paper and energy ink. Then she picked up the seventh painting, the grapes, and tossed it into the pool.

The paper began to melt, but not all at once. Only the blank, unpainted portions were dissolving. The cluster of grapes in the center grew deeper in color and ever more lifelike... no, not lifelike, but truly transformed from flatness into volume. She could even faintly smell the fresh fragrance of grapes.

This was creation.

Sang Sang's eyes shone brightly. She lifted the great bunch of grapes and held them in her hand, turning them slowly. The grapes in her painting had only twenty-three berries, but the bunch before her was clustered so tightly there were no obvious gaps, and there were thirty-eight in all. The laws had automatically completed the half she had not painted.

The size of the fruit was more or less the same, but each berry was subtly different in shape, and the colors of green, red, purple, and black were not the same. As for the taste... it was exactly as imagined: the green ones were tart and sweet, the red ones just sweet enough, and the purple-black ones were almost too sweet, with a faint hint of bitterness.

"It isn't the sprouting, growing, flowering, and fruiting of a seed. It's directly making a mature form. So this is creation, not life... Life is a process; creation is not making life. It's making..."

Sang Sang muttered to herself, placing the fish, the meat pig, and the horse into the water one by one, carefully observing the changes in spiritual power. She did not let a single fluctuation of law escape her notice, testing each one against the thoughts in her mind.

"Water, earth, yin and yang... yin and yang give birth to all things?"

The fish were lively and leaping; the pig was snorting and rooting. There was no sign that they had just been two-dimensional paintings.

Sang Sang slaughtered the pig and fish, dissecting them for examination. Their internal structures were exactly the same as naturally grown fish and pigs. The meat was not especially good, the spiritual power content was low, but the purity was fairly decent.

The horse was an ordinary steed, average in appearance and average in speed, unable to sustain life merely by absorbing spiritual power. It still needed grass, probably because too little spiritual power had been infused during the painting process.

Sang Sang painted a patch of clover and created it, letting the horse go over to eat. Then she continued painting.

This time, she planned to test the effect of spiritual power on created things. She made ten identical works, with energy measured in standard crystals: the first had only 0.2, then 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1. Beyond that, the amounts doubled directly: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32.

She first tested inanimate things: ten handkerchiefs and ten jade pendants.

The first handkerchief felt rough, the thread was poor, and the color was dull. The second was a little better. By the third, the material had already reached the standard. By the fifth, it had already reached the limit of what ordinary people could make. Starting from the sixth, with twice the energy, the painting was no longer a single-use item; it could be used repeatedly, with the number of uses proportional to the spiritual power infused.

But at sixteen times, the painting again became single-use. This handkerchief was no ordinary object, but a spiritual artifact impervious to water and fire, capable of rebounding magical damage. The thirty-two-times handkerchief was also a spiritual artifact; not only was it immune to water and fire, it could also enlarge or shrink to store items.

"Interesting."

Sang Sang curved her lips and tossed the handkerchief aside, then picked up brush and paper to paint several jade pendants, raising the spiritual content by ninefold, tenfold, fiftyfold, and one hundredfold. She had even wanted to try one thousandfold, but one hundredfold seemed to be the limit; add even a little more and the painting would shatter.

Jade pendants consumed more spiritual power than handkerchiefs. The first piece was carved with exquisite craftsmanship, exactly like the one in her painting, but the material was stone. Only the second had a trace of jade color. The third was smooth on the surface. The fourth could be recognized as jade, though of rather low quality. The fourth and fifth both improved the jade's quality. By the sixth, the jade was already translucent, and its color was fairly lovely. The seventh, created with four times the spiritual power, was truly a top-grade treasure; placed in water, it could dye an entire pool to a single hue.

Ninefold, tenfold, and sixteenfold did not bring great change, only allowing repeated use. Only at thirty-sixfold did it become a spiritual artifact, with the effect of calming the mind and settling the spirit. At fiftyfold it gained a limited-use protective barrier that could withstand attacks below heavenly level. At one hundredfold, the barrier's uses became unlimited, and it also gained the ability to create illusions.

"Pretty useless properties. They can still be of some use to people below heavenly level."

After that, Sang Sang tested buildings, grains, cooked food, fruit, livestock, and riding beasts one by one.

With the same amount of spiritual power, different things changed in different ways. In general, larger volume required more energy than smaller volume, greater density required more than lower density, and inanimate things required less energy than living things. Cooked food counted as inanimate. Whether living or dead, the maximum spiritual content was capped at one hundred. However, living things had one characteristic: once they reached a qualitative transformation and acquired attributes, after being created as real entities they could accept the infusion of spiritual power and grow stronger.

Buildings had to have their internal structure drawn in the initial draft; otherwise, when created, the inside would be nothing more than a single room at best, with a few floors divided perhaps.

The Heavenly Emperor, having barely escaped alive from Cain's hands, returned to find Sang Sang using spatial laws to expand the living room into a vast square. She was sitting amid a heap of animals of every size, while all around her were piles of random odds and ends, and in the distance stood several houses, some crude and some exquisite.

"Sang Sang, why are you making so many identical things?" The Heavenly Emperor's voice was hoarse as he flopped like a puddle of mud onto Sang Sang's back.

"Only identical things make the differences easier to compare." Sang Sang stared unblinking at the changes in the clothes inside the gestation pool, while the runes in her sea of consciousness moved at high speed, trying to simulate the laws of creation.

"The book doesn't have data on spiritual power changes, does it?" The Heavenly Emperor started helping himself, taking healing paintings from the spatial container in Sang Sang's earring.

"What you learn from books is always shallow until you practice it yourself." Sang Sang shoved the Heavenly Emperor away, fished a set of clothes out of the pool, and threw them at him. "Danxia ethnic clothing. For you. Get yourself dressed. We're leaving."

"Leaving for where?" The Heavenly Emperor was instantly revived. He held up the clothes against his body. Though the clothes were far inferior to the one he was wearing, he still cheerfully put them on.

"Studying behind closed doors has hit a bottleneck. When I condense the laws of creation, I always feel like something is missing. I'm planning to go down the mountain and have a look around."

Sang Sang had already mastered the Danxia paintings, but she was still far from mastering the laws of creation. In a different environment, without paper, brushes, pigments, or the gestation pool, she could not turn the things in her paintings into real objects.

P.S. Please subscribe to the official version. If not, at least support the first purchase, please. Sisters, don't forget to vote after reading. The next update will be at eight tomorrow morning.