Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

by <unknown>

  "If it's the powerful high-level cultivators, their computation ability is relatively high and they could remember more information of demon beasts.

  "And if it's a hunting team, then among the numerous people, someone would always know the details of the demon beasts, and even if no one knew, one of them could always refer to the crystal processor slowly."

  "Since I cannot find anything in the market, how about… I craft it myself?"

  Li Yao's head was struck with a thought; suddenly, his fingers started to itch.

  Since the winter break, during which he had refined some flashy magical equipment, he just stuck to the basics. Usually, he would refine some complex structural components to practice the basics; at most he would modify his own saber and firearm.

  Could someone like him, a freshman, craft a completely new magical equipment?

  The frequency of freezing glyphs pasted on Li Yao's forehead increased significantly, while his teeth clattered from cold.

  On one side, he was shivering, while on the other, thinking calmly.

  "For my needs, the magical equipment must be pre-inputted with a database of millions of demon beasts' species."

  "No, there is no need to have millions; as long as it is pre-inputted with the demon beasts that would appear in the specific area, it would all fine."

  "For instance, if I am hunting on the Wasteland, obviously, there is no need to include the information for the demon beasts residing in the sea as well as in the forest."

  "This way, the amount of information will be greatly reduced, I will only have to store the information of a couple hundred thousand species which could be stored in an ordinary memory crystal card."

  "Second, the magical equipment needs a very high precision camera that can find a demon beast from a distance; most importantly, it should be able to scan every detail of the demon beast's body."

  Li Yao pondered for a bit and summarized that it could be done.

  The camera was a special magical equipment. In the cultivation world, it was also known as "crystal eye". It had a highly complex structure consisting of numerous lenses and imaging array glyphs.

  The highest-grade camera could even take a picture of a cultivator's soul as well as a high-level demon beast's true form. It was known as the "Dæmon Illuminateur"!

  In the world of cultivation, there was a fair share of refiners who would spend their lifetime crafting the crystal eye.

  Some even spent over a decade on a top-grade crystal eye, utilizing great care and precision. However, they would never sell it, only keep in their hands to play with and take a picture.

  According to them, there was no need to let others know the indescribable pleasure of gazing at the beautiful world contained within a square inch.

  No matter whether others said something like "crystal eyes ruined three generations of fortune or the camera ruined their life", they would still never be bored with it.

  Although Li Yao was utterly ignorant of the crystal eye, nowadays, whether it was the cultivators or ordinary people, they loved taking pictures using the mini-crystal processor; as a result, the crystal eye technology was continuously developed and commercialized.

  Currently, on the market, there were many powerful crystal eyes to choose from.

  Although for the accuracy required by Li Yao, the price of crystal eye wasn't cheap, this thing could be used for a long time; thus, he could only clench his teeth and accept it.

  "The next problem would be how to compare the images of demon beast taken by the crystal eye with the vast database."

  "This needs a very powerful algorithm, and also a unique analogizing array glyph."

  Li Yao tensely pondered. Just as the cold sweat dripped down his forehead, it was immediately frozen into ice pellets by the freezing array glyphs.

  Not long after, his forehead was covered in ice pellets.

  However, his eyes were getting brighter and hotter as though they could melt the ice pellets one by one.

  "The algorithm is not a problem. I have many ancient and modern algorithms in my hands. I could always find a suitable algorithm through repeated trials with the help of the large crystal processor."

  "The analogizing array glyph is even less of a problem!"

  "Every crafting furnace has a set of analogizing array glyphs. We, refiners, are most familiar with this type of array glyphs!"

  When the refiners mass produced magical equipment, it was impossible to refine each component one by one.

  Last time, when he and Jin Quan, the refiner of Empyrean Terminus Sect, dueled, the two respectively forged a nail purely for the sake of showing their abilities.

  In a normal crafting process, hundreds of thousands of the same type of components were forged all at the same time.

  And whether these components were "exactly the same" or there were there any flaws was judged with the help of analogizing array glyphs.

  Many pieces of magical equipment needed a high degree of precision for their components. High-grade analogizing array glyphs could even distinguish a hair’s difference.

  Different species of demon beasts looked similar, but could the difference between them be any smaller as compared to that between an ideal nail and defective nail?

  When even ideal nails and defective nails could be identified in a furnace, would it not be a piece of cake to identify the species of a demon beast?

  "Alright!"

  Li Yao snapped his finger. He was so excited that he wanted to shout.

  "Database, crystal eye, analogizing array glyph, algorithm... all the crucial points are no problem, they can be completely resolved with the current technology!"

  "The only problem is to assemble the crystal eye, memory crystal card, and the processing crystal chip carrying the array glyphs in a square inch of space. The magical equipment cannot be too big, it has to be very light and conveniently carryable. When fighting, it should be able to automatically retrieve the information so that both hands are free to use!"

  "Think, think..."

  In Li Yao's mind, countless magical equipment blueprints emerged, as they quickly rotated, constantly expanded, and broke into pieces.

  After half a minute, his eyes flickered with an intelligent gleam as the blueprint of a slightly weird magical equipment jumped out.

