The written parts are like two-dimensional anchors for the full design which is only visible to cultivators.  It's not just what's in ink, which is why they don't mass-print them with woodcuts.  The base components have meanings but can manipulate one another in a way that's very unlike words in a sentence.  That makes larger talismans hard to predict; talismans are often split into smaller sections that trigger one another to get around that. 

Wei Wuxian clearly thinks of it like a fun puzzle to solve, as well as something where one ought to take advantage of serendipitous results - half of his favorite talismans came about when he was trying for something else and got sidetracked by a novel effect.  Most people only ever use memorized talismans, or swap out full subsections.

Wei Wuxian gets interrupted by a yawn.  He pouts as dramatically as he can while being at such low energy.  "Ah, I want to talk more about talisman design.  You'll definitely have to ask me again when I'm healed up and have paper and ink in front of me."

"Yes, I certainly will!" Weeping Cherry agrees. "The whole subject is fascinating."

She really wants to figure out how to see and manipulate spiritual energy. Wei Wuxian has shared just enough hints for her to start making guesses about the structure of talismans, but of course that isn't anywhere near enough to actually put the knowledge to use.

Her sleep cycle isn't synced up with local time yet, but, conveniently, she's starting to feel sleepy herself. She checks the position of the sun and the amount of processor power her forb has rebuilt. And ... yes, she can just about get a full 10 (simulated) hours of sleep before local sunrise, and sync her body clock.

"Thank you very much for answering my questions. I've had fun learning about your world. I hope you rest well," she says.

Jiang Cheng swoops in and makes sure Wei Wuxian eats something first, but Wei Wuxian is absolutely asleep very quickly after that.

Everyone else meditates, then sleeps.  Someone is always set to keep watch.  At sunrise this is Jiang Cheng, who doesn't need extra spiritual energy for flying or healing and therefore doesn't need to spend as much time meditating as the others. 

Ah, interesting. She had assumed that they probably would not get up much before sunrise, and that appears to have been right. She stretches in her little virtual space, casting off the blankets of the night and summoning a breakfast smoothie.

During the night, she got back enough control that she can manage somewhat decent directional audio. She speaks softly, to avoid disturbing the sleepers.

"Good morning, young master Jiang."

"Good morning, Weeping Cherry." 

Jiang Cheng shifts, trying to sit up properly now that there's someone else awake without making it obvious that he'd been sitting in anything but the most proper and dignified posture to begin with. 

Weeping Cherry doesn't really have posture right now, and making her smoothie-slurping sounds audible is probably not a good way to reinforce the idea that she's an actual person who is here with him, instead of just a sword.

... actually, cultivators might actually be able to hear her heartbeat and breathing noises. She includes them in her audio feed because people find talking to someone who doesn't have them subliminally creepy, but if cultivators have better senses it might be more obvious.

"I hope you slept well?" she offers instead. "Also, I'm curious: can you hear my heartbeat?"

"Well enough.  You?"

"And I can't, not from here."  If she wants him to go over to check, he'll have to wake someone else up.  'Don't let artifacts talk you into touching them when no one else is around to spot you' is one of those rules that cultivation disciples get drilled into them pretty hard.  "Do you have a heart?"

Well, that's an obvious follow-up question in hindsight.

She hasn't really gotten into her whole virtualization situation in any detail, but there's no real reason not to explain.

"In a manner of speaking," she says. "My normal body has a heart, and so the crystal that sustains me is mimicking one — it contains the idea of a heart, alongside the idea of the rest of me. And when I set things up so that you can hear me, I made sure to include the ability to hear all of me, not just my voice, because people get subconsciously nervous when they talk to someone who doesn't have the ... necessary background sounds of a human. Breathing, heartbeat, and so on."

"So I was just curious, since cultivators have better senses, whether your senses were good enough to pick up on the sound of my heartbeat separately."

Jiang Cheng nods in understanding.  "The improvement to normal senses is minimal unless someone is deliberately using a technique to enhance them.  Thankfully - crowded cities can be enough as it is.  The main sense we use for night hunting and cultivation doesn't have a mundane equivalent."

"Oh, that makes sense! Yeah, I imagine cities would get pretty overwhelming."

She looks around at the rest of the group of cultivators.

"Do you know what the plan for today is? I gather that we're going to keep traveling, but it would be nice to have a little more detail than that."

"The plan is to meditate in the morning and fly through the afternoon, with a short break halfway through the flight."

