Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

The supply point was a piece of flat empty ground amongst the forest. An offensive glyph array was set up encircling the surroundings. As soon as a Denib Beast enters within, the Demon Beast would be assaulted relentlessly by the glyph array. After time passed, Demon Beasts would no longer come here seeking their own deaths.

Piled up in the supply point were some food and water. There were also several dozen camo green weapon crates as well.

Li Yao swept his gaze in a circle. He opened a weapon crate first and took out a set of jungle camo battle clothes.

He did not even consider the battle boots due to the excessively complicated environment of the forest. Wearing boots would get in the way of attacking; it would be better to go barefoot.

He opened the second crate and discovered several dozen alloy blades glittering like snow inside.

As if facing a pile of garbage, Li Yao kicked the crate away in disdain.

He opened the third and the fourth crate in succession. They were packed full to the brim, loaded with artifact parts.

Li Yao examined the crates for a moment and discovered that the rest of the crates were filled with artifact parts, save for a crate containing first aid drugs and etc.

He went ahead and opened all the crates, sending the parts toppling out and forming a small mountain.

“What is he up to?”

Cultivators whispered to each other’s ears in the monitoring center.

The artifact parts in these supply points are for competitors to assemble their own artifacts. It tested the competitor’s degree of familiarity and manual dexterity with these artifacts.

However, most people would open at most one or two weapons crates and extract parts for a set. It was enough to assemble one or two artifacts.

“This little fellow took all the artifact parts and mixed them all together. Can he distinguish them clearly from one another? I mean, they are the most rudimentary of artifacts, but there would be several thousand different components when added all together. To be able to find matching sets of components would be hard. Hard. Way too hard!”

A high ranking military officer disapproved and shook his head.

Artifact Assembling Competitions were quite popular within the military. Soldiers were required to assemble complete artifacts in the shortest amount of time.

Some experts were even able to assemble artifacts to completion with their eyes blindfolded.

But these sorts of competitions used components of the same kind of artifacts. Nobody would take components of several dozen different kinds of artifacts and mix them together. How would one distinguish parts from one another?

Even though Li Yao’s ranking was falling lower and lower, the interest that these cultivators had in regards to him was growing stronger and stronger.

Li Yao didn’t know that numerous cultivators were paying careful attention to his performance from the Distant Expanse.

He was neither tense nor slow, instead moving at his own pace in this match.

He first picked out a crystal cell for the part heap. Then, he picked out some artifact parts and coiled them around the crystal cell, creating an ugly and peculiar small device.

After doing this, he took out approximately 20 more crystal cells and coiled the artifact parts around them following the same pattern. Finally, he connected them in series.

“What is this?”

The cultivators in the monitoring center were puzzled and confused. Everyone’s gazes fell towards the Artificing Expert Xie Tingxian.

Xie Tingxian looked to be deep in thought as he spoke, “Crystal cells are the cores for the most low-level of artifacts. They are responsible for providing essence energy to artifacts as an energy source. But what this competitor has made and created using crystal cells isn’t your standard artifact. At most, one can say that this is a device that carries some artifact capabilities.”

“Professor Xie, what sort of uses does this device have?” a military officer could not help asking.

Xie Tingxian thought to himself for a time. “It’s a kind of explosive device. It can disrupt the Stabilizing Glyph Array within the crystal cells to cause the powerful spiritual energy contained within the crystal cells to rupture in an instant and give rise to a great powerful explosive force.”

“Could it be that he wants to make over a hundred explosive devices and bombs his way as he goes?”

“That can’t be right. He set up 20 of them crystal cells in series. With that big of a mass, it would be impossible to carry around. Don’t even mention about going out to bomb Demon Beasts, it would be impossibly lucky of him to not be caught in such a big explosion.”

The military officer wrinkled his eyebrows having sunk into deep thought.

After making a small and a large crystal cell bomb, Li Yao did something unexpected by changing his style completely.

His dexterity increased abruptly in a flash. His pair of hands transformed into two trailing shadows as he plucked out several hundred components from the pile at lightning speeds.

A crackling exploding sound rang forth as a long sawtooth-edged sword began to form at lightning speed.

“Such fast hand dexterity!”

The monitoring center was in an uproar.

Assembling artifacts was a basic skill of cultivators. Every cultivator had some understanding of it.

But at their level, they long since ceased using their hands and instead used spiritual energy to manipulate the components.

For an ordinary youth whose spirit root had yet to awaken, possessing hand dexterity as demonically fast as these means that he had absolutely gone through long, difficult, and unsurpassed amounts of practice!

