Published: August 25, 2025
Chapter 213: Preparation
Although the journey to the Forbidden Zone lasted only about ten days, Han Li felt as if several years had passed. So lying on the bed in the Garden of a Hundred Medicines felt incredibly warm and nostalgic.
He had risked his life on this trip, but he had finally returned alive and successfully achieved his goal. Now, he could sleep peacefully, soundly, and purely! It seemed that all the worldly conflicts were far away from Han Li in his dreams at this moment.
Han Li didn’t wake up until noon the next day.
Upon waking, Han Li was full of energy and immediately began planning for the future!
Naturally, the first thing he did was to quickly ripen the three main spirit medicines in his hands to preserve them. As for the other auxiliary materials, they were arranged last. However, preparing everything was not something that could be done in ten or fifteen days. Han Li estimated it would take at least several years before everything was in place and he could formally begin pill refining.
Having all the spirit medicines ready, Han Li was not in a hurry. Instead, he sorted out other gains from the Forbidden Zone.
As a result, he obtained more than ten mid-grade spirit stones, hundreds of low-grade spirit stones, a large number of spiritual devices of various grades, several centipede demonic beast shells, some materials from the ink flood dragon’s body, a discarded Silver Sword, and so on.
However, aside from these items, two things caught Han Li’s attention the most.
One was a doll holding a bow and arrow, and the other was a silver-glimmering page.
The doll was mainly carved out of wood, with ears, nose, mouth, and eyes all complete, almost lifelike. Dressed head to toe in extremely realistic iron armor and helmet, even the bow in its hand was made of bronze. This item was the high-grade magical artifact "Puppet Archer" that Han Li had stealthily taken from his sect.
After obtaining this magical artifact, Han Li had never taken it out to try. This artifact required knowledge of the secret art of dividing the spirit—only by injecting a trace of spiritual consciousness into the puppet could it be controlled and operated.
But mastering the dividing spirit technique was impossible before the foundation establishment stage! Only cultivators above foundation establishment stage had enough spiritual consciousness to endure the pain of dividing the spirit. Otherwise, the limited spiritual consciousness of a qi refining stage cultivator would collapse and go mad before successfully dividing the spirit.
The so-called spirit consciousness used by immortal cultivators to sense surroundings or scan things was not true dividing spirit. It was just a small external technique of displaying original spiritual consciousness. However, after mastering the secret art, dividing the spirit was equivalent to gaining one or even multiple spirit consciousness clones, mainly used to operate multiple magical artifacts simultaneously. The more divisions, the more artifacts could be controlled at the same time.
Normally, qi refining stage disciples could only use two magical artifacts simultaneously in battle. More than that, they lost control. Otherwise, if everyone carried five or six artifacts and threw them all out at once during a fight, it would be ineffective, but it could at least make the opponent flustered for a while.
Han Li played with the doll for a while before putting it down and then picked up the silver page to read.
This silver page was a war trophy Han Li got from the barefoot man of the Great Sword Sect. It was bumpy with many strange patterns, looking very mysterious! Han Li pondered over it for a long time but couldn’t figure it out, so he gave up for the time being.
Thus, in the following days, Han Li studied the silver page while waiting for news from the higher-ups to see if his reward had truly been discounted, as the old fellow had said!
On the afternoon of the fourth day, Senior Disciple Uncle Wang and another unfamiliar steward came to see Han Li, bringing only one foundation establishment pill as a reward. Their words were basically the same as what the old fellow had told him, except they changed the excuse for Grandmaster Li taking the spirit medicines to say it was a filial duty of disciples.