It was well before sunrise when Xavier woke up, and he still felt like crap. After stretching for a bit, he relit the fire that had gone out sometime in the night, then began cultivating. By the time the sun did rise the cave dwelling was nice and warm, and Xavier felt far better than he had. After eating some grilled boar, Xavier used part of a bone ingot to create several more beast controlling plates.
The first thing Xavier did when he exited the cave dwelling was to order First and Second to the soul banner. When he arrived, they looked better than they did yesterday but still looked weakened. This was a normal process of changing normal ghosts into ghosts that could cultivate to grow stronger. They were no different from him when he first started to cultivate. When he first found the inheritance site and began cultivating, he transformed from a very strong martial artist that inspired fear in his enemies to a very weak cultivator that had to run or hide from his enemies to survive. In less than a week First and Second would break through to the first layer of Qi Condensation and could be used again. But for now, they were useless and were stored inside the soul banner.
Two ravens flew in the sky to locate a small group of wild boars while two ghost boars followed Xavier as guards. The ravens quickly found several groups of wild boars, including one that had twenty-four. This was the one Xavier picked. Like before he used a ghost boar to possess a wild boar and feed it pills while having the ghost boar circulate the spirit energy in its body. After dispatching the remaining boars and pulling their souls into the soul banner to be refined by the soul lantern, he left the new spirit beasts to devour the remains.
On the way back to his processing area, Xavier was gathering the spirit herbs he would need to transform blood into ink. In the next day or so he would be making ink from the blood of the three spirit beasts that were taking up most of the space in his storage bags. He would need it to inscribe the runes for First and Second's weapons and armor. Xavier's plan was to turn First and Second into death knights, armored warriors that fight with weapons.
For a ghost cultivator, choosing the kind of ghost to use is an important decision. Some choose human souls as the base of their ghost armies, some choose the souls of spirit beasts, while other choose to create abominations. Xavier former ghost army was comprised of 90% human souls, 8% beast souls, and 2% abominations. Human souls were easy to get; all he had to do was wait till a couple of mortal kingdoms went to war and harvest the souls of the fallen. Spirit beast souls were also easy to get but Xavier only chose spirit beasts to use for scouting, tracking, and for roles as beasts of burden to supplement his human ghosts. As for the amount of abominations he had, it's not like he wouldn't have liked more but the knowledge of the various types of abominations and materials to create them were expensive and he had always been poor.
After deciding on what kind of ghosts to use, the ghost cultivator needs to decide on what types of ghosts to use. Each type corresponds to a type of cultivator. Fighters correspond to body cultivators, but instead strengthening their bones and flesh with arduous training, they have highly refined bone steel with strengthening arrays. They can also have arrays to harden the bone steel, increase its size, increase its weigh, and to alter the shape of their bone steel components to create blades and spikes. Their bulky bodies wade into battle punching and slashing enemies to cause physical damage and inflect ghost poison. Ghost knights corresponds to sword cultivators. They are armored ghost that use weapons to attack close up or from a distance. Assassins correspond to cultivators that attack with stealth techniques. They are usually made to look tall and thin with long arms and sharp claws. They move through the shadows to slash and stab their enemies to inflect poison. Casters correspond to cultivators that prefer to fight using spells. Casters are rare for most ghost cultivators to own due to the cost of buying the various spells capable of being used by ghosts. Xavier owns a full set of spells for fire and shadow up to Golden Core, water and earth spells to Foundation Establishment, and some spells for Qi Condensation rank for several other types. The last of the five standard types of ghost soldiers are the support type, they use spells to heal humans or ghosts, increase or decrease spell damage, or curse the enemy. This is a type of ghost soldier that Xavier was never able to own due to the lack of people selling the necessary spells and exceptionally high price for the very few that he did find.
This time around he hoped to be able to improve his alchemy skills enough that when he returned to the sect, he would be able to sell enough pills to slowly buy the knowledge he needed to create a far stronger army than he had before and improve his cultivation. Xavier already had the knowledge of his first time but that was nothing. It was like reading a few pages from several dozen books in a vast library, it was enough to allow him to make a living, but it was nowhere enough to rise beyond being a poor outer court sect disciple.
When he had gathered more spirit herbs than he should need, Xavier let First and Second out of the soul banner and begin cultivating again. After placing the soul banner halfway between the processing area and his cave dwelling, Xavier headed to the stream to begin processing the spirit beast corpses. The first thing he did was use several bone ingots to make a barrel large enough to hold all the blood of one of the spirit beasts, so he didn't have to make ink in so many smaller batches. Then he used bone ingots to make tools, a longer stirring stick, a long thin boning knife, a skinning knife, and a cleaver large enough to hack through the bones of the spirit beasts.
These tools were nothing special, but the flesh and bones of these spirit beasts were stronger than the wild boar he had processed before and would wear down the iron tools before he was done. After draining the blood of one of the spirit beasts and processing it Xavier was left with a blood red ink instead of the dark red ink he got from the wild boar's blood. This blood red ink was just like the tools he had just created an upgrade from normal materials to supernatural materials that were stronger and beyond the grade of what mortals could create.
With the blood removed and processed, Xavier began to skin the spirit beast. While he didn't need the hide to remain in a pristine condition as the hide he used for his soul banner, but he still took his time and was careful not to damage it. Depending on how far he wanted to process these hides still had many uses or could be sold to other cultivators in the future. Next came breaking down the body of the spirit beast for its meat. He had been eating the meat of the first boar he killed two or three times a day since he got here and had only eaten a fraction of the total mass, and now he was going to have three times as much.
By the time Xavier was done processing all three spirit beasts it was late in the afternoon. He was covered in blood and had small bits of meat stuck to him. He wanted nothing more than to take a warm bath and change his clothes.