《Earthly Treasures Pavilion [Discontinued]》Chapter 26: Tutorial Complete! Let's start with Hard Mode now.
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Yui was getting ready to open the shop, when she noticed a little bit of an oddity to her daily routine. The barrier keeping everyone away from the second floor of the shop was no longer there.
First, she wanted to ask Tora about it, but it didn't look likely Tora was around, likely either napping or busy with something elsewhere.
Curious, Yui stepped on the stairway that she would usually take to get downstairs into their living area, but now following it up further.
The room was a bit smaller than their regular shop room and other than some sort of table seemed to be completely empty. What was this place for? Why so much room for just a small simple table?
Thinking back about the lack of decoration and things to sell when she first entered the pavilion, she decided not to judge this place too quickly.
'Will it fill up as the pavilion grows or we add more things?'
She stepped closer to the table and inspected it some more. Yui just wanted to touch the surface when a glowing orb of energy started to materialize above the table, pulling at her consciousness in some way.
It did not take long for Yui to have her mind dragged into this orb completely and find herself in a dimensional space. Or was it some mental world? Would her body still be standing around in the pavilion? She could not tell for sure.
Yui was standing on a circular stone platform in this world, all around her was just a big void, lightened up by stars or something similar. It felt empty, but at the same time this world seemed to react to her thoughts.
Not in a way like she could manifest things with her magic or influence their dimensional worlds like the auction house. It was more like a blueprint, an unfinished design made on an empty canvas.
It was like a big box of building blocks she could pick from and put something together. There were larger compositions in this 'box' like mountains and rivers to form a big landmass, there were smaller things like a single tree or stone as well as the smallest building blocks with separate minerals or particles she had a hard time focusing on. There were also complex things like spirit beasts.
Yui played around with this toolset for a while.
"Oh, nice I can have an ocean and set an island inside of it. It feels like one of these world building simulators just way better."
A small body of water with a single small island was quickly made, as the 'toolkit' easily reacted to her wishes, adding the details she did not specify, while she just played around with her new toys to her liking.
Yui just made a little pond on her new landmass wanting to add a few ducks when she noticed something interesting.
"I have no ducks available?"
Mentally 'scrolling' through her options, she could see a few options for birds, but not all that many really.
"Are there no ducks in this world?" she mumbled to herself and quickly discarded the thought.
'Even if there are no ducks exactly like in my home world, there should be a bigger variety of other birds and even water birds instead.'
"You obviously have to add them silly." Yui heard a familiar voice, but still inside of the mental world, she could not see anyone.
Leaving the mental world with a thought, she found Tora standing behind her.
"Sis, what is this place?"
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"It's the Divine Treasures Archive. A place to work with the various creations that you have collected."
"Creation's I have collected? That sounds really strange. What does it do exactly?"
Tora rolled her eyes again. Did she really have to spell everything out for her silly sister?
"Well, the Earthly Treasures Pavilion is bound to your soul. I just skip the technicalities, as you wouldn't understand most of them yet anyways."
"Basically, in order to make the Earthly Treasures Pavilion secure and safe to use, without being able to be stolen and abused by others, it is bound to your soul. You still remember this part, right?"
"The one about only you and the ones you designate can use its functions. Me assisting you with the process as I'm part of the artefact as its artefact spirit."
Yui nodded, bobbing her head up and down like a good school girl listening to teacher Tora.
"Yes sis, we already talked about that."
So far so good. Yui understood the basics at least and Tora nodded happily before continuing her explanation.
"Now as much benefits such a way of security this might bring, it also has its downsides. Everything that's bound to a soul, will obviously require that soul to work properly. This archive is part of this very problem. Like a specific key to access the information, if the soul is gone, you lose the key and along with it, all of the things that were bound to the key."
Yui frowned slightly. That seemed too bad.
"You mean. All the information in the archive collected by others is bound to them and worthless to me?"
"Even more than that, once the soul dissipates, so will this information bound to it, but yes that is the gist of it. If you want to fill this archive, you have to fill it by yourself. You didn't expect that the pavilion would provide you free and easy divine resources just by selling more right?"
"It's not?" Now this seemed like really bad news to Yui.
"Not really, at least not all out of the box, you just get the basics that you can say are hardcoded with the pavilion. I helped you make some sample locations because you couldn't access this place yet."
Now this was information that was rather shocking to Yui.
"You mean … Tora … you really mean all we've been working on so far, all that I have been doing all this time, was just the tutorial!?"
This time Tora's mischievous smirk gave Yui shivers all along her spine. Once more her view of the pavilion, it's functions and all of what she expected to know about this artefact was blown away, replaced with a massive, but at the same time scary challenge ahead of her.
"You're right! Welcome to New Game Plus! To be able to make locations with all the better goodies you will have to travel around the various places and find them. Or buy them from somewhere."
"Others would still call it cheating, as once you have added something to the archive its available to you in any quantity, provided we have enough spirit energy to fuel and maintain it."
Pouting a little bit, Yui did not really know what to do in the future. She did not like going out to meet people and exploring the big open world was nice to read in a story, but it actually really scared her and made her nervous.
