Blue sparks flew around wildly in the air, the remnants of burning spiritual energy drifting aimlessly before they were quickly extinguished by the presence of the single person inhabiting the workshop.

He sat down on a stool, hunched over his working bench, covered head to toe in a protective cowl of treated leather taken from the body of a spiritual beast, furthermore, a wide crystalline mask hid his features from the supernatural glow produced by his instrument.

A thin, metallic contraption was held comfortably in his right hand, the device roughly resembling the shape of a pen, with a sharply cut blue gem acting as its tip which was currently glowing an eerie pale blue as spiritual energy coursed through its faceted body.

In his other hand, the working man was holding a finger thick slab of metal. A perfectly rectangular shape with glowing lines of power carved into its surface, with unfinished scripts lining half of the curious item.

After a few moments spent assessing his current work, the cloaked man returned to his task, finishing up the inscriptions that were to be the basis of the formation.

With a few careful strokes of his glowing tool, a perfect circle appeared in the center of the metal rectangle, and with slow delicate movements, the empty circle was filled with line after line.

Five interconnected and intersecting lines were placed inside the glowing boundary, forming a five pointed star, or in other words, a pentacle. A symbol of occultism from a world far far away, but an excellent aid to focus one’s Intent through the power of sympathetic imagery.

A lot of big words to simply say that an image bringing to mind the supernatural would help him focus on it more easily.

After the central piece was concluded, the practitioner shifted his attention to the still half done scripts surrounding the main symbol, letting out a despondent sigh as he quickly calculated just how much time he’d need to spend on finishing up his project.

Line after line of glowing scripts written in an otherworldly language only known to him as ‘English’ appeared on the steely canvas, every stroke of the ‘pen’ bringing the artifact closer and closer to completion.

It was only around an hour later that the cowled man put down his tools on his workbench, alongside his still unfinished project, satisfied with his latest progress and growing ever more excited for the moment his work would finally come to fruition.

With a groan of discomfort, Yu Xiang detached the mask from his face, passing a gloved hand between long strands of light brown hair. The young reincarnator didn’t know why Elder Lai insisted so much on him wearing this getup, he was confident in his refined body, and was sure that a few stray sparks would not do anything worse than tickle him.

But the older man had insisted, and who was he to spurn the advice of an expert concerned with his safety?

Lazily, Yu Xiang pulled the thick vest off of his body, hanging it on one of the walls of his workshop.

This particular edifice was a relatively recent addition to his home, placed right beside Lin Fen's own alchemy laboratory, financed by some missions taken for the sect and with a heavy discount courtesy of his allegiance to their esteemed Golden Prince.

Hurray for nepotism!

Many blank scrolls adorned the walls of the room, ready to be filled up with practice arrays or transformed into useful talismans. In a corner opposite of his workbench stood a couple of shelves, filled to the brim with different tools, materials, and the odd artifact or two, born from his previous practice of the art.

The green eyed cultivator hummed to himself as he used a wet cloth to rub himself down, only to then purge any actual filth from his skin and hair with a pulse of Intent directed spiritual energy.

As much as he would have liked to keep chipping away at his current project, the green eyed cultivator still had some obligations to answer to, namely his own given promises.

Gathering some of his other tools in a bundle, Yu Xiang finally left his laboratory, now heading for the sect’s Forges.

It had been little more than a year now, since he and his companions had become inner disciples, and with the passage of time came inexorable changes.

Lin Fen, his ever present companion and all around studious feline had taken another step forward in his goal to become a master alchemist by joining the sect’s Apothecary, which saw him spending a lot of his time away from their home.

Yu Xiang might have started to feel lonely, as he’d grown almost too used to his constant presence at his side over the years if the silver haired alchemist didn’t make sure to return for at least a meal every couple of days.

Meanwhile, Yu Xiang and Zhen Ai had both joined the Hall of Knowledge as hopeful students on the path of array and formations, for the former, and talisman creation, for the latter.

By now they’d spent their fair share of evenings in heated discussion about which of their chosen fields was superior, with the young reincarnator obviously always emerging victorious in their verbal sparring! No matter what the red headed pipsqueak said!

Cough. Hm. Anyway.

Zhen Yin had ended up joining the Exploration Troop, having taken a weird shine for discovering and searching around Hidden Spaces after their near death experience all those months ago, while Su Mei had quite the opposite reaction, deciding to join the Apothecary alongside Jin Shui as trainee medics.

As for Huang Lei and Feng Liu, the two of them had almost disappeared from the inner compound. The former was busy building bridges and forming connections on behalf of her clan with the help of her new shiny golden badge, while the latter had returned to his family higher up the mountain, descending only every once in a while just to connect back with Yu and the others.

