[Thunderfire Body Tempering] had been an unexpected gain, but he still had one small flaw in his swordsmanship: how to resolve the issue of his flying sword's Sword Spirit while he was in Flying Sword Stance.
Should he split off a strand of his mind and send out part of himself as the Sword Spirit? Or acquire another flying sword? Whichever he chose, there was no established path to follow.
He had already realized that resolving this problem in the Heaven-Connecting Realm would probably be very difficult, because until he reached Golden Core, the mental power in his Upper Dantian would not be enough to support such an improvement.
He could only seek the answer through cultivation. Considering that no one could resolve every problem at a low level in their personal cultivation, this flaw did not seem quite so unacceptable.
Hou Niao dawdled along through the desert with the camel caravan. A dozen or so days later, they approached a water source. The caravan's route was not always a straight line, which differed greatly from how inland people understood it; inlanders always subconsciously assumed that, since the desert was as flat as a mirror, traveling in a straight line was only natural. In fact, ordinary mortals in the desert determined their routes according to the distribution of water sources.
It might be a small oasis, a pool, or a hidden well, something that could provide the drinking water people and sand camels needed. They could not carry enough of it themselves; if they really did, they could forget about carrying any goods.
What Sha Jia's caravan found was just such a small pool, a dozen or so zhang across. Surrounded by sand dunes, it looked as though it might disappear at any moment.
"This pool is seasonal. It appears