There is a limit to how much life energy plants will be willing to give away for free before they start to experience adverse effects.
Even with the Plant Affinity and Communication talent, no plant will give them life energy at the cost of their lives. So those who want life energy to cultivate with will have to pay for the life energy with something that the plants want.
To top things off, he has to always go looking for plants to gain life energy from them. Compared to the benefits that he gains from the Fate Binding divine ability, which enables him to cultivate faster no matter where he is, using the wood vessel seems lackluster.
He was thinking about this when he received a message from Stella asking about the storm over his island. She was asking to know if something had gone wrong with his cultivation.
She can't tell what is going on with him directly, but she can still sense what's going on around him. She can also track him, so she knew that he was right under the storm when it appeared.
He told her that he was just practicing a spell and that he was fine. Then he went into his house to pack his things for the trip.
His preparations didn't take much time. What he did after securing his trump cards was to get pills. He got energy replenishing pills as he would need them outside in the sect.
After his fight with Green Viper, he knows more about the importance of environmental mana. The lack of environmental mana didn't affect him much during the fight with Green Viper since he was fighting just one person and the fight was a spar, not a life and death match. But he is sure that won't be the case for the upcoming war.
In the war that he is going to fight in, it is highly likely that he will find himself in a situation where there are many people who want to kill him. In that kind of situation, he will expend his energy quickly, and the environment mana won't be able to replenish his energy stores quickly enough.
What could make things worse than being surrounded by enemies on all sides is to run out of energy needed to fight and resist. So in order to prevent the worst-case scenario, he gritted his teeth and spent money on energy replenishing pills.
He had to sacrifice a lot of money to get the energy replenishing pills. This is because pills that affect golden core cultivators are expensive.
As cultivators grow stronger, it becomes more and more difficult for external substances to affect them. This resistance to external influence helps them resist attacks better, but it also makes it more difficult for pills to affect cultivators.
This increase in the resistance of cultivators also increases the difficulty of making pills that can affect cultivators. So anyone who wants to become an accomplished pill refiner must be very talented. This strict requirement for pill refinement is the main reason why the Red and Blue Fire sect declined so much.
The Red and Blue Fire sect became incapable of making pills that can affect rank 6 and rank 7 cultivators. They stopped producing pills that help cultivators transcend to rank 6 and rank 7, which meant that they couldn't produce rank 6 and rank 7 cultivators.
Over time, they declined from their once glorious past to what they have become now. Now they are fighting some backward sect in a backward part of the world of Ethera for a rank 4 secret realm. In turn, they are making Arthur spend his precious money on pills.
He said to himself as he examined the pills, "This had better be worth it. They have to have a lot of loot for me to take, or I would have made a loss for buying this pill."
He also cursed the pills for being so expensive. Then he returned to making other preparations, such as polishing his weapons.
After a few hours of preparing himself for battle, he returned to cultivating. He pulled mana into his golden core and refined a part of it into a sliver of essence that strengthened his golden core permanently.
The permanent improvement of his golden core is the core of cultivation for him. Once his golden core has been strengthened enough, it will undergo another transformation, which will in turn liberate the power of his body and mind.
He can use pills to artificially improve the quality of his golden core, but the cost will be prohibitive. Rather than spend money on that, he spends money on formations.
His decades of practice with formations have helped him master rank 5 formations. He even managed to install one on his hammer. The materials for this cost him a lot of resources, but it was worth it for him compared to spending money on something he could get by being patient.
He is also cultivating the vessel sigil techniques. But it is the virtual copies in his mind that are cultivating them for him.
For now, he is focusing on the lightning vessel sigil technique because it is the one that grants him power, and power is the most important thing in the world.
He had stopped cultivating the wood vessel sigil technique and let it remain stuck at 1% after learning it. Once he has mastered the lightning vessel sigil to 100%, he will resume cultivating the wood vessel sigil technique.
By his estimates, it will take about 100 years for him to master the lightning vessel sigil technique to 100%. This is even with the help of 5 virtual copies in his mind, working night and day nonstop on it.
If not for the virtual copies, he would have needed 500 years to master the lightning vessel sigil technique to 100%. Even with his long lifespan of 900 years, of which he has already spent 76, it would be impossible for him to master both the wood and lightning vessel sigil technique.