Cultivation Begins From The Desert-Chapter 116 - 114: Promotion to 3rd-Tier Artifact Refiner (Seeking Subscription)
Chapter 116: Chapter 114: Promotion to 3rd-Tier Artifact Refiner (Seeking Subscription)
Zhouyang began his refining journey with Tier One Puppet Beasts, choosing an Iron Bull Puppet primarily made of Refined Iron as his starting point. This type of Puppet Beast had no other advantage than its durability and low Spiritual Power consumption; it only required a single Low-Grade Spirit Stone to operate. If pitted against an ordinary Tier One Demon Beast, it would undoubtedly win.
However, this was of no practical use.
Even a Tier One Puppet Beast needed to be controlled with Divine Sense, which only a Qi Cultivation Stage Cultivator could possess.
And with the weak Divine Sense of an ordinary Early-Stage Qi Cultivation Cultivator, they could only command such a puppet in battle by riding on its back.
So, Puppet Beasts, in essence, weren’t toys for Qi Cultivation Stage Cultivators. They couldn’t afford to play with these expensive, high-end items, whether in terms of their cultivation level or personal finances.
Even though Zhouyang wasn’t short of Spirit Stones, he didn’t waste much time or resources on Tier One Puppet Beasts. After spending three months refining a few Tier One Puppet Beasts, he ceased their production and focused all his efforts on researching the refinement methods of Tier Two Puppet Beasts.
The cost to refine a single Tier Two Lower-Grade Puppet Beast exceeded two hundred Spirit Stones. Even with a personal mine, Zhouyang was cautious in refining such magical artifacts and wouldn’t do so lightly.
After more than six months of research, he successfully refined his first Tier Two Lower-Grade Puppet Wolf Beast, which could attack by spitting Wind Blades. Coincidentally, at this time, Zhou Guangxiang also completed his Innate Realm cultivation and successfully reached the First-Layer Qi Cultivation Stage, and Zhouyang gifted him the Puppet Wolf Beast as the first magical artifact of his life.
Ever since Zhang Yunpeng’s betrayal incident, Zhouyang became committed to the education of Zhou Family’s young cultivators. Not only did he often summon Zhou Guangxiang and Zhou Xiang, comforting them with toys he crafted, but he also frequently gave ideological lessons to other Zhou Family young cultivators at the school.
Moreover, he compiled a related book based on the knowledge from his past life and handed it to the current Grand Elder, Zhou Xuantai, instructing him to regularly provide supplementary lessons to these young cultivators.
During these times, Zhouyang couldn’t help but think of the elders from the "Guang" generation who had passed away. These elders had truly experienced the rise and fall of the Zhou Family, and their experiences were incredibly educational for the younger generation.
Only by enjoying the benefits of a prosperous clan would one cherish past lives more after the clan’s decline and strive to restore the clan to prosperity so the descendants wouldn’t have to walk the same old path.
The generation of cultivators like Zhouyang grew up amidst the teachings and guidance of these clan elders, fostering a strong sense of belonging and identity with the clan.
Shortly after Zhouyang refined his first Tier Two Lower-Grade Puppet Beast, news came that the old clan leader, Zhou Minghan, had successfully broken through to the Eighth-Layer Foundation Establishment Stage. However, due to numerous artifact refinement orders he accepted after an exchange meeting, he had to stay temporarily at Baisha River Oasis, borrowing the Earth Fire Chamber there for artifact refining and couldn’t immediately return to the clan.
Additionally, over the past six months, Zhou Xuanhao also raised his cultivation to the Second-Layer Foundation Establishment Stage, finally not lagging too far behind his son Zhouyang.
A year later, after completing the orders he had taken, Zhou Minghan returned to Jade Spring Peak and started delving into the refinement method of Puppet Beasts.
With his expertise in artifact refining, Zhou Minghan soon surpassed Zhouyang in the skills of Puppet Beast refinement, managing to refine a Tier Two Middle-Grade Puppet Beast before Zhouyang and began guiding him in the refining techniques.
Under Zhou Minghan’s guidance, Zhouyang finally refined a Tier Two Middle-Grade Puppet Beast six months later.
