Shawn left with the gun and the boxes of “cigarettes”, and he did not tell Jianmen any more. Jianmen did not have the heart to ask for more. He was not too worried about himself, because he had no one that was very personally close in this world, and he knew that the normal kind of “trouble” this world can inflict upon him, he could easily evade.
But the bad feelings he had about what just happened were not eased by these factors of consideration. In fact, the more he thought about it the less it seemed to be about his own immediate wellbeing, but more about something that shouldn’t have happened.
Jianmen himself was somewhat familiar with the feeling, yet from what he remembered, this kind of feeling generally does not occur unless it was something really substantial - it was the feeling of disturbance in the flow of karma, something that generally leads to unwanted outcome of events.
But from what Jianmen understood about karma and the Will, trivial actions like this, even from an out-of-worlder with power, should not have had this kind of effect. It must have been something worse - with the experience and knowledge from his previous world, this must have something to do with some other factors. But with Jianmen’s current power level due to his sealing his own power, he was not able to peek into the details.
After standing behind the counter and thinking about his options for a while, Jianmen decided that he should try divination. Divination had always been sort of a “loophole” when dealing with karma for those with a good connection to it and had a good understanding of it as well as the Will. It was like taking a picture of something from far away with a long range but low resolution and small angle camera - one can tell shapes and colors but the signals were mixed and vague, but if the one doing it had the knowledge and experience of interpreting it, they would have the chance to read a lot from very little cost.
And seeing that the shop stopped having guests after the kerfuffle anyway, Jianmen immediately proceeded to action. There was already an incense burner in the store, which was on the small altar in the store right in between two fake plastic candles with red small light bulbs on top faking as the “candle fire”. The incense burner had no ashes from actual incense in it, which was not ideal - according to traditional wisdom, the right amount of incense ashes in the burner is a symbol of respect for the gods and heaven, but according to Jianmen’s own experience, in the ashes of incense that were used for past divination attempts lies the residual energy of enlightenment and revelation, which would in turn help subsequent divination attempts.
Jianmen grabbed a handful of rice, gently blew on it and put it in the burner. Then he took out some incense sticks from the shop’s inventory and put some money in the cash register to show that he actually bought them and did not steal.
Jianmen lit up three incense sticks and carefully concentrated his Xuanli and power of mind and will on the incense sticks and tried his best to connect to the karma flows around him but not activate the Law of Karma - he was too weak to bear the cost of using such a powerful but costly cultivation method.
Jianmen stayed silent for a while as he completely infused the incense sticks with his powers, when the incense sticks started glowing and cracking, Jianmen stuck them into the rice in the incense burner.
With the three incense sticks burning, Jianmen then took out a small knife, infused a bit of his Xuanli on it and gently cut a small wound on the tip of his middle finger. Then he dropped a few droplets of his blood onto the rice.
Jianmen’s power level was still on that of a second layer cultivator, but it was because he sealed his own power, which meant that his physical body still retained many characteristics of a much more powerful cultivator - and one of which was that his blood can be served as really valuable sacrifice for certain rituals, divinations included.
Being infused with Jianmen’s power, the three incense sticks were burning in orange and golden light and much faster than normal incense sticks. Before long, all three completely burnt up and left only the thin and short red bamboo sticks at the end and some ashes scattered on the rice.
Jianmen picked up and threw away the bamboo sticks, then he started observing the patterns of the grey ashes on the white rice trying to find some recognizable pattern. And after staring at the burner for around five minutes, he noticed that a simple symbol - a True Word made of the incense ashes, was right at the center of the rice pile.
Jianmen was not unfamiliar with the symbol - it was something he got to know when he first traveled to this world and used his connections to karma to gain knowledge about this world.
---------------------------------------------
“And what does the True Word mean?” Jason asked, while Jianmen was taking them around yet another floating ring, where shops on both sides of the road were selling magical enchanted potions, various kinds of special drugs and small magical gadgets. One short man in a dirty brown robe in front of a store that looked like a giant brown khaki backpack even bragged that the store behind him had the exclusive supply of a new type of mana potion that could permanently increase the size of a magic user’s mana pool and enhance their natural mana recovery. But Jianmen promptly dismissed their claim, with a simple phrase: “All that claims to be a magical pill that requires no work on your part tend to be poison”
“Well, it was basically something like ‘Fuck off’, or ‘Stop meddling’.” Jianmen sighed: “And that was the moment I knew that I fucked up.”
“How so? Because Shawn was supposed to die that day?” Caroline asked as she glanced over a shop that looked like a giant metal box with nails and patches on the exterior and had a sign that said “Mystique Barron’s Items of Trickery”, which had a tall woman in heavy makeup and a skimpy dress standing in front of it who was basically flirting with any customer that passed by.
“Well, let me put it this way.” Jianmen thought for a while and said: “You know, when a bullet is shooting your way, and it is already a few inches away from your face. If you’re… you know, not me, the bullet would’ve hit you right?”
“I guess so. But I can try to conjure my fire shield and burn it up.” Caroline shrugged and said.
“Yeah, true.” Jianmen nodded: “But if it was a heat resistant bullet, it would still hit you on the head.”
“Damn, Boss, how much do you hate us?” Caroline giggled, she was in a good mood because she just picked up a really good looking leather jacket, which had internal temperature control and a really deep pocket.
“It’s just a metaphor.” Jianmen shook his head but still smiled at the teasing: “And you acknowledge, that the bullet will hit you, even though it will take a few milliseconds.”
“Right.”
“But suppose there are some kind of creatures in this world, with the lifespan of less than one millisecond. So a few milliseconds would be … a few generations of them. To them, it took several generations of their lineage for the bullet to hit you. And to them, intuitively, they may have the idea that you have all the time in the world to dodge that bullet, even though to you who’s being shot at, you really don’t have the chance. So when we consider it from the prospect of the universe, our notions of chances of change may seem just like these creatures thinking you could dodge that bullet.”
