He had lived inside the tomb for about a week, only stepping out to relive himself. He had enough food to last another week but would run out of water in two days. If he had needed to, he would have melted snow for drinking water.
To enter the forest, Xaiver had used tree sap and a striker to light a mushroom on fire then placed spirit grasses on it to smolder, but leaving he used his ghost flames to start the fire. He could have controlled the ghosts with spells, but that would require effort, spiritual energy, and time, none of which he wanted to waste when he could just use a method he knew worked well.
Reaching the edge of the forest, Xaiver was greeted with mid-thigh high snow as far as he could see.
"This... is going to take some time."
Whether it was spells or martial art techniques, Xavier knew plenty that would allow him to move through or on top of the snow and allow him to return home within an hour. But he was too weak to use any of them and could only make his way through the snow by walking.
Four hours, it had taken him four hours to get to his home, this included the several times he had to stop and use his ghost flames to warm himself up. The inside of his home wasn't any warmer than outside having sat empty and unheated for a week. Walking to the fireplace, he tossed several logs inside. Then he sat down and brought out cultivation manuals of the fire worshiping inheritance, tearing out several pages he crumbled them up before placing them under the logs and lit them on fire. The logs in the fireplace were slowly catching fire, but it would take a couple of hours for the house to warm up.
While the fire continued to grow, Xaiver used a bucket to bring water from the water well in the kitchen and emptied it into a barrel in the bathroom. He was going to take a bath; he needed to war up after trudging through the snow for so long, and after sweating so much in the tomb, he stank. Trip after trip and bit by bit, the barrel slowly filled up. When it was full, Xavier stripped off his close and plunged an arm in. The inside of the barrel glowed with a pale sickly green color; he had used his ghost fire inside the water to warm it up. Given the choice of using ghost fire or heating a tea pot dozens of times to slowly heat the water, he chose to use his ghost fire. It was a flame that only needed spiritual energy to burn, using it to heat up some water was a waste of spirit energy. He would prefer using a simple heating array to save his spiritual energy, but he didn't have the materials to make one.
Cultivators judged fire spells by lethality, usefulness in alchemy, and usefulness in artifact refining. Ghost fire was an extremely lethal fire spell, but was almost worthless for alchemy, and mediocre for artifact refining. There were hundreds of different kinds of fire spells for various applications, the more they excel in one area, the weaker they are in others. The Soul Controlling Sect was not known for its alchemy or artifact refining skills, they were known for being an extremely powerful sect of killers, and anything they did make, was very lethal.
Xavier got in the barrel when the water was hot enough. As soon as he did, the chilled feeling he had melted away in the warmth of the water. Sitting in the bath he began to plan his next moves. He needed to head to that shop again and buy some things for hunting boars, then he would head for spoiled wastes. There he would hunt a large amount of boars and begin refining a soul banner. Then it would be bandit hunting time, he would use their souls to construct his ghost army. And once he could defend himself, he would leave the cult's lands and try to find the hidden cultivator black markets. If they didn't have a habit of moving every few years Xavier could just use his memories to find them, but the ones he knew wouldn't be there for another fifty to sixty years.
His primary goal was to break through to Foundation Establishment as quickly as he could so he could leave for the mainland. He wanted to return to the Soul Controlling Sect; it was his hope that using everything he learned from his old memories to make it into the inner sect. This would allow him access to spells, techniques, knowledge, and cultivation recourses that he could only dream about in his first time around. His past self was not rich, and he did not come from a powerful cultivation family. He may have been at Core Formation, but those from the inner sect that were of the same rank openly mocked him, those at Foundation Establishment ignored him, and even those at Qi Condensation showed him no respect. Those of the outer sect had to work ten times harder than everyone around to just to get a fraction of what the inner sect got.
When the bath water lost its warmth, he got out, and after drying off he changed into his least dirty clothes. Gathering his dirty clothes, he placed them in a bag and hung it from a hook just outside his front door. Tomorrow morning the bag of dirty clothes would disappear and later in the day would return with freshly laundered clothes.
Sitting in front of the fire, Xaiver pulled out the sword cultivating manuals to read. He was interested in seeing if there was anything in these manuals he could use. These manuals could be broken down into sperate components; the cultivation technique, signature spells and techniques that could only be used those using the cultivation technique, sect spells and techniques, and common spells and techniques.
The cultivation technique was useless to him he had already using the Soul Controlling Sects cultivation technique, and the signature spells and techniques were also useless to him. The sect spells and techniques were not only useless to him, but they were also dangerous for him to learn. If he used the in front of his sect mates, they think that he was a spy and try to kill him. This only left the common spells and techniques, but he knew most of the already and the rest weren't worth learning. This meant these manuals were destained to share the same fate as the fire worshipper's manual, to be used as fire starters or to wipe his ass after a shit.
Now it was time to check out the alchemy inheritance manuals, he would look for anything that he could use to improve his alchemy skills and reading the many alchemy recipes. While some of what he was going to read would be useless, other things wouldn't, ad as long as he didn't use them in front of people, no one would know he had them. It wasn't like he gathered a crowd every time he tried to use alchemy.