Birth of the Demonic Sword

The dark-red crystal wasn't a real Bloodline Inheritance, not in terms of the benefits that could bring to the cultivators' minds at least. Noah had only used his knowledge in the matter and the intensity of his will to recreate suitable conditions and force the crystallization.

Cracks filled the crystal, and Noah sensed his mental energy escaping through those small fissures to disperse in the air. The Elemental Forging method had made it become part of the item, so they didn't belong to Noah anymore.

'This won't do.' Noah thought as he analyzed the crystal.

It wasn't its cracked state that left him unsatisfied. He could fix that with enough practice in the forging process. Yet, the fact that his mental energy had occupied the insides of the crystal was a troublesome issue.

He wasn't trying to create actual Bloodline Inheritances, but a physical imitation of a sea of consciousness that could contain the wills of the magical beasts. That fake center of power was the key to the creation of living weapons.

Noah knew that creating something as unique as his Demonic Sword was merely impossible. He had poured too much of himself in that weapon to produce something with similar qualities. However, forging organic inscribed items was possible, just extremely difficult.

Noah didn't need just to create them though. One of the most important requirements was to build living weapons that were also stable and wouldn't revolt against the cultivators wielding them.

'I need to decide on a species if I want to optimize the process and reach the point where I can mass produce empty Bloodline Inheritances.' Noah thought before summoning his sword to cultivate.

Noah barely had any free time in that period. The training of his centers of power always had the priority, but testing his abilities and researching the organic living weapons forced him to execute multiple tasks at once.

Luckily for him, it wasn't hard to train all his centers of power at the same time.

For his cultivation technique to work, he just had to press the Demonic Sword on the rune on his waist and make sure that its position remained completely still even with the enhanced suction force attempting to move it. One hand was enough to complete that task after he became used to the procedure.

He could use his other hand to hold the sixth Kesier rune, which worked together with the spherical runes in his mind to enlarge its walls. After all, he just needed to keep a direct line of sight for the rune to unleash its effects.

As for his body, he could take bites of any creature's corpse even when his hands were busy.

Rank 5 cultivators would generally avoid that approach when it came to their centers of power. Small mistakes in their training could hurt them, and the periods between every breakthrough were simply too long at that level.

Most of them didn't have a reason to risk injuring their centers of power just to have access to more free time. It was better to seclude themselves for years and temporarily neglect their cultivation during their period in the outside world.

Truth to be told, Noah didn't have any hurry either, except for the sixth Kesier rune that he could keep only for a limited amount of time. However, the matter with the living weapons interested him too much to delay it by a few years.

The possibility of creating living beings able to give cultivators part of the power of the magical beasts without passing down their drawbacks was simply too incredible to ignore. After all, Noah had seen how helpful his flames were in an actual battle, and he couldn't even begin to imagine how strong the Hive would become if he managed to give a similar weapon to each of its heroic assets.

Also, he was diving deeper into the laws connected to his creation with those experiments. Success in that field would eventually benefit his dantian in the long run.

As for June, she was busy studying the various formations provided by Thirty-seven, which put her in a situation similar to Noah. Yet, they decided to take a break every two months in which they would spend an entire day together.

Noah felt his level increasing as the months passed, but he could sense how slow it was compared to when he was still a rank 4 cultivator. The fifth rank was too vast to calculate the time required for each breakthrough, and there seemed to be hidden obstacles along the path.

The journey between the fifth and the sixth rank would ideally bring cultivators from expressing their individualities to wielding laws, which was a huge qualitative leap. It was no wonder that even incredible experts spent more than a thousand years to succeed in reaching the apex of the heroic ranks.

Thirty-seven revisited the mansion at some point. He had ideated a formation able to reproduce some of the effects of the Body-inscription spell. Still, he wanted to discuss the matter with Noah before involving an inscription master in the case.

When he saw the mansion though, he discovered that dozens of magical beasts' corpses of various species surrounded the area of the separate dimension around it.

The corpses weren't in a good state. All of them were missing their heads and blood, and there were even multiple bite marks on them. Also, one of the corpses had a black sword stabbed on its back, which drained it right under the stupefied gaze of the automaton.

"Hurry, I was waiting for you." Noah's voice resounded from inside the mansion, and Thirty-seven simply floated above the corpses to reach him.

The automation soon discovered that the trail of corpses continued inside the mansion. Still, there were a few areas that had been purposely kept away from those remains. Yet, those rooms had multiple burns on their walls, with some of the reinforced ones even featuring black cracks with the shape of a spider web.

Whatever the couple was doing inside that luxurious building, it didn't mind its integrity.

Thirty-seven found Noah in a large room filled with blood, buckets, and maimed corpses. Noah was sitting cross-legged directly on the blood, uncaring that his robe was getting dirty. His focus was on the bucket in front of him, which trembled as his hands forced some kind of procedure.

The automaton immediately understood that Noah was performing an inscription, and he didn't dare to interrupt him. There was nothing more sacred than an inscription master at work in Thirty-seven's mind.

The process only lasted a few minutes, and Noah promptly took out a dark-red crystal from the bucket. Blood fell from the smooth surface of the crystal, and Thirty-seven noticed that there were similar items sparse in the room, which seemed to be of inferior quality.

Noah turned to speak with the automaton after he inspected the crystal and stored it. "You can summon Flying Demon already. We need to perform practical tests before advancing in this field."