Yu Xiang smiled awkwardly at his two young friends, completely expecting their thrown off response but still finding it somewhat unflattering.

Zhen Yin, the redhead bitch actually giving him a concerned stare, was the first to recover from her frozen state.

“Uuuuuuh…” That was the supremely intelligent first response of the wild haired woman, showing her supreme grasp of both the linguistic and philosophical doctrines. “Are you sure you didn’t dream it, Xiang?” She finished lamely, shrinking backward slightly as the young reincarnator glared at her openly.

With a tight lipped smile, Yu Xiang promptly answered her most insightful question. “No, Zhen. I did not dream about being recruited by our sect’s young patriarch.” For added effect, Yu slapped the rolled up scroll that detailed his mission on the low table that stood between them, Guan Hui Chen’s seal standing out clearly and backing up his claims.

The three of them were currently sitting in Yu Xiang and Lin Fen’s living room. The other two inner disciples had come to their humble abode to pick up their promised cultivation pills, which the feline alchemist was currently in the process of refining, so the green eyed cultivator had taken it upon himself to use this chance to inform the two of his upcoming mission and ask if they wanted to participate.

Not his real mission, to be clear, as he seriously doubted that dogpiling Su Rong into accepting the power of friendship and camaraderie was a viable strategy.

He instead asked them if they wanted to go on a completely blind expedition.

An expedition that was furthermore being captained by a core disciple working directly under the Golden Prince.

Yeah… he could somewhat understand their perspective, it sounded kind of crazy even in his own mind. Not that he was going to admit that though.

Rule number one hundred and twelve of being a cultivator! Never backpedal on your statements. Especially when flexing on other cultivators!

With a far too cheery smile plastered on his face, Yu picked the scroll back up from the table, filing it away in one of the folds of his inner robes.

“Well.” He started in a conversational tone. “I can clearly see that the two of you are not interested. Truly a pity.”

As his words registered in their brains, this time it was the ever polite boy that reacted first, snapping out of his shock induced wide eyed coma.

With a sound similar to thunder striking the earth Feng Liu performed a picture perfect sitting bow, the cause of the booming clamor being his now chi refined forehead colliding against the hard surface of the table.

Yu was just relieved that it hadn’t broken in two. They had just replaced it after they, cough Lin Fen cough, broke the old one…

"I would be honored to accompany you on this expedition brother Xiang!" Feng Liu shouted those words at the top of his lungs, making Yu blink in surprise at his outburst.

"Welcome aboard?" Said the green eyed cultivator tentatively, giving the usually prim and proper young man a perplexed stare.

He hadn't expected Feng Liu's reaction at all, was getting to work for the young patriarch so big of a deal for him?

Meanwhile, Zheng Yin pinched the bridge of her nose in exasperation, at this point having grown used to the man's sometimes overboard shows of appreciation. "Uh, yeah. Me too I guess."

At that, Yu Xiang gave the two a genuine smile, nodding his head in silent thanks for their future support.

After that was over and done with they simply chatted away, waiting for Lin Fen to finish his pill refinement.

"You know," Yu Xiang said, facing the wild haired redhead. "You can feel free to invite your cousin to this expedition on my behalf. The more the merrier after all."

Zhen Yin grunted in acknowledgment, laying on her side atop her cushion with her head propped on her hand. "I feel like I have to warn you not to get your hopes up too much." She said while looking at the young reincarnator with a bored half lidded gaze.

One of her hands reached towards her robes, plunging down deep into her neckline and coming back out with some strips of paper clutched between her fingers.

With a mischievous glint in her eyes, she flicked them at the green eyed cultivator.

Yu Xiang reached out with a swift movement, catching the paper slips in his right hand, he could clearly feel the warmth that the slips had absorbed from the contact with the redhead's chest, but not even the hint of a flush appeared on his face.

He snorted derisively. She was a hundred years too young to hope of making him flustered!

"So, what are these?" He asked Zhen Yin, tracing his eyes over the items laying in his palm.

