Chapter 206: Hidden Training For A Month

In a stone room about ten square meters in area, a giant flame was lit at the very center of the room. There was no wind blowing through this room, but the fire danced and flickered wildly left and right as if there was.

Then all of a sudden, the fire began to dance animatedly and twist in on itself in a patterned swirl. Not even a moment later, the fire had transformed into a two meter tall tiger made completely out of fire!

Absolutely life-like in its creation, the tiger let loose a ferocious roar that while brokered no sound, the stance it was in was still incredibly fearsome.

With a blink of the eye, the ferocious tiger immediately disappeared in a blaze of fire before the fire reformed to become a giant bird!

The bird then disappeared and transformed into a mighty ape that beated at its chest….

All sorts of beasts and birds materialized out from the flames, but not a single one was capable of sound when they formed.

After several more transformations, the fire began to gather in on itself to form a crimson-red fireball about two meters in diameter. Slowly rotating as it levitated upwards, the fireball soon reached the top of the room. As soon as it touched the ceiling, a single spear came boring out from the sphere!

As straight as it was long, the spear was clearly made up from the flames, but not a single flicker of the flame could be seen from the materialized weapon. For all intents and purposes, it looked no different than to a genuine spear.

Following the same time when the spear appeared, another longsword appeared by its side.

One after another, all sorts of weapons came pouring out from the fireball in rapid succession. Blades, axes, hookblades, and even hammers came raining down in a fan-shaped wave so that it were similar to a peacock fanning its tails, but these tails were instead weapons. Each one of these weapons being shaped so similarly to their actual counterparts with an equally intimidating air to them.

“Bang!”

With a resounding crash, a multitude of weapons separated itself from the ‘main body’ and were left to float in the air. As they detached themselves from the still rotating fireball, they became genuine weapons made from seemingly solid material.

In the center of the fireball from which these weapons clearly left from, there was the hazy figure of a person!

Sitting crossed-legged in this fireball, this person slowly stood up and extended his right hand outwards so that the fire around him contracted in size and was reabsorbed into his body!

Dressed in a gray robe, the man had such long hair that it covered both of his eyes. The raging fire continued to stream back into the man’s body without at all burning or even singing his clothes.

Lifting his head, the man’s black hair blew aside to reveal the brightly-lit eyes behind them. A faint smile adorned his face as he regarded the circle of floating weaponry rotating around him.

This person was in fact Bai Yunfei!

Closing his eyes after watching the weapons circle around him once, Bai Yunfei began to concentrate on something for a while before finally breathing in a deep breath of air and then out. By the time he opened up his eyes and extended his hand out, all of the weapons in front of him collapsed back into a splash of fire and spread throughout the area in a sea of fire.

In the next second, Bai Yunfei appeared at the very heart of the swirling mass of elemental fire before reabsorbing it all into his body.

With all the elemental fire absorbed into his body, the room was once again plunged into darkness. Silence reigned in the room for a while before another fireball the size of a washbasin materialized back into the room. Now that the room was lit up again, Bai Yunfei’s right hand rose up to touch the fireball. It floated over his palm for a while as he studied it before he let out a sigh.

“And now I have strength like when senior Ge Yiyun showed me. He could do this with a flip of his hand. I thought it was amazing at first, but even now I can do it just as easily….” Sighing at the last bit, bai Yunfei began to mutter to himself, “I never would’ve thought that the Secrets of Firebending would be so easy to learn….Is it because I was always in contact with fire-related soul armaments? Was the Fire-tipped Spear instrumental in helping me learn how to react to the elemental fire? Or does this mean to say that this training method wasn’t even hard to learn to begin with?

“There’s still three days before the first month is over and I’ve already reached this far. I wonder if master would feel happy about this? I should spend the next three days perfecting this….I wonder what the art of crafting will be like…”

Bai Yunfei’s right foot stepped towards the corner of the stone room where a stairwell was. This stairwell led straight to his bedroom right above.

In every room in the courtyard, each disciple had a secret room given to them for the sake of training by themselves in privacy.

Twenty-seven days had passed since the creation of his soulbound armaments. In just a few more days, Bai Yunfei would reach the one month mark of him being a disciple of the Crafting School.

For the past twenty-seven days, Bai Yunfei spent most of his time training by himself in this secret cellar. For the sake of learning the Secrets of Firebending, Bai Yunfei closed himself off from the outside world completely almost. But every so often, he would leave his room to take a walk.

