Before he began to forge, Zhou Fan decided to change locations. He had been on the same mountain top for more than a million years and felt that a change of scenery was natural.
After wandering around for a while, Zhou Fan found a nice looking cave. As he went in, he discovered that it went extremely deep into the ground.
Even after walking for a thousand miles, he had not reached the end. After walking what he estimated to be a hundred thousand miles, Zhou Fan found the cave's end. Surprisingly, it ended with a little dome shaped room that had only a pillar going through the middle.
Zhou Fan estimated that he was around thirty thousand feet deep. It wasn't much compared to the distance between the surface of the world and the core, but it was definitely one of the deepest caves on the planet.
Zhou Fan knocked down the pillar in the middle of the dome shaped cave and left only the stub of it. The stub was about the same height and length of a tree stub.
Zhou Fan removed some of the stone in the middle of the stub, enhanced the rest of the stub to the god realm, and put some fire in it.
The fire was enough to melt many god realm ores, but it wouldn't melt the stub since not only was the stub very strong, but he was controlling the fire to have minimal effects on the stub.
The next thing Zhou Fan needed were ores. He still had many god realm ores left over from when he was practicing formations, but there was no were near enough to last him the entire tenth rank. Even if he did have enough to last him the entire tenth rank, he didn't have any other rank ores on him.
Therefore, Zhou Fan needed to go collect ores. He almost directly teleported out of the cave system himself, but he remembered the fact that he had an array he had never used that could do that for him.
In a very little amount of time, Zhou Fan set up a teleportation array. He wanted to use it, but there was still a problem. There was no exit from the teleportation array. He still needed to make a receiving teleportation array that would mark the place he would teleport to.
Since he still wanted to teleport out of the cave, Zhou Fan shot his divine sense outwards and let it build the array for him. Since he had never used his divine sense to do such a thing, despite it having the ability to many realms ago, it took a while for him to build the array.
The process took him about a minute before the teleportation array was finally finished. Using some of his Qi since there was no power source on the arrays, Zhou Fan stepped into the teleportation array.
In an instant, he appeared on the surface of the world. Well, he wouldn't exactly call it a surface since he was essentially standing on a pile of vines, but he was outside of the cave.
As he looked around at the world, he was struck by a hint of genius and came up with a name.
"The Plant World." He said out loud. Such a name perfectly described it without missing a single detail.
Zhou Fan proceeded to fly out of the plant world and teleport around nearly the entire silver river galaxy cluster before he finally came back. A long time had passed, but the life Qi rain had never stopped and nothing had really changed.
Speaking of life Qi rain, it didn't really need to exist for Zhou Fan to get materials anymore. He was only keeping it to help the planet out. Before he left, he planned on seeing whether or not the planet had evolved enough to survive without the life rain.
If it wasn't able to, then that was a pity. Zhou Fan found the same teleportation array buried under a couple tens of feet of plants. He dug it up and cleared the area around it with Qi before he used it again and returned to the cave.
Unlike the other teleportation array, the cave teleportation array hadn't changed at all. Not only had the array not changed, but the entire cave had stayed the same.
The fire was still burning and it was still a dome shape with only a teleportation array to the side and a stub in the middle.
Zhou Fan went over to the stub and stood near it. He then took out a ball of ore from another world. The ore was already at the Qi gathering realm, so he didn't have to worry about upgrading it at all.
Zhou Fan threw the ore in the fire and controlled it to slowly burn it. Once the ore was red hot and easily mendable, Zhou Fan took it out without touching it by using his Qi.
He let it float in the air and used some more Qi to hit it, which slowly turned it into the shape he was hoping for. After a minute, the ore took the shape of a sword.
Zhou Fan created an upside down dome in the ground and filled it up with cold water. He then stuck the sword in the water, cooling it down and finishing the first part of the forging process.
The sword was completed once it was cooled, but there were still some optional steps to make the sword stronger. One of them was the process of adding formations to the sword.
In his study of formations, he had found that there were some formations specifically meant for forged items.
Some that fit on the sword were the sharpening formation, the strengthening formation, which increased the hardness of the sword, and some elemental formations that would add some sort of elemental effect to the sword.
Zhou Fan decided to add first rank sharpening, strengthening, and flame formations to the sword.
While it would be harder to add formations as the amount increased, Zhou Fan could put thousands of first rank formations on a sword with no difficulty.