During the days that followed, Ye Qingxuan’s primary consciousness never again left his main body.
He resumed his former routine of daily cultivation, day in and day out.
In his spare time, he would occasionally refine some decent-quality True Artifacts, low- and mid-grade Spirit Artifacts, various fourth- and fifth-tier elixirs, talismans, formation plates, and even flying vessels of different grades.
He prepared all of these items for his avatar.
Once his avatar established a city in the Eastern Extremity Domain, Ye Qingxuan planned to organize an auction to make his city’s name known.
By then, he would naturally need some fine pieces to serve as the grand finale.
The items offered at the auction didn’t need to catch the attention of Nascent Soul cultivators, but they had to be attractive enough to draw the interest of Core Formation cultivators.
Only by doing this could he build his city’s reputation while ensuring safety in the early stages.
After that, he could smoothly set up his own commercial platform, which would bring him a steady stream of resources and speed up the growth of the Qingxuan Cave Paradise.
The various fifth-tier cultivation resources Ye Qingxuan had prepared were meant precisely to attract Core Formation cultivators to his first auction in the Eastern Extremity Domain.
If it was just Core Formation cultivators, with his current foundation, he was confident he could keep the situation under control and make them think twice.
But what about Nascent Soul cultivators?
After his experiences in the Demon Realm, Ye Qingxuan understood that the gap in cultivation realms wasn’t something that could be easily bridged with ordinary external aids.
Currently, the highest-grade items he could obtain with spirit stones were only some sixth-tier goods.
Unless he set up a sixth-tier grand formation beforehand, other ordinary sixth-tier offensive items—like talismans—wouldn’t be able to effectively harm a Nascent Soul cultivator.
Perhaps only top-grade and supreme-grade sixth-tier talismans could pose a certain threat to early-stage and mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators respectively, and thus create some deterrent effect.
As for items above the sixth tier, they couldn’t be bought with spirit stones alone within the Xuantian Sect.
Items above the sixth tier touched upon the level of Mystic Essence Rules—things that could only be used or refined by cultivators beyond the Nascent Soul stage.
Within the Xuantian Sect, obtaining items above the sixth tier basically required a massive amount of contribution points.
Even in the Xuantian Sect’s market, there were essentially no goods above the sixth tier that could be purchased with spirit stones.
Occasionally, when raw materials or certain items above the sixth tier did appear and could be bought with spirit stones, they were snapped up almost immediately.
That was because items above the sixth tier could basically only be traded with spirit crystals.
And spirit crystals were one of the resources that aided the cultivation of cultivators above the Nascent Soul stage.
The spiritual energy within spirit crystals had been compressed to the extreme, making it exceptionally pure.
When a cultivator absorbed spiritual energy from spirit crystals for cultivation, it could greatly reduce the time needed for their spiritual root to convert spiritual energy.
The spiritual energy within supreme-grade spirit crystals was so pure that it could continuously transform into a cultivator’s spiritual power without requiring much conversion by the spiritual root at all.
It could even passively enhance the purity of spiritual power within low- and mid-stage cultivators.
However, this extremely pure spiritual energy was not something that low-stage cultivators’ bodies could withstand.
An ordinary cultivator would generally need to be at least at the Core Formation stage to endure the power of spiritual energy from a low-grade spirit crystal.
That’s why spirit crystals were mostly circulated only among high-stage cultivators.
Although there was an official exchange rate on the market between supreme-grade spirit stones and low-grade spirit crystals, in practice, there was always high demand but little supply.
One low-grade spirit crystal could easily be exchanged for a hundred supreme-grade spirit stones.
But conversely, a hundred supreme-grade spirit stones might not necessarily get you a single low-grade spirit crystal.
When spirit crystals occasionally appeared on the market, they were almost always traded at a premium.
Spirit crystals could only be condensed from spirit veins of the seventh tier and above.
Below the seventh tier, even if a spirit vein did produce spirit crystals, it would be at most one or two low-grade crystals here and there.
In other words, spirit crystals were themselves one of the key cultivation resources for high-stage cultivators.
So if Ye Qingxuan wanted to obtain goods above the sixth tier through purchases, he would first need to stockpile enough spirit crystals.
As for acquiring spirit crystals, relying solely on his Heavenly Fortune Shop was simply not feasible right now.
Unless Ye Qingxuan was willing to throw a huge amount of spirit stones at the problem, he might have a chance to exchange for some low-grade spirit crystals—but the quantity definitely wouldn’t be large.
Aside from that, Ye Qingxuan had two channels available for obtaining spirit crystals.
Those two channels were the Xuantian Sect and the Dizuan Realm Alliance.
The unified exchange rate for one low-grade spirit crystal within both the Xuantian Sect and the Dizuan Realm Alliance was one hundred million contribution points.
