Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Although he was occupying the Earth Fire chamber with the lowest rating, Grade C, Earth Fire was still Earth Fire. As long as it could produce flames with temperatures higher than that of Flaming Sun Wood charcoal with less effort, a Grade C Earth Fire chamber was good enough.
Zhou Yang followed the steps to cast an opening spell on the fire outlet of the Dragon Head made from Grade 3 spiritual gold obsidian in the Earth Fire chamber. The Dragon Head immediately let out a light roar, opened its mouth, and spat out a pale purple stream of Earth Fire as thick as an arm that landed below the cauldron in front of it.
This Grade C Earth Fire chamber was usually equipped with Lower Grade 2 cauldrons for renters. However, once Zhou Yang had broken through to become an Advanced Grade 2 artifact refiner, the clan leader had given the Advanced Grade 2 cauldron that he had used in the past. Clearly, Zhou Minghan did not like using Lower Grade 2 cauldrons and did not want Zhou Yang to be using them either.
The clan leader’s cauldron was called the Purple Phoenix Rising Sun Cauldron, a treasure cauldron refined from Grade 2 spiritual gold copper which had excellent heat conductivity and resistance. It was the first-choice material for refining pill furnaces and cauldrons.
Zhou Yang had used the Purple Phoenix Rising Sun Cauldron before but this was his first time using it with Earth Fire. As a way to familiarize himself with the new combination, he focused on practicing with refining Grade 1 magical artifacts first.
After two to three days of working experience with the properties of the Purple Phoenix Rising Sun Cauldron and control techniques of Earth Fire, he officially started artifact refinement.
Since the Purple Phoenix Rising Sun Cauldron enhanced the temperature of Earth Fire that already burned at higher temperatures than True Fire, Zhou Yang would not take more than an hour to refine a Lower Grade 2 magical artifact. Even an Intermediate Grade 2 magical artifact would not take more than two hours to refine.
In addition to Zhou Yang’s current cultivation level and Divine Sense, the minimal amount of mana needed to operate Earth Fire meant that Zhou Yang would be able to refine magical artifacts for an entire day without eating or drinking.
But Zhou Yang would not want to fast because it might affect the refinement success rates. After refining two or three magical artifacts, he would choose to rest for one or two hours to recover his spirit and reflect on his experience. Zhou Yang ended up refining magical artifacts roughly fifteen to twenty times a day.
Through repetition, Zhou Yang was also delighted to find that his success rate of refining Lower Grade 2 magical artifacts had slightly increased by 10% with the help of Earth Fire and the Purple Phoenix Rising Sun Cauldron.
10% was no small amount. For a refiner, a 10% increase in artifact refinement success rate meant that he was a big step closer to reaching the next level of the Artifact Refinement Technique.
Zhou Minghan had once told Zhou Yang that if an Advanced Grade 2 artifact refiner wanted to break through to become a Grade 3 artifact refiner, the former would first have to increase the success rate of refining a Lower Grade 2 magical artifact to 100% and an Advanced Grade 2 magical artifact to 60%.
Currently, Zhou Yang was still quite far from meeting this requirement. However, the 10% increase in his artifact refinement success rate meant that his skills were now at least on par with the most experienced an Advanced Grade 2 artifact refiners.
After days of persistency in artifact refinement, Zhou Yang had finally completed the refinement of the hundreds of custom orders received by Yuquan Pavilion in less than half a month.
The other artifact refiners and shopkeepers stared at the results of his efforts in shock upon his return. They realized that Zhou Yang had not only succeeded in meeting the expectations of his customers but also earned thousands of lower-tier spiritual stones despite the deduction of the compensation of material cost due to the failures!
And since Zhou Yang had completed all the orders by himself, he only needed to hand over 30% of his earnings to his clan.
“Wow, what a crafty kid. Look at the orders they have completed. Since they had only received less than ten orders for custom Advanced Grade 2 magical artifacts, the kid was able to use the fees earned from the successful refinement of Lower and Intermediate Grade 2 magical artifacts to cover the cost of the failed refinement of Advanced Grade 2 magical artifacts. No wonder he gained such a huge profit instead of making a loss!”
Most immortal cultivators were quite intelligent. They simply needed a short amount of time to observe the results of Zhou Yang’s strategy to realize how cunning he had been.
Every artifact refiner knew that being an Advanced Grade 2 artifact refiner meant that refining Lower Grade 2 magical artifacts would bring more profit than losses.
However, due to the way magical artifacts were valued in the marketplace, rogue cultivators would rather buy than put in orders for custom magical artifacts, which only gave artifact refiners more profits.
Moreover, unlike Zhou Yang who was able to accomplish so much mainly because he wanted to kill two birds with one stone – to improve his artifact refinement skills and success rates as well as bring in more profit to the Zhou clan’s business – the usual artifact refiners belonged to larger and wealthier clans and sects with a reliable supply of refining materials for them to work on their artifact refinement whenever they wanted.
Before Zhou Yang came along, none of the artifact refiners had realized the beneficial concept of low-profit margin, high sales volume. By simply completing 30%-50% of a large volume of custom magical artifact orders, artifact refiners could already bring in a lot of profit.
