Zhou Fan reached through space and grabbed a large amount of 8th rank plants before strengthening them. They were still fairly common within the world, so he had gained more than enough.
After twenty thousand years, Zhou Fan mastered the 9th rank, or inner world rank, pills. It felt like a much more arduous and time taking process than the previous ranks, but Zhou Fan was still relatively good.
The hardest part was now directly in front of him. Not only would gathering the materials needed be harder, but the level of difficulty would finally reach the same realm as him. He expected it to be twenty times harder at least, but who knew what would happen.
A million years later, Zhou Fan completely mastered tenth rank pills. As he had expected, it was quite a bit more difficult. It was much more than twenty times more difficult. If not for his talent, he doubted that he would ever be able to comprehend pill making to the tenth rank as a 2nd level god realm cultivator.
As expected, there were new pills at the tenth rank. The most interesting of the new pills were the ones that involved divinity. While the main focus was recovering divinity faster, there were also some that could speed it up.
There was little use to speeding it up since it was already fast enough to handle just about anything in the universe, but the pill would be there if someone ever needed it.
Of course, even a god realm cultivator would find it difficult to make or acquire such a pill that involved divinity. One must not underestimate the amount of skill and plants it took to make a pill that involved divinity. One of the main ingredients was actually one's own divinity, so only a god realm or above cultivator could even fulfill the requirements.
As for the plant requirement, it required around a hundred tenth rank plants in order to successfully attempt to make it. Since even Zhou Fan sometimes failed when making a tenth rank pill, although that was only once every hundred attempts, others were sure to struggle to make such high grade pills.
Now that he was done with pill making, Zhou Fan could move on to the last art he planned on practicing. Although there were many sub arts such as poisoning, cloth making, and designing, they were really just branches of the five main arts.
Those arts were formations, arrays, talismans, which could also be called a sub art, alchemy, and forging.
He planned to go through forging which would likely be extremely easy due to his experience in other arts, but he first wanted to go through what he had learned in the last long years.
As he planned, Zhou Fan spent the next hundred years digesting all of the information that he had learned during his studies of the arts.
When he came out, he did not come out without gains. After remembering all his experiences with arts, he actually came up with a few more formations and arrays. They were ones he had overlooked or simply not thought of.
One example was the hidden void piercing arrow. As soon as it was released from its array or formation, it would hide behind the layers of space it was strong enough to hide behind, and silently sneak up on the target.
Once it was inches away, it would unhide itself and instantly defeat the enemy. While some parts of it required more strength than void traversing or space shattering, so that it could hide behind more layers of space, it was still possible to create at the void traversing realm.
Another one that he had overlooked was a god realm array that could only be created by someone at the god realm. It would take your divinity and the element of your greatest affinity, although Zhou Fan hadn't allowed it to use his chaos Qi, and combine them to make an extremely strong attack.
The best part of the attack was that, while it utterly destroyed all sorts of buildings, materials, and other non living things, it would deal no damage once it hit a living thing. Instead, it would cause them a great deal of pain in an instant, the type of pain depending on the affinity.
For example, a fire element and divinity combo would give them the feeling of their very soul burning. Yes, this array gave the soul pain. Any self respecting cultivator should know that soul pain was thousands of times worse than any other pain there was.
Even damage equivalent to a papercut on the soul would cause pain equivalent to your entire arm being slowly shredded to pieces.
Therefore, this array that only causes pain, and soul pain at that, was an extremely useful tool. It could kill beasts from the pain alone, allowing you to fully harvest their materials without a single bit of damage happening to them.
While killing beasts without harming their physical bodies could also be done via soul attacks, the array was naturally a much better torturer than any other array he had.
While he definitely wouldn't call it the greatest array, it was a very interesting and possibly useful array.
Regardless of its usefulness, Zhou Fan had no plans to use it. It simply wasn't his way of conducting himself.
He would much rather use the million swords array or the great explosion array than use such a pathetic method that could only be used for torture unless the opponent was many realms below you.
Next, Zhou Fan was ready to forge. He had previous experience in creating weapons, but compressing a galaxy into a sword shape and forcing it to stay that way wasn't exactly the proper way. The proper way usually included fire of some sort, although, like pills, there were many ways to forge.
Forging wasn't limited to swords and other weapons, but it could also be used to create armor or other metal/ore made things.
Nevertheless, he had no interest in clothes or weapons that were not swords.