Vessel of Worlds

Andy put the mid-grade Luminous Crystal away. Once his crafting skills advanced another level, he could use it to forge peak-grade artifacts with special properties.

He opened another jade box.

"A Blood Crystal! So that's what this was about!" This box also held a fist-sized, gleaming transparent crystal, but the spiraling filaments inside it were deep red. It was unmistakably a high-grade Luminous Crystal—also known as a Blood Crystal.

Blood Crystals were raw materials capable of producing dharma treasures, usable only by Core Formation cultivators. Every expedition into Dragon Descent Valley included this treasure among its objectives, and this time was no exception.

As long as he survived the month inside the valley, he was now guaranteed at least one Foundation Establishment Pill as a reward.

With excitement and anticipation swelling in his chest, Andy opened the remaining two jade boxes. One contained a beautifully carved jade ornament, but judging by its spiritual energy, it was merely a low-grade artifact—why it had been stored so carefully in a jade box was a mystery. The other, a longer box, held a half-chi-tall figurine of a monkey clutching a small knife. Andy couldn't identify it at all. The little knife in the monkey's hand, at least, was a low-grade artifact.

Baffled, Andy opened the remaining wooden boxes. Each contained one or several pills of various kinds.

He recognized two Tendon-Transforming Pills, but the rest were unfamiliar. One pink pill gave off a strangely alluring fragrance; he guessed it was most likely the Bliss Pill the young woman had mentioned.

Andy had heard of the Bliss Pill before. Several texts on pill-making had discussed it.

According to those sources, the Bliss Pill was a powerful aphrodisiac refined from beast glands. Anyone who took it, male or female, would lose all reason and be consumed by desire. The effects lasted a full twelve hours, after which the user would awaken with no memory of anything that had happened while under its influence. Cultivators who practiced dual-cultivation arts or similar parasitic techniques often used the pill to force themselves on unwilling partners.

The remaining pills all reeked of a pungent, foul odor—clearly not meant for human cultivators. Andy guessed they had belonged to the Hundred Spirits Sect man and were used for raising spirit beasts.

Next, Andy sorted through the jade slips one by one, sending a thread of spiritual sense into each to examine its contents.

"Inviting the Moon Technique"—a cultivation method exclusively for women. He set it aside immediately.

"Jade Maiden Pure Heart Technique"—the title alone told him everything he needed to know. Another women's cultivation method. He set it aside.

"A Thousand Talks on Spirit Beasts"—an exhaustive treatise on how to hatch, raise, improve, and command spirit beasts. It had to belong to the Hundred Spirits Sect cultivator. Andy was now even more certain the man had met his end.

He pieced together what must have happened. The Hundred Spirits Sect cultivator had found the Blood Crystal, only to have the Hundred Crafts Sect brute kill him and seize it. Before dying, though, he had managed to severely wound his killer. The injured brute was then spotted by the two Moon-Gathering Sect women, who chased him all the way into the forest.

In truth, Andy had only guessed the ending correctly. The Blood Crystal had actually been found by the Hundred Crafts Sect brute himself. Long before entering the valley, he had gone to great lengths to extract the treasure's precise location from a senior who had entered on a previous expedition. The moment he arrived in the valley, he made straight for a deeply hidden cave halfway up Crystal Jade Peak. But his entry point was far from the peak, and encounters with beasts and cultivators along the way had cost him time, so he reached Crystal Jade Peak after Andy and the others.

When he arrived, he found Andy searching near that very hidden cave and had arrogantly driven him away. After seven or eight hours of searching the cave, he did indeed find a Blood Crystal. By that time, however, the Hundred Spirits Sect man had somehow formed an alliance with the Moon-Gathering Sect women, and together they cornered the brute inside the cave.

Stolen novel; please report.

Fighting one against two, the Hundred Crafts Sect brute held his own. But before long, a third opponent arrived—a Moon-Gathering Sect cultivator at the very peak of the thirteenth layer—and joined the siege. Left with no choice, the brute unleashed a desperate, all-out strike that killed the Hundred Spirits Sect cultivator outright and broke free of the encirclement. But the dying man's counterattack had landed: his winged green creature had bitten the brute, poisoning him badly. Fighting and fleeing by turns, the brute eventually stumbled into the forest where Andy was hiding—and Andy killed him, reaping the fruits of everyone else's labor.