  "That's it!"

  Li Yao fiercely waved his fist, as though he was trying to grasp a fleeting speck of dust in the air.

  He immediately plunged into the Super Perception Cabin and his consciousness fled to the Heavenly Refining Tower, where he began drawing the blueprint with madness!

  Chapter 190: Just Out of the Furnace! |

  Three days later, in the refining room.

  Over these three days and nights, Li Yao didn't sleep a wink. His eyes were almost blood-red, his hair was disheveled, and incoherent mumblings could be heard coming from his mouth.

  A silver-white metal ring was wrapped around his forehead, engraved upon which were a few dozen freezing array glyphs. Whenever his body temperature shot higher than 40 degrees, it would automatically start operating, releasing a cold stream of air which would keep his brain temperature lower than 38 degrees.

  "Whish! Whish!"

  From the metal ring, a cold stream of air was constantly released, forming a faint layer of mist around Li Yao's forehead. It made him look almost like an extremely mysterious immortal.

  Licking his dry lips, Li Yao inputted over a thousand blueprints and spiritual energy flow diagrams into the command crystal processor of the crafting furnace.

  Although he wanted to invent a tiny magical equipment, in order to pursue lighter, faster, and more ergonomic design, he had made hundreds of thousands of changes in each component within these three days, and finally devised the most optimal structure.

  In order to bring this model to fruition, the refining process was extremely cumbersome. Its difficulty was comparable to modifying the 1st Generation Tai'e Crafting Furnace.

  "Let's begin!"


  Inputting the blueprints and spiritual energy flow diagrams, debugging the performance parameters and the mixing ratios of various raw materials…

  Li Yao moved his hands in a neither hurried nor slow manner. His flexible hands, after being trained using the "Thousand Fingers Supple Bone Exercise", seemed as if they had no bones.

  Li Yao's breaths grew longer and longer, the blood in his eyes gradually began to fade away and was replaced with a deep, pitch-black calmness. The deepest point was dotted with a twinkling of stars, as though the entire universe was hidden inside his eyes.

  Gradually, Li Yao entered the intangible state of no-joy-no-sorrow, no-self-no-world, giving off the impression of a peerless master refiner from forty millenniums ago. All the fatigue from three days and three nights had flown away, the anxiousness over 40,000 thousand credits was thrown to the back of his mind, he had even completely forgotten who he was. In his brain, there were only over a thousand blueprints that intensely collided with each other again and again.

  "Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!"

  Ten translucent holograms appeared before him as they surrounded him in a circle before gradually rotating.

  In order to craft this new magical equipment, Li Yao had made relevant upgrades to the 1st Generation Tai'e Crafting Furnace, installing two units for specially crafting ultra-small components. As a result, the complexity of the refining interface had tremendously increased. The ten translucent holograms consisted of thousands of command array glyphs, where each array glyph could control a few dozen variations.

  When Li Yao lightly touched the starting array glyph, the steel giant beast that had occupied half of the warehouse once again let out a low hum.

  Steam spouted from the joints of the metal pipes, the crystals inlaid in the magical equipment units flickered, while the temperature within the furnace constantly increased.

  Watching various jumping parameters on the monitoring hologram with rapt attention, Li Yao didn't even dare to blink, his pupils were completely transfixed as though he had lost his mind.

  "Whoosh!"

  After 37 seconds, a large gust of cold air was once again released by the silver-white ring covering Li Yao's head. Apparently, his brain was operating at the limit.

  As if the horn for the battle had resounded, Li Yao's pupils suddenly shrank to the size of a needle tip and his hands transformed into two masses of gray mist; moving at such a fast speed that only the afterimages were visible.

  After several months of training, Li Yao's refining techniques had experienced amazing progress.

  At first glance, his hands would not even have the slightest bit of wasted movement, just like the movements of Elder Lie Yongming's hands, which were not that fast but not too slow either; there was not a single trace of any rashness or anxiety.

  Upon looking carefully, one would discover that although the range of his arm movement was not too large, even being somewhat slow and unperturbed, his palms and ten fingers were moving like a whirlwind. Every second, they would move more than a hundred times, tapping those few dozen command array glyphs, issuing over a hundred refining instructions.

  The combination of calmness above the wrist and madness below the wrist gave a strange yet beautiful feeling, as if a storm was blowing within a teacup!

  Under the incomparably precise operations of Li Yao, water, wood, metal, fire, earth, and various aspects of spiritual energy set off a small storm within the furnace, causing newly-entered raw materials to be molded into a strange form as they were slowly purified, compressed, cut, and combined.

  After 47 minutes, the first batch of components was taken out of the furnace.

  From a total of hundred and four components, only thirty-seven were perfect; the rest were defective.

  This was quite normal.

  After all, there were new components which were designed by Li Yao, many of which he had never refined before. Furthermore, he was refining a dozen kinds of components of varying shapes all at the same time within one crafting furnace.

  With Li Yao's refining methods, such yield was already outstanding.

  In Li Yao's vision, the new magical equipment consisted of 1,424 components.