With the successful refinement of this Tier Two Middle-Grade Puppet Beast, Zhouyang had a feeling that as long as he could refine a Tier Two High-Grade Puppet Beast, he could attempt refining a Tier Three Magical Artifact.
This discovery made him extremely excited, and he immediately set aside everything to focus all his energy on the refinement of Puppet Beasts.
After a year and a half of persistence, numerous failures, and expending materials worth thousands of Spirit Stones, Zhouyang finally refined his first Tier Two High-Grade Puppet Beast—a sturdy and durable "Xuan Iron Turtle" Puppet.
This "Xuan Iron Turtle" Puppet Beast was gigantic, capable of accommodating over a dozen people on its back without feeling crowded. Its shell and carapace were crafted from Tier Two Spiritual Gold Profound Iron, offering tremendous defense. Moreover, this Puppet Beast could employ "Earth Armor Technique" and "Golden Light Body-Protecting Technique" for added defense magic.
The most ingenious aspect was that the "Xuan Iron Turtle" Puppet Beast had a hidden space inside its abdomen, where a door could be opened for one person to hide and control the puppet from within.
Essentially, if a Mid-Stage Qi Cultivator could hide in this "Xuan Iron Turtle" abdomen, even a Ninth-Layer Qi Cultivation Cultivator would have difficulty breaking the puppet’s defense to attack the person inside.
Of course, such an impressive "Xuan Iron Turtle" cost a significant amount of materials, with a production cost reaching as high as eight hundred Spirit Stones, comparable to a Tier Two High-Grade Magical Artifact. The Zhou Family’s Cyan Ping Mountain’s annual net income from its Refined Iron Ore could only produce one of these behemoths.
However, for Zhouyang, all these efforts were worthwhile. The experience gained from refining the "Xuan Iron Turtle" provided him with great insights into artifact refining. To assimilate this knowledge, he offered the "Xuan Iron Turtle" to the Clan Treasure Vault for a discounted price of fifteen hundred clan contribution points, then secluded himself in his cave to consolidate and reflect.
A month later, Zhouyang emerged from the Seclusion Chamber and formally began the refinement of Tier Three Spiritual Artifacts.
He had long decided on the type of Tier Three Spiritual Artifact he wanted to refine, and the materials were already prepared.
Sitting cross-legged in the Artifact Refining Chamber, he waved his hand, bringing out the materials.
The materials included Tier Three Spiritual Gold "Fire Crystal Iron," Tier Three Spiritual Gold "Crimson Profound Pure Gold," and a special Spiritual Gold he had extracted from the feces of a Tier Two High-Grade Demon Beast "Gold-Eating Rat."
The principal material for the artifact he intended to create was "Fire Crystal Iron," "Crimson Profound Pure Gold" was to enhance the artifact’s hardness and flexibility, and the effects of the special Spiritual Gold remained uncertain until the artifact was completed.
Refining a magical artifact, the first step was naturally to purify the impurities from the materials. Zhouyang waved his sleeve and released the Tier Three Lower-Grade Artifact Refining Cauldron, the "Phoenix Pattern Purple Gold Cauldron." Then he flicked his hand, and a mass of pale golden "Qianyang True Flame" landed under the cauldron and burned fiercely.
Once the cauldron was heated to a sufficient temperature by the True Flame, Zhouyang cast a spell to lift the cauldron’s lid and threw in a chunk of fiery red metal, as big as an adult’s head, into the cauldron for quenching.
"Fire Crystal Iron" was a Tier Three fire-attribute spiritual gold with extremely high heat resistance. If one used ordinary earth fire and a Foundation Establishment stage cultivator’s true flame, it would take ten days to half a month to melt it. free𝑤ebnovel.com
However, under the burning of the "Qianyang True Flame," which had a temperature a notch higher than the Purple Core Earth Fire, it began to melt in less than a day.
When Zhouyang noticed the material in the cauldron beginning to melt, he started casting artifact refining spells to quench the impurities in the material. As he cast one spell after another, wisps of black smoke began to rise slowly from the opening in the middle of the lid above the cauldron.
This black smoke was the result of impurities in the material being refined at high temperatures, possessing strong metallic toxicity. Once the black smoke emerged, it was dispersed into the outside air by the ventilation array set up in the artifact refining chamber.
