Weapon & Puppet Refining

"Is it, really?" Rendo couldn't help but ask as his voice slightly stuttered.

"Of course, I have no reason to lie to you."

"Well my father always said my paintings were horrible, and I should invest more time in talisman making. In fact, my dream was always to be an artist, but I thought I had no talent for it…" He said with a sad voice.

"Well your father must have lied to you in hopes you'd concentrate your full attention on talisman's." Minos replied.

"Yeah, I realize that by now" Rendo said as his eyes got redder.

Minos didn't say anything, giving Rendo a moment to regather his emotions. After wiping away his tears with a leaf, he attempted to put a smile on his face, of course the forced smile looked slightly ugly.

"Can I see yours?" Rendo asked.

Minos didn't say anything, but gave Rendo his drawing. Rendo unscrolled the paper and was quickly mesmerized by the drawing. It not only depicted the beauty of the forest, but also included Minos and Rendo drawing on the cliff side.

If he didn't watch the whole process of Minos creating this, he may have even thought it was a picture taken with Memory Jade.

"It's amazing! How long have you been drawing?"

"Well, I used to draw a lot when I was younger, but honestly, it's been a few years since I last drew something." Minos replied.

"A few years? How are you still so good after so long?" Rendo questioned.

"Talisman making." Minos answered with a smile.

"Talisman making? But what does that have to do with drawing?" Rendo asked with confusion.

"Your understanding of the talisman arts is still shallow. Drawing, talisman making, it's all part of the same root, different means of expressing the beauty of our cosmos."

"That's what you need to understand Rendo, whatever art form it happens to be, it's all just trying to take a little bit of the brilliance of this vast world for ourselves. The greater the master, the bigger a piece they take."

Rendo couldn't help but be enlightened by Minos's understanding. He had always separated the two, never taking drawing and talisman making as similar at all, but when he looked back on it, he realized the two weren't actually much different. The tools were all the same, it's just what they were expressing was different.

Minos smiled as he looked at Rendo's frozen expression. Naturally he wouldn't disrupt this moment of enlightenment, instead standing guard as Rendo kept pondering.

After another half hour, Rendo came out of his reverie, and to Minos's surprise, he began to kneel towards him. Minos wouldn't allow that, so he quickly picked him up by the shoulders, forcing him to stand straight.

"Please let me kneel, I don't know how else to thank you…" Rendo couldn't help but say.

"If you want to thank me then learn how to make talisman's. There couldn't be a better reward for me than seeing my efforts pay off." Minos said.

Rendo still wanted to kneel, but under Minos's iron-like grip, he couldn't even if he wanted to. Eventually, he gave in, and under the darkness of the night, the two went back to the cave to call it a day.

…

The next morning, Minos woke up early as usual. Seeing as Rendo was still asleep, Minos exited the cave back to the clearing from yesterday to continue his Twelve Beast Movement Tome training.

After a couple hours, Minos was completely drenched in sweat, and he could feel his body was slightly strengthened. While the improvement was small, one had to realize that when Minos first started using the Green Bull Tendon Fist, it would take 5x as long to get the same results, and that was after he had pushed it beyond perfection.

Meanwhile the Twelve Beast Movement Tome was only at initiation at the moment, so one could imagine how much better it would be once it reached perfection, or even beyond.

Finishing his training, Minos ran to the nearest lake and took a bath to wash away the stink. Diving naked into the river, he swam for a bit before finding a rock to lean on and relax as he felt the currents scrub his body clean.

As he relaxed he couldn't help but use this free time to think back on the other auxiliary occupations beginner guides he had bought

Both formations and alchemy required one to reach the Inner Heaven Realm, so for the time being, Minos could only really focus on weapon and puppet refining.

While both were considered under the same division of refining, the two were completely different, hence they weren't marked under the same label.

Weapon refining was naturally much more popular, and even mortals required weapon refiners, of course the level of skill between a true weapon refiner and a mortal one was absolutely crushing, but it showed how necessary the craft was.

Meanwhile, puppet refining was far more niche, and Minos hadn't even seen any puppets before. In fact, the lady who sold him the book said that puppet refiners were close to extinction, and it was rare to see anyone pursue it.

