Clouded Soul Crafting Systems

There are three types of crafting, or at least three that I will bother documenting in this early preproduction phase. Smithing, Alchemy, and Talisman Scripting. All need better names when it’s time for terminology.

To save time, all items will share the same 7 tier grade scale. Feel free to suggest better.

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Fleeting- only possessing a taste of power, but far better than nothing

Auspicious- getting somewhere, nothing to sneeze at

Momentous- the absolute peak of what an ordinary human crafter can produce

Embodied- beyond then scope of what a human can create, made by lesser sages at the very least

Magnanimous- an item with the first touches of divinity, greater sage tier

Exalted- a treasure worth sacrificing your entire clan for, demigod-tier

Peerless- godly quality, wars have been fought over the few that exist in the mortal realm but are almost only ever seen in heaven

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I will begin by paraphrasing something my editor said because I want it put down for my benefit. These supplemental arts are another path to power for any refiner. Each trains one's soul in different ways, but there is a distinct divide between refiners who refine solely for strength and ones who practice any of these crafting arts for profit. Going down both roads at once is immensely difficult, but there are benefits to doing it. Not every master or even every God dabbled in one of the supplemental arts, but those who did benefited greatly.

It's way too early to say if the main character will do so, and if he did it certainly wouldn't be in this first series, but if he did, it would probably be as a calligrapher since I don't want to purposefully ape my biggest inspiration, Cradle, more than I already am. The main character is a smith in that on top of a skilled fighter.

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Smithing

Smithing is the creation of weapons, armors, and other magical trinkets. On top of your average blacksmithing steps, it involves breaking down physical material into their affinities or dead matter into their aspect and transplanting them into a vessel. It is a battle of the smith’s willpower and concentration, relying on their chi to rip out and contain these foreign essences inside themselves long enough to purify/enhance before putting them in the object- all while maintaining the purity of their own soul. It’s very dangerous. You could be making a fire affinity sword and when drawing out the fire affinity from some monster’s fire sac and storing it, a slip up in concentration could engulf you from the inside, killing you or causing damage to your soul.

The more advanced you are the easier it is to make lesser quality items, but in general it doesn’t get much easier to make harder ones. That’s why skilled smiths are always in high demand, as anyone who can consistently create such powerful weapons and such without damaging themselves in the process is worth more than the actual treasures they produce.

At a very high level a smith would be able to imbue treasures with their own souls, creating artificial soulful treasures.

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Alchemy

Alchemy is about as you’d expect and not too different from how I portrayed it in my other series, but I may have to look up how eastern alchemy differed. I know a lot of it came down to fengshui, but I’m not incorporating the 5 classical elements into this series so prominently so it wouldn’t be wholly applicable. Either way, perhaps it could be different by having the alchemist have to watch over the process and provide a steady stream of the appropriate affinity chi at specific intervals, which requires teams of people watching over the elixir or pills in progress as the ingredients are treated, all without sleep.

Because alchemy is a group effort and requires many types of chi, they often form communes or sects devoted solely to production. Each project is overseen by as many alchemists as need be, and on top of that alchemists up are well known for having a wide degree of contracts with both worldly spirits and sacred beasts. The reason for this is simple, no one man can ever produce enough affinity cruxes in their soul to create elixirs and pills by themselves. Basic ones, sure, but for an advanced elixir it might be a convoluted hundred step process where you need to boil the ingredient for thirty straight minutes with so-and-so grade fire affinity chi, strike this extract with lightning chi exactly 3 times in five second intervals, and other such crap. Alchemists specialize in maximizing their amount of chi, but it would take a God to do everything by themselves.

The spirits are almost always very easily convinced to contract themselves to an alchemist, as they are entitled to a portion of the end result which will help overcome developmental issues.

Alchemists can also be powerful warriors because they produce such potent elixirs and pills for their advancement, but most are happy to let their harem of worldly spirits and sacred beasts do all of their fighting for them and most techniques they develop are ones that specifically help with alchemy in some way or another.

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Talismans

Lastly for now is talisman creation, which involves an ancient alchemical art of breaking down materials into different ink sticks, turning immaterial affinities into physical matter. Then, the calligrapher users a special ink stone made to contain affinity ink and creates the ink with sacred water of some kind.

The calligrapher then uses a special brush which they have learned to temporarily place a bit of their soul into, which acts as a sponge. An ordinary brush would not absorb the ink. From there, it’s pretty self explanatory. Calligraphers must keep concentration or the ink will evaporate. They draw on mystical sheafs of parchment, also an ancient art, and the quality of the final product is dependent on many, many factors. The complexity of the script, quality of the paper, the brushwork itself, quality of the ink, and so on.

Talismans themselves can vary in their effect. Some are single use, like spell scrolls, others provide a passive buff when applied to a person or object, while others still can be used to in force very specific commands on inanimate objects. Think golems and jiangshi, for two different sides of that particular coin.

For logic’s sake, part of the scripts on each talisman would be to make them difficult to remove and in some cases destroy. You don’t want to apply an ‘increase muscle’ talisman to your body and have your rival target it first thing, tearing it off like paper. It would have to be overloaded with chi, something that takes a few seconds to do which could be difficult in the heat of battle. Of course, only the really, really high end talismans would stack up in this regard. The most common type would be the single use ones.

Being a calligrapher has much less downsides to it than a smith or alchemist, aside from maybe the secret art of making the ink and paper which I’m not really getting into here, but the trade off is that it’s far and away the most difficult branch of crafting and so many things can go wrong at any step that true-blue master calligraphers are almost unheard of.

It’s also not a very dangerous art to learn, as most talismans that could harm you need to be activated first. Exceptions would be like accidentally arranging the runes wrong and ending up with an explosive effect, but this is mitigated by training under a teacher who will look for such errors before a talisman is ever used.