Chapter 73

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Chapter 73: Ten Million Spirit Stones

As Xu Fan watched the siblings eat, he started to reminisce about their past.

“Xu Gang, Yuexian, have you been to see your grandparents lately?” Xu Fan asked, suddenly realizing it had been four years since he took them as his disciples. He wondered how the wise old man was doing.

“Every time my little sister and I leave the sect for a mission, we make sure to visit Grandpa,” Xu Gang replied.

“Grandpa and Grandma are doing great; they’re healthy and have 20 people taking care of them.”

“Grandpa even works on two acres of land with Grandma.”

“Grandpa says he’s lived a life without regrets.”

As Xu Gang talked about his grandparents, his eyes shone with the warmth of home.

“Oh, and Grandpa and Grandma adopted a Little Girl who’s super cute. They say she’ll marry my brother when she grows up,” Xu Yuexian chimed in, waving her hands to emphasize how adorable the Little Girl was.

“Really? I didn’t expect your brother to have a fiancée already,” Xu Fan said with a smirk, thinking the old man had done well treating Xu Gang like his own grandson.

“It’s not like that! Little Xi is just like you—she’s my little sister,” Xu Gang quickly clarified, as boys his age usually weren’t interested in fiancées.

“Haha, maybe I should take in another little boy as a disciple to be Yuexian’s husband. That would tie everything together nicely,” Xu Fan joked, implying it was no big deal to arrange marriages for his students.

“No way!” Xu Yuexian turned her head away.

“Haha.”

While the three of them relaxed after a hearty meal, a group of puppets arrived, carrying jade bottles, jade slips, jade plates, and a few alchemy furnaces.

“The spirit pills in these jade bottles have lost their potency. Those artifact-level pill furnaces have been around for thousands of years; they’ll need a few years of nurturing to get them working again,” Xu Fan explained, looking over the pile with a hint of disappointment.

As for alchemy, Xu Fan had always kept up with it, maintaining the same level as his artifact crafting. Over the years, he’d mastered spirit pill recipes far beyond those of other alchemists at his level, so he wasn’t too interested in this alchemist’s inheritance.

“Anyone here interested in alchemy?” Xu Fan asked, noting that the jade slips and inheritance jade plates contained willful transmissions to help cultivators easily enter this path.

Both siblings shook their heads. They hadn’t even mastered the secret techniques their master had taught them, so how could they have the energy to learn alchemy?

Seeing their reaction, Xu Fan said, “Alright, I’ll hold onto the inheritance jade plates for now. If either of you gets interested later, just come to me.”

After six hours, everything valuable in the secret realm had been stored in Xu Fan’s space rings.

“All three space rings are full. I’ll need to bring more next time I go out.”

“It’s a shame I still haven’t found runes with spatial attributes. Otherwise, I could craft a space artifact myself,” Xu Fan mused. He decided to study that iron plate when he got back to see if he could extract some space runes. If that didn’t work, he’d just have to push Wang Yulun for a bold gamble.

After leaving the secret realm, Xu Fan carefully returned to Yijin City with his two disciples.

For some reason, back in Yijin City, Xu Fan thought of Ye Xiaoyao. If he’d been with that guy during their secret realm adventure, there would’ve been trouble—like a 90% chance of getting robbed.

Meanwhile, far away in the Demon Spirit Realm, Ye Xiaoyao, disguised as a young master of a wolf royal family, had just come out of a treasure site. He was happily planning how to trade for spirit stones once back in the Feiyu Realm, so he could ask Xu Fan to craft some flying swords for him.

“Old Sword, when do you think we’ll head back?” Ye Xiaoyao asked inwardly, feeling uncomfortable with the wolf ears and tail he wore, especially during fights.

“What’s the rush? The bold thrive, and the timid starve. You’re finally in the Spirit Demon Realm—why not grab more treasures?”

“My Transformation Technique is a life secret technique from the vast world. Not even a Demon Sovereign here could see through it.”

"So just focus on gathering resources here. In the future, you’ll need more than just a few hundred flying swords," Old Sword said. "Once you reach the Great Ascension stage and wield the power of ten thousand swords, you’ll be able to slay immortals and subdue demons."

At that moment, Ye Xiaoyao felt a bit overwhelmed. He didn’t catch much of what was said, but the mention of ten thousand flying swords stuck in his mind.

"Old Sword, should we switch to the Sword of the Heart path? Ten thousand flying swords? Are you treating this like some mundane task?" Ye Xiaoyao thought to himself, feeling a bit regretful for having followed Old Sword’s advice to pursue the sword formation path.

He could already see his future: endless cultivation, earning spirit stones, finding someone to craft flying swords—this cycle would dominate his entire cultivation journey.

"Just ten thousand flying swords? When you reach the Overcoming Tribulations stage, I’ll take you beyond this realm to find the artifact treasury I left behind. Just a small portion of it will be enough for you to get tens of thousands of flying sword artifacts."

"Even the least valuable items there are artifact-level flying swords."

Hearing this from Old Sword, Ye Xiaoyao’s fighting spirit was reignited.

Just then, a massive claw suddenly reached down from the sky and snatched Ye Xiaoyao into the air.

"Little Wolf, you seem quite spirited. How about becoming my disciple, the Great Butcher Demon Sovereign!"

……………………….

Back at his mountain peak, Xu Fan looked over his gains and pondered one question. How had he managed to bring back so much without facing the usual life-and-death struggles? This made Xu Fan, who was well-versed in the typical story tropes, feel a bit uneasy.

It seemed he didn’t have the luck of a protagonist. Every time an opportunity arose, someone would try to steal it, leading to a counterattack. And just when he started to feel proud, fate would send a mentor to teach the protagonist a lesson.

"Master, you’ve been staring at these things for a while now. Shouldn’t you start categorizing and storing them?" Xu Yuexian asked, noticing Xu Fan’s daze.

"Oh, let’s get started. Put the spiritual herbs directly into the spirit herb garden."

"Store the spirit ore separately in storage bags, and put the remaining jade slips and jade butterflies in the secret vault. You two can handle categorizing the rest," Xu Fan instructed.

Xu Fan lay back on a lounge chair in the courtyard, starting to calculate his net worth.

After a rough estimate, he found that, excluding his puppets and magical artifacts, his net worth had already exceeded ten million spirit stones.

Just as Xu Fan began to feel a surge of pride, memories of his experiences aboard the Floating Sky Ship brought him back to reality.

"These spirit stones are just a few cannon shots on those warships; there’s nothing to be proud of," Xu Fan told himself. His current goal was to craft a giant warship like the Floating Sky Ship.

These spirit stones were insignificant compared to Xu Fan’s ambition.

"Damn it, I need to find a way to dispose of unused spirit objects tomorrow and focus on collecting runes with spatial attributes."

"Also, I’ll allocate two million spirit stones to upgrade the puppet army."

"And I need to craft several artifacts specifically for storing spiritual herbs and spirit ore."

"Plus, I still need to………………"

As Xu Fan continued his calculations, he realized he was running low on spirit stones.