Matt had spent the bulk of those two years relearning his crafting techniques. He had to actually do it manually but the gained knowledge opened up new ways and opportunities. There was one particular nifty perk of the new system, he could reverse engineer weapons and treasures that other people made. He had a chance of receiving crafting points through that but also the schematics for that item. It mostly depended on the ranking of the items and how the system rated his current skills.
For instance, while being a Novice Blacksmith, he couldn’t really earn anything from items that were above the common grade. He gained those schematics by depositing the item in question into a special smelter, it would burn the item up and then signal him if he received something back. He could also use it to gain a percentage of resources that the item was made from in return, so it wasn’t a total waste even if he failed.
So came the grudging task to work himself to a semi-reliable craftsman. There was a difference between having the knowledge in your brain and actually doing things with your hands. He fumbled around constantly, hammered items into unrecognizable lumps and atrocities pulling his hair out at night as he burned through the resources.
The system ranking was self-explanatory it started from the Novice rank, then went Apprentice, Adept, Expert, Master, and Grandmaster at the end. He thought that the ranking names would be more eastern styled but they were exactly like ones from a certain RPG game he used to spend countless hours on back in the day.
There were also separate occupations for each crafting classes like Blacksmith, Apothecary, Alchemist, Armorer. For instance, Alchemist was more geared towards making liquid elixirs while Apothecary was your usual pill maker, the former was more popular around this world than the later both had their good and bad parts.
The Alchemist’s elixirs were harder to brew, even small deviations and mistakes would turn your elixir into black sludge but when you made it right you received something special. In response, pill making was more lenient you just ended up with a pill of a lower grading that had a certain level of toxicity to it. If you took too many of those toxic pills your cultivation would suffer later on and without some special cleansing pills, you might even remain stuck at a realm with no way of progressing in the future.
But time is what Matt had plenty, he couldn’t reach the Nascent Soul level without gathering ten million points and regular cultivation would just take far too long. He also feard that he could blunder while breaking through such an important realm and suffer some consequences if he did it. The system only updated his cultivation method after he upgraded it, so he didn’t have the nascent soul version of his method in his brain just yet.
He spent those two years on crafting, due to having many manuals geared towards healing and forging he was able to increase his knowledge in certain Daos. He couldn’t tell if there was a bonus in the system to having multiple Daos anymore, he could see his progress in his status screen. It was always nice to have a tangible number attached, it showed him if he progressed or if he was stuck in a rut. After the two years, his Status window looked something like this.
When he went into his Dao section you would see :
The interesting thing about the status screen was, that it only showed him the greater Daos, so, for instance, he could click the Water Dao section and it would show him all the lesser Daos that he learned. He was part of the Zhang Clan so in his free time he decided to learn some of their techniques. So you would see the Dao of Rainwater in that section, ice-related Daos would also be featured in there.
He earned the Holy element Dao knowledge thanks to his upgrade of the cultivation technique. His elemental affinities were also going upwards the more he immersed himself into the Daos, the only thing holding him back was the lack of time. Thanks to the various manuals of the heaven grade he could progress at a fast rate, but even then it wasn’t that easy. He couldn’t just absorb the knowledge from the manual and be a Grandmaster at it from the start.
Just like with his crafting skills, he had to make his body and soul experience the various spiritual energies from the Daos. Take his time to digest and contemplate before reaching an epiphany. But after grasping that essence of the Dao he was able to process and learn the skills from it at a rapid rate.
After immersing himself in the techniques he also noticed that there was a difference in rankings to them. The system gave him the bare-bones knowledge letting him move into the novice level without problems. There were various ways that people in this world rated the level of their proficiency in skills like minor success stage and greater success stage. Matt preferred the grading of the system gave him, the RPG like mechanics were much easier to digest.
It went the same as with the crafting ranks, starting from Novice all up to Grandmaster. Six stages of proficiency, if you got it all the way up to Grandmaster a lower graded technique could start competing with a higher graded one, even jumping one larger stage in power.
He could instantly bring his skills up into the Novice stage, it took some training to move it into the apprentice stage but it was still fairly easy. Adept was the staple stage you wanted to be in, it wasn’t so hard to earn it but it let the practitioner wield his techniques with moderate competence. He set out to obtain all of his skills to this level at least, he even earned some system points for training and getting his proficiencies up.
For instance, the Supreme Thunder God’s Penetrative Nirvana Finger attack. When he used it against the demonic being it was at most at the apprentice level, if he managed to push it up to the expert level he probably wouldn’t have had to burn through his life force to win that battle.
