Night of the Broken Gliph

As the wind howled through the night, a hardyhorse coach travelled a bizarre route leading to the wilderness. Not long after, the coach arrived at a deep, foul-smelling cave enveloped in darkness that seemed to house an ancient beast. 

Bak Wun stopped the hardyhorse at the entrance and tied the reins to a boulder. 

In the blink of an eye, he disappeared once again. He returned a few moments later with dry firewood. It was unknown where he got it from, considering it had only just rained. 

Chui Yim dragged the unconscious Chor Shing Chit down the coach. Thanks to Chui Yim’s constant physical training, he supported Chor Shing Chit’s weight and carried him alone. 

When he dragged Chor Shing Chit into the cave, the place was already brightly lit. Bak Wun might be old, but he was still surprisingly agile. They had just reached the cave a few moments ago, yet he had already set up a fire, which got rid of most of the smell, and placed a pile of fuel and hay near the fire. 

Chui Yim didn’t overthink it and laid Chor Shing Chit on the hay hurriedly. 

“Are you confident?” Bak Wun was worried, but still cool-headed. 

“Nope,” Chui Yim answered without sparing Bak Wun a glance. “But we don’t have any other choice,” he said as he started taking Chor Shing Chit’s clothes off. “Death is inevitable if we return to Southary, and there is no other city close enough.”  

“Sorry.” Chui Yim looked at Chor Shing Chit and mumbled to himself before tearing off his tight, black clothes. 

Szz! 

Chor Shing Chit’s chest and muscular figure was revealed. His chest was red, and there was a fist-sized scar moving as he breathed, as if something was trying to escape. 

“It’s the heart chamber.” Chui Yim could tell that the chamber Chor Shing Chit was breaking through was his heart chamber. 

Bak Wun looked at them weirdly after hearing Chui Yim. The heart chamber is the hardest to break through to amongst all six chambers. If this is his third chamber, Chor Shing Chit must be really talented. “What do you need?” he asked immediately. 

“I need water,” Chui Yim ordered without a single bit of politeness. “And it would be best if you can get rid of the damp smell completely. It’s disturbing.”

Without further ado, Bak Wun tapped his left foot on the ground and vanished. A white figure and a ball of light was then seen shooting around the cave. The next minute, the smell was gone. 

But Chui Yim wasn’t even paying attention to this. Ever since he stepped into the cave, his eyes never left Chor Shing Chit, who no longer looked human, but more like a weapon to him. He had always taken carving gliphs on his weapons seriously. 

The process was similar, but Chor Shing Chit was alive while weapons were dead. Take fire-forging as an example; the main ingredients for the weapons and components need to tolerate each other, but the criteria were lower as minerals can generally withstood each other. By comparison, humans needing new gliphs tattooed had a stricter requirement for materials.  

If the strength used or direction was wrong, it would result in the loss of life. Making a mistake would only cost you ingredients and time during forging, but when tattooing, both the glipher and the gliphists’ lives were at stake.  

This difficult challenge was what made gliphists all the more precious. 

On the other hand, Bak Wun had already dealt with the smell and fetched several basins of water. He watched them both anxiously as he knew how dangerous this process was. 

A gliphist who hadn’t even broken through his first innate chamber was tattooing a gliph for a three-chambered glipher. Even as a knowledgeable person, Bak Wun had never heard of anything like this before. 

However, Chui Yim ignored his stares and continued with his work. Calmly, he unwrapped the gliph covers on Chor Shing Chit’s arms and revealed his gliphs. The gliphs on both arms were similar, which was what most gliphist would choose to tattoo. 

Tattooing similar gliphs on both arms would result in a substantial increase in the strength of the tattoo. Gliphism was a profound subject, and gliphers tend to prefer developing something they were already good at. Like Kot Chi Sing, he had the Snake Scale on both arms, and it worked better to have the same gliph on both arms than have it on just a single arm. 

The increment in stage equated to a change in quality. 

When the gliph cover was removed, a ferocious aura emanated from Chor Shing Chit’s arms. A pair of claws were tattooed on his arms, and they reached from his fingers to his shoulders. The sharp claws of a beast were tattooed on each of his fingers respectively. 

“This…” 

“Chor Shing Chit is part of the Spiral Dragon Chor Clan. That’s the gliph passed down their clan, the Spiral Dragon Claws,” Bak Wun reminded him immediately. 

This was why Bak Wun didn’t have any confidence in Chui Yim. Usually, gliphs were carefully chosen before they were tattooed. Especially for clans and large organizations, they would pair gliphs carefully before deciding what to tattoo. And one such example was the Spiral Dragon gliph of the Chor Clan. 

The gliph consisted of six parts: claws on both arm chambers, tails on both leg chambers, the dragon’s abdomen on the wind chamber and a dragon head on the heart chamber. 

If a glipher broke through all six chambers, it would form a perfect spiral dragon. This was how great clans worked. 

However, this method had its own pros and cons. The pros were that the gliphs perfectly matched each other and would strengthen the beneficial effect brought by the gliph significantly, while it was dangerous to tattoo any other gliph not a part of the set. 

The Spiral Dragon was mighty. The claws already tattooed on Chor Shing Chit’s arms looked extremely violent. How could such a gliph coexist with other gliphs of a lower class? If such a gliph were to be tattooed on Chor Shing Chit, he would be devoured by the Spiral Dragon Claws instead; the gliph on his heart chamber would be destroyed no matter how skilful Chui Yim was. 

Every step of tattooing a gliph was like walking on eggshells.