Several days soon passed.
The spirit herb seeds buried in the backyard soil had sprouted fine, tender shoots of emerald green.
With the Eternal Life Martial Sect's foundations laid, Gu Qinghe needed a basic set of medicine-refining tools.
In the outer city lay the Azure Cloud Market.
Its streets were a chaotic jumble, lined with stalls piled high with scraps that low-level rogue cultivators had dug out of the mountains.
Gu Qinghe dragged his right leg as he walked along the muddy street.
His hemp robe was covered in plant ash and mud, and his hair was casually tied behind his head with a length of straw cord.
He stopped before a blacksmith's shop that sold miscellaneous goods, his gaze settling on a crude iron furnace covered in dust.
It had no spirit-gathering formation engraved on it, nor was it made with any fire-resistant black iron.
It was nothing more than an ordinary Mortal Iron furnace, with several rusty dents in its outer walls.
Gu Qinghe paid the spirit stones, gripped the furnace's rim with one hand, and tensed the muscles in his arm.
He lifted the three-hundred-jin Mortal Iron furnace with one hand and hoisted it onto his shoulder.
Just as he turned to head back to the sect.
A powerful pressure of spiritual power belonging to a Sixth Realm cultivator suddenly descended around Gu Qinghe.
That pressure deliberately avoided the surrounding rogue cultivators, targeting Gu Qinghe alone.
Gu Qinghe's steps halted.
Under the crushing pressure, the Mortal Iron furnace on his shoulder let out a teeth-grating groan of twisting metal.
Gu Qinghe's knees bent slightly, but he immediately mobilized the fire- and wood-aspected qi and blood within him, forcibly withstood the pressure, and straightened again.
An old man in a blue-green robe stood ten paces ahead of him.