Impurities were not only discharged in the form of black smoke. Some harder-to-refine impurities or raw materials of insufficient purity required Zhouyang to use artifact refining spells to strip them from the material, directly extracting them in liquid form from the cauldron and throwing them into the quenching pool as waste.
By the time a large mass of "Fire Crystal Iron" was fully quenched, three days had passed.
The quenched "Fire Crystal Iron" looked more radiant and translucent, with a much stronger spiritual energy aura than before, and its volume shrank by nearly a third.
Zhouyang did not continue quenching other materials at this moment, but first sat down to restore his expended magical power. Although using "Qianyang True Flame" for refining was faster than using earth fire, it consumed much more mana, making it impossible to continue refining artifacts for ten days in the Earth Fire Chamber.
After a day, Zhouyang resumed quenching the remaining two materials once his mana recovered to eighty percent.
By the time he quenched all three materials, eight days had passed.
With the materials fully quenched, the artifact refining truly began.
Zhouyang rested for a full three days, waiting for his mana and spirit to completely recover, before finally beginning the final refining task.
To refine successfully in one go, he greatly enhanced the temperature of the "Qianyang True Flame" using the ability of the "Qianyang Treasure Pearl." In less than half a day, he refined all three materials into metallic liquid.
Then, as he followed the records on the artifact refining diagram, he merged these three masses of metallic liquid at different ratios to form a ring made of metallic liquid. He slowly lowered the flame temperature to let the ring gradually solidify, yet not fully turn into a solid, keeping it in a molten state and maintaining this condition.
Meanwhile, he kept casting artifact refining spells, using his divine sense to make final adjustments to the metal proportions in the ring. After completing the adjustments, he sequentially set three restrictions in the ring, which was less than a foot in diameter. Finally, he retracted the flame, causing the temperature within the cauldron to plummet rapidly.
"Done!"
In the artifact refining chamber, Zhouyang looked at the cauldron before him with a weary expression, his eyes brimming with deep joy.
Without needing to open the cauldron lid to retrieve the magical artifact inside, he could already sense the spiritual energy fluctuations of the artifact hidden within the cauldron. This indicated that his refining effort was successful, and he had successfully advanced to a Tier Three Refiner!
However, he did not immediately extract the magical artifact from the cauldron. Instead, he placed the cauldron aside and sat down to restore his magical power.
This step had a name known as "artifact gestation."
High-tier spiritual artifacts were usually left to undergo a period of "artifact gestation" before being taken out, as artifacts that underwent gestation showed significant differences in power compared to those that did not.
It was said that some high-tier refiners possessed unique "artifact gestation" secret techniques, enabling the upgrade of an already refined artifact’s grade through long-term gestation.
In the Cultivation Realm, it was rumored that a Nascent Soul stage great power once refined a Tier Six spiritual artifact, leaving the cauldron on an earth fire opening for artifact gestation for a thousand years. Ultimately, the artifact, initially supposed to be Tier Six Lower Grade, was elevated to Tier Six Top Grade due to that thousand years of gestation!
Of course, Zhouyang did not expect artifact gestation to upgrade his successfully refined Tier Three Lower-Grade Spiritual Artifact to Tier Three Middle-Grade. He simply wanted to avoid leaving flaws in his first Tier Three Spiritual Artifact.
Moreover, the artifact gestation period for Tier Three artifacts did not need to be too long, ranging from three to five days to eight or nine days. Zhouyang retrieved the artifact from the cauldron on the seventh day by opening the cauldron lid.
As he cast a spell upon the cauldron, opening the lid, a crimson flame burst forth, directly revealing the image of a fire sparrow.
At this, Zhouyang smiled slightly, extending his hand to summon the fire sparrow. It transformed into a crimson ring artifact with flame patterns and laced onto his left wrist.
"Hmm, as my first Tier Three artifact to be refined, it surely deserves a commanding name. Since your initial form appeared as a fire sparrow, you shall be named ’Vermilion Bird Ring’ from now on!"
He gently stroked the metal ring on his wrist, still emitting strands of heat, with a satisfied smile, giving the artifact what he considered a high-class and noble name.
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