Last and definitely least, Su Rong had been hard at work on a special project of his own, something he’d been cooking up with the green eyed cultivator’s aid, and the reason he’d left his workshop behind for the day.

On the cultivation side of things, Yu Xiang had kept his lead among his peers and even widened it a bit, being now in the fourth stage of the Constitutional Realm and well on his way to advancing.

It didn’t take him long to reach the Forges, merely a few minutes of walking or ‘walking’ at a cultivator’s pace. Almost by instincts now, Yu waved past different huts before he found himself stepping up to his ‘friend’s’ door.

“Hey yo! I’m coming in!” A single good smack opened the door fully, sending an expanding cloud of something flying everywhere.

A moan resounded from the depths of the room, resembling the wailing of a damned soul more than the human it came from. Yu Xiang strolled inside casually, completely ignoring the slumped form of one exhausted Su Rong draped over a nearby chair, having been cruelly taken away from the sweet embrace of sleep by the young reincarnator's callous ways.

What had caught his attention instead was a particular object laying on top of the fiery cultivator's anvil.

It was a gauntlet, the metal that made up its base shining a dull yellow as the sunlight streaming in through the still open door reflected off its surface. The metal Su Rong had used to forge the artificial hand had taken on a dark yellow-almost orange-y color, like that of burnished gold, which Yu knew meant that it had been heated and treated to as close to perfection as someone of their Realm could without help from stronger cultivators. Or at least that is what the young blacksmith had told him on previous similar reunions.

Speaking of the man, Su Rong slowly shuffled towards his side, his gait awkward and stilted as he still struggled to banish the remnants of his nap. A dark grey prosthetic rose to his eyes, rubbing away at the dirt that had accumulated during his rest.

The dull thing was a former prototype of the golden gauntlet they'd been working on together, all around functional for more mundane tasks and the rigors of the forge, but not up to the standards required of a proper fighting cultivator.

"Did you really have to be so loud?" Grumbled the not so fiery cultivator, trying and failing to hold back a titanic yawn. "I was up all week finishing that." He said, waving at the golden prosthetic.

Yu Xiang lifted an eyebrow challengingly. "Did you really have to finish it all in a single session?" The green eyed cultivator then pulled a disgusted face. "And you didn't even clean yourself did you? I can smell the week of uninterrupted work on you."

Su Rong sighed, passing his fake hand over his face in exasperation. He trudged over to a barrel of water resting against a wall, grumbling all the way as he rinsed what must have been a week's worth of sweat, soot, dirt, and who knows what else from his skin.

Meanwhile, Yu Xiang took the golden hand from its resting place, studying it with a critical eye from every side and angle. He took a couple of his instruments from the bundle he'd put them in, mostly to check on its proportions and to take measurements for his part of the work.

A few minutes later, Su Rong returned to his side, his completely soaked robes hanging heavily off of his frame and a much more aware expression now present on his face. "So? How is it?" He asked anxiously.

Yu Xiang hummed non committally, letting the taller disciple stew in silence for a few moments before he gave him an actual answer. "Looks good to me." The fiery cultivator's shoulders sagged in relief, a weight taken off of his mind now that he knew he hadn't wasted all of his time and money on nothing. "I can start drawing up some prototypes for the layout of the formation right now if you're up for it." He offered, starting to get fired up at the prospect of a new challenge.

Su Rong nodded, looking actually grateful for once. "Yeah, yeah go ahead." With his assent given, the apprentice array master seated himself at a workbench, taking the rest of his tools out alongside some scrolls he'd filled with preprepared arrays.

"Oh, yeah!" The fiery cultivator suddenly perked up. "I almost forgot, my master told me to give you this thing, said it might be helpful with the sketching of the formation." Yu Xiang was handed a piece of parchment by the dark haired young man, looking at it in thinly veiled interest as he noticed it was filled with some kind of rough array.

The young reincarnator was not about to decline a peek at something done by an actual master blacksmith. His eyes shined, quickly deciphering the contents of the piece of paper as a kind of facilitator for the spiritual connection between man and weapon.

It was going to need a bit of an adjustment since the golden prosthetic was not only not a weapon, but a semi permanent fixture to the body, but this endeavor had already started bearing fruits for him, if only because he could now steal everything on the paper.

Su Rong dragged over the chair he'd been sleeping on towards the workbench, already knowing Yu was going to need him to stay close at hand so he didn't mess up the positioning of the connectors to his spiritual channels.

He'd learned from experience just how painful a misaligned channel could be and was more than willing to lose some of his precious free time to make sure there wasn't a repeat of that particular incident.

Yu Xiang could not help but smile as he dived headfirst into his work.