Data-Driven Daoist

After a few breaths, Yu Han tried again.

And again.

One stroke at a time. Thought after thought flowed with the ink.

This was the script-based array school. Each word, each character had its own meaning. A connotative property imbued upon it by the very usage each character received in the likes of language, art, poetry. What Yu Han would refer to as ‘media.’

At least, that’s what Yu Han assumed. The Review on Dao of Characters by Liang Fuyu mentioned the hardest part of script-based arrays was getting the intention right. It wasn’t something that could be taught without invasive mind-based techniques. Each word and character was perceived by the individual subjectively. Differently. They would not line up between father and son, let alone reader and author.

People used words to make sense of reality. And their past experiences shaped how they saw that reality, their lived experience.

Fledgling script-array practitioners just had to grind and experiment until their intention aligned with that of the world’s, whatever that meant.

Finally, after twelve tries, the light array—just a character in this case—glowed for longer than half a minute. It didn’t sputter out, although it did go dark eventually.

The spiritual energy had run out.

The paper wasn’t designed to host spiritual energy. From what he had read on The Dao of Characters: A Review and The Primer of Elemental Flows, the ink, brush, and surface, all mattered greatly at the starting levels of array mastery. Sometimes, even more than the will and intention of the practitioner.

Using normal paper was not ideal, but it saved money.

Regardless, after a few weeks of practice, he could finally produce an effect. It worked less than 10% of the time. But that apparently meant he had slightly above average talent.

Average isn’t going to cut it, though.

Yu Han should be grateful he could practise arrays in the first place. He could not consciously control essence, because he was in the body-tempering realm.

That’s where the artefact brush came in.

Yu Han rinsed the tool in a bowl of water. Its wooden shaft was rough, the lacquer long faded to a dull, uneven brown. He took care not to let the water touch the shaft. The bristles, coarse and unevenly cut, splayed at the edges no matter how carefully he tried to shape them. Faintly drawn near the ferrule was a single array, its lines aged but still alive, as evident by the essence drawn out of Yu Han’s body with each use. Connected to this array was a groove where a pinky-nail-sized mortal-grade spirit stone was inserted.

After trying and failing once more to shape the tip, he placed it on a towel to dry.

He picked up another brush, this time with a finer tip.

All these brushes were artefacts. Low in grade, yes, but even the lowest grade brushes for arrays were elite-grade, as were the jade-carving blades. The tiny array on each of these tools for drawing out essence and imbuing it into the ink was far out of Yu Han’s expertise to even decipher at this point.

Without essence, one could not imbue the strokes and the mediums with intention. And without intention, there could be no script-array, no matter how much qi was fed to power it.

He dipped the brush in ink, and drew another character for light, this time in common script. More precisely, yellow tongue, his native language.

The character glowed and sputtered, but far dimmer. Another failure, but he wanted to compare the lumen, despite not having the tools.

He had to eyeball it.

If the previous failed arrays written in imperial script were LEDs powered by a 5000 mAh battery, then this was a tiny bulb powered by a hamster running in a wheel. A small hamster at that.

It infuriated Yu Han.

Script-based arrays were paywalled behind a barrier called history.

Languages with more weight of time, longer existence, richer culture, and a million other uncontrollable factors could produce far more intensity of intention while drawn even by a novice, and could produce better results. The magnitute of history. One would have epics written across hundreds of years, poems that could fill libraries the size of mountain ranges, scholars across land and time giving their lives to the craft and art of the words. The other would have, at most, ledgers written by bandit accountants listing how much rice they had robbed over the month. Maybe in a thousand years, yellow tongue would evolve enough history. As of now, it was a young bastard with three dads and eight mothers.

If the difference between the imperial script used by the various noble families and the common script used by the commoners was already so vast, then what about the runes of earthly and heavenly scripts? How did this weight of history even get calculated? Y

Yu Han didn’t believe that more people used imperial than common. If only a small percentages of humans had talents in cultivation, and one needed to be a cultivator to even comprehend heavenly scripts, then how the hell would it have more content than, say, a common script with a few countries worth of peasants cursing and writing and emoting with it every day?

So what was it? Was the dao biased against certain classes? Did it have a caste system? Did common scripts evolve and change too rapidly? Did imperial and above languages remain static for longer? Were they like french, rather than english?

It was written in the texts that some cultivator clans with hundreds of thousands of years of history had their own glyph-based scripts. Each character of the original script would be augmented with certain ways, as if to compress more meaning while using a default template.

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They had invented sigils too. They weren’t part of a language system but scripts and shapes could be used to craft them.

Sigils were invented symbols of meaning that would encompass entire systems of concepts so fully, it could replace a whole library’s worth of writing. Yu Han had a hard time wrapping his head around them. How could a single symbol be so conceptually rich that it could contain an entire book, its art, and the thousands of reviews, critiques, and analyses that the book inspired? It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t have to.

It worked.

Most clans made their sigils locked to their bloodlines. It was nearly impossible to get the desired effect without being in on the gene.

Array formations are pay to win! Be born in a good clan and you’re already ahead.

Yu Han knew it was like this, even in his old world. He was the biggest nepo-hire after all. If he had been reborn in a noble clan, he’d probably laugh at the plebs while holding his privilege on blue china.

He practised the character for light, then heat, cold, gust, and darkness. He drew and wrote. Sometimes just the character, other times with the accompanying symbols and shapes to make the array behave differently. The same water character without a specific accompanying triangle would wet the paper, and with the triangle would produce water. Light would make the writing glow, or the paper it was written on.

He failed most of the time, but one or two successes here and there kept his spirits high. He tried fire, then burn.