Clearly feeling defensive about potentially being perceived as lazy, he also explains his reasoning.  "Cultivators only get so much spiritual energy in a day and flying takes a lot of it.  Normally we'd intersperse shorter bursts of flight with walking, but there's no reason to jostle Wei Wuxian or give him more chances to wander off, and the few extra li we'd make on foot aren't going to matter."

"Oh, interesting!"

But everything to do with cultivation is interesting, so she feels she should elaborate slightly.

"My world mostly uses teleportation at this point, but prior to that we did use a lot of flying machinery for personal transport. That and self-propelling ground-based carts, both of which need a certain amount of infrastructure to support. But having cultivators able to personally make short hops by flying must complicate your logistics," she muses. "Do you tend to have a lot of permanent resupply points that you can easily fly between on a night hunt? Or do you have non-cultivator support that needs to take routes around rough terrain, and then the cultivators can range away from it with flight?"

"Not many.  Anywhere that can hire a cultivator will have an inn nearby, or some other place that can host us for a few days.  Staying in towns as we travel also allows people to come to us with reports of problems in the area."

Her current inability to nod thoughtfully is really cramping her style.

"I see. So you don't really do night hunts into unpopulated areas? Is that because there aren't things to hunt there, or because the things that are there aren't bothering anyone?" she asks.

"More the latter than the former.  No one pays to have something killed if they aren't being harmed by it. Though, our range isn't that limited when we're fully rested.  If someone wants to go out looking for interesting prey for fun and glory there is plenty of wilderness still in comfortable range of villages and farms."

"I see. Thank you for explaining," she replies.

Interacting people without a physical presence is so awkward. Plus, she's not entirely certain her HUD is correctly calibrated for these people anyway, and she's constantly second-guessing whether she's come across well.

"Is there anything I can do to help with breakfast or morning preparations more generally? Or are we just waiting for everyone else to wake up? I can start fires or heat things up if you press me to them."

Jiang Cheng is awkward even with a body.  He continues to sit stiffly in the posture of both a noble young man and one with the important task of guarding his sleeping sect-mates.

"No, the inn staff are already handling everything.  We're just waiting."

"Alright, then," Weeping Cherry replies. "Do you have a favorite way to pass the time? I would be quite interested to hear more stories about your home, or tell you about my own," she suggests.

He already seems nervous enough that she doesn't really want to poke him for more details on cultivation.

He was intending to sit in complete silence for the next hour, but he supposes talking is okay too. 

"This one would like to hear more about your own homeland.  Perhaps clothing?  Are the fashions very different from what you've seen here?"

"Oh, quite," she agrees. "While some people do like wearing robes, my home has a lot of ... diversity, I guess you'd say. You can walk down the street in New Selenopolis and see people wearing pants, skirts, shirts, robes, dresses, gowns, etc. Probably the most common day to day wear in my neighborhood is short-sleeved shirts with pictures or writing printed on the front, and stretchy but hard-wearing black or blue pants decorated with little bits of metal near the waist. But you wouldn't find it terribly remarkable if someone was wearing something else. Partly, that's because we have technology for making clothing cheaply, so people are liable to have lots of clothes to choose from."

"For my part, I usually wear a sort of enchanted light summer dress. I do have some other clothes, but I have tweaked the enchantments to make it the most comfortable thing for me to wear 90% of the time. It has sleeves that grow or shrink depending on ... well, approximately on how many people I've spoken to recently, but that normally come to half way between my shoulder and elbow. The skirt comes to my knees, and has just enough extra fabric to swish a bit while I turn. The dress itself is a light silvery-white, and resists becoming stained. It's decorated with embroidery that follows the shape of a particular mathematical process. It's my default out-of-the-house outfit, although I wear other things for fancy occasions or when meeting with someone who expects a particular look."

"Even though causal clothing has a lot of variety, some people read a lot more in to what you're wearing during a business meeting, or while courting. So to get things right, you really need to know what culture the person you're approaching is coming from, and either try to match, or just let that inform how you choose your outfit. There are some formal clothes that are more broadly acceptable. A high-level business meeting will fairly often see the people involved wearing earth-tone or black straight-cut pants, with a long-sleeved white or light blue shirt fastened with buttons, a decorative cloth around the neck, and a long-sleeved darkly colored jacket over it. Women are less likely to wear the cloth, but more likely to be able to vary the color of their shirt or jacket. But ... then there are the people who want to show off that they're so important that they don't need to care about what other people think, who will deliberately wear clothing that doesn't match that standard in order to show off that people still have to respect them anyway. Even those people typically don't wear anything that shows too much skin during a business meeting, though."

