A week later, the milky-white spirit crystal above the Yellow Spirit Tier in Song Miaozhu's spiritual platform finally took shape.
"So above the Yellow Spirit Tier… is the White Spirit Tier."
She barely had time to marvel before she dove back into paper crafting and cultivation. There were still so many relics that needed to absorb spiritual energy to become unbound artifacts—she couldn't afford to waste even a trace of it.
This session lasted a full month.
Even then, the spiritual tide showed no signs of slowing. If anything, the flow was growing stronger.
Miaozhu had already summoned all her spiritual artifacts, using them daily to channel and refine energy. Yet the spiritual energy around Xiaozhu Mountain didn't weaken. Instead, it continued to increase.
The spiritual tide had been ongoing for several years now, but it had always followed a rhythm: a few days of surging energy followed by a few days of calm. Neither phase had ever lasted longer than a week.
This time, however, the surge was breaking every pattern.
Though her cultivation and spiritual artifact refinement consumed a great deal of energy, it still wasn't enough to match the outpouring that Xiaozhu Mountain was now drawing in.
So Miaozhu quickly began moving batches of relics from the Ghost Shop's warehouse into the unused rooms of her spiritual residence.
While she cultivated inside, those rooms had the densest concentration of spiritual energy. This allowed the relics to absorb it naturally, accelerating their transformation into unbound artifacts and saving her a considerable amount of spirit stones.
Still, unbound artifacts were unpredictable. She was wary of too many relics transforming at once and causing trouble, like the Water-Suppressing Stone Rhino had done before. She assigned her little paper servants to keep watch.
If any relic began to glow with signs of imminent transformation, it was to be moved back into the Ghost Shop's warehouse immediately. Inside that warehouse, if she withheld spirit stones, the environment lacked the energy needed for transformation. It would hold them in stasis until she was ready.
When she had the time, she could take them out and oversee the process personally, extracting their spirit residues safely.
Even so, despite the many relics consuming energy around her, the spiritual energy over Xiaozhu Mountain only continued to rise.
Watching it spill outward into the wind, Miaozhu felt like she was watching a pile of spirit stones float away. Her heart ached at the thought of such waste.
Who knew how long this spiritual surge would last?
Clenching her jaw, she decided to attempt one of the three most advanced paper-craft techniques recorded in the Secret Art of Paper Crafting—the Ninefold Spirit Trap.
This formation had been created by the very ancestor who pioneered the art of spiritual infusion. It was one of the three signature masterpieces recorded at the beginning of the book, representing the peak of that ancestor's lifetime of research.
The Ninefold Spirit Trap was the simplest of the three. The others were the Spirit-Link Paper Offering and the Mirage Paper Realm.
Once laid down, the Ninefold Spirit Trap could lock the flow of spiritual energy within Xiaozhu Mountain, preventing it from drifting away and being wasted ever again.
But these three techniques were not for the faint-hearted. Each one demanded an extraordinary level of cultivation to sustain the ignition process, along with masterful paper-crafting skill.
Miaozhu wasn't sure she met the standard, but she had to try.
To make the Ninefold Spirit Trap, she needed translucent spirit paper as thin as cicada wings, three-year-grown green bamboo, and deepwater cinnabar.
The bamboo and cinnabar were no problem. The bamboo grew right on Xiaozhu Mountain, and the cinnabar could be ordered at any time from the SEIU app.
The real trouble was the spirit paper.
Translucent as a cicada's wing, imbued with the thinnest spiritual thread—it was nowhere to be found.