THREE DAYS LATERAlex didn"t know the first thing about building a raft, but even more than that, they couldn"t really move forward with it until they had a proper understanding of what the heck was in the river staring at them, nonstop for the last three days. It was somewhat unsettling, but the boys had slowly gotten used to the presence of those eyes in the water, but just so their time wasn"t spent wasted, the boys decided it would be a good idea to focus a bit on their training.
And with that realization came the discovery of a really amazing yet dangerous training tool, and that had to be the waterfall that almost beat them all into a pulp. After they were fully healed, they realized that their skin was tougher, their bones were stronger, and the muscles tighter and more refined.
There was no method or cultivation to go with it, all they had to do was have their body tortured by the waterfall, taken to it"s limit, and once they get healed up, they end up stronger than before. And in this regard, the balm of discomfort as Yun Fao had affectionately named it, was a big help.
Alex didn"t know it, but the b.l.o.o.d.y healing balm was powerful enough to heal and reinforce their physique, though after using it once more with their training under the waterfall, Alex realized that it"s efficiency was actually dropping. But with that aside he reckoned he had other things to focus on, so in their spare time Yun Fao tried building the raft with Louis to help him, while Alex studied for his first foray into blacksmithing. Sure practicing would have been better, but Alex was a bookworm, and the books on forging techniques he brought along was something that he happily wanted to go through before taking the next step.
And in that manner another week pa.s.sed. By now the raft should have been completed, except of course they had a ma.s.sive problem. The trees that made up the forests were a variety of fruit trees, that were rare delicacies not native to earth, however the trees themselves were also edible along with the fruits they bore, but the curve to that was that such trees were not durable or strong, they were called water trees, due to how absorbent of water they were. They were easily felled having as much defense as a wicker basket, so without any sort of resiliency from those trees, it would be hard for it to carry all of their weights, much less sail them down the river without sinking.
But through it all not everything was a bust, both Yun Fao and Louis advanced to seventh and fifth stage of the open Dantian realm, but more than that, all of their physiques were greatly improved from the constant a.s.sault of the waterfall. Much to their extreme happiness, the balm had ran out, and the boys had to rely on their natural healing abilities. Which by this point was already really good, especially for Alex and Yun Fao who had trained in the Dragon blood Qi pool.
It wasn"t exactly what they planned, but the boys were able to fall into a leisurely and monotonous life. Yun Fao might be somewhat of a muscle head, but he was also quite smart. Knowing that the water trees weren"t strong and resistant, he felled quite a few of them, and had them drying by a fire over the course of a few days until he was sure there was absolutely no trace of water on it. And then he began the long task of cutting them into strips, and overlapping them into each other to create a thicker bundle. But there was also an availability of resources that he felt would be able to stop the raft from absorbing water, and that was clay.
Though Louis wasn"t really sure that clay wouldn"t cause the raft to sink, he was more than willing to help with that endeavor. If it failed they could always try again; after all food was no longer a problem, apart from the trees, there was a colony of fist sized ants that tasted really good living on the other side of the forest across the river, and on their side there were actually moles of a sort that were quite blind, and relied on something similar to echolocation to move and find their way around the forest. Since they were in no danger of starving anytime soon, the boys knew they could just carry on as they were and focus on a way to get out of here.
As for the eyes staring at them from under the river, in all of the time they"ve been there, they never blinked or moved, not even once. And while it was still creepy and unnerving to the boys, they"ve learnt to deal with it and just ignore it. Either way today...whatever day it was, Alex was ready to try forging a weapon. He had spent most of his time buried in advanced forging books, trying to learn and figure a style that would be suitable for him, especially since he did not have access to a full forge but a portable one.
He had a Portable alchemy and array mastery set, along with a portable forge which was a gift from scholar Fan before he left for this G.o.dforsaken training. The portable forge set was about a meter and a half high, and no less than two meters wide and long. It was like a ma.s.sive machine of cogs and wheels, with angular and platforms to work with. Refinement, tempering and quenching of metals were automatically taken care of by the machine. Whilst it was always quite an experience to do all of those things by hand, spending hours hammering away at a piece of ore to refine it into metal, before further the turning that metal into a weapon.....but this was the 21st century. What kind of idiot would kill themselves with that amount of stress when there was a machine that could do it.
But even with the portable forge in existence, blacksmithing was still a meticulous job. The forge ran on Qi and the spiritual perception of a blacksmith. Anyone could forge with this, but only a true blacksmith with Qi can forge anything above stage 3 mortal grade weapons. Besides sometimes the forge could develop problems of it"s own, and the blacksmith would be left with no other option but to fix it, or use some of it"s facilities manually. But never the less the machine needed the full and absolute attention of the blacksmith using it, also the hammering of the blade or whatever equipment being made was a must.
And this was because a machine could not replicate the rhythm and infusion of Qi into the blade to make it stronger, and make it more susceptible to the usage of Qi. And apart from that, the sharpening of weapons also need his attention, so basically the forge was just like a very efficient a.s.sistant, but the blacksmith still had to take care of the major work. There were multiple grades of forges, just like how weapons are rated from mortal, to spirit, to immortal. Mortal grade forges can only forge mortal grade weapons and Equipment, spirit grade forges can forge both spirit and mortal grade equipment, depending on the materials used, but it"s almost impossible for an immortal forge to make anything less than a spirit grade weapon.
For an immortal forge to make a mortal grade weapon, it would only mean one thing, and that"s the fact that the blacksmith responsible for the forging, must suck a lot. None the less Alex hopes he didn"t suck, Yun Fao was relying on him to at least make him a simple sabre, longswords were not too favorable to him, and Louis wanted another rapier, he liked the idea of dual wielding just like Alex.
First of all Alex had to identify the ores he was working with, before they were stuck here, he had prepared some tempered Silver steel, Luminalium; a very durable kind of ore that when forged into a blade, cause it to light up with the color of the user"s Qi. Plus it was also used by array masters to etch arrays into forged weapons, which makes it a big resource for Qi engineers; the combined vocation of blacksmithing and Array Inscribing.
Alex had no intention of jumping the gun in his studies, he wasn"t even ready to begin etching the most basic arrays yet, so he would not be using the metal. However he found mythril, it was a legendary grade material, however it was a metal tailored for Mana not Qi, and Alex also noticed that the diamond crystals absorbed ambient Mana, and released it as spirit energy, it was like a tree undergoing photosynthesis. They would serve as really awesome training resources for both him and Khan who absorbed spirit as opposed to Mana.
But here in lies the secret, both Yun Fao and Louis were dual cultivators of Qi and Mana, making them both mages and cultivators. Yun Fao had a lightning spirit root, but also an Earth element magical vein. Louis was even more talented as he had yin-yang spirit roots, and both light and darkness element magical veins, it was probably why they were chosen to be by Alex"s side. Bu Yun Fao and Louis were just two out of the five chosen, Alex could not help but wonder how strong and talented the others might be.
Either way Alex was going to be attempting to combine silver steel with the mythril, and then add that diamond as a core to the weapons forged. He would be adding arrays later on, but this was an ambitious and tricky endeavor, because since the dawn of cultivation, both magical, Qi, spirit, or the battle energy of the knights. Blacksmiths have yet to combine ores of different energy natures together. But Alex didn"t know that, there was just a chapter left in his blacksmithing studies that would explain such, however Khan had ripped it out by mistake when he was looking for a balm, and Alex had absolutely no idea what he was getting into.