I'll make you the furnace and the cauldron, so you can refine Yin and Yang and prove the Great

Instead of entering the sect through the main gate, Yin Yue led Li Hanshan to a side gate, handed over a token, and successfully entered the sect.

After passing through the protective array, a valley shrouded in spiritual mist came into view. Dozens of stone houses and workshops of varying sizes were scattered throughout the valley, each building covered with intricate array patterns that gleamed with a warm spiritual light in the night.

The distant mountain walls were riddled with caves, and occasionally a few streaks of light could be seen entering and exiting from them, but no one noticed them.

Yin Yue led him around the workshops, along a path shaded by spirit trees, deeper into the valley. The further they went, the higher the temperature in the air became, and an aura mixed with the smell of smelting metal and refining spirit ore wafted from ahead.

At the end of the path stood a stone house built entirely of dark red rock, with a bronze cauldron about half a person's height hanging above its roof. Fine white smoke rose from the cauldron's mouth, slowly dissipating in the night breeze.

The stone house door was half-open, and a series of clanging and knocking sounds came from inside, the rhythm chaotic yet carrying a strange cadence.

Yin Yue stopped in front of the door and knocked twice. The knocking didn't stop until a clear but somewhat impatient voice squeezed out from the crack in the door: "Who is it now? No guests today, no guests tomorrow, no guests the day after. Leave your order at the door if you have one, otherwise leave."

Yin Yue didn't answer, but instead took out a silver-white token from her sleeve and gently placed it in the groove on the inside of the door panel. The moment the token was inserted, a crisp metallic clanging sound came from inside the stone house, as if something had been casually thrown onto the table. Immediately afterward, footsteps came quickly from inside the house, and the door was suddenly pulled open from the inside.

A young girl stood inside the threshold, holding a palm-sized forging hammer in her hand. Her hair was casually tied into a ponytail, with a few stray strands falling beside her ears, glowing slightly red from the firelight.

She looked no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, with delicate and petite features, a slightly pointed chin, and almond-shaped eyes that naturally revealed her annoyance at being disturbed. She was wearing an obviously ill-fitting dark blue work uniform, with the cuffs rolled up several times to reveal her slender white wrists. The hem of the uniform reached below her knees, and a leather apron with several burn holes was tied around her waist.

Her gaze first fell on Yin Yue's face, and her irritation subsided slightly. Then she moved to Li Hanshan, lingering on his young face for a moment before her brows furrowed. "Sister Yin Yue, who is this person? Why did you bring a stranger here? You know my rules, we don't take jobs from outsiders."

Yin Yue retracted her token and stepped aside to let Li Hanshan pass: "He has a job that only you can take."

The girl looked Li Hanshan up and down with suspicion, her gaze lingering for a moment on the deliberately concealed aura surrounding him. She wrinkled her nose slightly: "Peak Nascent Soul stage? Your cultivation is alright, but I don't need any handymen. What kind of work?"

Looking at the young girl standing on the threshold with her hands on her hips, giving off an air of "you won't get in until you explain yourself," Li Hanshan felt a faint sense of absurdity. Yin Yue called her a master craftsman, but this girl was clearly a child. He spoke calmly, "The twelve teleportation arrays need to be forged using rune circuits with precision less than a hair's breadth. The materials list and blueprints are here."

When he handed her the blueprints for the array device, the girl took them and glanced at them. Her movements as she turned the pages were much more focused than before; her brows gradually furrowed from a slight frown. By the third page, she had squatted down on the threshold, spread the blueprints on her knees, and slowly moved her fingertips along one of the structural lines of the adjustment circuit. A completely different kind of focus surged in her almond-shaped eyes.

A moment later, she raised her head and looked at Li Hanshan. The impatience in her eyes had faded considerably, replaced by a scrutinizing gaze that had piqued her interest.

"There are indeed very few people in the Immortal Alliance who can make arrays of this precision." She stood up, rolled up the blueprints, and held them in her hand, her tone much more serious than before. "How did you know to come to me?"

"She brought me here," Li Hanshan said truthfully.

"No rush," Li Hanshan said.

The girl snorted, turned and walked into the stone house. After a few steps, she turned back to look at him, her almond-shaped eyes filled with wariness: "You just wait outside, don't come in. Outsiders aren't allowed in my workshop."

