The birth of his son did not interrupt Liu Changxu's grand artifact-refining undertaking. It was not that he did not want to spend time with Lian'er and their child, but that the situation was beginning to grow tense.
According to a message from Xue Yuchan of the Azure Cloud Sect, the sect would launch a campaign to purge the demon race deep within the Azure Cloud Range by the end of the year.
To give himself and his family a better chance of surviving the coming war, Liu Changxu had to refine more spirit artifacts and magical artifacts for them.
And so, in the days that followed, Liu Changxu threw himself into a frenzy of artifact refining.
Liu Changxu first refined two second-tier spirit artifact shields.
One was an Ironwood Shield for his mother, Lin Yulian, made primarily from second-tier golden ironwood. This spirit artifact shield's greatest advantages were its light weight and ease of handling. It offered the best protection against lightning, water, and earth attacks, but was weakest against metal and fire attacks.
To improve its protection against metal and fire attacks, he inscribed three restrictions on the Ironwood Shield, each containing at least a hundred and fifty artifact runes. This made its overall defensive power no weaker than that of the Vajra Shield.
For the spirit artifact shield he refined for his father, Liu Shihao, he ultimately used the two second-tier spiritual materials he had originally planned on: gold-patterned iron and golden ironwood. In doing so, he overcame the difficulty of refining a spirit artifact with two different attributes.
Although the resulting spirit artifact shield offered no better protection than the Vajra Shield or the Ironwood Shield, he had successfully refined it nonetheless. As he gained more refining experience, the quality of his spirit artifacts would continue