Chapter 260: Pedal to the Metal
With all the pills he needed for the immediate future created, Benton turned his attention to creating the qi sources. He wanted to make one for each of six elements—Fire, Ice, Momentum, Nature, Shadow, and Time. And each required three separate types of materials—beast, plant, and mineral.
Eighteen materials total.
He currently had in his possession three of the eighteen—the Fire aspected core from the Cyclops, the Fire stones Kang Ya-Ting traded, and Nature kernels from the Orange Vigor Spirit Wood. Even better, Benton was expecting delivery of a Fire-aspected plant in a little more than a month, which he’d receive in exchange for letting one of the Poison Claw Sect elders use the Trial Pagoda.
Normally, he might have questioned if the material was worth the five hundred Sect Points the usage would cost, but gaining that Fire aspected plant would complete the set of three, allowing him to actually create the Fire qi source.
He couldn’t wait!
Besides, the qi sources were the key to his plan for building his sect to the level high enough for all of them to be truly safe. No cost was too high.
The Poison Claw Sect elders had offered two more materials for trade—an Ice aspected plant and a Shadow aspected core. Step one of hopefully acquiring those items was to use his crafting abilities to create products to sell at the auction. If he could make treasures that were extraordinary enough, they would be so in demand that he’d have no problem completing a trade for the materials he needed, even if he had to find a third party to make things work out.
Still, out of eighteen separate materials, he only knew of six. One out of every three he needed. One third. Thirty-three percent.
By any measure, that wasn’t a lot.
Finding more wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, though. After all, he’d barely even begun to search. His only real effort thus far had been to send the kids to the city and have them ask around. And that seriously minimal effort had born a decent amount of fruit.
Benton even had two very good potential places to search—the upcoming auction and the mountain. Just because he was currently focused on the auction as a way to trade with the elders, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t find materials for sale there. Which meant it was even more important that he produce as many treasures as he could and make them desirable as possible.
Even easier was exploring the mountain. As far as he could tell, the closer to the mountain one got, the stronger the beasts. Then, upon reaching the slope, the higher up you reached, the stronger the beasts. His spiritual senses indicated that the cyclops wasn’t anywhere near the apex predator there, so as a mere Golden Core, Benton had been extremely reluctant to take a look around.