Whether or not Dragon Lord had gone ashore to study for a PhD—or even several—his reasoning was sound.
If a craftsman wished to do a good job, he must first sharpen his tools. Rather than struggle away in the Dragon Palace for one or two thousand years, moving the golden light bit by bit, Shen Le might as well find another solution.
For instance, Shen Le felt he could hope that the artifacts he restored might develop self-aware Artifact Spirits, capable of helping him bear some of the burden and speeding up the process of guiding the Dharma vessel's golden light.
As for the Madam Xu Dagger, the Bolang Mace, and the Daze Village Wooden Weapons, they had yet to develop sufficiently strong self-awareness, so Shen Le was not worried about them.
He had not played all his cards yet. Of the lacquer chest excavated from underground, two items still remained unrestored:
The pottery urn that had held those three weapons, and the lacquer chest itself—
Shen Le packed up his things, bid Dragon Lord farewell, and returned to his alma mater to restore the final two artifacts. To be fair, restoring the pottery urn was extremely simple:
With his experience from restoring the large Pottery House last time, Shen Le barely had to exert himself to restore this urn.
He photographed and scanned it, cleaned off the external grime, tested its moisture and salt content, asked a senior martial brother next door for help with supercritical CO2 fluid dehydration and desalination;
Then he found a porcelain kiln, packed the urn inside and out with porcelain clay, and fired it again. As it burned, he guided earth-element essence into the urn, filling and reinforcing it—
[Slower.]
[Turn the fire down a little. Lower, lower... good.]
[A little faster with the