Chapter 236: A Stabilized Rate of Training and Changes to the Upgrade Technique

Equipment Grade: High Earth

Elemental Affinity: Space

Upgrade Level: +10

Attribute: +660 Spirit

Additional Attribute: +320 Spirit

Soul Compatibility: 10%

Item Effect: Volume of ring increases to the cumulative sum of all space-related items held within.

+10 Additional Effect: Up to 2000 soulpoints can be stockpiled for later use.

Upgrade Requirement: 110 Soulpoints

Looking at the +10 Violet Soul Ring, Bai Yunfei had a happy look on his face,

“Some soulpoints and a space element, that’s double the success! Plus, being able to store 2000 soulpoints is already a third of what I can store in my body at once. With the ring fully charged, even someone of the same level of strength as me won’t be a match for me....”

Thanks to the space rings that were used to store soulbeast puppets and several normal space rings, the amount of storage of the Violet Soul Ring was at about a hundred cubic meters. He took off the space ring he wore on his right hand and replaced it with the Violet Soul Ring.

As of right now, Bai Yunfei wore two rings. The left hand had the soulforce recovering space ring, and the right had the Violet Soul Ring.

Now that he had everything worked out, Bai Yunfei took out the lightning fire cauldron.

Gently putting his hand on top of it, he thought,

“Upgrade!”

Upgrade Successful

Equipment Grade: Low Heaven

Elemental Affinity: Fire, Lightning

Upgrade Level: +1

Special Effect 1: Increase chance of success when crafting by 210%

Special Effect 2: Additional 6% chance of adding a lightning affinity to the crafted item.

Soul Compatibility: 1%

Upgrade Requirement: 110 Soulpoints

Surprised, Bai Yunfei upgraded the cauldron one more time.

The first special effect went to 220%, the second special effect became 7%, and the soul compatibility grew to 2%.

Rather than continuing to upgrade, Bai Yunfei stopped here to think.

“One of the more particular points to the Upgrade Technique was that you couldn’t tell what aspect of the equipment would be upgraded prior to the upgrade. Is this what you’d call a ‘flaw’? Will I come across a problem like this in the future?”

Bai Yunfei stared at his cauldron with a contemplative look,

“The lightning fire cauldron is quite different when its upgraded than when a weapon type soul armament is upgraded....The probabilities of its effects went up, I wonder what happens if I upgrade it to +10? It doesn’t look out of the ordinary right now, but I wonder if master will be able to tell the difference if I upgraded it?”

After putting much thought into this, Bai Yunfei shook his head,

“As long as I don’t show the Violet Soul Ring’s effects, the master won’t notice the changes. But the lightning fire cauldron will be seen by the master since I’ll be using it daily. To avoid trouble, I’ll hold off on upgrading it. Right now, the most important thing is to learn the art of crafting. Relying on the cauldron wouldn’t be a good thing....”

Although Bai Yunfei was already Zi Jin’s disciple, the Upgrade Technique was his biggest secret. Never did the thought of telling Zi Jin about it ever cross his mind.

............

On the second day, Bai Yunfei was practically stuck in the Northern Point. Under the guidance of Zi Jin, Bai Yunfei was further entranced by the art that was crafting.

Crafting a human tier soul armament was only just the most rudimentary of achievements; so said Zi Jin. Bai Yunfei was stuck on this phase for more than half a month before he was able to create his first low earth tier soul armament. Although it was just barely above what could be considered an earth tier soul armament, it was still an improvement from before.

After that, his training in the art of crafting reached a lull. There hadn’t been any unexpected spikes in circumstances since earth tier soul armaments were even harder to craft than human tier ones. Right now, his odds for making one was one successful soul armament for every five attempts; and even that one was a low earth tier.

But an achievement like that had still been enough for Zi Jin to be satisfied. Bai Yunfei was getting more and more familiar with the craft, but he wasn’t spending the entire day seeking out the master’s instructions, he was at the caves crafting a soul armament for training. If he had a question, Bai Yunfei would go to Zi Jin for guidance.

The cliffs had been ‘repaired’ as if nothing had happened to it in the first place. The upper half looked completely new in comparison to down below, but other than that, it was back to normal!

Bai Yunfei had asked Song Lin in passing, only to hear that it was elder Xiao Binzi that had repaired the cliffs. The elder was in possession of an extremely strong soul armament that could control the earth; but other than that, Song Lin didn’t know what else happened.

And so, two months passed as Bai Yunfei continued to train and craft....

Early one day when the sun was just starting to sprinkle down its bright rays onto the earth, Bai Yunfei was just slowly opening his eyes. Sitting upright on his bed, Bai Yunfei stretched his arms and then the rest of his body, eliciting a series of crackling sounds from the bones in his body.

