Inside the Quiet Chamber of the Flying Fire Hall.
True fire blazed, and waves of heat rolled.
Xuanming swept his sleeve and first cast in a piece of Demon King hide.
During his travels, he had slain a pangolin that had committed all manner of evil. The demon had cultivated for two thousand years and was sinister and cunning, always hiding its head and revealing only its tail. Xuanming had expended considerable effort to kill it.
By now, his Samadhi True Fire had reached an inconceivable level of power. Even the Demon King's tough scales and hide melted into liquid in just an hour.
Over a full day and night, the liquid was refined forty-nine times. Only when no impurities remained did Xuanming add another item.
It was an earth-grade water-aspect spiritual material: merfolk silk.
The chief of the Eastern Sea's Merfolk Clan had spent a hundred years weaving it. A visitor from the Sword Lake Palace had privately presented it during the Truth-Seeking Abbey's advancement ceremony, as one of the gifts of thanks for rescuing the Sword Lake Palace's supreme elder, Taishang Yan Jiu.
After another day and night, the merfolk silk melted.
Xuanming then took out earth-grade spiritual materials of the Wood Element, Metal Element, and Fire Element phases in turn, spending three days and nights melting them into liquid.
He immediately cast myriad profound hand seals. With the earth phase as the principal element, he followed the principle of mutual generation among the Five Phases: earth generated metal, metal generated water...
He fused the five spiritual liquids.
Once this step was complete, Xuanxu and the other six True Persons, who had been watching Xuanming refine the artifact all along, finally moved.
They acted alongside Xuanming, each tracing a rune corresponding to one direction of the Eight Trigrams.