Jiang Mang had now learned six intents and 10 Di tier techniques. This allowed him to be called a prodigy. He has also become an incredibly versatile low saint stage cultivator. This will allow him to fight against many different types of opponents and even defeat many but his young age and recent breakthrough bottleneck his combat ability to older geniuses like Chu Lingxin. She should be able to beat him through her small accomplishment sword intent, which is many times stronger than his initial mastery intents. He would at most be able to reach a stalemate if he used his techniques ingeniously.
If he wanted to become stronger then he had to either breakthrough or elevate his mastery over his intents. Jiang Mang decided to hone the usage of his many different techniques during the daytime while meditating at night to increase his comprehension.
Two hours passed swiftly, and they arrived at Sea city. They would spend three days inside the city to acquire some techniques or artifacts for Jiang Mang or a pill that allowed Chu Lingxin to breakthrough. The duo entered the city accompanied by four peak saint stage cultivators and Xiao Lu. The duo looked extremely close as they walked next to each other and chatted about their cultivation and the newly entered city. Jiang Mang and Chu Lingxin both wore white and attracted quite a bit of attention with their looks. Jiang Mang's face and skin attracted the females' attention while Chu Lingxin's figure and veiled face attracted the men's.
Both remained unbothered and searched for an inn. They found some empty rooms after searching for only a short while. They had a meal at the establishment before touring the city. The duo stayed together while touring the city and learning about its infrastructure. They came to know that the most prominent shops inside Sea city were from three factions. The biggest store which deals in all types of goods is called the Serpent store under the Sea serpent group, while the other two stores specialize in pills and artifacts. The pill store was under the alchemy association's branch, while the artifact store was under the craftsman organization's branch.
These two are organizations that have spread their stores and branches over most of the continents and can rival a top power in terms of manpower but they dominate in terms of resources. These organizations are ruled by the major occupations of this world who are more respected than their counterpart cultivators. These occupations are alchemists, refiners, and formation masters. Alchemists create pills through medicine refinement and require a cultivator to possess the fire and wood element as qi. Refiners smelt metals and fuse them to create artifacts and require a cultivator to possess the fire and metal element as qi while formation master creates arrays and formations to communicate with the surrounding qi and make it behave in a certain way. Formation masters require a strong soul to learn the complicated formation designs and apply them which makes them the rarest occupation of the three.
All three occupations require a cultivator to be at the saint stage before they can learn and understand the underlying principles and have the required qi control to become an alchemist, blacksmith, or formation master. Jiang Mang found it a pity that he didn't have the required elemental qi to become an alchemist or blacksmith while he didn't know very much about formations.
The duo's first destination was the artifact store as Jiang Mang required a set of new throwing daggers to perform his hidden weapon techniques and damage saint realm cultivators. When they arrived, they were fascinated by all the different artifacts. There were weapon type artifacts that could rival weapon type profound spirits in power, there were also defensive type artifacts and storage type artifacts. The storage types here were of a much higher quality than those the duo already possessed. There were even flying type artifacts and musical instrument artifacts. Many people at the saint realm would prefer artifacts over their profound spirits as they were most often weaker than equally strong artifacts. It was however not the case for both Jiang Mang and Chu Lingxin, who had peak tier twin profound spirits that belonged to the rarest and highest-quality type of profound spirits.
The duo asked help from a female attendant who helped introduce all the artifacts in the store. She told them that this store sold every common type of Saint tier artifacts from low quality to perfect quality and that all artifacts were forged by recognized apprentice blacksmiths of the craftsman association. There existed four tiers of artifacts that corresponded with the cultivation realms. They were the saint, king, sage, and emperor tiers and required similar ranked blacksmiths to produce them. Blacksmiths were split into apprentices, seniors, masters, and grandmasters like the other cultivations. She also informed them that king tier artifacts could only be custom ordered by the seniors at the king stage at the only senior blacksmith in this craftsman organization's branch.
After her introduction of the shop and its artifact, she showed them multiple sets of throwing dagger artifacts together with some storage artifact. If he wished to buy something in this city then the standard currency of the world would be required instead of gold and silver. This currency was called spirit coins which were made out of a common metal used in most forgings of artifacts. Chu Lingxin and he were provided with 50 000 thousand spirit coins for their journey by the Chu empire which they would have to spend on housing, pills, techniques, and artifacts.
The duo decided to buy new storage artifacts for both of them. They bought two low-quality saint tier storage rings for 500 spirit coins. These two storage rings had ten times the capacity as their former artifacts when they were the two cheapest and lowest quality type of artifact. Jiang Mang had to still buy a new set of flying daggers and he was choosing between a set of 36 leaf daggers or 48 moon daggers. The first was an artifact set which would increase in speed if he infused his life qi while the second set would increase in sharpness if he infused his death qi. Both sets were off the high-quality saint tier and cost 7200 and 9600 spirit coins respectively. Jiang Mang eventually chose the leaf dagger set as they suited his current dagger techniques the best, while their quality ensured him the ability to damage any cultivator or spirit beast with a defense not at the utmost of the saint realm.
The duo left the shop with 42 300 spirit coins remaining while Jiang Mang was now in the possession of his new weapons which allowed him to assassinate higher stage saint realm cultivators.