Vessel of Worlds

"Soft-hearted with beautiful women to the last," Andy mocked himself—while privately noting the warning: he could not let such feelings interfere with the great Dao of cultivation.

If anything, he felt this encounter had considerably strengthened his resistance to beautiful female cultivators. The next time a similar situation left him no choice but to strike the killing blow, he was confident he would not hesitate at all.

He spent several days deploying the formation sets purchased on Penglai around the dwelling as well. Only when all of it was done did he walk to the dwelling's hidden entrance.

Striding down the passage toward his dwelling, Andy was in excellent spirits.

He had arranged numerous telltale mechanisms along this passage—nothing formidable, but if any outsider had passed through, he would see it at a glance.

Every mechanism was intact. So the Fairy Yun truly had not entered his dwelling.

More important still: the Heavenly Fragrance Beguiling Formation the girl had handed him was enormously useful to his beast-hunting plans.

Others had no high-grade spirit stones. Andy had more than he could ever spend!

The Heavenly Fragrance Beguiling Formation, combined with his existing plan, could all but transform him into a cultivator of vast powers who slaughtered beasts at will—with astonishing efficiency to boot.

He could hardly wait to finish his preparations and descend on the Outer Star Sea for a grand hunt.

The moment he pushed open the stone door to the Spirit Eye Spring, Andy sensed something.

A flash of green light shot straight at his face!

Andy neither dodged nor blocked, letting the green light pounce upon him. It landed on his body and revealed its true form—a little snake a chi long and finger-thick, its back green as young bamboo, its belly white as jade. The little snake wound back and forth over him, rubbing its cheek against his, utterly affectionate.

Andy knew at once: this was the hatchling newly emerged from the Bitter Cold Flood Dragon eggs. Because the master-bonding had succeeded, the little snake regarded him as something like a parent and clung to him with deep attachment. The beast-handling texts noted that frequent soothing contact during a spirit beast's infancy did much to build rapport between beast and master—so Andy, his boyish side surfacing, played with the little snake for a while.

It was said that the flood dragon line was generally born in the form of snakes or pythons, at that stage possessing only the strength of a rank-one low-level beast—roughly a third- or fourth-layer Qi Condensation cultivator. As its cultivation advanced, it would in time shed its snake skin and transform into a true flood dragon. The Bitter Cold Flood Dragon of Bitter Cold Pool had made that transformation upon entering rank two.

Examining the little snake carefully, Andy discovered it was a mutated offspring bearing two anomalous attributes at once—ice and wind. Such mutated spirit beasts were exceedingly rare; by all accounts, a mature mutated beast often possessed inconceivable and unique powers. The catch was that mutated beasts matured far more slowly than ordinary ones. When this ice-and-wind snake might finally take dragon form, no one could say.

Andy went to the Spirit Eye Spring to check the other eggs. Just as the texts recorded, every one had been destroyed—nothing remained but a heap of white and green shell fragments.

This was the flood dragon line's peculiar way of rearing young: however many eggs were laid, at most one was ever a living egg. And when that single living egg hatched, the newborn snake would immediately devour the other dead eggs. Without enough dead eggs to consume, even that sole offspring would soon die.

Perhaps because the flood dragon line was born so far stronger than other beasts, heaven made the rearing of their young that much harder. Perhaps that was simply the way of the Dao, Andy mused.

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"Since you're a spirit beast of ice and wind both, I'll call you Ice-Wind Snake." Andy stroked the little snake's body, smooth as polished jade, and spoke softly.

Then, following the instructions in A Thousand Talks on Spirit Beasts, he spent a while practicing how to issue commands to the Ice-Wind Snake through his spiritual sense.

The Ice-Wind Snake's cultivation was still very low. For now it could only puff out a thin thread of cold air, without a single spell to its name.

Andy was in no hurry. The flood dragon line's potential was enormous—and this was a mutated beast of double attributes besides. His hopes for the Ice-Wind Snake's future ran high, and he resolved to raise it well, until it became yet another great pillar of his strength.