Of course for Minos. who was thirsty for anything he could learn, he wouldn't care about such a thing, instead puppet refining was actually the art he was most interested in.

He couldn't help but wonder if it was possible to create a puppet so real it was indistinguishable from a living human, if that was the case, couldn't one make an entire army of puppets? Going even further, could one make a society of self-replicating puppets?

Of course crazy thoughts like those were still a thousand miles away from Minos, but his inquisitive mind couldn't help but wonder.

Back to the point, occupations and their items were split into moons. For example, a one-moon alchemist can make low-level pills for between the first and third layers of the Mortal Renewal Realm.

A two-moon alchemist would make mid-level pills for the fourth to sixth layers of the Mortal Renewal Realm. Three-moons would therefore make one a peak Mortal Renewal alchemist, and naturally, four-moons meant you could make low-level Inner Heaven pills.

Similarly a low-level pill would be considered a one-moon pill. For example, the low-level Lock Breaking Pill Minos had wanted in the past, it would be classified as a one-moon pill.

This rule applies for all occupations, which makes things a lot easier for most people. Minos couldn't help but wonder who made just a unified system, but the answer didn't really matter.

Minos himself would be considered a one-moon talisman maker, but given his true skill, he could easily become a two-moon talisman maker, or even a three-moon one.

Of course his true ranking didn't really matter at the moment, but in the future, if he wanted to sell more powerful talismans, a ranking badge would be essential.

Most stores wouldn't accept items beyond a certain moon if one didn't have a badge to certify their own skills. No one wanted to be sold a broken object, or one that didn't reach the usual quality standard.

So getting his own level certified might be a task for the future. For now Minos went back to pondering weapon and puppet refining.

In fact, talisman makers and weapon refiners actually had an occupation between them, known as Talismanic Weapon Refiners. These people would refine weapons normally, however they would also engrave talisman's into the weapons, allowing them to explode an additional skill.

Of course reaching a point where one could naturally meld those two skills together to create a Talismanic Weapon was no easy feat, and masters of this caliber were exceptionally rare, at least Minos had never heard of one.

Puppets also shared a lot of intimacy with talismans. The crucial point of making puppets were the 'veins,' the vessels inside a puppets body that let the energy from its core reach the rest of its body.

Of course puppet masters didn't call these vessels veins, instead calling them puppet lines. These puppet lines reminded Minos of talisman strokes, except they existed internally rather than externally.

Of course, puppet lines required a completely different motion then the typical talisman stroke, but it still required a smoothness that Minos had long honed as a talisman maker.

But puppets required more than just the smoothness of a talisman maker, they also needed the material refining skills of a weapon refiner, and even a slight understanding of formations.

The talisman making skills to make the puppets blood vessels, the weapon refining skills to make the puppets body, and the formations skills to make the puppets brain.

The myriad skills required were a reason why puppet masters continued to lose popularity. The fact of the matter was, becoming a true puppet refiner required a level of talent that was simply too rare.

Reaching mastery of one occupation was already a lifetime endeavor, and being a puppet master was akin to mastering multiple professions at once.

So it wasn't so much to say that puppet refining wasn't popular, in fact it was more fair to say that it simply wasn't practical for most, hence its number kept dwindling.

To the current era, it was arguable whether a puppet master even still existed on the Alephora continent, and even if one did, they were certainly at the center, where talent and knowledge was much more abundant.

Puppet making was still a bit of a distance from Minos, he still needed to know other things first, so he decided to concentrate on weapon refining first, and come back to it in the future.

Weapon refining was much more simple in comparison, and the beginner guide Minos had introduced him to a one-moon weapon called the Wood Shift Dagger.

While nothing impressive, it could still destroy mortal weapons with relative ease, and would be a nice way to further bolster Minos's ensemble.

While given his current wealth, he could easily buy such a weapon, as the old adage goes, better to teach a man to fish than to give him one.

Having established his next goal, Minos jumped out of the river and got changed. By the time he reached the cave, Rendo had already woken, so his timing was good.