The golden eyed vixen pouted at his lack of reaction, stoking Yu's own amusement, taking a moment before finally answering his question. "It's Ai's newest obsession." Her tone of voice shifted to a tired and forlorn pitch, one the young reincarnator recognized instantly as the same one he took after a particularly lengthy and boring lecture.

Yu shot her a pitying look, their gazes meeting and conveying each other's pain in less than a blink.

A sigh escaped the wild woman as she started playing with the thin crimson braid hanging from the side of her head. "She got it into her head that she can figure out how to make talismans from zero just by studying on her own." Her tone of voice clearly conveyed what she thought of her cousin's decision.

A spark of interest made its way in Yu Xiang's gaze at the mention of talismans.

At the end of the day, talisman creation was simply another branch of array formation that simply focused on smaller scale arrays.

Defensive talismans, offensive talismans, cleansing talismans, sealing talismans, trapping talismans. These were simply a few of the various kinds of creations that an array formation master could create, and while talisman creation wasn't exactly what had brought his attention to array formation in the first place, it still managed to arouse his curiosity on the matter.

But before he could start grilling Zhen Yin for more info on the matter, Lin Fen finally returned to the living room, two pouches filled to the brim with shining pills that permeated the room with a medicinal fragrance held in his hands.

At the heavenly sight, both Zhen Yin and Feng Liu could barely contain the greed overflowing from their eyes for long enough to thank the feline alchemist, after which they quickly said their farewells and ran back to their homes to start popping pills like Halloween candy.

Yu Xiang didn't even try to stop them, after all, he had his own bag of cultivation pills just waiting for him to stuff them down his gullet.

But before that, he needed to complete his daily meditation session and the exercises that he'd learned from the scroll given to him by Guan Hui Chen.

He'd been training hard the entire week since he'd finished absorbing the knowledge from the scroll, managing to feel his own Intent intermittently and even briefly bending it in a conscious way.

It had been kind of different from how the scroll's words had described it. According to the aged text, mortals possessed only the tiniest spark of this universe bending energy, while cultivators in the nascent realm held a small flame, like the one produced by a lighter, and only once someone reached the later stages of the Constitutional realm would a cultivator have enough Intent and mental fortitude to truly learn to harness it consciously, having reached the size of a lit torch.

But when he'd laid eyes upon his own reservoir of Intent, that's not what he'd found.

A steely gray flame burned hotly in a void space in his mind, reaching the size of a lit fireplace or a campfire. Not negligibly larger than the one described in the text.

Yu Xiang didn't know what the difference meant, but as he had no other sources of information on the matter at his disposal, he simply chalked it up to the scroll describing the low end of a person's Intent.

Of course, now that he knew about the true nature of techniques and the secret of Intent, Yu Xiang had already set a goal for himself to reach before he could truly call his basic Intent training complete.

A hand slipped inside the green eyed cultivator's robes, returning from the folds of cloth a moment later with a small rolled up bundle held in his hand.

Once unfurled, the bundle revealed rows upon rows of pearly white scales intersecting tightly and forming a formidable protective mesh.

The white snake he and Lin Fen had killed and promptly looted had spent no small amount of its energy in refining its scales beyond what most people would've normally expected from a beast at its stage. A matter readily apparent by the fact that even after a couple of months after its death the white scales had at this time still lost none of their luster.

These scales were what had first pushed Yu Xiang into picking up and learning his new defensive skill, his mind conjuring pictures of himself covered in the pearly plates, wading through a rain of blows and offensive techniques without a scratch to be found on his body. And while [Snake Skin] was an awe inspiring technique in its resilience and adaptability, it still fell woefully short of the ivory scales.

Something that the green eyed cultivator had decided he wasn't going to stand for. He had decided he would not settle for anything less than his imagined shining white scale armor, so that was what he was going to get!

But for that dream of his to become reality, he still needed much more practice, in both sensing and manipulating his Intent, and many more hours spent in meditation.

And you know what they say. No time like the present!