txolops Chapter 276 Improving Techniques and Saying Goodbye to Zhang Tie
Chapter 276 Improving Techniques and Saying Goodbye to Zhang Tie
Inside the Wanfa Pavilion.
Li Ping informed Gu Musheng of his return and asked him to tell the others to gather together.
Finally, he smiled and said, "Musheng, come find me at 'Xianlaiju' then."
Xianlaiju is an inn in the inner city exclusively for high-level cultivators. It has a second-tier spiritual vein environment, and many Foundation Establishment cultivators who are only passing through the Immortal City like to choose Xianlaiju as their place of stay.
Li Ping came to Fenglan Immortal City only to visit a friend and would return to Jiang Kingdom afterward. Therefore, he did not plan to rent a cave dwelling and only intended to make do with the inn for a while.
"Okay, big brother!" Gu Musheng nodded repeatedly in agreement.
While agreeing, his keen insight also allowed him to easily discern the unspoken meaning in his elder brother's words.
The fact that the eldest brother is staying at the inn indicates that he will not stay in the Immortal City for long.
"Could it be that my elder brother has shifted his focus of business to the far north?" he wondered to himself.
Having explained everything, Li Ping was preparing to leave, but soon he thought of a few other things about this trip.
He smiled and said, "By the way, Musheng, I need a batch of spiritual materials. See if the Myriad Laws Pavilion has any in reserve."
As he spoke, Li Ping took out a blank jade slip from his storage bag and used his divine sense to input some second-grade spiritual materials that were still lacking in refining the third-grade low-grade puppet.
After doing all this, he used his magic to control the jade slip to float in front of Gu Musheng.
Actually, the spiritual materials he needed weren't particularly scarce, but collecting them was a bit troublesome.
He entrusted this matter to Gu Musheng, mainly because it would be easier to collect the information through the channels of the Immortal City.
"No problem, brother, let me take a look first." Gu Musheng took the jade slip and immersed his divine sense into it to examine it carefully.
After reading it, a hint of unease appeared on his face.
However, the troubled look was fleeting, and his expression quickly returned to normal: "Brother, leave this matter to me. I will bring you the spiritual materials in a few days."
Li Ping smiled and nodded: "That's good."
He naturally noticed the fleeting look of difficulty on Gu Musheng's face, and guessed that there might be some twists and turns in the collection of spiritual materials.
However, he knew that his third brother was a man of his own mind. Since he had agreed to the matter, it meant that he was confident that he could resolve these troubles, so he didn't need to pay too much attention to him.
Immediately, he poured out a small pile of spirit stones from his storage bag and gestured for Gu Musheng to accept them as a deposit.
After finishing all this, he smiled and gestured for Gu Musheng to go about his business. He then ignored Gu Musheng's attempts to persuade him to stay and left Wanfa Pavilion to book a superior room at Xianlai Residence.
……
Sitting cross-legged in the inn, Li Ping took out the Jiezi Heaven and Earth where Gaoji Daoist resided and placed it beside him.
He took advantage of his free time to take out the spiritual materials used to refine the third-order puppet and perform preliminary processing.
During his work, Gaoji Daoren occasionally offered suggestions for improvement.
Li Ping inherited the puppetry techniques of the Tianqiao Sect from a thousand years ago. During this thousand years, Gaoji Daoist, a puppet master, not only pushed the puppetry making skills to the fourth level, but also made some optimizations and improvements to the puppetry making techniques of the Tianqiao Sect.
He offered to observe Li Ping create the third-tier puppet for two main reasons.
One reason was to witness Li Ping's skill in crafting puppets and to confirm the truth of what he had said earlier.
Secondly, based on the premise that Li Ping possesses third-tier puppetry skills, the team will use its own experience and thousands of years of research to help Li Ping improve the crafting techniques, upgrade the technology, and eliminate some of the defects and shortcomings of the original third-tier puppets of the Heavenly Craft Sect.
Li Ping naturally agreed with this suggestion.
With Gaoji Daoist's guidance, he has a chance to forge an even more powerful puppet.
In fact, he dealt with the spiritual materials while traveling back to the Western Wilderness.
However, third-tier spiritual materials are too troublesome to process, and even though he is a Core Formation cultivator, he cannot rush it.
In addition, he hoped to take advantage of the opportunity to refine this puppet to learn the improved method of refining third-order puppets by Daoist Gaoji. However, his unfamiliarity with the technique made him somewhat hesitant, which further slowed down his processing speed of spiritual materials.
However, as a cultivator who prefers to remain at ease, Li Ping has no immediate need to engage in combat. He has ample patience for crafting puppets and is not in a hurry to immediately create a third-tier puppet.
"Regarding the Radiant Stone, I have developed a better solution over the years. This method can increase the puppet's mana conversion efficiency by at least 10%!"
"Although using Cloud Burial Gold to replace Wind Hair Jade increases the cost, the puppet's one-time mana drawback is about 20% higher, almost reaching the peak of the early Core Formation stage!"
……
Li Ping kept hearing Gaoji Daoist's prompts.
He humbly followed the other party's instructions and carefully handled the spiritual materials.
During this process, the skillful techniques he displayed were greatly admired even by an old monster like Gaoji Daoist who had lived for over a thousand years.
In fact, Li Ping himself may not have had much talent in puppet making.
However, when he inherited the third-tier puppetry technique of the Heavenly Craftsmanship Sect through the Myriad Craftsmanship Puppet, he accepted everything without hesitation, swallowing all the skills whole, and firmly grasped them by relying on the 'one certificate for all' characteristic of the inheritance tree.
