Reforging the Moon Palace

In the end, they were caught by Cai Yue'er, leaving Yun Jingheng alone to face the mess of slippers scattered everywhere.

Yun Jingheng stood in the center of the room, hands on his hips, looking down at the five pairs of slippers on the floor.

"... Why didn't you take your slippers with you when you left?" he asked the air.

No one answered him.

He walked around the room, gathered all the slippers scattered around, put them in the shoe cabinet, then took a mop from behind the door and mopped up the dust and shoe prints on the floor.

The whole process took twenty minutes. By the time he straightened up, the room was clean and tidy again, and the morning light outside the window had changed from golden threads to a sheet of gold leaf covering most of the floor.

He glanced at the shoe cabinet, shook his head slightly, and turned to walk into the basement. The ring Gu Yue had given him contained more than just a piece of Lunar Divine Metal; he planned to use a portion of it to rebuild the Moon Palace.

He took the table from the Outer Court hut out of his Storage Soul Tool and put it down, then turned on the light and faced the Lunar Divine Metal.

But the carving knife in his hand hesitated to fall.

He realized that with his sixth-ring cultivation level, he could only create a Level 7 Soul Tool at most.

Isn't using the Lunar Divine Metal to create Level 7 Soul Tool a bit too extravagant?

But he was unwilling to put down the carving knife.

Gu Yue gave him this piece of Lunar Divine Metal, indicating that it should be of greater use in his hands.

However, his current bottleneck is that his cultivation level is insufficient, preventing him from creating high-level items.

He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the stone ceiling of the basement.

He suddenly remembered a common setting in the cultivation novels he had read in his previous life: magical treasures have spirits, and their grade can be improved by nurturing them through the dantian after being refined.

"Nourish the dantian..." he repeated the four words, then sat up straight.

The nascent Golden Core in his dantian was slowly rotating, its surface covered with a warm, silvery light transformed from the Lunar Divine Metal.

If he creates the Moon Palace and places it in his dantian, allowing the bead to continuously "nourish" it, his Soul Power will permeate the patterns of the Lunar Divine Metal, like water flowing over a dried-up riverbed, reawakening the natural structure inside the metal.

It doesn't need to be a magical artifact from the start; it only needs to be a "seed."

"Try it."

He picked up the carving knife and gestured at the Lunar Divine Metal. "If it doesn't work, just absorb it all. Anyway, after absorbing the lunar attribute inside, the remaining metal will just be an ordinary piece of divine gold. It's not a loss."

He took a deep breath and fixed the Lunar Divine Metal to the table.

I dug out the blueprints I had designed before.

He scaled down the structures to the size of his palm and began to carve out their outlines layer by layer with a carving knife.

He felt it when the first knife fell.

This piece of Lunar Divine Metal is much softer than ordinary metals. When the carving knife cuts into it, it's like cutting a piece of butter that's been frozen for three days—there's resistance, but it's effortless.

Moon-white fragments curled up from both sides of the blade, gleaming faintly as they landed on the table before quickly fading away.

He carved very slowly.

It wasn't that he didn't want to be fast, but he discovered that after each cut, a very thin layer of spiritual energy patterns inside the metal would be "activated," spreading outwards from the blade.

If he cuts too quickly, the lines will interfere with each other and become tangled.

But with each pause before making the second cut, the patterns would straighten themselves out, as if the metal itself was responding to his rhythm.

"Interesting..." he said softly.

An hour later, a pile of silvery-white debris and a miniature palace the size of a palm appeared on the table.

The palace is entirely silver-white, with the eaves of the main hall slightly upturned and the three steps of the platform clearly visible. On both sides of the side hall, an arc-shaped corridor extends outward from the main hall.

He put down the carving knife, held the finished product in his palm and examined it under the light. The carving wasn't exactly exquisite, but overall it looked quite beautiful.

Now comes the crucial question: how will he refine it?

Yun Jingheng examined the Moon Palace several times, then placed it on the table, took a half-step back, and crossed his arms to scrutinize it.

"Refinement... how do I refine it?" he muttered to himself.

The novels he read about in his previous life made it sound simple, involving methods like "blood oath," "divine imprint," and "spiritual power infusion." But this was Douluo Continent, and he had never heard of anyone using those tricks before.

The key to making Soul Tool lies in the resonance between the Core Array and the metal material. Even the top-tier Soul Tool are nothing more than Grandmaster engraving skills combined with high-quality metal. I've never heard of anyone dripping blood into Soul Tool.

However, Lunar Divine Metal is not an ordinary metal.

