Three more months passed. Yan Chihuo had made great strides in both spellcraft and swordsmanship, but fusing the two remained a mountain he could hardly scale. He had long since learned to cast Falling Rock Art, Stone Armor Art, and Imprisoning Earth in an instant, but he was still at a loss as to how to weave swordsmanship into them. He had tried more than ten methods in succession, and none had worked. Even so, Iron Sword Daoist had praised him, saying that he truly was a promising talent in swordsmanship, and that mastering Sword Momentum was only a matter of time at this rate.
But Yan Chihuo knew his own limits. If he had apprenticed himself to Iron Sword Daoist, he could have received guidance whenever he needed it, and mastering Sword Momentum would have been no problem. But he had only six months. Five had already passed, and once he left, with no one to guide him, his progress would slow.
To take just those ten-plus methods as an example, whenever he had even the slightest doubt, he would ask Iron Sword Daoist for advice. The Daoist was, after all, a master swordsman. He would immediately point out what was wrong with a method and tell Yan Chihuo to change course. Without Iron Sword Daoist's guidance, Yan Chihuo might have spent at least three years discovering that those ten methods were unsuitable—and he certainly would not have come up with new approaches so quickly.
Over the past three months, Yan Chihuo's greatest progress had, unexpectedly, been in carving Restrictions. The Restrictions on the Soul-Breaking Sword had reached the twenty-third layer, but he had hesitated to carve the twenty-fourth.
Once a Talisman Artifact was engraved with twenty-four layers of Restrictions, it stood only one step away from becoming a