Chapter 303 - Forging Twin Serpents, First Foray into the Lotus Cult’s Beast Valley - Part 2
A few days later.
An ox cart labored up a mountain track, dragging an enormous wooden crate. The driver’s blank eyes betrayed almost no will of his own. The moment he left the crate at the designated spot, he turned the cart around and rattled off down the slope.
From the trees, Tang Nian stepped out first; Li Yuan followed soon after.
Li Yuan pried the crate open, and a wave of heat rolled out, sending white wisps curling into the frigid air.
Inside the crate, the space was nearly empty. In one corner sat a forge, bone charcoal, tongs, and other weaponsmithing tools; on a cotton pad lay several fist-sized red-black crystals.
Tang Nian’s puppets hauled out the furnace and tools.
Li Yuan vaulted into the crate and gathered up the crystals—top quality blood crystal marrow.
It was the same material he had once used to craft Gu Xuejian’s weapon. Ordinarily, a fifth rank spirit artifact only called for blood gold crystal; blood crystal marrow was far rarer. A single blood gold vein might not cough up a batch for decades, even a century.
Blood crystal marrow was twice as dense as ordinary blood crystal, which itself weighed ten times as much as iron. As for price, blood crystal was priceless against gold, and marrow was priceless against blood crystal. If you forced an exchange, 50 kg of marrow was worth at least 3,000 taels of blood gold.
Li Yuan had 300 kg in his hands, yet the volume was no bigger than 15 kg of iron. Scraping it together had taken everything he had. Half came from Qing Hancheng to ensure his loyalty. The rest was scrounged up through sheer grind and luck.
He stored it in a secret mountain cache, guarded by fearless troops and puppets. Moving it straight into the black market ghost domain had been out of the question. There was no telling how its blazing heat might react with the ghost domain’s damp chill.
Now that everything was in place, Li Yuan jogged back to the ghost domain, picked an open patch of ground that could survive a lightning strike, sat cross-legged, and settled his breathing.