At first, her brush moved carefully, each character deliberate and precise. Formulas. Diagrams. Theories.
Then she stopped.
She stared at what she had written.
And slammed her fist on the table.
The paper crumpled in her grip. She threw it across the room where it joined the dozens of other failed attempts.
She pulled another sheet toward her and began writing again.
She was so close. She could feel it.
She glanced at her remaining qi. She had made several theories already and experimented with each one, losing a significant amount of qi with little to no success.
She needed something definitive. Soon.
She continued writing.
As her brush moved across the paper, something clicked.
Her eyes widened.
She began rummaging through the manuals frantically, tossing aside ones that weren’t what she needed. Books flew left and right as she searched.
"Where is it... where..."
She found it.
A thin manual with a faded cover. She flipped through the pages rapidly until she reached the section she was looking for.
Her eyes scanned the text as her finger traced along the characters.
"Found it," she muttered.
...
The methods the Moonlight Sect used seemed to rely on some sort of special body.
She had noticed it referenced in this foundation technique. A prerequisite physique that all practitioners needed to possess.
But something didn’t add up.
She had seen hundreds of disciples at the Moonlight Sect, all cultivating their methods. At least, she assumed they did - otherwise, how could they be members of the sect?
But how was this possible?
Hundreds of disciples, all with this unique physique?
Did physiques grow on trees?
So it had to be something else.
It was some sort of physique... but also not.
She decided to call it a pseudo-physique.
A physique that one wasn’t naturally born with, but rather one that could be learned.
An example would be something like the Grandmaster’s spirit body, which allowed for much easier qi management in the grandmaster realm. That wasn’t something you were born with - it was something you attained through hard work.
The reason she was glad to discover this aspect of the Moonlight Sect’s technique was simple.
The physique seemed to modify the features of the body.
Sun Lihua had talked about turning Cipher into a woman. At the time, the Heavenly Demon hadn’t thought much of it.
But if there really was such a physique - one that could fundamentally alter the body’s structure...
Then almost half her problems were solved.
The only issue was that she didn’t have the manual for learning such a technique.
She considered going back to the Moonlight Sect. But she quickly dismissed the idea. Such a foundational technique would be closely guarded. Probably locked away in the Sect Master’s personal chambers or on her body.
Almost impossible to obtain.
But that didn’t mean all hope was lost.
No. Far from it.
She began going through all the manuals she had collected, reading them with extreme care.
All these methods were created with the assumption that the practitioner already possessed the pseudo-physique. Every technique, every circulation pattern, every refinement method - all built upon that foundation.
If that was the case...
Then she could use her knowledge of a normal human body alongside these techniques to reverse-engineer the difference.
She could figure out what the pseudo-physique changed.
And then recreate the base template herself.
She got to work immediately.
...
About a day later, she had a rough outline.
She smiled for the first time in days.
"This should do," she murmured.
She began drafting a new theory.
This time, she used the base outline of the Moonlight Sect’s pseudo-physique to create something entirely new. Her own pseudo-physique.
The way the Moonlight Sect’s version worked was mostly about modifying certain aspects of the body to make it more aligned with yin energy, which their techniques embodied.
The Heavenly Demon couldn’t care less about that.
What she was particularly interested in was just the "modifying the body" part.
She extracted that core concept and began building upon it.
She spread her qi throughout her own body, using it to scan every inch of her vessel. Every muscle. Every bone. Every meridian. She formed a base mesh - a complete map of her current physical state - and used it to expand the technique further.
She hardcoded her own properties into it, making it specifically tailored to her needs.
After that, she borrowed some knowledge from the Grandmaster’s spirit body to expand the technique even more. The spirit body’s simple but effective qi management systems. Its efficient energy pathways. Its stable foundation.
She incorporated all of it.
Then came the main part.
She needed to modify the technique so it would alter her body in specific ways:
First, create an organ for qi absorption. Without this, she would eventually run out of energy and die.
Second, refine her meridians and qi pathways. Her current vessel was crude - barely functional. It needed optimization.
Her understanding of qi was quite deep, so this part wasn’t as hard as she had initially feared.
She had extreme knowledge of all types of qi - how they related to each other, how they reacted, how they flowed. The properties of an organ that could absorb ambient qi were easy for her to determine.
She began modifying the initial technique, replacing the yin-alignment modifications with her own specifications.
...
Another day passed.
She revised the theory several more times, catching errors and refining inefficiencies.
By the end, she had almost perfected it.
"This should work now," she thought.
The final part was converting it into a proper cultivation manual and doing the last optimizations.
While she had no experience in creating cultivation scriptures, she had read thousands of them courtesy of the Moonlight Sect’s library. She understood the base structure and the flow needed for a functional scripture.
While she could just test it with her body, she felt making it into a scripture would be better. This way, she could consolidate her discoveries and catch any mistakes that might cause problems later on. After all, she was in her last bit of qi so she needed to make this count.
She painstakingly wrote the scripture from scratch.
Ensuring that every circulation pattern was mapped precisely.
Then she optimized it.
She went through each section, trimming redundancies and clarifying ambiguities. She tested the logic of each step, ensuring there were no contradictions or dangerous gaps.
Finally, she confirmed it.
Completely perfect.
She gazed at Cipher’s body, still lying motionless on the wooden bed.
Then she looked at the manual she held in her hands.
"Time to put it to the test," she thought.
She closed her eyes.
And began circulating her qi, following the method she had created.
...
A/N: Feels like the light clone all over again.