Opening the doors, Bai Yunfei’s face was assaulted with the fresh air of nature. It had only just rained a while ago, so the courtyards were still wet and several of the wilting trees were dripping with raindrops still. The ground wasn’t too muddy yet, and so the world felt as if it had underwent a cleansing to leave any spectator revitalized at the sight.

It was still early in the morning, so Bai Yunfei planned on taking a brisk walk around the courtyard and look around the place to relax a bit.

“Ehhh? Senior Bai, you finally came out!”

The moment when he walked out from his room, a pleasantly surprised voice made itself known to Bai Yunfei from his right. Turning to meet the source, Bai Yunfei could see a young boy in his teens run up to him with a smile on his face.

Reciprocating the smile, Bai Yunfei nodded his head, “Yes, I wanted to take a walk. Little Xian, what brings you out here?”

The boy had short hair to accompany his shy face. He was named Si Kongxian and was a fellow student of the inner school of the Western Point. Since he was in the room next to Bai Yunfei, he was considered to be his neighbor and would often times help Bai Yunfei bring some food and drink. As a honest and straightforward person, Si Kongxian was always willing to help another out with a smile on his face.

Pointing up to the living quarters in the area behind the mountain, Si Kongxian spoke, “I was about to bring some materials for senior Chen to use for crafting.”

“Ah, I see.” Bai Yunfei nodded. “I was planning to go there myself, let’s go together.”

Smiling, Si Kongxian nodded his head, “Okay! Let’s go then. If we’re late, senior Chen will get angry.”

……

Trekking up the path to the mountains, Bai Yunfei and Si Kongxian watched as the birds flitted through and through the grass. With the fresh air that blew through the place, one would’ve thought that it was spring time on the mountain despite it being in the winter.

Along the way, he and Si Kongxian talked to one another with idle chatter on what had happened in the past month.

Tian Yuhang was currently learning under Song Lin how to increase his soulforce so that he could become a Soul Sprite.

Mo Xiaoxuan and Xi Yan were able to make friends with the rest of the inner school soon after they joined them. Since they were both at the late-stage Soul Warrior stage, they were both in a hurry to try and reach the Soul Sprite stage and forge their own soulbound armament.

Zhong Xuhao and Liu Mang were both faring well in the outer school, but both were dead set on joining the inner school so they spent most of their time training themselves.

Many a times they came to Bai Yunfei in search for advice, but because Bai Yunfei was constantly training behind closed doors, the three of them never met up.

There wasn’t much known about Ye Zhiqiu personally, but Bai Yunfei was sure that he too was focused completely on training.

Time went by quickly with how the two chattered to themselves. Soon enough, they arrived at the end of the path. An expansive cliff wall greeted the two, with holes scattered throughout the cave as if someone took a giant stick and tabbed incessantly into the cliff.Every ten meters or so, another cave would pop up with a height of several meters.

It was a strange area to behold, but it was where the students of the crafting school crafted soul armaments.

The Secrets of Firebending was the foundational training method of the Crafting School. Learning how to manipulate elemental fire was something only a Soul Sprite could learn, so students below that stage could only focus on their training to hopefully become a Soul Sprite and learn the art of crafting. Sometimes, crafting soul armaments was a very loud task, and also ‘unsafe’, so creating soul armaments were forbidden from being done in the residential areas. When a student reached the Soul Sprite stage, they would be allocated a ‘forge cave’ for the sake of crafting soul armaments. They were nothing special and were essentially just regular caves. The only thing that might stand it out from any other place was the fact that these caves were extremely sturdy.

The first time Bai Yunfei came to this cave, he had been stunned for a very long time. Never did he imagine that the Crafting School where so many countless precious soul armaments were made would be done in places that were so….crude and simplistic.

But still.

With how the caves glowed fiery red with the elemental fire, the sight was exceedingly spectacular.

“Little Xian, did ‘senior Chen’ tell you which cave is his?” When they arrived at the ‘forge caves’, Bai Yunfei asked Si Kongxian for the next step.

The caves of the lower layer were for students of the outer school, and the upper layer were for students of the inner school. The caves at the topmost level were rare and few, but they were for the disciples to use.

Pointing at the cave to the top left side of the cave, Si Kongxian spoke, “Over there! The fourth row sixth cave from the left; that’s one of the caves for the inner school. Senior Chen is there crafting a soul armament. Senior Bai, can you wait for me for a second? I need to give senior Chen the materials he needs….”

“Boom!!”

Not even before Si Kongxian finished speaking, a thunderous crack exploded from the caves and shook the earth. From the cave he was only just pointing at, a giant pillar of fire and smoke blew out from the cave. For ten meters, the pillar of fire persisted for several more seconds before gradually coming to a stop….

“Uh….”