Moreover, once a spirit beast bonded to a master, it could never be transferred to another; only its master could command it. If the master died, the beast would immediately self-destruct and follow. So even if others learned he possessed a flood dragon spirit beast, the worst it would draw was red-eyed envy—it would not, as a rule, bring killers to his door.

Human cultivators could vastly advance their cultivation by consuming pills and elixirs—and spirit beasts could do the same. A spirit beast was simply a beast: it was called a spirit beast only to distinguish it, tamed and bonded and under a cultivator's command, from the unawakened wild beasts.

Among the pills suitable for the Ice-Wind Snake at its current stage was Spirit-Nurturing Powder, which was not especially expensive; Andy had bought a good supply. He enhanced it with the small bowl and fed it to the Ice-Wind Snake every few days.

As for himself, he felt no urgency about refining his dozen-plus rank-three beast cores into pills for meditation.

Andy's first priority was to forge a large batch of mid-grade spirit tools!

Like artifacts, spirit tools came in rich variety: offensive tools such as bows, sabers, swords, spears, staffs, hooks, hammers, tridents, whips, and axes; and defensive tools such as shields of every shape and bronze plaques.

What types he meant to make, Andy had long since decided.

From then on, apart from occasionally feeding and playing with the Ice-Wind Snake, Andy poured every hour into forging spirit tools.

After most of a year, he had several dozen offensive spirit tools and a dozen or so defensive ones—every one a mid-grade tool running on mid-grade spirit stones.

The dozens of offensive tools were, without exception, bows—ranged weapons all, in an assortment of attributes.

The dozen-plus defensive tools were likewise shields, the type he crafted best.

Judging his forging technique now seasoned to a certain level, Andy turned his attention to his small stock of rank-five beast materials.

From these, he meant to forge one or two high-grade spirit tools—the kind that required high-grade spirit stones to unleash their full power.

Months later again, Andy stood gripping a scarlet bone saber, its hilt set with a translucent red high-grade fire-attribute spirit stone, and trembled with excitement.

After repeated failures that squandered no small amount of material and high-grade stones, he had at last produced his one and only high-grade spirit tool: the fire-attribute Blazing Heaven Blade.

Andy took the hilt in both hands and gave the lightest of swings. A fire dragon more than ten zhang long burst roaring from the blade's face, claws bared and fangs snapping—its momentum was truly frightening. By Andy's own estimate, he could not have withstood a single strike of that fire dragon himself.

Spirit tools drew mainly on the power within their spirit stones, the cultivator supplying only a trickle of spiritual power for guidance and control. But for a high-grade spirit tool, even that cost was enormous—the casual swing just now, mere guidance though it was, had consumed a good portion of Andy's spiritual sense and nearly a fifth of his spiritual power.

For that reason alone, Andy knew the Blazing Heaven Blade would become another of his trump cards—never shown in ordinary times, and when finally drawn, drawn to annihilate utterly, leaving no one alive.

But this was not the routine weapon of his plan. Next, Andy began crafting the humanoid puppets.

Puppet-making technique was not complicated—if one wasn't fussy about the puppet's features, it was downright easy, scarcely harder than forging a mid-grade artifact. The only troublesome part was fusing a beast soul with the finished puppet body to form a complete puppet, a process requiring a small formation and a particular secret art.

Neither the formation nor the art was especially abstruse, and after a period of study Andy grasped them.

In a mere half year, Andy produced more than fifty humanoid puppets of Qi Condensation caliber—all little figures about a chi tall which, powered by low-grade spirit stones, could swell to the size of living men. Since Andy's workmanship ran to the rough side, their faces were stiff and crude.

Crafting carried its failure rate, too: though he had prepared materials for over a hundred puppets, only fifty-odd emerged complete.

Everything stood ready—all that was missing was the east wind.

Andy picked up the jade slip recording the Spirit-Splitting Technique and read. He had long since studied its contents through; now he would follow its method in earnest—splitting his spiritual sense by main force to create a strand of divided spirit!