Xiang Yu worked at his forge, crafting weapons. Once he finished crafting a weapon, he would feed it to the spirit vein.
As he watched another mid-level spiritual sword disappear into the ground, his thoughts raced. While part of him wanted to upgrade the sect’s equipment, he had to be realistic about priorities. From what he’d witnessed during recent battles, the real fighting was done mostly by the strongest members, that being Li Yao and the elemental spirits.
Regular disciples, while important, rarely participated in the decisive moments that determined victory or defeat. It made more sense to feed the spirit vein and unlock access to more valuable cultivation resources rather than spreading himself too thin trying to dress up everyone.
Still, this didn’t mean he would completely ignore the sect’s equipment needs. He just planned to focus a portion of them to the spirit vein for now(until the spirit vein could no longer be upgraded).
After the recent negotiations, how he spent his produced resources had changed a bit. Before, he would just give them to his martial aunt and she would find uses for them. But now, things had changed a bit. Fifty percent went to fulfilling trade agreements with the five major sects. Twenty percent was designated for trading with local merchants who dealt with lower-level sects throughout the region. This helped build the Azure Cloud Sect’s reputation and created a steady income stream from smaller transactions.
The remaining thirty percent stayed within the sect, though these statistics weren’t entirely accurate. The resources being traded to low-level sects weren’t particularly high-grade since those sects couldn’t afford premium items anyway. Most of what went to them were things the Azure Cloud Sect wasn’t actively using. Even for the major sects, he was trading at least one grade below his current top-tier products, meaning the absolute best items remained one hundred percent within his own sect.
From that exclusive hundred percent, the weapons and artifacts that were the highest quality he could make, he had decided to dedicate fifty percent to feeding the spirit vein. Even with this significant allocation, he didn’t think it would seriously impact the sect’s combat capabilities or growth. The remaining high-quality equipment would still provide substantial upgrades to their key fighters.
For now, his main concern wasn’t weapons or basic resources—it was securing high-level cultivation materials. They had successfully negotiated trade agreements with the five major sects just yesterday, but his skills were advancing at such a frightening pace that those agreements were already becoming insufficient. His alchemy mastery was teetering on the edge of advancing to fourth grade, which meant he would soon need fourth-grade resources to continue his progress.
These sects did possess some fourth-grade materials, but they were precious treasures that couldn’t be used lightly. Getting access to them wouldn’t be impossible—as long as the sect commissioned him to create something using those herbs.
With his success rate, as long as he was careful, he would be able to save some extra resources for his own and the sect’s benefit. But this approach wasn’t sustainable long-term as the major sects also didn’t have many of these herbs. They also weren’t actively looking to use them as some of them were being kept to be used for either making a breakthrough pill when the sect master is about to advance to the Void Traversing stage or for other similar occasions.
It seemed they needed to find larger, more prosperous trade partners. He wondered when Li Yao would unlock higher level maps for them.
When his allocated weapon-refining time came to an end, Xiang Yu collected his finished products. Fifteen weapons lay before him—ten low-level spiritual weapons and five mid-level ones. He had actually crafted ten mid-level weapons total, but had already fed five of them to the spirit vein during the creation process.
The growth this time was noticeably greater than when he had fed it low-level spiritual weapons. The qi concentration increase was now somewhat detectable even without paying close attention to the changes. Still, it remained quite far from upgrading to a proper mid-level spirit vein. That transformation would require significantly more feeding.
After completing his weapon crafting, Xiang Yu moved on to talisman creation. Since the soul infant was still recovering from its exhausting practice session with the Soul Spike technique, he decided not to have it help craft soul shock talismans right now. Instead, he focused on producing standard talismans for both sect use and trade purposes.
Creating low-level talismans proved quite easy given his fifth-grade mastery. His qi moved almost automatically as he crafted thousands of seventh-grade and lower talismans. These would serve the sect’s disciples in their daily cultivation and missions, while also providing valuable trade goods for dealing with minor sects throughout the region.
For the five major sects, he refined several hundred sixth-grade talismans for them. However, he deliberately didn’t include any soul shock talismans in these batches, even though he could create sixth-grade variants. The main reason was simply because he didn’t want to exhaust his soul infant for other sects’ benefit. They would have to wait until he had doubled his soul infant exp some more.
After he was done with those, Xiang Yu could finally craft something special for himself. Since he wanted to avoid using the tired soul infant, he focused on creating a fifth-grade explosion talisman, managing to only create one before lunch time arrived.
As he examined the completed talisman, his gaze drifted to his existing collection of explosion talismans stored in his spatial ring. A wry smile crossed his face as he realized he hadn’t actually used any of them yet in real combat. He wasn’t particularly disappointed in this, in fact, he hoped to keep it that way. Though part of him felt that it was a pity that he didn’t get to witness their beauty.
With that thought, he gathered all his seventh-grade and lower explosion talismans that he’d been keeping for personal use and mixed them in with the batch designated for trading. Since he now possessed sixth-grade and fifth-grade versions, the lower-tier ones had become redundant.
Sixth-grade and fifth-grade talismans could threaten Nascent Soul and Soul Formation realm cultivators respectively, and given that his combat power had already reached those levels, he no longer needed weapons designed for weaker opponents.
With his work complete, Xiang Yu sealed away his crafting materials and left the spirit vein to prepare lunch.