It's important to know that the name "Wan Gong" (meaning "ten thousand craftsmen") wasn't chosen randomly!
The Myriad Craftsmanship Puppets were not created by any single cultivator from the Heavenly Craftsmanship Sect.
It is a work created by the outstanding puppeteers of the Tianqiao Sect throughout the ages, embodying their most prized skills.
Only puppeteers who innovate in the art of puppetry are qualified to refine their skills into "Ten Thousand Crafts" puppets, leaving them for future puppeteers in the sect to learn.
Li Ping was not fighting alone; behind him stood the outstanding puppeteers of the Tianqiao Sect throughout the ages, including Gaoji Daoist himself.
Therefore, Li Ping was generally able to quickly master the refining techniques improved by Gaoji Daoren by drawing on the strengths of various schools of thought, and occasionally he could even come up with a new idea.
Within the universe.
Watching Li Ping occasionally display his skills, Gaoji Daoist seemed to see his younger self in him.
Now, because he is only a puppet, he can't use some of the refining techniques that cultivators can use, so he has to make some compromises, and it doesn't have the same feel as before.
He couldn't help but lament, "My things have become distorted when I'm in them."
……
Li Ping originally thought he would see Zhang Tie and the other few people the next day, but to his surprise...
That afternoon, after learning from Gu Musheng that Li Ping had returned and finding out where he was staying, Zhang Tie immediately put down what he was doing and rushed to Xianlai Residence.
"Big brother!"
Upon seeing that ethereal figure again, Zhang Tie's face flushed, and a hint of something flickered in his bloodshot eyes. .
His lips trembled slightly as he uttered the soft call.
Clearly, he was extremely excited to see his respected elder brother again after nearly seventy years.
Among the seven siblings of the Tongzhou Society, Zhang Tie was the closest in age to Li Ping. He was also the first cultivator to meet Li Ping and join the Tongzhou Society.
Of the seven, he had the deepest relationship with Li Ping and trusted him the most.
Although after reaching the Foundation Establishment stage, he devoted a lot of energy to work and life, and became more independent, and with Li Ping also busy with cultivation, he no longer had to ask Li Ping for his opinion on everything as before.
But his older brother is still his older brother.
Despite being separated for so long, his feelings for his elder brother had not faded; on the contrary, they had become even stronger, like a fine old wine.
"You've arrived." Li Ping smiled and nodded.
As he spoke, his gaze swept over Zhang Tie.
Nearly seventy years have passed, and Zhang Tie is approaching one hundred and forty years old. Even for a Foundation Establishment cultivator, he is already middle-aged.
As Zhang Tie reached middle age, his figure became rounder, his face became larger, and the outline of his protruding belly could be vaguely seen under his gorgeous silver robe.
The only thing that remained unchanged was his cultivation level at the early stage of Foundation Establishment.
Li Ping estimated that he was probably similar to Gu Musheng, focusing more on family and work, and less on self-improvement.
Although it is difficult to find pills to break through the bottleneck of the mid-Foundation Establishment stage, he could easily see that Zhang Tie's cultivation level had not yet reached the peak of the early Foundation Establishment stage, and he was not stuck by the bottleneck at all.
However, as I said before, spiritual practice is a very personal matter, and everyone has their own choices, so he can't interfere too much.
Even if one truly dedicates oneself to arduous cultivation, as long as one fails to form the Golden Core, how much essential difference is there between the early and late stages of Foundation Establishment?
It's just a matter of fifty steps versus a hundred steps.
As soon as Zhang Tie sat down, he asked impatiently, "Brother, where have you been all these years?"
"Why does everyone ask me this question as soon as we meet?" Li Ping thought to himself, but he still gave a brief introduction to his trip to the far north.
Zhang Tie listened with amazement, deeply admiring Li Ping's ability to travel so far.
After sharing his own experiences, Li Ping also smiled and asked Zhang Tie about his situation over the years.
When talking about himself, Zhang Tie seemed rather desolate.
When he was building his foundation, he married one wife and two concubines from the Meng family, but they all died a few years ago when their lifespans were exhausted. Although he later remarried and married a young and beautiful wife.
However, as the saying goes: new clothes are worse than old ones, but old friends are worse than new ones.
His new wife was more beautiful and more docile in his presence, but she could not replace his deceased wife.
What Zhang Tie still has hope for now is his family.
Over the years, the Zhang and Lin families have flourished under his care, each with several Qi Refining cultivators stationed there.
He only hoped that before he passed away, one of his two families could produce a Foundation Establishment cultivator, so as to preserve the family's status in the Immortal City.
To his disappointment, the two families had been passed down for generations and had hundreds of members, but most of them only had the aptitude of four or five spiritual roots.
There were only two people with the aptitude of three spiritual roots, and no immortal seedlings with the aptitude of two or more spiritual roots were born.
Li Ping nodded slightly; he understood perfectly.
Needless to say, the Zhang family is also a descendant of Zhang Tie.
After Old Man Lin passed away, Zhang Tie, in order to express his gratitude to his master, specially changed the surname of one of his sons to "Lin" to carry on Old Man Lin's legacy.
After looking around at the room's decor, Zhang Tie asked curiously, "Brother, why are you staying at an inn? I remember that the rules at Xiantao Mountain are still the same as before. As long as you reveal your identity, it'll be easy for you to check in."