Amid his delight, Han Li was also somewhat curious—if he continued to ripen the Golden Thunder Bamboo, would it undergo any further changes?
With this thought in mind, Han Li spent several months dripping more green liquid onto the bamboo.
In the end, the bamboo's color and power did not change in the slightest, and its size remained at that of a ten-thousand-year-old stalk, no longer growing by even a hair.
Instead, after this period of forced growth, a young bamboo shoot had unexpectedly sprouted beside the stalk.
As the green liquid dripped onto it, the young bamboo gradually grew taller. A few months later, the new Heavenly Thunder Bamboo looked exactly like the original had in its younger years. Of course, this time it was a complete bamboo stalk.
Seeing this, Han Li was not disappointed in the least; on the contrary, he was overjoyed.
To tell the truth, the single Heavenly Thunder Bamboo he originally possessed was barely enough to refine one set of twelve "Azure Bamboo Bee Cloud Swords." Now that he knew the green liquid could sprout young stalks, the predicament of insufficient main material was thoroughly resolved.
However, this also made Han Li's ambitions swell.
Since he no longer needed to worry about how much main material he had, he would not settle for refining only twelve flying swords. On a sudden whim, he wanted to refine the maximum number of Azure Bamboo Bee Cloud Swords—a set of seventy-two flying swords.
Although with his early Core Formation magic power he could not possibly refine and control so many flying swords, he was in no hurry. He could slowly refine them one by one as his cultivation progressed.
In any case, as long as they were a complete set, the flying swords could be taken into his body as a single magic treasure, or separated and used individually without any effect at all.
The moment this thought appeared, Han Li's heart burned with excitement, and he began to consider whether he could truly accomplish it.
The greatest difficulty in refining a set of magic treasures was that differences in the main materials made success hard to achieve. But now he would be using Heavenly Thunder Bamboo grown from the same root, so this was no longer a problem.
What remained was his own refining skill and how well he had prepared the auxiliary materials.
He had long since prepared the auxiliary materials. After all, whether refining twelve swords at once or seventy-two, the same amount of auxiliary materials was used, so there was no need to go looking for more.
The only thing worrying him now was that his skill in refining magic treasures was far too poor.
After all, he had no experience in artifact refining whatsoever.
If it were an ordinary magic treasure, he would naturally have no such concerns—it was an easily mastered process of refining with pill fire.
But the "Azure Bamboo Bee Cloud Swords" were different.
Even a single one of them, taken on its own, was absolutely far more complex to refine than any ordinary magic treasure.
What was more, because they had to form a complete set, the semi-finished swords had to be consecrated with a special spell formation, and this in turn required familiarity with a certain degree of formation knowledge. Otherwise, refining this treasure was simply out of the question.
Han Li was a man of extremely firm will. Even facing so many difficulties, he still made his decision: if he was not going to refine them, so be it, but since he was going to refine them, he would certainly refine the best flying swords possible.
Otherwise, he would never have clung so persistently to the Heavenly Thunder Bamboo in the first place.
And so, after pondering in his cave abode for a day and a night, Han Li finally arranged his cultivation plan for the next twenty-odd years.
A few days later, in the market of Heavenly Star City, an unremarkable little shop suddenly changed owners. The new proprietor was an ordinary-looking young man of about thirty, and besides him there was another servant—a tall fellow with thick brows and big eyes.
Upon taking over the shop, the young man promptly changed its name from "Li's General Goods" to "The Green Bamboo Cottage." At first he sold only talismans, medicinal herbs, and the like in the shop, but half a month later, some crude, low-grade magic tools were added as well.
What surprised the nearby shopkeepers, however, was that the young man never readily stepped out of the shop's front door. All day long he simply pored over a tattered silk book without a cover, occasionally waving his hands about as he read, as if he had come upon a particularly thrilling passage. At other times, he would hide away in the back of the shop and not show his face at the front for half the day or more.
As for the customers and the business, they were all handled by that honest-looking big fellow.
Most of the nearby shopkeepers were mortals born and raised in Heavenly Star City, who had opened shops here merely to scrape by. Only one gray-haired old man surnamed He possessed inferior spiritual roots, and had reached a cultivation level of merely the third or fourth layer of Qi Condensation. Even so, the old man surnamed He was deeply respected by the other mortals, who called him "Immortal Master He" all day long.
Thus, as soon as the young man arrived, the others had asked the old man surnamed He about him, and learned that the young man had not the slightest trace of magic power and was just another mortal.
