The Science of Cultivation

While Li Lang waited for his students to reach the peak of Energy Gathering, he used his time wisely on creating artifacts.

For the past two years, he had been practicing on and off within Ruby’s artifact space after consuming each type of beast core.

Now that he had completed his printer artifact, he naturally set his sights on weapons and armor that a typical cultivator would have. However, it was a far more challenging endeavor than he thought. He hadn’t succeeded a single time throughout the years.

For the printer artifact, Li Lang used a mimeograph machine as a base and customized it to fit in with a beast core, along with using materials that conducted Qi in the right way. That way, the exotic energy could power the machine to move as the creator intended. Then, he used programming knowledge as a base to repurpose the beast core’s remnant spirit into a working operating system.

The same process didn’t translate well when it came to weapons and armor. At first, one may conclude it should be significantly easier, as cold weapons were simply chunks of sharpened metals. Unfortunately, that simplicity was what made it so challenging.

There was no direction to program the artifact’s spirit, which meant there was no will or goal for the artifact’s spirit to focus on. Li Lang suspected that normally this wasn’t a problem, as artificers used the remnant spirit of the beast core. It could grow freely, as all life did. His programming method just happened to not be suitable for it.

To verify if his programming method did indeed do anything, he even used a few of the remaining neutral affinity beast cores to recreate more printer artifacts. They never succeeded if left to the traditional method of taming the remnant spirit, but did once he programmed their spirit into existence. When he tried with a blade, the elementary AI he programmed never worked. He surmised the lack of direction disqualified it from being deemed an artifact spirit.

With that figured out, the obvious solution was to create a more sophisticated weapon with a theme in mind, but that proved to be an even bigger hurdle. With the printer artifact, it wasn’t meant to be wielded in combat, which meant it didn’t need to take into account weight and wieldiness.

If he tried to make his custom spear into an artifact, the lack of cohesiveness and structural integrity due to the hidden compartments made it fail every time. After all, artifact weapons were supposed to be durable. Those that didn’t meet this requirement would never be able to become an artifact.

Li Lang’s success with his first artifact was largely owed to the few restrictions imposed. It could be as big as he desired, whatever form he desired. For weapons, the forms were less flexible. On the limited platform of a sword or spear, he had to finely engineer it so that both its spiritual aspects and physical aspects were extraordinary and synergized. It was like inscribing a talisman, but on a tiny piece of paper.

All this caused Li Lang to take the time to slowly improve his artificing skills so that he could practice how to create a true artifact despite these stringent requirements.

Today, he would be making his first attempt in reality.