Chapter 201
Forging the Ten Swords
Li Fan spent the better part of a month simply gathering materials before he lit the furnace once.
He bought what the market could offer him openly — ordinary ores of good quality, purified metal stock, a bolt of Heavenly Silk woven from the threads of silkworms raised on spiritual mulberry rather than ordinary leaves, expensive enough that the merchant selling it assumed, correctly, that whoever bought it intended something more serious than clothing. He supplemented the rest from his own stores, materials looted years earlier from cultivators he'd killed during the fall of Myriad Craft City and the escape that followed it, set aside at the time without any specific purpose beyond the general instinct that good materials were never wasted by keeping them.
He carried everything down into the underground chamber, sealed the entrance behind him, and began.
The mask came first, since it demanded the least material and gave him a chance to test his own control before committing to anything larger.
He fed the ores into his furnace one at a time, watching each melt down into its own distinct pool before he began drawing them together. Refining metal for artifact work bore no real resemblance to the alchemy he'd taught himself years earlier, but the underlying discipline felt familiar regardless — patience, attention, the willingness to discard a batch entirely rather than push forward with something contaminated. He skimmed impurities from the surface of the molten mixture as they rose, working the metal with careful, repeated passes until what remained held a clean, even consistency under his own trained eye.
Shaping it took longer than melting it had. He used his divine sense to guide the cooling metal into the mask's final form, working it slowly enough that the material never fought his intent, letting the shape emerge through patient correction rather than force. By the time it had cooled fully, he held a plain, featureless mask in his hands, unadorned, the surface smooth enough to catch a dull reflection of the chamber's lamplight.
The formation work came next, and here his years of guild training and quiet independent study finally justified themselves fully.
He inscribed the concealment array first, tracing it directly into the mask's inner surface with a fine steel stylus, each line calculated to fold and redirect any spiritual perception that swept across the wearer's face. He'd built concealment formations for years, refining the same underlying principle across dozens of smaller commissions, and the accumulated skill showed in how cleanly the lines settled into the metal — no wasted strokes, no correction needed partway through.
The defensive layer went in beneath it, a second array woven so tightly against the first that the two functioned as a single structure rather than two separate systems stacked awkwardly together. He tested the finished piece against his own qi, pressing gradually harder against the mask's surface until he was satisfied it would hold against a strike serious enough to matter.
The robe took considerably longer.
He worked the Heavenly Silk in smaller batches than the metal had required, treating each length of fabric with a mixture of refined mineral dust and his own carefully measured qi, watching the silk darken slightly and thicken under the treatment without losing the flexibility that made it worth using in the first place. Ordinary cloth would have burned away or lost its shape entirely under the same process. The silk simply absorbed what he fed into it and asked for more.
He cut and shaped the treated fabric into a plain, unremarkable robe, deliberately avoiding anything that might mark it as valuable to a casual glance. Once the physical garment was finished, he began the same formation work he'd applied to the mask — concealment first, defense layered beneath it, every line inscribed directly into the weave of the fabric itself rather than added as some separate attachment that might tear loose under strain.
By the time both pieces sat finished on his workbench, mask and robe together, he understood he'd built something considerably more capable than either piece would have managed alone. He tested them together, mask in place, robe settled over his shoulders, and pressed his own senses outward to check how thoroughly the combination hid what lay beneath it. Even knowing exactly what he was looking for, he found the concealment difficult to penetrate from his own perspective, which told him more about its quality than any amount of theoretical calculation could have.
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The swords demanded more of him than either of the first two pieces combined, and he approached them only once he'd rested enough to trust his focus through what he expected to be the most difficult work of the entire month.
He melted his remaining ore stock together in a single batch, more material by far than either the mask or the robe had required, purifying it with the same patient, repeated passes until the molten mixture held a consistency he trusted completely. Then, rather than shaping it into a single form, he divided his attention into ten separate threads of intent, each one guiding a portion of the same liquid metal into its own distinct blade at the same time.
