Vessel of Worlds

Mo Bai was a thirteenth-layer outer disciple of the Great Void Sect whose assigned duty was to manage the crafting workshops alongside a twelfth-layer junior brother—registering rentals and collecting fees.

It was an exceptionally easy post, entirely free of danger. Better still, Mo Bai regularly exploited his position to skim spirit stones from the rental fees, giving him a monthly income far exceeding that of any other outer disciple.

He had obtained this cushy assignment by deliberately bribing the sect's Steward Ma with fifty low-grade spirit stones. Less than two years in, he had already recouped his investment many times over.

Whenever Mo Bai tallied up the figures, he congratulated himself on his own shrewdness.

One day, his twelfth-layer junior brother claimed to have gotten his hands on a Marrow-Cleansing Pill and asked to return to his meditation chamber for a period of cultivation. That left Mo Bai alone at the entrance to the crafting workshops.

Mo Bai was more than happy with the arrangement. Guarding the place by himself meant that any extra spirit stones he skimmed could go entirely into his own pocket, with no need to split them. He agreed without hesitation and secretly hoped his junior brother would stay away as long as possible.

He was busy calculating how to leverage his accumulated spirit stones into even greater profit when the teleportation formation flickered with spiritual light. Someone was coming out of the workshops.

Mo Bai's spirits soared. A cultivator emerging meant a rental fee to settle—and another chance to pocket a few stones.

A flash of white light, and a grey-robed cultivator appeared on the formation. With a cultivator's perfect memory, Mo Bai recognized him at once and spoke up:

"Junior Brother Zhao, you've been in seclusion quite a while. I trust the gains were worth—" He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes going wide. The depth of the spiritual energy radiating from the man before him was unmistakable. "You—you've reached Foundation Establishment! This humble nephew greets Uncle Zhao! Please forgive my discourteous words just now!"

"There's no need for formality. I only just managed to break through by a stroke of luck," Andy said. The new treasures he had crafted during seclusion had put him in excellent spirits, and he saw no reason to take offense over trifles.

"Congratulations on your successful Foundation Establishment, Uncle! Please don't call me 'senior brother' anymore—'Nephew Mo' will do!" Mo Bai was equal parts astonished and envious. How had a twelfth-layer cultivator gone into seclusion for barely a year and come out a Foundation Establishment elder?

"As you like, Nephew Mo. Here is the restriction disc for Workshop Nine. I won't be renting it any longer." Andy produced a round blue jade disc and handed it over. In the cultivation world, seniority was determined by cultivation level. Addressing the Mo surnamed cultivator as "nephew" was entirely proper.

"Yes, Uncle. Here are your remaining spirit stones—please accept them." Mo Bai wouldn't have dared overcharge this "elder" now. He returned a full sixty low-grade spirit stones. Every scheme he had so carefully prepared crumbled to nothing before the man's superior cultivation.

Andy didn't even bother counting them before sweeping them into his storage pouch. Then he strode away toward the passage leading to Recluse Peak.

Reflecting on how much had changed since he entered seclusion a year and a half ago, Andy felt as though he had been reborn. He had gone from being a high-tier Qi Condensation outer disciple to a Foundation Establishment cultivator who drew a sect stipend without needing any assigned duties. And during the final year of seclusion, he had crafted several treasures that made his current strength incomparable to what it had been before.

Before beginning his crafting, Andy had spent considerable time deliberating between peak-grade artifacts and mid-grade spirit tools.

After thoroughly studying the Hundred Crafts Manual, the crafting jade slips Golden Leaf Fairy had given him, and several other texts, he had gained a much deeper understanding of the distinction between the two.

Generally speaking, artifacts were more complex but also more versatile and adaptable, full of subtle applications. Once a cultivator mastered their control, an artifact could be wielded as naturally as an extension of one's own will.

Spirit tools, by comparison, were far simpler. They typically pursued maximum output of spiritual power at maximum speed. Their offensive and defensive capabilities were impressive, but in versatility and adaptability, they fell well short of artifacts.

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The way Andy saw it, an artifact was like a sophisticated, multifunctional machine—while a spirit tool was a single-purpose but devastatingly powerful piece of heavy equipment.

Each had its merits. Though spirit tools carried the significant drawback of consuming large quantities of spirit stones, for Andy, that was hardly a concern.

After weighing every angle, he decided to sort his hard-won materials—the Bitter Cold Flood Dragon's body, the mid-grade Luminous Crystal, and the rest—by their most suitable applications, dividing them into offensive-defensive and auxiliary categories.

Offensive and defensive materials would go toward crafting powerful mid-grade spirit tools. Auxiliary materials would be used to forge peak-grade artifacts with versatile applications.

