3/3 this week.
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The first thing Cha Ming felt was a light, supportive breeze that caressed him as the Ninesky Seals faded, returning him to surprisingly painless awareness.
His eyes flicked open, and all around him was a familiar whiteness. But it was not the familiar whiteness. This was not the Clear Sky World.
First things first, damage report, Cha Ming thought. He inspected his body and saw that somehow, it was functional and relatively pain free...
2022-08-12 07:44:21 +0000 UTC
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2/3 this week.
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Between Elder Azure Crimson Tempest and the sect master of the Azure Tempest Sect was a hall, and in that hall was a test. A gentle wind blew through it, sending pain lancing through Cha Ming’s body with every step he took.
The wind is hitting me internally, Cha Ming observed as he rose and put down his foot once again. I can’t paint this. I can’t defend from the outside. I can’t block it. He inspected his body but did not discover...
2022-08-10 04:37:58 +0000 UTC
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1/3 this week. Sorry about the delay ^^.
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The Azure Tempest Sect was a large and powerful sect that kept mostly to themselves. In his dealings on the Chasewind Plane, they’d seldom come up, and even then, only in passing. Despite their general policy of non-interference, it was possible to drum up a fair amount of information with relatively little hassle. They weren’t secretive – they just didn’t like troublesome interference.
The Azure Tempest Sect was a Tier 1 S...
2022-08-08 08:28:36 +0000 UTC
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3/3 last week. Sorry about the delay. Internet is getting less spotty, so I should be a little more reliable this week.
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Three months after the Grand Opening in Soaring City, Cha Ming expanded into three other cities. Three months after that, he expanded a second time, and a few competitors even popped up. He naturally did not bother with entrepreneurs and let them grow their half-competent imitations, as this was all according to plan.
Inevitably, some of the Clear Sky Ce...
2022-08-08 08:27:36 +0000 UTC
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A while back I wrote a novella and published it for you all. I've just taken it down to publish on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. I'd really appreciated it if you all took the time to leave a review for it, since it's standalone and won't have the same momentum as the next installment of Painting the Mists.
Here's the link and blurb, in case any of you haven't read it:
https://mybook.to/WinterSwordsman <...
2022-08-05 06:03:15 +0000 UTC
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Yes, I've managed to sneak through the firewall! Another long chapter. 2/3 this week, don't panic if I don't manage to post by end of week, I'll catch up later.
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It took a week to finally tunnel to a safe location and escape the Crosswind Pirates. Holdouts and sects not buying into his system were one thing, but people actively trying to rob, sabotage, and pillage in the middle of a planetary crisis was simply inexcusable, so Cha Ming decided that something needed to be done.
2022-08-05 00:45:09 +0000 UTC
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A month has passed, and I'm back in action. Thanks everyone for your patience. Three chapters this week, the plan is to finish posting Book 16 by the end of the month.
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Cha Ming returned to hunting fiends for a full three months after completing his deals with the Tier 3 Raging Tide Sect, the Tier 3 Storm God Clan, and the Tier 3 Purple Sieve Sect. It was busy work, jumping around, and every second he wasted in getting there meant more lives were lost. Ideally, he’d have more ...
2022-08-01 00:30:26 +0000 UTC
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3/3 this week, and just a reminder that Patreon contributions were frozen this month, and will start again next month. Just so you know, there' s about a month's worth of content left in Book 16, after which we'll be heading straight into 17, assuming my writing plans pan out.
Now time to take some time off and pack. Wish me luck!
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There were many places to exchange points for items or services in the Heartforge Realm, and only some of them were located on the Jade and Oc...
2022-07-01 03:09:42 +0000 UTC
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2/3.
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Cha Ming did not have the luxury of returning to the Heartforge Realm very often. Slaying fiends was very important, but since there were other Invited on the Chasewind Plane, including Cao Wenluan, improving his personal strength was as priority.
This was especially the case, given that Cha Ming was only ranked moderately high in terms of relative power. He also had the disadvantage of being unable to use soul burn techniques.
To make matters worse, Cha Ming w...
2022-06-29 05:29:30 +0000 UTC
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1/3 this week.
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The instigator in the wine house was punished, and so were the other cultivators that had attacked Cha Ming without clarifying things. On the surface, their charge was breaking the peace between cultivators and mortals and offending a cultivator of the senior generation, but reading between the lines, Elder Choking Tide was simply rebuking them for not cluing in on obvious things like one’s domain randomly breaking apart, or not being able to determine your opp...
