After discussing a few more things, Xiang Yu handed Li Yao hundreds of heavenly grade foods that he had been spam-creating with his cooking clone before she left.

After they had left, he fell into deep contemplation.

With such a small time frame before the battle, he didn’t know how far she could advance in her cultivation. She probably wouldn’t reach the Void Traversing realm, and perhaps that was for the better. If she started breaking through, he had no idea how long that would take for someone with her foundation.

Still, the heavenly grade foods should provide enough energy for her to reach the peak of Soul Formation realm.

Xiang Yu had run some simulations earlier and confirmed that complete Li Yao at the peak of Soul Formation realm should be evenly matched with his current combat power at peak Integration realm. This gave him some confidence, though he knew it still probably wouldn’t be enough.

He thought to himself that although this wasn’t much compared to the enemy, he was hoping that once they destroyed the flowers and the treasure was damaged, the combat power of the demon would decline from Mahayana realm to maybe something at the Tribulation realm or Integration if they have extremely good rng.

In that weakened state, they should both be able to put up a fight. Though the more he thought about it, the more unrealistic it sounded. Would they really be able to match such a powerful opponent, even in a weakened state?

He shook his head and sighed again.

He placed his hopes on their heavenly grade weapons making a difference. That’s right – he was also planning to upgrade Li Yao’s weapon for this battle. He hoped that their two weapons would give them at least some fighting chance against a Tribulation realm opponent.

There was also the heavenly grade formation to consider, but he wasn’t sure if he could count on it. The demon might break through their defensive formations before his clones could successfully destroy all the flowers across the continents.

Of course he could always destroy the flowers earlier, but that would just put the demon on high alert and might prevent her from attacking. The optimal timing would be to destroy the flowers when she was at their doorstep, then instantly deploy their attacking formation while she was still dazed from the sudden power loss.

If this strategy succeeded perfectly, they wouldn’t even need to engage in direct combat at all. But such perfect execution was probably too much to hope for.

This plan didn’t even take into consideration the potential resistance he might face while trying to destroy the flower in the Central Continent.

He sighed once more, then looked down at his spatial ring which he had filled with all sorts of heavenly grade talismans and runes he’d been accumulating for this kind of situation. Although these explosive talismans possessed enough destructive power to seriously damage or even completely annihilate the demon, he needed to find the perfect opportunity to use them.

Besides timing, he also needed an escape method. Using a heavenly grade explosion talisman would create such a devastating area of effect that he and Li Yao would also be caught in the blast radius. He would need to figure out how to protect them from it.

Well, he would find a solution somehow.

First, he needed to deal with the clone problem that had been weighing on his mind.

Since he couldn’t use his regular clones for the flower destruction mission, he needed to create the 2.0 clones. But this presented a significant challenge – his bloodline wasn’t currently strong enough to create all five clones he needed to destroy the five flowers.

That’s why he had decided to create three of the clones today. Although this would push his bloodline to the limit, almost to the point of causing his bloodline to regress, he felt this sacrifice was necessary.

It was still relatively early in the day, which meant he should have enough time to recover his bloodline strength to the point where he could create the remaining two clones tomorrow. He definitely didn’t want to overexert his bloodline on the actual day of the battle as that might weaken some of his abilities that relied on his bloodline power like regeneration.

…

The lightning, metal, and earth clones walked over to Xiang Yu.

Without a word, they reached out to him and were immediately reabsorbed back into his body.

Xiang Yu took a deep breath and began recreating them. Each recreation took slightly longer as he strained his bloodline but he was eventually able to pull it off.

Once he finished recreating all three, his body felt extremely weakened. He could feel that something was wrong within his body and he was about to regress in bloodline level.

He tried a few breathing exercises but it wasn’t helping. Just as he was wondering if he might actually regress, the bloodlines intensified their fight for territory after sensing each other’s weakness, restoring some of the lost bloodline essence in the process and pulling him out of the brink of regress, only then could he relax a bit.

Since these new clones could use all elements, Xiang Yu could no longer refer to them by their elements. Instead, he assigned them numbers, from now on, they would be Number One, Number Two, and Number Three. The trio would work together on blacksmithing as Xiang Yu really wanted those two weapons ready by tomorrow.

With his clones assigned their tasks, Xiang Yu began producing yin-yang and chaos crystals for the weapon. Yes, he had decided to incorporate these into the mixture as well.

He sighed inwardly, thinking that if he had broken through to immortal-grade blacksmithing, he could have crafted a truly immortal-grade weapon instead. Too bad he didn’t have much time to grow.

Still, he hadn’t completely given up and had something else in mind.

He had heard about upgradeable weapons from the empress and intended to create one. His plan for this was to produce a soul partition – not a fully conscious one as he could only create ten of those and two were already permanently lost so he didn’t want to lose any more.

Instead, he would produce an incomplete partition and embed it within the weapon during the crafting process. This would function as a weapon spirit, enhancing his connection to the weapon while simultaneously acting as a DRM check to prevent people from stealing it.

This would allow him to upgrade the weapon by feeding various crystals to the spirit. When he discovered new concepts, he could condense crystals for them and feed them to the spirit to incorporate additional attributes to the weapon.

“Kekeke,” Xiang Yu chuckled at his own cleverness before catching his reflection in the spring water. He quickly composed his expression to something more dignified.

“It seems the blacksmith in me is coming out”

…

Author’s Corner

“two were already permanently lost” : not really but like kinda. One is with yao yao, good luck getting it back. And the other one is merged with the spirit vein as a new body and he can’t get it back without harming the spirit vein.