He built one stone chamber after another within the mountain cave, widened the passage leading inside, and embedded large luminous stones into the walls every few meters along both sides.
The entrance was also turned into a wide stone gate.
After that, he activated a fourth-grade formation disk that had been upgraded through repeated fusion to secure the area.
The stone gate, passage, and the entire mountain cave spirit vein were concealed and protected within a fourth-grade formation.
As long as there were sufficient spirit stones to supply it, the area covered by the formation could only be broken by late Nascent Soul cultivators and Deity Transformation cultivators.
His social connections were simple and he was unlikely to provoke those powerful cultivators with strong backgrounds and high cultivation.
With this formation in place, at least within Snowy Cave Mountain, his crisis was greatly reduced.
After everything was properly arranged, Xiao Shou officially began his secluded cultivation life.
Each day he cultivated for three to four hours.
Once his dantian became full, he would stop cultivation.
Originally, he planned to use spiritual rice and spiritual flour to cook delicious meals and satisfy his appetite, but he had no talent for preparing spiritual ingredients.
Every time he cooked, he ended up producing strange and unpleasant tasting dishes.
In the end, he had no choice but to give up this hobby and rely on fasting pills for sustenance.
During cultivation breaks, he would read various jade slips stored in his pouch.
He would also casually fuse miscellaneous items he did not recognize, turning them into even stranger things to pass the time.
In particular, the cyan-green stone that could conceal spiritual energy, a specialty of Snowy Cave Mountain, after four rounds of fusion, actually advanced into a top-grade artifact refining material called Emerald Hidden Stone.
It could increase the hardness of refined artifacts, conceal the spiritual energy emitted when the artifact was activated, and hide its shape, granting the artifact an invisibility-like function.
Such a powerful material caused Xiao Shou to become obsessed with fusing Emerald Hidden Stone for a period of time.
However, after the novelty wore off and he had filled three stone chambers with materials, he grew bored and stopped doing it.
More than three months passed like this.
With an extremely abundant supply of spiritual energy, Xiao Shou's cultivation advanced to the ninth level of the first cycle of Qi Refining.
However, his boredom had reached its peak.
In a world without computers to pass time, where daily life consisted of six hours of cultivation, several hours of technique practice, and no need for sleep, even three months of seclusion had reached Xiao Shou's limit.
Even though he was cultivating immortality, he had never cultivated his state of mind.
He still possessed the heart of an ordinary mortal.
One day, Xiao Shou could no longer endure the loneliness.
He packed up his belongings, brought what he believed to be sufficient equipment to defend against all threats below the Nascent Soul stage, activated a fourth-grade concealment talisman, and rode his wooden crane puppet toward Azure Origin City.
After more than five hours of travel, he finally arrived.
After paying the city entry fee, his previous temporary identity token had already expired, so he had to apply for a new one.
He finally entered Azure Origin City before nightfall.
Based on experience from reading novels, he indeed found cultivators near the city gate who functioned like modern brokers.
As long as one had spirit stones, they could provide guidance, introduce reliable shops, explain city conditions, and even describe faction distributions.
Xiao Shou paid spirit stones and gained a much more detailed understanding of Azure Origin City.
The entire Azure Origin City had three major first-rate cultivation aristocratic families, namely the Gou family, the Rong family, and the Mao family.
Below the first-rate families were nine second-rate families, and more than ten third-rate families, along with numerous unranked small families.
Inside the city, there were many industries belonging to different families, while outside the city, for millions of miles, mines, spiritual medicine mountains, and other resources were all divided among various powers.
These things had nothing to do with him, so Xiao Shou did not bother to understand them further.
In any case, the original book had stated that Snowy Cave Mountain would remain ownerless until more than a hundred years later.
The current problem was that because his Absolute Fusion ability had advanced to the fourth level, many things needed to be re-fused and upgraded.
Combined with the boredom during cultivation, he also wanted to learn other things to pass the time.
After all, in many novels he had read before.
The male and female protagonists in cultivation stories often excelled in certain skills, such as alchemy, artifact refining, formation arrays, or talisman crafting, and then became grandmasters.
He was not a protagonist, so he did not aim to become a grandmaster, but at the very least he should learn one skill and become proficient in it.
Because of this, he would need to buy basic cultivation manuals for these skills, bring them back to upgrade through fusion, and also purchase miscellaneous notes and recorded jade slips that documented stories of this world.
These could be used like novels to pass cultivation time, and also allow him to better understand the entire Heaven Origin Realm.
Therefore, he had quite a lot of things to buy, and it would not be possible to finish purchasing everything in one go.
However, he also did not want to make multiple trips.
After all, from what he had read in novels, the entire Azure Origin City looked to him like a giant beast with its mouth open.
One careless mistake and he might never come out again.
So he would need to stay in the city for a few days.
Since it was already getting dark today, it was not suitable to visit major shops.
Following the advice of the cultivator he had met earlier, he decided to go to a relatively safe inn where no major cultivators frequented, where prices were reasonable and most residents were Qi Refining and Foundation Establishment cultivators.