“Alright, I can’t do this anymore. I must lower the prices of my service. Zhou Yang’s success rate of refining an Advanced Grade 2 magical weapon was only at 30% but mine is already at 40%!”
“Cut the price. We must cut the price. If we can make more money by cutting the price, why not?”
“We can’t let the Zhou clan take all our business. The Luo clan needs to earn money too!”
When the competitors realized what Zhou Yang had done, they decided to lower the prices of their services to re-enter the competition.
Unfortunately, the competitors soon discovered that despite their efforts to follow in the footstep of Yuquan Pavilion, rogue cultivators still preferred to be patrons of the Zhou clan’s business.
No matter how much they try to convince potential customers that their artifact refinement skills and success rates were better than Zhou Yang’s, it was pointless. Zhou Yang had established his and Yuquan Pavilion’s credibility with one big move and there was nothing the other artifact refiners in the marketplace could do about it except watch the Zhou clan continue to make huge amounts of profits. It didn’t help that news of the Zhou clan’s services had spread far and wide, causing their sales to increase exponentially.
And all of this was part of Zhou Yang’s plan.
His experience in his previous life made him aware of the importance of first impressions more than anyone else here. As long as immortal cultivators were still human beings, their mentality would not be any different from mortals in this regard.
“Even if someone surpassed me in terms of their Artifact Refinement Technique, it won’t be a big deal. Jinsha Square City may be big but there is still a limited number of rogue cultivators. Within a few moments, half of the customer population will be Yuquan Pavilion’s patrons. By the time we have the entire customer population as our patrons, my Artifact Refinement Technique would have reached new heights as well.”
Zhou Yang smiled confidently. It was as if he had the entire market ]in the palm of his hands.
And it was indeed the case. Although all the magical artifact stores were desperately advertising how good their artifact refiners’ skills were, the rogue cultivators who came from afar to get their custom magical artifacts refined with the materials they had brought had mainly heard of – and thus preferred – Yuquan Pavilion.
The rogue cultivators were only this biased because they used to be taken advantage of by the other artifact refiners of immortal cultivation clans and sects by being made to pay higher for less.
As such, the other stores’ efforts backfired – the more they advertised themselves, the more the rogue cultivators avoided them, suspecting their intentions to be as impure and corrupted as ever.
Of course, there were also rogue cultivators who had suffered losses at Yuquan Pavilion and decided to frequent the competitor’s business. However, there were more customers who still had faith in Yuquan Pavilion than there were dissatisfied customers.
Eventually, the number of customers frequenting Yuquan Pavilion made up 60% of the entire customer population of Jinsha Square City. The other shops, including the Chen clan’s magical artifact shop, could only watch with envy and hatred as they resolved to pick up Yuquan Pavilion’s leftovers despite their pride and dignity.
The more successful Zhou Yang’s strategy was, the bolder he became – he started to take on more orders for custom Advanced Grade 2 magical artifacts.
He had already racked up enough spiritual stones that he was willing to make sacrifices just to improve his Artifact Refinement Technique.
Even if he started to run out of money, he already knew how he could earn them back. However, missing the opportunity to improve his Artifact Refinement Technique through the large-scale refinement of Advanced Grade 2 magical artifacts was not something he could afford. Opportunity never knocked twice. If he passed it up, he might have to spend more time, effort, and resources after.
His heart was as clear as a mirror – he knew what he had to do.
Unfortunately, the Earth Fire chamber was not a comfortable place to spend long periods of time in. Though Earth Fire had been suppressed and purified by the array formation and magical artifact, it had a very fiery Qi which would negatively affect the body and mind of even an Advanced-Stage Qi Refinement cultivator like Zhou Yang who practiced Fire-based cultivation methods if he stayed in there for too long.
That was one of the reasons Zhou Yang had developed his previous schedule – refining for two days and resting for a day. But it was no longer possible for Zhou Yang to follow this schedule because he could no longer afford to leave his Earth Fire chamber whenever he wanted since it would immediately be occupied by other artifact refiners who had followed in his footsteps and now needed to rent Earth Fire chambers to complete the higher volume of orders they had received. In other words, once he left the Grade C Earth Fire chamber, there was no guarantee that he would be able to rent one again. He might not be able to rent a Grade B Earth Fire chamber either.
Therefore, to keep up Yuquan Pavilion’s business, make a name for himself, and improve his Artifact Refinement Technique, Zhou Yang had to revert to what he used to hate doing in his previous life – staying up late and working overtime – and endure whatever discomforts he was facing as he remained in the Earth Fire chamber.
This went on for a month but by that time, Zhou Yang had refined magical artifacts more than ten times per day on average. His success rate of artifact refinement had also steadily increased. By the time he walked out of the Earth Fire chamber, his success rate of refining an Advanced Grade 2 magical artifact had already reached more than 40%.
With that kind of success rate, he could guarantee no losses when accepting custom orders to refine Advanced Grade 2 magical artifacts, no matter the order volume.
Other than the great improvement in refining techniques, during his month-long high-intensity artifact refinement period, Zhou Yang was also pleasantly surprised to find that the bottleneck he was facing to break through to Qi Refinement Level 9 was also slowly opening up. He predicted that it would only be another year at most until he would finally be able to break through to Qi Refinement Level 9..