With nothing in particular to deal with, Huo Hai stayed in the city for over a month. Since his Battle Spirit Arts in every aspect had basically reached their current limits, he had no way to improve them further.
Besides continuing to study Spirit Formations and feed the Sky Cloud Elephant, Huo Hai spent his remaining time training his techniques and raising his cultivation. With truly nothing else to do, he even set aside some extra time to study alchemy. What he mainly researched was not pills for humans, but pills for Spirit Insects and Spirit Beasts.
Over the course of that month, Huo Hai's progress in every area was slow, except for his cultivation, which advanced faster and faster. As the number of Star Cores he condensed increased, the time needed to temper each newly condensed Star Core to its limit grew shorter and shorter.
As long as Huo Hai used a Spirit Energy Bead to condense a Star Core, he could temper it to its limit in less than a few hours. With more than a month of idle time, added to his earlier efforts, Huo Hai had finally condensed over a thousand Star Cores.
"Heh, I've finally reached a thousand. Huh? Why has something changed?" Huo Hai discovered, to his surprise, that once he reached a thousand Star Cores, the difficulty of condensing them suddenly rose by a huge margin. Before, a single Spirit Energy Bead could help him condense one Star Core. Because Huo Hai's spirit power was vast and highly refined, condensing Star Cores had been much easier for him.
Yet after breaking past a thousand, Huo Hai discovered that one Spirit Energy Bead had failed to help him condense a Star Core. Only after swallowing a second Spirit Energy Bead did he finally manage