Jing Hongchen was run off his feet, which was a thoroughly good thing as far as Chen Ping was concerned.
After asking Ning Tian and Wu Feng to take the High-Altitude Detection Soul Tool and the detector blueprints Huo Yuhao had scanned back to the Academy when they returned, so the Academy could try reproducing them, Chen Ping had more or less wrapped up everything on his plate.
The High-Altitude Detection Soul Tool was a Soul Tool from the Sun Moon Empire to begin with, and Chen Ping felt awkward about actually asking Mo Fang to help dismantle it and explain the precise function of every component. It was not Jing Hongchen's work, after all.
Had it been the latter, things would have been much easier. Given the grudges between those two, Mo Fang would have volunteered to work overtime, scattered Jing Hongchen's equipment across the floor, and then explained each component's function to Chen Ping one by one, thoroughly disparaging the flaws in Jing Hongchen's Soul Tools along the way.
Since Chen Ping had also outsourced his original work of researching the High-Altitude Detection Soul Tool, he enjoyed a rare stretch of dedicated cultivation over the entire following year.
Well, he had lured Mo Fang away, and the Body Sect's people had ravaged Mingdetang so badly that it had entered reconstruction. That made it difficult for Chen Ping to learn any more cutting-edge knowledge, anyway.
In theory, since his own mentor had been missing for half a year without returning, Chen Ping could have asked Jing Hongchen to assign him a replacement. Even if no Level 9 mentor was available, surely there was a Level 8 Soul Engineer like Xuan Ziwen.
The problem was that, aside from mulling over court affairs, that old rascal Jing Hongchen had recently been