Burn would burn the paper, while fire produced a flame above the writing. With an accompanying circle and triangle, it would burn the paper. It made the effects more… directional? Like changing the vector?

The exact difference was more connotative. And what the difference was between them, Yu Han few clues.

He took another sheet of paper. This time, he drew just a circle. Then within the circle, he drew multiple stacking triangles, and lines on top. It was a symmetrical drawing if folded vertically, but not horizontally. This kind of symmetry had a name, didn’t it?

Then in the middle of the triangles, he drew a strange geometric squiggle.

He connected the final line of the squiggle to the final triangle, and the shapes on the paper—which looked like a magic circle—glowed.

During the whole process, he didn’t think or concentrate on his will or intention.

The intensity of the glow was somewhere between that of the imperial and common script-array for light, inching closer to imperial. It was a bit brighter today than yesterday, and Yu Han thought it was because of proficiency.

The essence cost was nearly the same too, if not a little less.

It was a complicated shape. Yu Han drew another squiggle shape in the centre of the magic circle after the light went off, connecting it to the first one. The squiggles were like self-similar components. He could only draw one at a time though, as the strain of essence leaving his system gave him a headache. He had to rest and recover before drawing another.

He was able to cram in three self-similar squiggles within the circle and stacked triangles.

The character on the paper glowed brighter. But not thrice as much.

Yu Han looked at the magic circle and frowned. It was ugly as hell.

In shape-arrays, the geometric precision of the drawing mattered. Unlike with script- and symbol-arrays, where the filthy pay-to-win scums could get away with calling bad handwriting their style and typeface and whatnot, shape-array was merciless when it came to precision.

Yu Han did not have the muscle memory or practice to make a precise circle.

I’m gonna need to make rulers and compasses.

Yu Han moved on to drawing three other shape-arrays. Each glowed, one slightly blue, the other slightly red. The final glowed only where the ink was.

These were the four shape-arrays for light that Yu Han had gathered. They were found in the notes of the past shape-array masters. He had the records of 40 such practitioners. Many had started with the same resources, others had found them in adventures and trade. Each took care to note their own experiences down, as if to pass them on to the next generation. No one wanted their struggles to go to waste, especially when they were commoners and had to claw their way up to qi-gathering. None of the shape-array masters reached foundation-building.

All their hard work eventually ended up in Liang’s hand. Would that be his fate too?

Yu Han shook the depressing thought out of his head.

Despite having access to the patterns of quite a few shape-arrays, he was only strong enough to draw less than 20 of them. By strong enough, he meant how much of the array he could draw at once without passing out.

Most of them were analogues to basic elemental effects such as fire, water, burn, wind, ice, cold, and so on. Some were more specialised. For example, Chao Chuan, one of the 40 shape-array practitioners had a bloodline that basically made him bankrupt in all elemental talents. He’d need nearly 100 times the input to cast a basic fireball spell compared to a typical common talent cultivator. So he specialised in what he called basic non-elemental arrays.

His notes listed five interesting samples. They were force, reinforce, power, perceive, and protect shape-arrays. Yu Han was not strong enough to draw any of them.

Chao Chuan called them basic non-elemental arrays, but other practitioners had different names for them such as auxiliary arrays, added arrays, control arrays, and outer arrays. After flipping the notes back and forth, Yu Han determined they were talking about the same thing.

These people really need some kind of International Standards Organisation for standard definitions.

He put down the brush and cleaned it. That was enough practice for the night. After putting away the brush set, he brought out his meta-notes on arrays and reviewed them.

One of the other names for basic non-elemental arrays was auxiliary arrays, and they were used in other contexts too. Immortal Yan’s Edict: A Hundred Lesser Forms of the Mortal Martial Path listed exactly 100 mortal-grade script-array talismans, and how to combine the 100 talismans into one big quasi-formation (the author claimed it was not a true formation). The book referred to them as ‘auxiliary,’ as they assisted mortal martial artists in their practice.

Circles of Serenity was a poetic text which also focused on what it claimed was ‘shape-based auxiliary array-formations.’

The keyword was formation. Not the basic shape-arrays, but a philosophical system of how to combine many shape-arrays into one circle. It was called auxiliary, not because it assisted or modified other shape-arrays, but because the system mentioned in Circles of Serenity only worked in creating formations that directly assisted cultivation environments and cultivation arts.

It was similar to Immortal Yan’s Edict in that regard.

Let’s call Chao Chuan’s arrays control shape-arrays.

The control shape-arrays were far more complex than the basic element ones. For example, power had five self-similar components and three non-self-similar ones within two overlapping circles and a seven-pointed star. The components would apparently manage the flow and storage of spiritual energy. Somehow.

Like a PSU?

Perhaps the talisman brush had a script-array analogue of it? The script-array on the brush definitely did not look large enough to need a whole tea-table-sized page to draw, unlike the power shape-array.

Both were arrays, but were so different in just about everything!

One was reliant on intention that made it somehow harder to learn but easier and stronger by default. The other was easier to learn since it needed no intention, but needed a ridiculous amount of precision and mechanical knowledge.

Even the triangles, complements, dots, lines, and other ‘shapes’ used in script-arrays didn’t need to be so precise in measurements to show their full effects. Yes, they were shapes, and yes, they seemed to be used to add directionality and control to the produced effects. But above all, like all things script-arrays, they needed intention and the power of will to impose that intention on reality. So these ‘shapes’ might as well have been characters!

Yu Han’s plan was to keep practising the light script- and shape-arrays. He wanted to make different types of glowrocks. It would be a good test project, since he could use the ones he borrowed from the Night Alchemists’ Yard as a benchmark.

Yu Han turned to the next page, where the notes summarised the difference between arrays and formations.