He picked up the palace again, his fingertips tracing the slightly upturned curve of the eaves of the main hall, and suddenly the reward for the Second Trial came to mind.

That scroll of the Lunar Path Technique!

"... I almost forgot about that."

He placed the Moon Palace back on the table, closed his eyes, and let his consciousness sink into his sea of consciousness to search for it.

He subconsciously ignored Xiao Jiu, who was tilting her head and looking at him, and who had grown much bigger.

It drifted in the very center of the sea of consciousness.

The moment his hand, formed from his consciousness, touched the scroll, he knew it was no ordinary object.

The material was unclear, whether it was jade or silk. It felt cool to the touch and was covered with a very thin, moon-white halo. Within the halo, there were faint, fine runes flowing, like a whole roll of solidified moonlight held in his consciousness.

He unfolded the scroll.

There are no words.

At least at first glance, there were no words; the entire scroll was covered in a uniform silver-white, like a perfectly polished mirror reflecting his consciousness.

But when he focused his attention on that silvery-white expanse, the "lights" suddenly began to move.

A silvery-white light rose from the scroll, flooding his mind like mist.

He froze completely.

A flood of information rushed into my consciousness in a very short time, like a bucket of cold water being poured over my head. This information was not text or pictures, but something more direct.

It was as if his body had memorized a "feeling"—a specific breathing rhythm, the path of spiritual energy flow, and the way of perceiving moonlight—all of which were imprinted into his soul.

He stood in front of the table in the basement, his body motionless, but his mind was churning for the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea.

When he opened his eyes, there was a thin layer of sweat on his forehead.

"...So that's how it is," he said softly, his voice carrying a sense of sudden realization.

That scroll of teachings has no name, or rather, it doesn't need a name.

It encompasses far more than any advanced meditation method on the mainland, including how to draw Moonlight into the body to temper the soul, how to use specific circulation paths to circulate spiritual energy to accelerate the formation of the Golden Core core, how to cultivate, and how to use the soul as a furnace and the body as a cauldron to "nurture" a magical artifact...

This just so happened to be the source of his confusion about the "refining" of the Moon Palace.

The Dharma clearly states: the moon is extremely yin and gentle, it does not like to be taken by force, it only accepts "guidance".

Refining artifacts with moon attributes does not require the crude method of blood recognition. Instead, one should "wrap" the artifact with one's soul, using spiritual power as a bridge. If the artifact senses the Moonlight's essence of the same origin, it will naturally open its internal patterns to accept the soul imprint.

He picked up the Moon Palace again, placed his palm on the base, closed his eyes, and began to try it according to the method recorded in the manual.

Silver Soul Power was peeled off from the surface of the Golden Core and traveled up the meridians to the palm. However, it was not "infused" into the palm as before. Instead, it formed a very thin spiritual energy membrane on the surface of the Moon Palace. The membrane trembled gently, and its frequency gradually approached the natural vibration of the patterns inside the Moon Palace.

At the first moment, the surface of the palace lit up.

In the second breath, those patterns "emerged" from inside the palace, protruding from the metal surface like silvery veins, pulsating up and down with the frequency of his palm.

In the third breath, he felt an extremely fine, soft "tentacle" reach out from the depths of the palace and touch his Divine Power.

It was like a test.

He steadied himself, not trying to grasp the "tentacle," but simply kept his soul open, releasing a wisp of Moonlight from the same source.

The tentacle paused for a moment, then suddenly wrapped around him, spreading along his soul and reaching deep into his sea of consciousness, where it dispersed into a gentle silver light.

The Moon Palace trembled slightly in his palm, and the patterns on its surface stabilized, changing from silvery-white to a moon-silver color with a slight gold edge.

It's done.

The feeling of being "connected" is wonderful.

He no longer needed to consciously use his divine sense to "see" the interior of the palace. The Moon Palace had become a part of his body, and the textures of every corridor, every pillar, and every step on the platform were clearly visible in his perception.

He tried to guide the palace with his mind, and the Moon Palace transformed into a silver light and entered his dantian, shrinking many times over. It then floated steadily above the Golden Core core, with a distance of about one finger's width between the palace base and the surface of the Golden Core. A silver-white light band connected the two, like the pull of the tide.

"WTF?! It actually happened?!"

Yun Jingheng was pleasantly surprised. He quickly put the Lunar Divine Metal fragments on the table into his Storage Soul Tool, turned off the lights, and walked back down the stairs to the first floor.

He needs to learn it quickly; he might be able to pass the Third Trial in less than a year.