Grabbing a pair of nunchucks, Bai Yunfei looked at them briefly before storing it back into his space ring. “6350 Soulpoints....” He muttered under his breath to himself.

Yesternight, he spent the most of the night time seeing how much soulforce he had. In the end, he came to a total of 6350.

Ever since he became a Soul Ancestor, Bai Yunfei realized that using up his soulforce over and over again to increase the total amount was no longer the same as it once was. As a Soul Sprite, he could increase the capacity by at least twenty, but now, he could barely get half of that....

“I’m getting stronger slower and slower now....” Bai Yunfei stroked at his chin with his right hand. “It’s possible I won’t be able to increase my soulforce with this ‘cheat’ in the future then, so I should try to avoid depending on it any more. It’s a good thing my training is still going at a decent pace though.”

He had also discovered during one of his crafting attempts that his strength was slowly increasing in accordance to his crafting. As the quality of his work got higher, the stronger he became.

This was where students of the Crafting School differed from others (or perhaps it’d be better to say the art of crafting). They didn’t have to rely on training their souls to get stronger. They could achieve the same results by crafting.

Otherwise, most of the students would be capable of only crafting soul armaments without being able to get stronger.

As for the Upgrade Technique, Bai Yunfei discovered a huge change after it was ‘upgraded’.

The chances of upgrading a low quality successfully had been changed.

And not for the better.

When he was upgrading several incomplete soul armaments, Bai Yunfei realized that out of 30 of them, not a single one had been able to reach +10!

This realization left Bai Yunfei thunderstruck. He thought that it was due to his bad luck that day, but upon further reflection, that line of thought didn’t quite seem right. After spending several days making even more incomplete soul armaments, Bai Yunfei tried his hand at upgrading again. So curious was he that Bai Yunfei had several students go down to buy him some regular weapons to test his theories.

At last, did Bai Yunfei come to a conclusion. The Upgrade Technique had an extremely low rate of success for any item in the human tier and below! Upgrading any armament in that range was practically impossible to get to +10!

There had been several other discoveries as well. When looking at one of the ‘Superior’ equipment he got to +10 way before his time at the Crafting School, Bai Yunfei realized that it had somehow gained an affinity for ‘fire’ despite not having it before!

It puzzled Bai Yunfei. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he was left with one single guess: As the Upgrade Technique improved, ordinary equipment would no longer be able to withstand the amount of ‘energy’ being used to upgrade it.

Even now, he could feel that each time he used Upgrade Technique, the soulforce being consumed was mutating the worldly elementals around him. In other words, the Upgrade Technique was borrowing Bai Yunfei’s soulforce to pull and manipulate the elements to improve the equipment.

Thus when the Upgrade Technique grew stronger, so did the ‘energy’ being used. Regular weapons would no longer be able to handle such a powerful energy, so their success rates dropped drastically.

With this guess in mind, Bai Yunfei tried his best to ‘delve’ into the ‘change’ that was happening when he used the Upgrade Technique. But it was to no avail. Perhaps the change was far too mysterious for him to decipher, or his power wasn’t strong enough to understand it....

......

Looking down at his Violet Soul Ring, Bai Yunfei pressed his soulforce into it and watched as several notifications popped up into his mind.

“30 low-earth tier soul armaments and 17 human tier soul armaments....”

This was the bounty Bai Yunfei earned after these past two months. It wasn’t as if he spent all of his time crafting soul armament after soul armament. There came days where Bai Yunfei would only make a few and try to adjust several techniques for improvement. Sometimes, it’d take multiple days to make even one soul armament, but the amount he made was already subject to the admiration of a good deal of students in the school.

After joining the Crafting School and learning the art of crafting, Bai Yunfei realized that soul armaments—low tier ones in particular—had very little value within the school....

Of course, this perspective was held by all the other disciples who were as strong as he was in the inner school.

After much thought, Bai Yunfei thought, “I’ll store a few so I can upgrade them all later. There’s plenty of time to craft; I refuse to believe I won’t be able to upgrade a single item out of the bunch here....”

Bai Yunfei’s thoughts were equating well over a hundred soul armaments to being as numerous as the stalks of bok choy. After these several months of being in the Crafting School, Bai Yunfei was already starting to adopt the mindset of that of a ‘wastrel’. If anyone else were to realize this, their reactions would surely be an interesting one.

Standing up from the bed, Bai Yunfei finished up the rest of his daily morning rituals.

As soon as he finished, the sound of a young girl could be heard from the outside.

“Brother strawhat, come on out, we’re about to go!!”