Andy continued examining the jade slips one by one with his spiritual sense.

Several in a row turned out to be mission slips, recording information about Dragon Descent Valley along with lists of target items and rewards issued by their respective sects. They were much the same as the Great Void Sect's own mission slips, though some locations were described in far greater detail while others had less.

Cross-referencing the different mission slips gave Andy a more complete picture of Dragon Descent Valley.

"The Hundred Crafts Manual"—a treatise on artifact crafting, and an extraordinarily thorough and detailed one at that. Andy's heart leapt. "I knew it," he thought.

Among the seven great sects, the Hundred Crafts Sect was renowned throughout the Golden Flame Kingdom's cultivation world for its mastery of artifact crafting. That the thirteenth-layer brute had come from the Hundred Crafts Sect and carried a crafting treatise was no surprise.

Of all these jade slips, this single one was by far the most valuable to Andy. He couldn't help spending extra time studying it carefully.

An hour later, Andy was making his way along a desolate mountain trail under the cover of his Concealment Technique, his spirits soaring.

This haul had been extraordinary. Beyond the Blood Crystal, the Hundred Crafts Manual jade slip alone had been worth the effort.

The slip didn't just contain detailed instructions for crafting dozens of different artifacts—it also laid out, in systematic fashion, the essential principles, key techniques, and accumulated experience of the craft. The sections on special methods and insights for forging peak-grade artifacts were, for Andy, like receiving charcoal in a snowstorm.

And there was more. The final section of the jade slip was devoted entirely to the crafting of spirit tools.

Andy, who had long been searching for exactly this knowledge, was overjoyed.

In his mind, spirit tools were the best way to put his inexhaustible supply of spirit stones to use.

With a few mid-grade spirit tools at his disposal, he could fight a Foundation Establishment cultivator on even terms. With high-grade spirit tools, he could disregard Foundation Establishment cultivators entirely.

For other cultivators, mid-grade spirit tools consumed far too much energy, and high-grade spirit tools required high-grade spirit stones—a cost even Core Formation cultivators could scarcely afford. Low-grade spirit tools, while cheap to operate, were too weak to be worth the trouble; one might as well use ordinary artifacts. So in the current cultivation world, spirit tools were seldom used by anyone.

But for Andy, spirit tools were the ideal weapon—unconstrained by his cultivation level, they were the best lifesaving measure available to him.

He had searched everywhere for texts on spirit tool crafting, but the subject had fallen out of favor in the cultivation world so long ago that no shop or archive carried anything on the topic.

The Hundred Crafts Sect had earned its reputation as a crafting powerhouse with a legacy spanning millennia. Even a high-stage Qi Condensation disciple carried a treatise this comprehensive—one that even included methods for crafting spirit tools.

And so, as Andy walked, he sent part of his spiritual sense into the Hundred Crafts Manual jade slip in his hand and began reading the section on spirit tool crafting with care:

"The craft of spirit tools originates with the cultivators of high antiquity, and few today study it in depth. Generally speaking, crafting a spirit tool is considerably easier than crafting a dharma treasure. But the enormous cost of using one has prevented their widespread adoption. To craft a spirit tool, in addition to mastering certain artifact-forging techniques, one must also learn to inscribe spirit-channel vein patterns. These are the meridian-like lines engraved across the surface of a spirit tool, running from the spirit stone socket to every part of the implement. Their purpose is to channel the spiritual power of the embedded spirit stone throughout the entire tool."

"The forging methods for spirit tools of various grades are broadly similar; the difference lies in the vastly different requirements for raw materials. As a rule, materials from tier-one high-grade beasts or above, or materials suitable for crafting peak-grade artifacts, can be used to produce mid-grade spirit tools. Materials from tier-five beasts or above, or materials used for dharma treasures, are needed for high-grade spirit tools. Unlike dharma treasures, however, forging a high-grade spirit tool does not require the Core Fire that only Core Formation cultivators possess. In other words, given sufficiently fine materials, even a Qi Condensation cultivator can craft a high-grade spirit tool. Whether low-grade, mid-grade, or high-grade, spirit tools cannot bond with an owner the way dharma treasures can. This is one of the spirit tool's great shortcomings…"