In theory, one contribution point was worth one low-grade spirit stone, so there was no premium when exchanging contribution points for low-grade spirit crystals within the Xuantian Sect or the Dizuan Realm Alliance.
But there were certain items that could be exchanged with contribution points from the Xuantian Sect or the Dizuan Realm Alliance that couldn’t be bought with spirit stones at all.
So in a sense, within these major powers or large organizations, when it came to exchanging contribution points for high-tier items, the contribution points themselves carried a built-in premium.
Still, for now, spirit crystals weren’t an urgent necessity for Ye Qingxuan, so he had no immediate plans to accumulate contribution points and exchange them for spirit crystals.
Over the years, his Heavenly Fortune Shop had gradually stabilized.
Although daily revenue had stopped growing, it remained very steady—truly establishing its foothold among the major shops in the Xuantian Sect’s market.
Aside from daily operations, the Heavenly Fortune Shop continued to acquire various spirit ores for Ye Qingxuan on an ongoing basis.
The acquisition tasks he had posted at the Xuantian Sect’s Mission Hall also remained active.
He spent roughly five hundred thousand low-grade spirit stones every year to cover the costs of these tasks.
It wasn’t that Ye Qingxuan didn’t want to spend more spirit stones, but rather that in the later stages, these various ore acquisition tasks had become far less effective.
The annual quantity of various spirit ores acquired by the Heavenly Fortune Shop had also been gradually declining.
That was because, over the years, Ye Qingxuan had already purchased nearly all the low-grade spirit ores below the fifth tier in the vicinity of the Xuantian Sect.
Basically, he had already acquired all the common low-grade spirit ores native to the areas near the Xuantian Sect.
With the variety of spirit ores he’d gathered over the years, combined with the various ores he’d swindled from the eight Nascent Soul-level powers, and the spirit plants grown within the Qingxuan Cave Paradise, it should be enough to advance the elemental Mystic Essence Rules within the Qingxuan Cave Paradise to the peak of the third tier.
However, to advance to the fourth tier, it seemed he was still a little short on accumulation.
To accelerate the advancement of his Cave Paradise, two conditions had to be met simultaneously.
The first was to speed up the rate at which the Cave Paradise’s fundamental origin was converted, accumulating enough origin.
The second was to accelerate the evolution of the elemental Mystic Essence Rules within the Cave Paradise, perfecting all the various elemental Mystic Essence Rules within it.
At present, regarding the first point, Ye Qingxuan could use Spirit Vein Origins to increase the number of spirit veins in the Qingxuan Cave Paradise, and use resources from the Qingmo Realm to evolve origin energy, accelerating the accumulation of origin within the Qingxuan Cave Paradise.
As for the second point, for now, Ye Qingxuan could only speed up the parsing and perfection of the elemental Mystic Essence Rules by planting various spirit plants and smelting various spirit ores for the Qingxuan Cave Paradise to analyze.
This second point required, besides various spirit plants, a sufficiently large variety of spirit ores as a foundation.
High-grade spirit ores might be able to substitute for some low-grade ones, but they couldn’t replace every single type of low-grade spirit ore.
This was exactly why Ye Qingxuan had never given up on acquiring various low-grade spirit ores.
It was also the reason he had sent his avatar to develop in the remote Eastern Extremity Domain.
In fact, various ores, plants, natural treasures, and even the corpses of Qingmo creatures within the Qingmo Realm all contained some of that realm’s elemental Mystic Essence Rules, and even tiny fragments of law.
But currently, the Qingxuan Cave Paradise was still too low in tier. Not to mention products from the Qingmo Realm—even high-grade items from the Dizuan Realm itself were extremely difficult for the Qingxuan Cave Paradise to parse.
So for now, Ye Qingxuan could only roughly purify his gains from the Qingmo Realm into simple origin energy, letting the Qingxuan Cave Paradise absorb it to speed up its origin accumulation.
He couldn’t have the Qingxuan Cave Paradise directly parse those materials to perfect its own elemental Mystic Essence Rules.
For a world to continuously advance, besides having sufficient origin energy, it needed to perfect its internal elemental Mystic Essence Rules in the early stages. In the later stages, it had to evolve the rudiments of greater laws, then continuously refine them and evolve even more greater laws.
If this process relied solely on the world’s own natural evolution, it would be an extremely lengthy one.
So to speed things up, various cultivation systems gradually emerged in higher-tier worlds.
They leveraged the living beings within the world to assist in evolving the elemental Mystic Essence Rules, and even the mysteries of greater laws.
As the living beings grew stronger, so did the world, slowly building up the foundation for its next advancement.
In many worlds, this was a win-win process.
In addition, cross-referencing between two worlds, or even multiple worlds, could also accelerate this process.
However, this method of cross-referencing between worlds might seem a little…
