Pattern of a Perfect Strike
The Pattern of a Perfect Strike is an Exotic Component, often employed in works of artifice designed for melee combat.
The motion and essence flow of a strike that is perfect is of great value in crafting such weapons, for it allows the essence flowing through the artifact to be channeled in the same manner, guiding the wielder with the perfection of that strike.
However, a strike is not itself material, and so is difficult to forge into a weapon. While some Solar Exalted artificers devised strange esoteric ways to distill strikes, the most common involved a mortal master of swordsmanship (the essence flows of the Exalted or spirits were shifted by the being’s unique state, and proved of little use). This master would be clad in a carefully-shaped suit of glass, and have their body’s essence charged with flame (most commonly through Fire Pearl injection of Aegis-Inset Amulets, or less common devices such as Chakric Envigoration Engines) as they executed a single perfect strike. The enflamed essence would etch the strike into the glass, allowing an artificer to lift impressions of the flows with wax and work them into the blade they were constructing.
Essence flows with the power to clearly etch were, of course, far from healthy… the intense pain and internal burns likely to be fatal without proper medical treatment and recuperation, atop the already-difficult task of training weapon-masters to make their perfect strikes while clad in glass and being seared internally. During the First Age, many artificers kept their own schools of swordsmanship, their members levied from the best blademasters of Creation, which provided a stable of a dozen practiced swordmasters with rotation between them allowing them to survive the ordeal of etching.
As this system had been beneath the direct attention of the Solar Exalted, most artificers in charge of the schools were Terrestrial Exalts, allowing them to persist long past the Usurpation, continuing to supply the artificers of the Shogunate Era. However, over the centuries a great deal of knowledge and infrastructure was lost, and many such schools became more desperate to find swordmasters, often resorting to taking their students from the wards of the state (most commonly orphans). Other artificers instead begged their daimyo to provide them Patterns through demanding the suicides of their mortal retainers, who would meet their honourable deaths performing perfect strike after perfect strike until their bodies failed them.
While this tradition continues in Lookshy, in the wake of the Great Contagion the Scarlet Empress placed heavy restrictions on these dangerous measures within the Realm… while exceptions might be occasionally made, the Realm needed skilled swordfighters in its armies and the schools of its scions, not dead to produce blades which could be as easily Scavenged or substituted with simpler designs.
As the Pattern of a Perfect Strike is one of the Exotic Components required for the forging of the Reaper Daiklave, this policy is oft thought responsible for the transition from favouring that blade in Artifact Creation and martial culture, as was done under Shogunate rule, to its cousin the Daiklave.