Their boldness grew at once, and from time to time they would drop by the shop to chat about everyday matters with this young man who called himself Han.
After all, this place was truly remote and business was sparse on ordinary days, so they could only visit one another to relieve the boredom.
And the arrival of this unfamiliar face naturally gave them plenty of new topics for conversation.
But the young man seemed ill at ease with people. He spoke somewhat slowly, kept himself shut up in the shop all day, and even when other shopkeepers occasionally dropped in, he mostly just listened without speaking. He was remarkably dull.
Moreover, the young man never spoke of his origins; when asked, he would only smile without answering. Naturally, the others could hardly press him further.
After a few rounds of this, the others gradually lost interest and stopped dropping by this "Green Bamboo Cottage."
Yet this situation actually made the young man secretly breathe a sigh of relief.
The young man and the big fellow were, of course, Han Li and Qu Hun in disguise.
Although it was only the most commonplace face-changing technique of the mundane world, it was more than enough to fool a few mortals and a single low-grade cultivator.
Han Li certainly had not come here to open a shop for the sake of earning the contemptible handful of spirit stones.
Rather, it was a place he had deliberately chosen in order to temper his worldly state of mind, and to prepare for studying the way of artifact refining and the knowledge of formations.
The reason Han Li had never dabbled in these two areas before was that his time in Foundation Establishment had been too short, leaving him no spare moments for such matters.
But now that Core Formation had been achieved, and since refining his magic treasure in the next step would also require knowledge and experience in both areas, he naturally intended to use this period of nurturing the Heavenly Thunder Bamboo to study the Cloud Vault Insights and the formation tome Xin Ruyin had given him.
In truth, deep down, Han Li was quite interested in the arts of artifact refining and formations.
In a mere twenty years, while studying both fields at the same time, he dared not hope to reach the level of those two geniuses. But if he could acquire a portion of each of their skills, he would be perfectly content.
At the very least, he should be able to refine the simplest formation flags and formation plates for himself!
But mastering these things could not be done by reading and rote study alone—he had to personally set his hands to refining and practice.
As a result, a whole pile of worthless, inferior magic tools soon accumulated, and they were not easy to dispose of.
Throwing them away would be a pity, yet keeping them served no purpose at all—truly a case of neither worth keeping nor worth discarding.
Moreover, whenever some sudden whim struck him during practice, he would need to buy all sorts of strange materials to use on the spot. He certainly could not run to the market every single day.
And by lucky coincidence, the cultivation of the fourth layer of the Great Development Technique happened to require a tempering of the state of mind through immersion in the mortal world. Otherwise, one could not withstand the backlash of inner demons while cultivating the fourth layer, and it would be very difficult to master.
So after some deliberation, Han Li simply bought the shop, killing several birds with one stone.
This place was neither too noisy to disturb his usual study of the way of artifact refining and the knowledge of formations, nor too far removed from the world, for he could witness the ordinary lives of mortals with his own eyes. The materials needed for refining practice and laying formations could be purchased in time, and the little items he refined could be set out on the counter for sale—selling a few here and there would be something!
Watching those low-grade cultivators buy away the magic tools he had refined with his own hands left Han Li feeling quite pleased.
Of course, every few days he still had to return to his cave abode on schedule to ripen the Heavenly Thunder Bamboo and visit the Gold Devouring Beetles, while the two Blood Jade Spiders were left behind in the abode to keep watch.
But before long, a sight that astonished Han Li appeared in the medicine garden.
When the second stalk had also reached five or six thousand years of spirituality, the first Heavenly Thunder Bamboo inexplicably detached itself at the root. The few branches and leaves it bore fell off completely clean, and the moment they touched the ground, they immediately turned into dazzling leaves like pure gold.
Though he had no idea what use these golden leaves might have, Han Li was unwilling to casually throw them away and picked up every one, storing them in his storage pouch. The main stalk, still verdant and glistening, was placed inside a box made of "paste jade" and carefully preserved.
Once he had gathered six or seven such stalks, it would be time for him to begin refining the "Azure Bamboo Bee Cloud Swords."
And so, having suppressed his magic power, Han Li thoroughly merged into the world of mortals, and in a remote corner of the market, began his journey into worldly life.
Apart from devoting each day to studying the silk book copied from the jade slip, he quietly observed the varied and complex displays of joy, anger, and sorrow among the mortals around him, then slowly recalled and savored them.