The Life Ability is a passive ability of rank 3 cultivation, so every rank 3 cultivator possesses it. This means that he can carry it with him when he reverses time.
Cultivators of different pathways create their Life Ability in various ways, but for forgers, they literally forge their Life Ability. For Forgers, their Life Ability is a weapon or artifact that they forge.
He must use an artifact forged with his blood and highly compatible with his Core Metac for his Life Ability. This is why he is so dedicated to learning how to forge instead of relying on buying weapons and artifacts with money that he earns from gambling.
So until he is done learning how to forge, he won’t be spending time on anything else or getting rank 3 Metacs. And as the situation will have it, the Rusty Bolts Society has a lot to teach him.
The Rusty Bolts Society mainly forges exoskeleton armor, mechs, puppets, and golems. But they forge miscellaneous tools like hammers, swords, spears, knives, etc.
They call weapons miscellaneous tools. It is clear that they look down on weapons.
Loki had to agree with them about this when he saw the intricate steps and the difficulty involved in forging puppets, golems, exoskeleton armor, and mechs compared to forging weapons. The difficulty between them made the forging of weapons the practice stage for novices compared to the skill needed to forge puppets.
But this comparison didn’t mean that it was easy to forge weapons or that it was useless to learn how to forge weapons. Weapons were also difficult to forge, and the skills acquired from learning how to forge weapons were also useful for forging more complicated things.
This was why Loki was willing to learn how to forge everything he could learn to forge. Since he didn’t need to spend time refining his internal energy, his cultivation never lagged behind.
The best part was that learning how to forge also increased his energy manipulation skill. This was because he was constantly using Metacs during the forging process.
So not only did his skill not lag behind because of his focus on learning how to forge, but it also increased, and it increased rapidly. It increased so fast that it brought a smile to his face anytime he thought of forging.
The refining of his Dao Heart didn’t lag behind either. This was because the Sky Raising technique has a passive component that would ensure that his Dao Heart grew stronger the more he loves and the more experiences he gains.
All of these made his experience at the Rusty Bolts Society a good time. He didn’t care about his bad accommodations when he rarely spent time there.
The same couldn’t be said about the six people who came with him. They were having a hard time just surviving because they needed money for food and money for Metacs. Their situation was made extra difficult by the 1,000 energy stones that they had to pay the sect every month.
The need to make the monthly payment to the sect meant that they had to find a way to earn money, so they couldn’t dedicate all of their time to learning how to forge as Loki could.
As for Loki, many people had noticed that there was something abnormal about him because of the fact that he was rarely tired. They weren’t sure what was so wrong about him because he was physically strong and was rich.
But if he had gone ahead to replace all his Metacs with their rank 3 versions and was using them 24/7 to forge, they would surely be able to identify what was so abnormal about him. That would surely be problematic because everyone would like to possess whatever he had that made him have infinite energy recovery.
However, no matter how he tried to lay low, trouble still came looking for him. The trouble came two months after he joined the Rusty Bolts Society.
It happened on a day that was like any other day. He hadn’t slept last night and had stayed up to work. The other members of the society were just resuming their work for the day when an explosion shook the factory.
Loki thought that a furnace had exploded, so he looked over with nonchalance. But when he looked over, what he saw was that the front door and a large portion of the front wall of the factory had been destroyed by an explosion.
So he thought to himself, "From the looks of things, the source of the explosion was from outside the factory."
As he thought of this, someone appeared in the large hole in the wall. Because of the bright light coming from the opening in the wall, they could see that this person’s skin was golden.
The person said to them in a booming voice, "Leave if you don’t want to die."
Their voice was so loud that it seemed as if they had spoken through a loudspeaker. But no one was paying attention to that or his golem skin.
His words were like a matchstick thrown into a barrel of fuel. They caused the crowd to explode in panic. Everyone began to scramble in a bid to escape.
Meanwhile, after the golden person had warned them, he turned his attention to the rest of the building. He pointed his hand to the rest of the wall as if he was pushing it. But the wall didn’t budge at all.
What happened next was that a hole appeared in the man’s hand, and an unassuming black ball was ejected from the hole towards the wall.
When this black ball struck the wall, it suddenly expanded into a ball of fire. This caused an explosion that destroyed another section of the wall.
The man stopped what he was doing to stare at them and say, "Leave if you don’t want to die."
Then it turned its head back to the wall. Walked closer to the intact portion and lobbed another explosive ball at it.