  In today's world, where the magical equipment was getting increasingly complex, this was not a big figure.

  However, most of the components were very small in size, they belonged to the category of mini-type components[1]. Refining these was quite troublesome.

  Having poured a can of high-energy drink in his mouth to regain strength, Li Yao crushed the can into a ball and threw it towards the back, whereupon the ball made a beautiful arc as it fell right into a dustbin twenty meters away with a "clang".

  "Let's begin the second batch!"

  Li Yao rubbed his hands before another storm appeared between his ten fingers.

  After a day and night of endless refining, the entire set of magical equipment components was finally finished. In order to prevent any mishap during assembling, he refined two sets of components.

  However, this was not the most difficult step. The most crucial part of the entire magical equipment was the command crystal chip.

  To distinguish between an ideal and defective product within a furnace, there wasn't any high-requirement as to how much time it would take. The analogizing array glyphs could take from a dozen seconds to a whole minute, identifying the components slowly.

  In contrast, Li Yao needed the analogizing array glyph to identify the species of the demon beast in the blink of an eye. Not to mention a few seconds, even a second was too slow.

  This required very powerful boosting array glyphs to speed up the operation speed of the analogizing array glyph.

  In order to shorten the recognition time to within a second, Li Yao planned out an accelerating group that combined 31 boosting array glyphs in series with a special algorithm.

  Then, he would add the rest of few dozen essential array glyphs on the finger-nail-sized command crystal card. All in all, he had to engrave one-hundred-and-one array glyphs.

  It was a test of the micro-engraving technique of a refiner.

  The five hundred top super sects of the federation possessed a mystical magical equipment called "Mystic Laser Micro-Engraving Machine", which could assist the refiners in engraving hundreds of thousands of array glyphs within a square inch.

  However, the Mystic Laser Micro-Engraving Machine was highly expensive. So expensive that it was a couple dozen times more expensive than an ordinary crafting furnace.

  At present, the Grand Desolate War Institution's Refining Department didn't have a need for such a configuration.

  Li Yao could only rely on his hands.

  A pair of hands that had been repeatedly trained in the Heavenly Refining Tower of the Hundred Smelting Clan from forty millenniums ago.

  The time passed on, second by second.

  Li Yao was like a stool attached to the front of a table as he showered his talent and creativity on the fingernail-sized crystal card under the magnification of a microscope that consisted of twelve crystal lens and eleven magnifying array glyphs.

  An entire nineteen carving pens crafted from adamantyl stone had been ruined. Only God knew how many times his ten fingers had been blistered. However, after soaking them in the medication for a while, regardless of the drilling pain he was experiencing, he would once again begin carving like an insane person.

  Finally—

  Since the flash of inspiration in his mind, an entire week had already passed.

  A new magical equipment shining with a magnificent gloss appeared on the scarred palm of Li Yao!

  Watching his very own idea come into being and seeing it lying quietly on his palm, Li Yao felt like crying.

  Over this one week, the painstaking effort, the sweat and blood, the frustration and depression whenever he failed...was worth it!

  All of it was worth it!

  This magical equipment weighed only 97.45 grams. The memory crystal card and command cr
ystal card were integrated upon a mini-crystal panel which was firmly wrapped in a silver-white shell that was refined from a titanium alloy.

  It looked like an ear pad. It was created totally in accordance with the contours of Li Yao's ear, allowing it to seamlessly fit upon his left ear. No matter how severe the movements were, it would never fall off.

  The front of the ear pad had two titanium alloy brackets that extended towards the front, while sandwiched between them was an ultra-thin lens crafted from red silicon crystal, which could be controlled with the rotation of his eyeball as well as the expansion and contraction of his pupils.

  In appearance, this magical equipment was a combination of communicator and monocle.

  The lens that was slightly glowing in red light was in particular strangely enchanting.

  Li Yao could not help but put the magical equipment on his left ear before vigorously shaking his head.

  There was no discomfort. It fit quite perfectly. As long as the head was not hit directly, no matter how much the head swayed, it would not fall off.

  And, due to a special ventilation design, wearing it for a long time would not produce a hot feeling.

  Adjusting a hologram onto the lens mode and looking carefully at the lens, Li Yao was extremely satisfied with the magical equipment’s appearance.

  His somewhat valiant face appeared even more aggressive against the slightly red lens; it brought a faint antagonistic appearance.

  As far as he, the "vulture" who grew up in the Magical Equipment Graveyard, was concerned, this shape was very much to his liking.

  "Good, that's a hundred points for the appearance. The trends of this year's teenagers would change completely—if they had this magical equipment in one ear, with the red lens covering an eye, their aura would shoot up by 300%!"

  Li Yao slightly smiled.

  Although its appearance would dazzle everyone, its performance was even more powerful.

  The magical equipment was equipped with a "super falcon"-class crystal eye that was manufactured by the Holy Light Sect. It was a quasi-military-grade crystal eye. Its dynamic imaging performance was quite powerful. Once it was pushed to its limit state, it could easily capture any object moving at a subsonic speed within a range of three hundred meters.