"With Deaf here, I can skip the hassle of drafting structural diagrams. The Solar-Shooting God Cannon is extremely complex, but if Deaf paints it into reality, measuring and decomposing it will be much easier. Refining it will be much simpler too."
Quinn Shepherd finally let out a sigh of relief.
Deaf hadn't sold a single painting for months, but after Quinn helped him for just a short while, he earned more than he had in his entire life. The Prince of Heavenly Diagrams was left sighing with emotion, lamenting how times have changed.
Now, with his livelihood secure, when Quinn invited him back to the Imperial Academy to help, Deaf didn't refuse.
Arriving at the Academy, Quinn wasted no time resting and immediately gathered his team and assigned tasks.
He brought in Little Jade Capital's Ewan Cloudwander, Hugh Darkriver, and Youyun; Dao Gate's Dao Lord Lucas Lin and ten high-level numerologists; plus the Academy, the imperial design bureau, the Cult of the Heavenly Saint's calculation experts, and Village Chief—twenty-six people in total, plus Dragon-Qilin—all responsible for handling the diagrams on the Golden Scripture Scroll and organizing the spatial numerology models.
—Dragon-Qilin's mastery of numerology wasn't inferior to those veteran Daoists either.
Dragon-Qilin was moved to tears, finally finding a reason not to be put on the dinner table, and threw himself into the work with extra enthusiasm.
Quinn didn't need to personally oversee the Golden Scripture Scroll; he focused all his energy on building the Solar-Shooting God Cannon.
Warren Moran, Cindy Mu, and Ronnie Long were assigned by Quinn to work with Dao Gate, the Academy, the design bureau, and the Cult of the Heavenly Saint’s calculation experts to organize the spatial and formation models for the Solar-Shooting God Cannon; Leonard Goodwin was also among them.
Many of the Directors of the Archives in the Imperial Academy’s Heavenly Records Tower were also masters of formations—experts in all kinds of divine arts, walking repositories of cultivation methods. Quinn Shepherd invited them all to join the project.
The Solar-Shooting God Cannon was originally an eye-technique called the Solar-Shooting Divine Eye. After the Imperial Preceptor acquired it, he archived the manual in the Heavenly Records Tower, so the Directors of the Archives were needed to guide the process.
Quinn spent several days working with the Directors, mastering the formation structure and mechanics of the Solar-Shooting Divine Eye. He then recoded the technique into a sequence of formation arrays suitable for the Solar-Shooting God Cannon, and began building the cannon’s frame.
Deaf watched intently from the side. As soon as Quinn finalized the cannon’s structure, Deaf immediately began to paint.
Even for someone honored as a Painting Sage, it took Deaf five full days to complete the god-cannon painting.
Once Deaf finished, he brought the painted blueprint outside the city, chose a stretch of open ground, and unfurled it. Instantly, a colossal cannon platform—over a hundred zhang tall and spanning nearly a thousand mu—rose from the painting, dominating the landscape.
Unlike conventional true-yuan cannons, Quinn’s Solar-Shooting God Cannon had no barrel—just a massive firing platform.
On either side of the platform were two arched frames, extending out in sweeping arcs and ending above in thick axle-arms.
The two axle-arms faced each other but weren’t connected. Their tips formed half-circular forks, with an eighty-zhang gap between them. Floating between the forks was a blazing divine eye, occasionally rolling and shifting.
When the eye opened, torrents of fire spewed forth.
When the eye closed, it would rotate on the spot atop the platform.
This was the Solar-Shooting God Cannon Quinn had designed, based on the Solar-Shooting Divine Eye!
Hundreds of numerology experts immediately swarmed over the massive platform, climbing across its structure to measure, calculate, and break it down. They decomposed the god-cannon into thousands of discrete components, recording every dimension and construction detail with zero tolerance for error.
Every formation pattern etched onto each component had to be measured and cataloged—a staggering amount of work.
Quinn hadn’t designed every individual part—only the main body of the god-cannon. No foundry was large or advanced enough to cast the entire thing in one piece.
So, to actually forge it, the cannon had to be broken down into countless individual parts and components, each to be cast separately and then assembled.
That’s why Quinn needed so many numerology experts.
Coordinating all these people—making sure their measurements and calculations matched up—was a discipline unto itself, with zero margin for error.
To handle this, Quinn simply invited Emperor Evan out from the capital to direct the coordination between the numerology teams. Although Evan’s wounds had mostly healed, they’d been so severe that his divine treasuries remained in tatters and his cultivation hadn’t recovered.
Quinn and Poison Prince Warren Foyne had treated him with such harsh medicine that both he and the Imperial Preceptor had suffered terribly; to this day, Evan still held a grudge about it.