Even so, before obtaining the Spirit-Nurturing Gourd, Lu Xiaotian had already possessed five Primordial Spirits, yet still felt he could barely keep up. After all, aside from cultivating himself, he also had to spend time every day studying formations. In all kinds of perilous situations, one's cultivation wasn't always the deciding factor—especially in the ruins of ancient cultivators. Take the Great Misty Hall last time, for example. If he hadn't had some skill with formations, his bones would have been cold by now.
Besides, he had never given up studying the gray stone he'd obtained from the Black Wind Demon Python and the Southern Wasteland cultivators back when he was in the Foundation Establishment Realm, even if he didn't research it as often as before. There was a saying among mortals: "Without taking small steps, one cannot travel a thousand miles; without gathering tiny streams, one cannot form rivers and seas."
Even with his current cultivation and strength, the Black Wind Demon Python's attacks and escapes, which ignored the distance between spaces, were astonishingly powerful. Neither he nor Di Kun, whose strength had advanced by leaps and bounds, could match the python's ability to slip directly through a short stretch of space, no matter how fast they were. Lu Xiaotian believed that if he could master this technique, even a Golden Core Late Stage cultivator would find it hard to gain the upper hand against him. At close range, it was practically impossible to guard against. That Black Wind Demon Python had been unlucky; it had fallen into his hands before it could fully mature.
He already had several Core-Derived Artifacts, as well as the Demon-Suppressing Tower, so he wasn't in a hurry to acquire any other powerful artifacts. He treated the Black Wind Demon Python's gray stone as a