Chapter 414: Shaping

First, I want to thank everyone for their opinions and thoughts on how we should overhaul completed novels. We've reviewed nearly 2000 comments across multiple platforms and forum, and while we haven't responded to everything I can promise I HAVE read it all. First, I'm going to briefly go into some of the things which were discussed which may or may not work, because I don't want people to think I ignored anything. I'm putting those in 'spoiler' tags so people who don't care can skip it. Then, we'll talk...

Chapter 414: Shaping

Han Li slightly narrowed his eyes and shook his fingers, cutting off the ten spirit threads.

He then patted his storage pouch and twelve streaks of white light flew out, stopping underneath the floating balls of green liquid.

The white lights faded away to reveal twelve small boxes, flawlessly crafted from white jade but only a few inches in size.

With a light wave of his sleeve, the jade boxes all opened. Han Li then uttered, “Drop,” causing the green balls of liquid to fall into their respective boxes.

After resealing all of the boxes, Han Li was finally able to relax. Even with the aid of spirit stones and medicine pills, his magic power had been completely exhausted by the refinement.

As such, Han Li quietly meditated for several days to return to his peak state before continuing the refinement of the other stalks of Heavenly Lightning Bamboo.

Three months passed in the blink of an eye, and Han Li had finally managed to refine all of his Heavenly Lightning Bamboo into an extremely pure liquid.

After a moment of rest, Han Li started to place down an extremely complicated spell formation in his hidden room.

Han Li didn’t know the name of this magic formation; he only knew that it was required to refine the Bamboo Cloudswarm Sword. The golden page’s refinement method had mentioned over and over that it absolutely had to be prepared.

As a result, Han Li took extreme care when setting up the formation despite his familiarity with it even while having practiced setting it up several times in the past. After all, a single error in the symbols could cause any number of mishaps to occur during the refinement.

As such, it took Han Li half a month of great care to finish laying down the formation. Only after testing it by placing several mid-grade spirit stones around it and feeling that the formation worked as expected, could Han Li finally relax.

Han Li didn’t set out to immediately start refining his magic treasure. Instead, he decided to leave his hidden room for the time being.

After continuously making use of his core flame for half a year and maintaining full concentration up until now, Han Li found it difficult to continue, even as a Core Formation cultivator. He needed a change of pace, as the next step was the most crucial in the magic treasure refinement process.

After Han Li left the room, he encountered a rather pleasant surprise.

Under the irregular feeding with the Rainbow Skirt Grass, the Gold Devouring Beetles had finally started to devour each other once more. Ever since the Gold Devouring Beetles numbered in the several tens of thousands, it was difficult to get them to lay more eggs and evolve using his small amounts of Rainbow Skirt Grass. In addition, most of his green liquid in the past years had been spent on maturing the Heaven Lightning Grass. It shouldn’t have been possible for the Gold Devouring Beetles go undergo any change.

However, after the Heaven Lightning Bamboo maturation finished, Han Li had Crooked Soul focus on breeding the beetles. After all, Han Li still held large hopes towards these exotic insects.

After Crooked Soul brought Han Li up to date, he immediately headed to the insect room.

The surviving Gold Devouring Beetles had gold specks that enveloped less than half of their shells. He supposed that the next generation would have a slightly larger concentration of gold specks.

But as Han Li gazed a while longer, his happy expression disappeared and was replaced with a frown. At this rate, it would be unlikely for the Gold Devouring Beetles to ever evolve to become fully golden.

After every evolution, their number increases by several times, as does the amount of Rainbow Skirt Grass that was required for their next evolution. As his green liquid could only mature so much Rainbow Skirt Grass, it was impossible for the massive number of Gold Devouring Beetles to all evolve at once. It would take a very long, unknown amount time before the next evolution would be possible.

Han Li sank into deep thought as he stood outside the insect room.

It seemed he would have to focus on breeding only a portion of them; otherwise, he may never have the chance to see to see any fully golden “Gold Devouring Beetles”.

With that in mind, Han Li suddenly came to a decision.

However, this must be done after the Gold Devouring Beetles laid their eggs. Han Li could only set it aside for now and first focus on refining his magic treasure.

