He watched Wei Yiling leave.
Li Ping stood still for a long while, but in the end, he merely sighed.
Rather than hurry back to the Training Room to enter seclusion and refine the true phoenix pill essence, he turned his gaze toward a corner of the courtyard.
There, the Desolate Fire Sparrow, Earth Spirit Mouse, and Earthrock Python each occupied a patch of ground, resting.
Naturally, the Desolate Fire Sparrow claimed the largest territory, followed by the Earth Spirit Mouse, while the Earthrock Python huddled in a corner, trembling.
Originally, Li Ping had expected a certain sequence.
The order of their breakthroughs should have been: the Earth Spirit Mouse reaching the third tier, the Desolate Fire Sparrow reaching the third-tier middle stage, and then him reaching the core formation middle stage.
But after he obtained the true phoenix pill essence from Wei Yiling's body, everything changed.
As long as he spent some time refining all the energy within the true phoenix pill essence, he should be able to break through smoothly to the core formation middle stage.
In other words, he would overtake them on the bend and break through before either spirit beast.
Still, he only reflected on it briefly before shaking those thoughts from his mind. In truth, his attention was not on the three spirit beasts resting on the ground, but on what lay beneath it.
Ever since successfully inheriting the skills of a fourth-tier corpse-refining artisan three years earlier, he had purchased a large quantity of supplementary materials in the Black Market and used the remaining liter of extreme yin qi to refine the two Copper Corpses Wei Yiling had brought back.
Once that was done, he separated out two strands of divine sense and placed one inside each Copper Corpse, then secretly buried both