Yin Yue nodded slightly to Li Hanshan, indicating that he should rest assured. The two then sat down on the stone bench outside the stone house. Yin Yue took out a pot of spiritual tea from her sleeve, poured two cups, and handed one to Li Hanshan. Soon, the clanging and tinkling sounds of knocking resumed in the stone house, but this time they were more urgent and more frequent than before, as if something had aroused their full interest and was now operating at full capacity.

Li Hanshan held his teacup, his gaze fixed on the dark red firelight filtering through the cracks in the stone house door. After a moment of silence, he spoke in a low voice, "Is she really over a thousand years old?"

Yin Yue took a sip of tea, her eyes curving slightly beneath her silver veil. "She is the only daughter of the previous sect leader of the Heavenly Mystery Sect. Born with a fire spirit physique, she began learning weapon crafting at the age of three and by fifteen, she was already capable of independently forging fourth-grade magic weapons. Afterward, her father sent her into seclusion in an ancient ruin, where she remained for hundreds of years. When she emerged, her cultivation had reached the Refinement Void stage, but her mind remained unchanged from when she left. Her weapon crafting skills far surpass her cultivation level. There are no more than three grandmasters in the Immortal Alliance who can forge array weapons of grade seven or higher, and she is one of them."

As Li Hanshan listened, he gained a different understanding of the little girl who had just been standing on the threshold with her hands on her hips.

The knocking in the stone house suddenly stopped for a moment, followed by a low mutter: "Why is the flow of spiritual energy in this regulating circuit so awkward... Where did Sister Yinyue find someone who could draw such a blueprint..." The muttering was quickly drowned out by a new round of more intense knocking.

In the days that followed, Li Hanshan meditated and cultivated himself on the stone bench outside the stone house.

Yin Yue didn't stay with him the whole time. After confirming that he was settled, she left first, leaving only one sentence before leaving: "I will come to pick you up in three months. During this time, you can move around on the outskirts of the Tianji Sect, but do not enter the core area, lest you be discovered by the elders of the Tianji Sect."

Li Hanshan didn't wander around. Every day, he sat cross-legged on the stone platform outside the stone house, and the pure yang energy slowly circulated in his meridians, solidifying and settling the spiritual power accumulated from continuous dual cultivation.

With Shen Qingyue and the others not around, he devoted all his energy to repeatedly attacking the bottleneck of the Void Refinement stage. Each cycle of spiritual energy made the barrier looser, but he was still missing the last layer of paper.

Every now and then, the girl's voice would come from the stone house. Sometimes she would ask him to help deliver some kind of spiritual ore, sometimes she would ask him to confirm whether the angle of a certain loop was exactly the same as the blueprint, and sometimes she would simply call out, "Don't go too far. If I want to come out for some fresh air, I need to find someone to talk to."

Li Hanshan agreed to everything, saying little, but gradually the girl, who had initially been indifferent, became more willing to chat. She would casually ask him where he came from, why he was building a teleportation array, and whether he had some secret deal with Sister Yinyue while hammering away at the metal. Li Hanshan answered the questions he could, changing the subject for the ones he couldn't. The girl didn't press him, muttering something like "mysterious," before burying herself back in her work.

Three months later, one evening, the door of the stone house was kicked open from the inside. The girl stood on the threshold, her face smeared with several black soot marks, her hair slightly curled by the fire in the stove, and she looked as if she had just escaped from an explosion. But her eyes were astonishingly bright, and in her hands she held a dark gold tray, on which twelve array artifacts, each about the size of a fist, were neatly arranged.

Each array artifact's surface is covered with fine, spiderweb-like silver-white runes. The runes have a warm, understated luster, shimmering like tiny starlight points in the twilight.

"It's finished." Her voice was crisp and clear, though exhausted. "It was faster than I expected. Your blueprints were strange, but the more you drew them, the more interesting they became, especially the design for adjusting the circuit—I'd never seen anything like it before. Next time you need something like this, remember to come directly to me. Don't have Sister Yinyue relay the message; it's too much trouble."

She shoved the tray into Li Hanshan's hands, then turned and walked back to the stone house. Her steps were much more unsteady than three months ago, clearly indicating that the intense refining process over the past three months had taken a toll on her energy.

She paused at the door, then tossed out a sentence without turning her head: "Oh, by the way, I also added a little something to your array devices—a miniature reinforcement circuit is embedded in the base of each device, which can withstand 30% more spiritual pressure impact. I won't charge you spirit stones; consider it a fee for testing the new structure."

After saying that, he slammed the door shut, and soon a soft snore came from inside the stone house.