With the core material secured, Lin Yan kept moving, leading the two boys straight into another street.
This was Batokia Mining's raw gemstone showroom.
"You're buying more? You still haven't spent all your money?" Killua's mouth twitched as he watched Lin Yan stride along with a chunk of black iron weighing several hundred kilograms on his shoulder.
"I still need materials for the formation," Lin Yan said tersely.
"A formation? What exactly are you trying to do?" Gon asked, curiosity all over his face.
"Forge an artifact."
Lin Yan offered those few words and nothing more before walking straight into the showroom.
The showroom glittered with jewels. Cut gemstones and crystals sparkled beneath the lights, and the strings of zeros on their price tags made one's head spin.
Yet Lin Yan didn't spare the finished products a glance. He headed straight for the "scrap section" in the farthest corner.
A pile of dull gray and chalk-white stones lay there, looking no different from rubble by the roadside.
"Sir, these are offcuts left over from cutting. They aren't worth much," a female attendant reminded him politely.
Lin Yan said nothing. He simply activated his Qi Observation Technique and began sorting through the stones.
He was looking for jade-or, more precisely, vessels capable of holding "qi."
In his eyes, the qi within these gray and white stones differed dramatically.
Some had energy fields as tangled as a knot of thread; others were gentle and pure, giving off a faint but steady glow.
In the artifact-forging formation, the dragon scale iron would serve as "Taotie," the formation's core responsible for devouring energy.
But a mouth alone wasn't enough. It also needed "teeth"-vessels capable of locking in the flow of qi and holding energy.
These rough jade stones, dismissed as scrap, had stable crystalline