It was the hardest sustained exercise of control he'd attempted since the Core Shattering breakthrough itself. Shaping one blade with divine sense was demanding but familiar work, something he'd done many times over the years on smaller commissions. Shaping ten simultaneously, each one requiring the same precise attention as the others, without any single blade drifting out of true while his focus divided across the rest, pushed his current cultivation close to its actual limit rather than merely testing it.
He held the effort for as long as it took, sweat soaking through his robes by the time all ten blades had cooled into their final shapes — identical in length, identical in balance, ten plain, unadorned swords lying in a row across his workbench.
The formation work on the swords took longer than the mask and robe combined.
Each blade needed its own inscription — a formation to strengthen the edge itself against the kind of wear no ordinary sharpening could prevent, a second to improve how cleanly qi transmitted through the metal when he channeled the Origin Sword Scripture's techniques into it, a third to stabilize the blade's structure against the stress of receiving a technique built for ten swords acting as one rather than a single weapon working alone.
Beyond the individual inscriptions, each sword needed a fourth layer entirely — a formation allowing it to answer his divine sense directly, moving under his guidance as a direct extension of his own intent, since the Ten Directional Sword Formation would be worthless if he had to physically hold and swing ten separate blades rather than direct them as a single coordinated will. And beneath all of that, woven through every one of the ten inscriptions, a final shared layer allowed the swords to recognize each other, to coordinate as a single system rather than ten weapons that simply happened to move at the same time.
He worked through the tenth blade well past the point where exhaustion had begun blurring the edges of his own concentration, and stopped himself deliberately rather than push the final inscription while too tired to trust his own hand. He rested, ate, slept for the first time in what he realized afterward had been nearly two full days, and returned to finish the work only once he trusted his focus completely again.
When the last inscription finally settled into place, Li Fan stood back and looked at what he'd built. Ten swords, plain and unremarkable to any eye that didn't know what to look for. A mask and robe, equally plain, equally capable of far more than their appearance suggested. He'd deliberately bound none of it as a Natal Magic Weapon — that particular bond demanded a portion of his own soul essence he wasn't willing to spend on equipment, however well made, when whatever waited inside the Secret Realm might yet offer him something worth spending that essence on instead. These remained external tools. Powerful ones, built entirely through his own understanding rather than borrowed from anyone else's design, but tools nonetheless, replaceable if the need ever arose.
He tested the swords together one final time in his training yard, drawing all ten from their case at once and directing them through the Ten Directional Sword Formation against the same row of wooden posts he'd used months earlier. The difference from his first attempt with a single blade was immediate and unmistakable. Ten threads of force, each one carried by an actual point of contact rather than a borrowed shadow cast from spiritual force alone, struck with a solidity the earlier version had never managed. All ten posts didn't merely fall. They shattered.
He examined the finished pieces afterward with the same critical eye he'd have turned on anyone else's work, judging them honestly rather than through the pride of having just finished them.
Mid-Grade had been his ceiling for years, matched carefully to the mid-grade formation master's identity he wore in public — good enough to be useful, never good enough to draw attention. What he held now sat well past that ceiling. The swords, the mask, the robe, every formation layered into all three, carried the density and precision of High-Grade work, the tier properly matched to Core Shattering rather than the realm below it. His years of accumulated study in artifact refining and formation had finally caught up to his own cultivation rather than trailing carefully behind it. He understood exactly what that meant without needing to inflate it further in his own mind. High-Grade sat well below what the realms above him could produce — Earth-Grade for Infant Formation, Heaven-Grade for Tribulation, and further still beyond that. But it was real, earned rather than borrowed, and it matched, for the first time in years, the actual strength of the man who'd made it rather than the disguise he wore over it.
He sheathed the swords, one at a time, back into their case, and stood quietly in the settling dust of his own training yard, understanding that whatever waited on the other side of the Secret Realm's doors, he would meet it carrying something built entirely by his own two hands.
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