Thanks to his Lightning Dao Mastery all lightning-based techniques came quite easy, still, he would have to train for quite a bit to take them all the way up to Grandmaster. For now, He aimed to bring his most used skills up to expert status. He was also a bit worried that he was spreading himself too thin. It always came down to time, at least the system was helping him upgrade the skills if he needed too which made them more powerful and easier to absorb.
Back in the present Matt nodded at some of his clan members that passed by him and gave him the usual ‘Oh god it’s the glorious Patriarch’ Bow. He wondered if he could do something about this mindset, maybe in a hundred years the people could stop bowing to everyone they met, operation handshake would take a while.
He had some things to do as he went into a secluded room and jumped into his crafting abode.
‘I’m glad that I have this thing with me now, otherwise, I would have to spend all of my free time in here slaving away.’
He patted a furnace looking contraption that was standing in one of the rooms of his new crafting castle. The area was a lot bigger than before and it had separate rooms for crafting and forging of other items. He was standing next to a very important item, it was something like a 3D printer.
This was quite the nifty little thing that he discovered while examining his new crafting base. After he manufactured an item it would be graded, there was the main grading and the advanced one. This here 3D printer was a time-saver, he could insert the created item into one part of it and the 3D printer would copy it down. It required resources to copy things, you could just put them into another slot. There was also a size limit, but he could upgrade it further to counteract that.
The product that came up would be of lower quality than the original though, but he could spend crafting points to upgrade this contraption. So by now it only dropped a couple of those advanced grades, in the beginning, it would even drop from a high grade all the way down to a low grade.
‘Took quite a bit of crafting points to get this going, but now I don’t have to produce all those police and military uniforms myself.’
The thought back to all those sleepless nights that he spent creating the police caps, the etching of the emblems was quite time-consuming as well.
‘Xue finally reached the early stage of foundation establishment, I promised to gift her something if she managed to do it within the year. Damn kids progressing faster than their own master!’
Zhang Liu was close to reaching the middle stage now, he was slightly ahead of his younger sister but she was quickly catching up. The girly being the youngest foundation establishment cultivator that the clan had brought up. Their progress was slowing down though, it would probably take some time till they are ready to burst through to core formation.
Things were hectic at the start, so he couldn’t really focus on his two cute disciples that much, he was more concerned about points at that time. Only later was he able to actually reevaluate his approach, he couldn’t just give them random skills and techniques that he used. They both had different proficiencies and talents.
Xue was proficient in the Spear, while Liu was good with the Saber. He had already produced a perfect graded Saber for the youth not long ago, he remembered that he was really worried back then as he didn’t fully grasp his crafting skill yet at that point. It was a bit of a drag that none of them were proficient in swords, he would have to train in those himself if he wanted to pass down any input that he had.
Luckily he wasn’t required to do that, the kids were fine with receiving some manuals and the crafted weapons. Everyone in this world understood that people were different and your master wasn’t required to give you everything. They needed to tread their own path in life, he was just supposed to partially guide them along.
“Well then, let me get this over with!”
He was already an expert blacksmith at this point and he used a technique that didn’t require much hammering to produce strong weapons.
“Guess I’ll make it a normal leaf-shaped blade and the tassel will have a sky blue color to signify the Zhang Clan.”
He used some spiritual energy to move the required iron ingots to the desired spot in front of him. He learned a certain crafting skill thanks to the seventh level of that trial tower, it was a high grade technique that required the utmost concentration. He moved his fingers like a conductor his lightning energy flowing into the blocky piece of metal.
It was heated up and quickly turned into a red hot liquid while hovering up in the air. Then with a couple of flicks of his fingers, the lump started extending slowly taking the shape of that leaf-like blade tip. Soon a spear shaft flew in from the side, Matt was sitting in a lotus position eyes closed and his arms moving around slowly while concentrating.
The shaft was made from special wood, it was much more resistant than regular steel. The flaming tip and the spear shaft embedded themselves into each other as the process continued. The resistant hair of a formation establishment beast was used as the tassel, the weapon coming together nicely as the process was finished.
Matt whipped the sweat from his brow, this skill made things easier and faster but it was quite taxing on his cultivation. The harder the materials the more time he had to spend on them. But thanks to this, he saved copious amounts of time and he could train his Qi manipulation while crafting as well.
“There, that should do it… let me just put my emblem onto it… and done!”
A little lightning bolt was embedded into the blade, showing that it was something that he made. He still liked to mark things that he made himself, good marketing was key. People liked to buy up his custom made stuff like hotcakes and thanks to that he almost had that ten million points to reach the next level of power.
‘Soon…’