As such, Han Li rested for an entire month before finally deciding on the day he would act. He first lit incense in his bedroom and prayed for two days, causing his heart to enter a state of tranquility. He then returned to the hidden room and stood at the very center of the formation spell.

With a solemn expression, he raised his arms while dropping several tens of boxes of the refined Heaven Lightning Bamboo onto the magic formation, seemingly in a specific arrangement

Afterwards, all sorts of boxes flew out of his storage pouch in quick succession and dropped down in front of Han Li with their lids open, revealing the supplementary materials that he had acquired.

After taking a look at these materials, he took a deep breath and sat down cross-legged with his eyes closed, slowly entering a state of meditation.

After the time it took to finish a meal, Han Li opened his eyes with his body covered in a mist of azure light.

Just as the mist appeared, the spirit stones embedded in the spell formation began to shine dazzlingly and released a low hum.

Although Han Li’s body remained motionless, his fingers were quickly shifting, drawing out the refined balls of liquid Heaven Lightning Bamboo from their boxes.

Then with a series of whooshes, bowl-thick pillars of light shot out from the formation, enveloping the balls of liquid and completely restricting their movements.

Han Li closed his eyes once more after seeing this and calmly released his powerful spiritual sense, bringing the light pillars under his control. The light pillars suddenly appeared alive and started to flicker while incessantly changing their color.

This strange scene continued until the light pillars eventually matched after an unknown number of fluctuations.

After the final color change had occurred, all the light pillars were a fiery-red color, providing an even stronger contrast with the alluring emerald-green liquid contained within them.

Still expressionless, Han Li opened his mouth and spat out a thread of dark green core flame towards one of the light pillars.

Woosh. The light pillar wildly combusted, becoming a scarlet pillar of flame in an instant.

Han Li continued to release core flame without the slightest hesitation, igniting all of the light pillars. As a result, there were eventually seventy-two six meter tall pillars of flame, filling the hidden room with a blinding red light.

He let out a gentle sigh.

With regards to the power of flames, a core flame was far more powerful than these flashy pillars of fire. Unfortunately, more powerful flames weren’t the slightest bit better at flying sword refinement. As such, it seemed that he had no choice but to temporarily injure his Origin Qi and squander much of his core strength.

Ceasing these gloomy thoughts, Han Li used his spiritual sense and the power of the formation to influence the green liquid within the flame pillars to slowly undergo a change. Their round shapes became longer and thinner bit by bit. Afterwards, they formed the initial core of a sword, each five inches in length.

While this was quite easy to describe, it actually took Han Li an entire day of focused control to shape the seventy-two balls of sparkling green liquid inside the fire pillars into the form of swords.

Han Li let out a gloomy breath and took a brief moment of rest. He felt his head slightly ache, and couldn’t help but bitterly smile in response.

Even with a spiritual sense as powerful as Han Li’s, simultaneously controlling the shaping of seventy-two flying swords was only barely possible.

Although he was nearly finished with the shaping stage that centered around his spiritual sense, Han Li didn’t dare to relax.

He formed an incantation gesture with his hands, causing the flame pillars to flicker several times before suddenly disappearing. Only the small, emerald-green swords remained, floating in the air.

As Han Li’s hands blurred with motion, the many small swords, slowly flew toward him and formed a circle around him.

Seeing that the seventy-two swords had gathered nearby, he suddenly bit down on the tip of his tongue and spat out a mouthful of blood essence, condensing it into a ball of blood that was the size of an egg.

Under Han Li’s control, he dripped a few drops of blood onto each of the swords.

As soon as the drops of blood essence touched the flying swords, they quickly seeped into them and disappeared without a trace.

After finishing this, Han Li tapped a box of silver powder on the floor, immediately scattering it. The powder evenly distributed itself among the swords, causing them to become a sparkling silver.

Following that, Han Li continued with a box of fine black dust, and then a...

Han Li carefully followed the instructions of the refinement, continuing to add supplementary materials onto the seventy-two sword cores. Afterwards, he enveloped the swords into pillars of flame once again and refined them once more.

This time, Han Li didn’t need to simultaneously refine all of the flying swords at once and took great care to carefully hone them in small sets.

Then, in strict accordance to what was described in the golden page, Han Li engraved a miniature spell formation that he didn’t completely understand on each of the swords with his spiritual sense.

It's mad fire, yo.

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