"This isn't gamelike at all. Can't I just make something if I know it's composition?" She grumbled making Tora laugh.
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"I think you were the one who said it was like a building simulator game. It's just a bit more hands on than the video games of your world."
"Obviously if you know exactly how something is made down to the very particle and atomic structure, you can adapt other materials to create it. That's how regular lower realms are usually made by cultivators. You need enough knowledge and cultivation strength for your brain and soul to process such a massive undertaking though and it gets far more complicated with spirit materials."
It now explained a lot why Tora did not just talk about expansion, but also various ways to travel around.
"So that's why you wanted to build this sky ship. I thought it would just make it easier to build portals in other places. It seems like we do actually have to move around a lot if we want something new."
"Yes Yui, finding treasures to bring back to the pavilion is also part of the deal. Either that or you buy it. Many good things however are hard to find, and you will not be able to buy everything you might want or need."
"Any more surprises for this Pavilion Master job no one told me about?"
"Many little sister, many more, but don't worry, I will tell you about them once they come up. It will get really interesting when you have enough skill with using your spiritual powers to actually influence existing things and change them around."
Once again Yui was feeling as if she had bitten into a lemon.
'What other surprises will the pavilion have in 'store' for me? Other than the store that is.' Yui rolled her eyes at her own silly thoughts.
"What exactly do you mean by changing things around?" she asked her sister instead of starting guessing-games in her mind.
"Like drastically changing a species, changing one of your created worlds or dimensions, adapting metaphysical laws, things like that."
"You mean we can do all of that in the future?"
"Silly, how did you think this lower realm we live in … nearly all lower realms actually, started to exist? Someone obviously made them. The worlds that evolve on their own are rather rare."
"Guess that explains why it's called divine realm and these strong cultivators are seen as gods to the people here. They seem to quite literally create worlds like this. Also explains why so many worlds look and feel really similar."
Having someone strong enough to create a world was still unbelievable to Yui, but all the veneration and respectful attitude to such strong beings now really did make sense. It also explained why all of them had similar living conditions and even though slight differences existed, they were still pretty much the same.
Different languages, different technological evolutions, but the very basics of the world, like gravity, orbit time around the sun, atmosphere all of that was close to identical. If you have humans create worlds, it would make sense they make worlds they are familiar with, with rules to have humans survive properly. Why reinvent the wheel right?
Were mythical people in her home worlds fables real too? All their gods the like?
Yui decided not to ask Tora. She might know, but it felt really strange to hear about her own gods and she kind of dreaded the answers to these questions. Were they all real? Neither a yes nor a no answer seemed like the right answer. In this case, Yui decided that it might be for the best to not have these questions answered in the first place.
"There are many worlds that are really different as well. Other strong species make their own strange worlds. You have probably heard stories about demons and angels, of strange celestial and mythological creatures, divine beasts and all of that stuff."
"These worlds are often very different from human shaped worlds. Some have no gravity, some have no days or night or even lack a sun. Not all of them would be inhabitable by humans without a lot of cultivation strength."
"Sis, can I make my own worlds in the future as well?"
Tora chuckled at the question.
"If the creator of the Earthly Treasures Pavilion heard such a silly question, he would really be sad how far I have fallen. The Earthly Treasures Pavilion was the first successful creation of an artefact that could, with enough skill and power, be used to craft a divine world. A place where all these cultivators who create the lower worlds and realms live."
"It's rather sad, that my creator also used his very existence in order to create the Pavilion, not even having the chance to make his success in creating it known. I was still too young and unaware at the time and sleeping. When I woke up, ready to tell everyone of my creator's achievements the Pavilion had already been discarded, misunderstood by others as a failed product."
Tora's story was somewhat sad. Her creator had spent his very life on making the Earthly Treasures Pavilion, yet no one really acknowledged his success. Yui in her typical motherly way gave Tora a hug and tried to cheer her up.
"Don't worry Tora, we find a way to this divine realm and show everyone how amazing the Pavilion really is."
"Oh silly girl, that's nice of you to say, but I'm not sure that's even the right way to go. As much as I'd love for my creator's life's work to be acknowledged, as much as I myself would like to be seen and appreciated by the divine realm …"
There was some silence when Tora didn't finish her sentence, contemplating things that might have happened in the past.
"Don't worry about it Yui. My creator would not have wanted you to get into trouble because of his work. Don't take silly risks to get some fame or some acknowledgement for the pavilion and bring trouble upon yourself."
"I'm sure my creator would also feel that living a happy life would be much more important than silly fame that might just get you killed because of a greedy person. In the end, he didn't make the Pavilion to get famous. He loved creating things, it was all he really loved in his life."
They left the Divine Treasures Archive soon after, getting ready for another day of taking care of the shop. There were many new options and challenges ahead, but without a real way to travel properly, it was still a bit far away for Yui.
'Let's just enjoy the days as they come and worry about things when they come knocking at my door.'
Yui cheerfully welcomed the customers, happy to just live for the moment, not worrying about future travels that would surely bring both excitement and more trouble than she really wanted.
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