This way, the strengths of both spirit tools and artifacts could be brought to bear.

With a generous supply of high-grade spirit stones to assist him, Andy crafted several masterworks in rapid succession.

The first was a mid-grade spirit tool called the Ice-Fire Shield, which required both a fire-attribute and an ice-attribute mid-grade spirit stone socketed into it to achieve its full power.

During the crafting process, Andy finally understood why spirit tools had all but vanished from the world.

Forging a spirit tool demanded a continuous supply of spirit stones to fuel the process. The moment the energy supply faltered, the entire effort failed. To craft this single Ice-Fire Shield, Andy had burned through twenty or thirty mid-grade fire spirit stones—and it still wasn't enough. In the end, he threw in a high-grade fire spirit stone and a high-grade ice spirit stone before the forging finally succeeded.

Seen in this light, the crafting cost of a spirit tool far exceeded even a peak-grade artifact—and using one required a constant stream of spirit stones on top of that. It was an almost absurdly impractical proposition. Presumably, only certain major sects or clans would equip a select few core disciples with a spirit tool for protection. Beyond that, spirit tools had no practical place in the world.

That Qi Condensation disciple who had priced the mid-grade ice shield at eight hundred spirit stones on Guling Street had been selling it remarkably cheap. The man had almost certainly stumbled upon the spirit tool by accident and had no idea what it was truly worth.

The Ice-Fire Shield was a defensive mid-grade spirit tool that Andy had forged from a Whirlshell Turtle's shell and the Bitter Cold Flood Dragon's jade-green scales. The shield was roughly six chi long and four chi wide, shaped like a heart. Its base was red, overlaid with rows of crystalline, translucent green scales. On either side of the shield was a socket—one holding a mid-grade fire spirit stone, the other a mid-grade ice spirit stone. Complex but patterned veins radiated from these two stones across the entire surface of the shield.

By Andy's estimate, the shield's defensive power when activated was roughly equivalent to that of a mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator. If he were to encounter a rank-two Bitter Cold Flood Dragon now, this shield alone would be enough to withstand the beast's attacks without harm.

The second piece was an offensive mid-grade spirit tool that Andy named the Frost Dragon Bow.

He had forged the bow's frame from the flood dragon's spinal bones and strung it with the flood dragon's spirit tendons. The finished bow was a translucent, pale bone-white, about three chi long, with a socket at the center of the frame where a mid-grade ice spirit stone was set.

Beyond these, Andy also crafted several exceptional artifacts.

One was a matched pair of silver-white swords—one long, one short—forged from Blood-Thread Silver and the flood dragon's twin claws. He named them Ganjiang and Moye. Both were peak-grade artifacts, and when used in tandem, they possessed all manner of subtle applications. Andy had originally planned to forge several more sets of coordinated attack artifacts for use in combat, but the failure rate for matched sets proved far too high. He expended a great deal of material before finally producing this single pair.

Another was crafted from the mid-grade Luminous Crystal and the flood dragon's eyeballs as primary materials, supplemented with Blood-Thread Silver and other secondary components. Using the purple bronze mirror he had taken from Bai Chuli as a reference, he forged a smooth, gleaming silver mirror that shimmered with a faint green light. Andy called it the Spirit-Focusing Mirror—an auxiliary peak-grade artifact. When he tested its effects, they proved even more potent than he had anticipated. Deployed by surprise in the heat of battle, it would certainly give his opponent an unpleasant shock.

The flood dragon's dorsal fin, tail fin, and belly fin were all used to craft flying artifacts. Flying artifacts turned out to be the most difficult type to forge. Despite practicing more than a dozen times with inferior materials beforehand, Andy still failed several attempts during the actual crafting before finally, with the aid of a high-grade wind-attribute spirit stone, forging the remaining dorsal fin into a dedicated flying artifact. He couldn't test its speed inside the crafting workshop, but judging by the quality of the spirit stones and materials that had gone into it, it should far surpass anything else in his storage pouch.

As for the flood dragon's horns and other leftover materials, failed forgings consumed them all.

On the whole, however, Andy's success rate was remarkably high—comparable to what even a master craftsman with decades of experience could achieve. This was largely thanks to his lavish, cost-be-damned use of high-grade spirit stones during the forging process, combined with the existence of the Vessel of Worlds, which could enhance the spiritual energy contained in crafting materials—a truly heaven-defying advantage.

With these artifacts and spirit tools in hand, Andy was quite confident in his own strength. He felt that even against a cultivator who had been at the Foundation Establishment stage for years, he should be able to hold his own.

What he did not yet know was that very soon, he would be locked in a fight to the death with exactly such a cultivator.