Making the Gathering Spirit Dolls wasn't difficult. Especially now that most of the little paper servants could help Song Miaozhu craft them. She only needed to personally handle the spirit infusion and the nurturing of each item.
Even when the little paper servants crafted the paper figures, Song Miaozhu could still absorb spiritual energy and refine her cultivation. She summoned all the idle paper servants to her side and had them work on Gathering Spirit Dolls, wanting to see how many they could produce in a single day.
Because they were so small, each paper servant needed to cooperate with others just to complete one doll. Fortunately, their minds were linked, and they worked in perfect sync, though their speed still couldn't match hers.
They crafted, and she did too.
By the time she was due at the ghost shop that night for class, they had finished a batch. After channeling spiritual energy into them together, nurturing each one, they had two hundred finished dolls by the end of the day.
Song Miaozhu listed the two hundred Gathering Spirit Dolls in the premium spiritual vault. As expected, they sold out instantly. At thirty thousand contribution points apiece, the batch netted six million contribution points. She exchanged that for RMB, then into hell coins, and finally converted the three hundred million hell coins into three top-grade spirit stones.
But even though she now earned three spirit stones per day, she didn't dare use them as recklessly as she used to. She couldn't afford to pour her entire cultivation into nurturing every spiritual item each day like before.
She still followed the more conservative allocation method from when she was running short. The extra spirit stones she earned now were fully dedicated to nurturing Gathering Spirit Dolls. In the past, she had looked down on these dolls, unimpressed by how little spiritual energy they gathered.
But now she found them invaluable. Using her spirit stones to cultivate more efficient dolls that gathered spiritual energy faster helped her conserve her own supply. It was a perfect tradeoff.
The dolls she sold were only lightly infused with blue spiritual energy—just enough to be considered spiritual items. But the ones she kept for herself had been nurtured for far longer, with much more spiritual energy poured into them. The longer the nurturing, the faster the dolls would accumulate spiritual energy.
Right now, with the world so starved for spiritual energy, that advantage wasn't obvious. But once the spiritual tide arrived, everything would change. Song Miaozhu was preparing for that future. But despite nurturing a mountain of dolls, there was still no sign of the tide.
Living deep in these desolate mountains, spiritual energy was as rare as people. Hardly any fresh energy emerged in this remote place. From the way the Gathering Spirit Dolls drew in energy, it was clear that the rate of new spiritual energy forming in the world was still painfully slow.
The little paper servants lined up for her to infuse them with spiritual energy. She used to simply close her eyes and pour everything in at once, but now she had to stop carefully, bit by bit. Not only did this slow the growth of her spiritual items, but it also left her feeling suffocated and frustrated.
"When will the spiritual tide finally come...?"
She found herself sighing aloud as she calculated how many stones she had left to spend. She couldn't talk about this with anyone else, so she simply sent a message to the Elite Masters group chat:
[Song Miaozhu]: I used to pour my full cultivation into nurturing spiritual items. Now I have to divide that same energy across a hundred of them.
[Master Zhang]:Your full cultivation?
[Yu Lichuan]: A hundred spiritual items?
[Le Pengkun]: Wait a second, are we even in the same era of cultivation?
[Gong Anyan]: Master Song, with that level of nurturing, how strong are your spiritual items getting?
As Elite Masters, they already had far more resources than ordinary cultivators. Even so, none of them dared nurture a hundred spiritual items for personal use. They carefully selected a few standout items from their own creations.
Where ordinary cultivators might focus on a single spiritual item, the Elite Masters might cultivate five or six. They had thought they were doing well. Then they learned Song Miaozhu had been nurturing a hundred for personal use—each time using her full spiritual strength.
How many Gathering Spirit Dolls would you need just to keep up with that?
Everyone lacked spiritual energy, but somehow, Master Song's version of "lacking" was on a completely different level. As for the blue spiritual energy, Song Miaozhu had the little paper servant pass the news to Zhao Huoyan and report it to The SEIU.
Back when she first formed her blue crystal, she had worried that she might have taken a wrong turn. But the way her red, blue, and Azure crystals had all formed followed the exact same pattern.
From one crystal to one layer, with ninety thousand crystals forming a layer. Once nine layers accumulated, the next color crystal would appear.
It followed a clear hierarchy: red was the first tier, Azure the second, and now blue was the third.
The SEIU's classification of "Red Level" and "Azure Level" cultivators had always felt intuitive.
Now, seeing how the structure built upward, Song Miaozhu guessed that seven tiers of crystal levels would be enough to reach the gateway of the spiritual platform realm.
She had a good sense now of the path ahead.
Thanks to her report, The SEIU officially updated its cultivation ranking system. The Blue Level was now publicly recognized.
Elite Masters knew who had broken into the Blue Level, but ordinary cultivators could only guess. But honestly, it wasn't hard to figure out. Who else had more access to spiritual energy than the creator of the Gathering Spirit Dolls?
The spiritual tide hadn't come, yet cultivation couldn't be paused.
Even though energy was scarce, she couldn't afford to stop studying the Secret Art of Paper Crafting just to grind for spirit stones. After reaching the peak of Blue Level Two, Song Miaozhu scaled back production of Gathering Spirit Dolls. She had the little paper servants continue crafting them while she handled the final spirit infusion and nurturing.
That meant only a hundred dolls could be sold each day, netting just one and a half top-grade spirit stones. With lower profits, there was less energy spent on nurturing the dolls. But this gave her time to start crafting new spiritual items.
With her current cultivation, plus the spiritual energy stored in her spiritual platform, she could now attempt more advanced crafts—not just the Paper Vine in Bloom, but also the Heartbound Paper Knot and the Dream-Bridge Fold.
Of the three, she looked forward to the Paper Vine in Bloom the most. She fetched a clay pot from the ghost shop's warehouse and had the little paper servants and paper soldiers dig up some soil from the bamboo grove.
Following the instructions in the Secret Art of Paper Crafting, she crafted a paper vine seed, infused it with spiritual energy, and planted it in the pot. By the next day, when she returned from her lessons at the ghost shop, a glowing paper flower had already sprouted.
She had made the seed from white spirit paper, so the flower was also white, with a very obvious paper texture. If not for the natural way the stem, petals, and core joined together, it would have looked just like a Qingming Festival paper blossom stuck into the soil.
But when she used the Spirit Mirror to examine its function, it showed clearly: the petals could be used to heal wounds and illnesses.