2022-06-27 23:44:26 +0000 UTC
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3/3 this week.
Also, I wanted to let everyone know that I'll be taking a one month "holiday", and will therefore be pausing contributions.
I didn't think I would need to do this, but apparently moving countries is incredibly stressful. Go figure. We're moving in two stages. This one involves moving from our place in Beijing to our inlaws place in another city. The next will involve moving to Canada at the end of October, so I'll likely do the same thing then again.
Onc...
2022-06-26 10:41:18 +0000 UTC
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2/3!
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Now that his soul was stable and no longer at risk of collapsing when exposed to a stiff spiritual breeze, Cha Ming was finally able to relax. He did not immediately resume training but spent most of his time painting.
Much of his paintings were mundane. He painted memories, both good and bad, and used them as a way to lightly touch on the things that, to this date, his Savage Deity Aura had marked off as forbidden territory.
Cha Ming also spent time replenishi...
2022-06-22 06:12:55 +0000 UTC
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1/3 this week.
Goooo!
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The excursion to the Tribulant Yin Demiplane was a great success in the end, despite the many misfortunes that had befallen them. Or was it because of the misfortunes they’d encountered? Otherwise, would they have found that cave and the mother hydra and the motherload of yin lightning crystal?
When accounting for resources gathered, like Wei Longshen’s yin spirits or Xing Tianlong’s yin lightning pool liquid, they averaged about...
2022-06-19 23:36:39 +0000 UTC
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4/4 this week!
Preparing for the interim move to another part of China. It's happening soon.
Good thing I got rid of most of my stuff when I moved here in the first place...
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It took three days for everyone to fully heal. Huxian was relatively uninjured, and Cha Ming recovered quickly, so they used their time to replenish paintings and consumables.
Xing Tianlong’s body was mostly fine, but he’d suffered serious spiritual damage when the hydra had atta...
2022-06-18 05:07:45 +0000 UTC
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This one's a bit long, but still one chapter. 3/4 ^^.
Danger and reward came hand in hand in the Tribulant Yin Demiplane. The moderate danger zones brought in a steady stream of wealth to their group, but in exchange, they encountered far too many close calls and even disastrous material losses.
Huxian ship suffered critical damage multiple times, and one of those times resulted in their group getting stranded for a week as the fox repaired it. Fortunately, Huxian’s Spatial Arch...
2022-06-17 05:02:30 +0000 UTC
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2/4, sorry about the delay.
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Deep in the Tribulant Yin Demiplane flew a small void ship. Very few ships could match it as it sliced through the air and slipped past obstacles as though they weren’t there. Whenever it encountered larger obstacles, such as a mountain or a yin river, the captain of the ship would create a void tunnel that could transport them up to a thousand kilometers in any direction.
It was, one had to admit, a powerful despite its small size, and as su...
2022-06-17 05:01:30 +0000 UTC
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So I just got this in from my artist. The typography isn't done, but I think it's definitely worth admiring. Enjoy!
2022-06-14 07:21:03 +0000 UTC
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1/4 this week. Enjoy!
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In a random location in one of the safe areas of the Tribulant Yin Demiplane, a soft gray light flashed briefly, leaving behind a group of five cultivators. These were naturally Cha Ming and his companions. They were armed and ready for the worst, but luckily, nothing attacked just out of the portal.
“Any idea where we are, Huxian?” Cha Ming asked.
The fox took out a blue jade tablet and began tapping on runes to activate one of its many f...
2022-06-14 07:18:56 +0000 UTC
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4/4!
Some say time is the eternal grind wheel, the inevitable force that wears away at a cliffside until all that’s left is a sandy beach. With enough time, it’s possible to crumble mountains, drain oceans, and even fray the edges of reality.
It therefore stood to reason that with enough time, even the deepest of mental traumas might wear away into nothing. Ten years had passed, but to Cha Ming, it was nearly a century. Enough time to unlock a host of unhealthy memories and pr...
2022-06-12 11:04:34 +0000 UTC
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3/4 this week! Woooo!
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Immortal White’s research and training facility occupied an unusually large plot of land on the training floor of the Heartforge Realm’s jade mountain. It was four times bigger than any other facility and had several more layers of defence than any other building, hands down.
The place was filled with every room that could be imagined and was veritable maze of marble corridors, marble flooring, and marble ceiling. There was no orienting yourself,...
2022-06-10 02:24:58 +0000 UTC
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So I changed my mind. Because of how the chapters work out, I'm going to release 4 chapters this week and next week. I'll release the third chapter today.