“Such solid fundamentals!”

Xie Tingxian nodded his head over and over, faintly feeling that he was about to snatch up a diamond this time.

The other cultivars could only see that Li Yao’s hand dexterity was demonically fast. With the eyes of an expert, only he could tell that Li Yao was maintaining a super high speed while also maintaining a pair of steady hands. Li Yao ensured that every component was assembled firmly and accurately. Even breathing did not cause the slightest hint of disruption.

The only thing was…

Xie Tingxian blinked his eyes. He had discovered that the assembling sequence Li Yao went through differed somewhat from the standard military greatsword assembling procedure.

At first, he thought that Li Yao had made a mistake. But a moment later, he found out that Li Yao was modifying the architecture in the most inconspicuous place. There he added a little “something”.

“Interesting. This really is interesting.”

Xie Tingxian did not expect that Li Yao, a high school student, would actually take these classical artifacts with finalized designs and go on to modify them.

Although he had yet to figure out what the small modification would entail, he was already made to nod his head over and over, firmly increasing his resolve to pay close attention to Li Yao.

Not five minutes had passed when Li Yao completed assembling the first artifact.

This was a military standard chainsword nicknamed the Tiger Shark!

It was a two-handed broadsword exceeding 1.5 meters long. A sawtooth ring crafted from super-alloy steel revolved around the exterior. Powered by crystal cells, the sawtooth ring was able to revolve at super high speeds. As for its killing power, it can easily chop through a giant tree with a girth that one could not wrap his arms around. No matter how hard the shell and bones of low-level Demon Beasts were, they were no use when faced with this sword.

“Four minutes thirty-nine seconds. This speed already exceeds that of several veteran military personnel,” the officer from a moment ago cried out.

Strictly speaking, assembling artifacts in this manner was only taking pre-crafted artifact components and assembling them together. Technically, it wasn’t real “artificing”.

But when adhering to the standards of a typical eighteen year old, Li Yao demonstrated an absolutely praiseworthy virtuoso performance.

What followed was…

Contrary to the expectations of most of the cultivators, Li Yao did not heave the Tiger Shark Chainsword out to go slaying around with it. Instead, he put it aside. He picked out a great amount of components once again and began to assemble his second artifact.

The components he picked out this time were completely different than those from last time. The style increased in crudeness, ferocity, and wildness, giving it the appearance of a war blade.

Soon, a somewhat shorter, but broader and thicker, strangely shaped blade looking like a dog’s leg was born in Li Yao’s hands.

“Thunder Blade?” the military officer shouted involuntarily.

It was also one of the most fundamental and rudimentary of artifacts. But the thunder blade and the chainsword designs were completely different in reasoning. This blade relied on the Jolt Glyph Array engraved on both sides of the back of the blade. The array generates high-frequency vibration ripples, causing the blade to produce over 10,000 oscillations per second. This way, the killing power is increased.

Each time the blade chops down, the internal organs of the Demon Beast will be completely disintegrated by the vibrations. Among the rudimentary artifacts, this was one of the most fierce!

These two types of designs had completely different logic behind them, creating completely opposite artifacts. In Li Yao’s hands, they were so easy due to experience, as if he had known these artifacts since birth.

“This little guy is really quite the monster!” muttered the military officer.

And this wasn’t even the end. After completing his second artifact, Li Yao was engrossed once more with the pile of parts. He selected components that were of completely different styles than that of the first two.

Again, he used another five minute interval. It was powerful and heavy. One look at this giant battle-axe caused people’s scalps to go numb as it formed in Li Yao’s palm.

Li Yao grasped the Drive Glyph Array on the handle tightly and slightly brandished the axe.

The numerous engraved glyph arrays on the surface of the battle-axe suddenly shined. The edge of the axe turned orange, like an iron heated red!

This was a heat-axe known as the Burning Sky. Its combat design was different again from the other two artifacts.

The large amounts of spiritual energy bursting from the crystal cells wasn’t transformed into a form of mechanical energy but was directly transformed into a super-high temperature flow of heat through the use of it’s glyph arrays.

When this axe descends, the internal organs of Demon Beasts will be all burnt to ash!

Three completely different styles of rudimentary artifacts with polarizing different designs were assembled in only a short 20 minutes.

There was no trace of sorrow nor happiness on Li Yao’s face. It was as if he had completed something small that wasn’t worth mentioning. He went and took a sip of cool water, splashing some onto his hands, carefully rubbing them to cool them down.

It was only now that everyone discovered his pair of hands were already burning hot, a sheet of crimson red, from the long duration of high-speed movements.