"We have so many people, though, that you'll be able to find someone wearing almost anything. One of my friends has experimented with 'wearing' a cloud of golden sand that constantly shifts around them. In some ways, it's really nice to see such interesting designs — an in other ways, it makes the whole prospect of signalling social status with clothing needlessly confusing and convoluted. I have a little ... call it an enchanted reference book that helps me recognize some of what people are saying with their clothes, but I'm sure plenty of it goes over my head too."

He listens attentively to her preferences, closing his eyes briefly to try to visualize the description better.  The short sleeves and skirts seem odd to wear in public.  Lotus Pier's inhabitants are no strangers to removing or hiking up robes in concession with the oppressive heat and humidity of Yunmeng summers, but he would never go into a market that way.

"When price is not an issue does everyone wear silk or have you found better materials?  Do the methods for creating clothing quickly also allow for faster embroidery?"

Jiang Cheng wishes he'd brought one of his fancier outfits.  His current outer robe isn't much different than the standard uniform of the others beyond being cut from a finer material.  There hadn't been time to waste packing and he hadn't known he'd want his formal robes. 

It only seems fair to explain some aspects of local fashion in return.  "Among cultivators, color tends to signal sect affiliation.  The Yunmeng Jiang Sect wears blue or purple and our embroidery is often lotus-patterned.  The Qishan Wen - the ones we're currently watching out for - wear red and sun or fire patterns.  The Nie wear grey or green, the Jin wear gold, the Lan wear white."

"Oh, that's very good to know — I'll keep an eye out."

Eventually she will have enough of a radius to put together a decent telescope, and then she'll be able to keep an eye out properly.

"And ... yes, we have found 'better' materials than silk, but that's mostly because there are a bunch of ways for cloth to be 'better'. Like, silk is probably the smoothest natural fiber, and is also fairly breathable and durable, but it's not the most breathable. There's a material called 'goretex' that is more light and breathable than silk, but still repels water and doesn't let in wind. But it's texture is not very smooth, and its surface doesn't look so nice as silk. Then there's other fibers whose main selling point is that they're stretchy, which means that they can conform perfectly to your body as you move. A lot of people doing intense exercise wear clothes made from them, so that the clothes don't get in the way — they're usually just enough to preserve modesty and wick away sweat without restricting your movements," she explains.

"In practice, most clothing is made of blended fibers, to find a balance between their properties. We can spin much thinner thread out of mixed fibers than I think you can; there are tricks to make the different fibers adhere. One popular blend is cotton, for thermal transparency, and nylon or rayon for stretch, sometimes with some silk for texture. But there are many blends in common use. People wearing pure silk is rarer — many people don't actually like the texture — but lots of people wear clothing that has some silk in it. My dress is technically made from linen, actually, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell under the enchantments."

"As for producing faster embroidery — yes, absolutely! We have much better machines for it now, but it's actually fairly simple to put together the first step toward that kind of machinery; a 'Jacquard loom': an automatic loom that can weave custom patterns without much human intervention. Although you do still need to occasionally check that they haven't jammed. I can show you how to build one, if you'd like," she offers.

"That would make swimming easier," he says of the stretchy fibers. 

"Jacquard looms sound useful.  I'm not the person to build or operate such things, but there are a number of shops near Lotus Pier that would appreciate one."  Jiang Cheng wears clothes, keeps track of fashion, and can do some basic mending.  That doesn't make him a tailor.

He turns the topic back to fashion trends.  Being able to recognize what people are doing with their appearance is important, and he enjoys being able to show his knowledge.  Glowing night pearls and magical color-changing fabrics were common a few years ago but were overused and are currently out of style.  As one might expect, more labor-intensive things such as embroidery convey wealth, and therefore influence.  Sleeve shape is a matter of personal preference - flowing sleeves are graceful, but can get in the way of archery.  Cultivators rarely wear hats, but the mundane do; some are practical while others convey information about rank.

Weeping Cherry very much appreciates having someone to explain local fashion; back home, she can rely on some mixture of being famous, not caring, and having a lot of training data to pick clothing. Here, she hasn't biased anyone's perception of her with a visual appearance yet, and she can take the time to get it right. She makes sure to get Jiang Cheng's advice on how her typical clothing will come across, and well as running some alternate designs by him.

She tries some of them out in her internal virtual space as they talk, tweaking them as he makes suggestions.

Jiang Cheng approves or shoots down ideas as needed.  Sleeve and skirt length matching what everyone else has on is going to be important for coming across as respectable.

"You're planning to cultivate a human form?  Local spirits can sometimes manage that but it can take them centuries."