In other news, Book 15 is out on Amazon and KU. I would be eternally grateful if you left a review or rating or upvoted positive reviews on it.
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Cha Ming had been to the Law Trial Complex many times over the years, sometimes to touch up on his training and sometimes to pay a visit to Huxian. Like body trials, t...
2022-06-10 02:24:07 +0000 UTC
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1/3 this week!
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From the moment Cha Ming accepted Godking Heavenbind’s instruction, the bitterness of his training increased several-fold. This was in part due to the bitter medicine he was forced to take before every trial, but mostly because said medicine increased his sensitivity to pain by an order of magnitude.
Body tempering formed the core of his training. Instead of aggressively drawing energy into his body, he used mantras he learned from the library to accelera...
2022-06-06 13:11:15 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 3/3 this week!
In other news, yesterday I did something I shouldn't have - I went on Amazon and sifted through reviews. I am both happy and regretful about the experience. On the one hand, Painting the Mists is highly rated, but on the other, it seems that negative reviews have a tendency of filtering to the top, drowning out the good ones. That's the case on both Amazon.com and Audible.com.
I don't want to provide links, as this would potentially trip Amazon's algor...
2022-06-03 01:10:48 +0000 UTC
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2/3 this week!
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Their adventure to the Tribulant Yin Demiplane had ended in failure. They needed to get stronger before their next attempt. Both Cha Ming and Huxian began a new routine as they both intensified their training.
Cha Ming was especially fastidious. He rarely took a break, and only when Huxian invited him over. Often, that involved talking to one or two people over a meal, which was within the limits of Cha Ming’s capabilities.
Most of Cha Ming’s time...
2022-06-01 00:58:11 +0000 UTC
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1/3 this week ^^
The Heartforge Realm, it turns out, was an incomparably huge plane, and in their three months living there, they’d barely scratched the surface in discovering to what extent. The smallest estimates ranged from hundreds of times as large as the Inkwell Plane, and there were rumors that it was actually infinitely large, because it was always adding to itself and shedding off pieces.
The jade and ochre mountains were at the very center of the realm, and beneath the...
2022-05-30 00:54:41 +0000 UTC
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3/3 this week. This one's a small one ^^.
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Cha Ming rested for a day after clearing the red strength trial. Once he was fully replenished, he moved onto the orange trial. He then continued on until he failed to clear the green trial obelisk, one less than he’d been able to clear on the path of body tempering.
He tried many more times to clear it, but failed, and it became clear that his strength control was lagging behind his body’s toughness.
He decided fa...
2022-05-28 13:03:32 +0000 UTC
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2/3 this week!
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Cha Ming and Huxian decided to shore up on general information. Cha Ming, conscious of his dwindling funds, remained in the general information section on the main floor while Huxian got a librarian to find him a cultivation technique and some elementary spatial manipulation techniques.
Huxian had never studied much in the past, but it came as no surprise to Cha Ming when he mastered the first layer of his cultivation technique, Great Maw of the Void, in th...
2022-05-26 00:49:39 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 1/3 this week. This one's a chonker at around 7500 words ^^.
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The library was located on the fourth level of the Heartforge Realm. It sat alone on a terrace of metal and stone that faced the opposing mountain. There were no other buildings beside it, and it was surrounded by something that Cha Ming could only describe as an absolute field of silence.
On the ochre mountain, there existed a mirror image of the same building. This gave the impression that there were t...
2022-05-23 23:35:39 +0000 UTC
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4/4 this week ^^.
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“Oy! Neighbor!” A booming voice called out to them the moment they left Huxian’s residence. Cha Ming looked over to see who it was and tensed before summoning the Savage Deity War Staff and preparing for battle.
“Don’t!” Huxian shouted. He blocked Cha Ming before he could take a step forward. “You can’t fight. At all.”
“No fighting?” Cha Ming muttered. He trusted Huxian, so he put the staff away. “What do you mean, no fighti...
2022-05-21 00:43:34 +0000 UTC
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3/4! Fast on the last one's heels!
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Cha Ming woke in a small artificial space. His body hurt, his head was killing him, and breathing proved extremely difficult. Daylight,he thought, looking around, and tried to rise, only to find out that he couldn’t.
He didn’t panic. If that past month had taught him anything, it was that panicking never helped. So instead, he calmly took in his surroundings.
This place... was a bedroom. A small, cozy bedroom with hard...
2022-05-20 00:20:38 +0000 UTC
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