278: Chapter 278 Puppet

1,200 kilometers away, inside the protective barrier, gray powder was still drifting.

What Su Mingyuan did not know was that during the few hours when he deployed defenses, arranged nuclear bombs, and sentenced the portal to death, the old man on the other side of the protective barrier had kept his eyes closed and had not moved a single step.

Daoist Spirit Control was standing right in the center of the open space at this moment, the hem of his robe dragging on the ground, stained with a layer of grayish-white powder—those were the bone fragments of Giants, and some would stick to him when the wind blew.

He did not care, nor did he look down.

He was circulating his Qi.

The Meridians in Daoist Spirit Control's body lit up one by one, and Spiritual Qi circulated along a fixed path; every time a full cycle was completed, the Nascent Soul in his Dantian grew stronger by a fraction.

The Nascent Soul sat cross-legged in the ocean of Spiritual Qi, its facial features identical to his own—emaciated, aged, with white hair and a white beard.

But the Nascent Soul's eyes were open, with a light golden glow revolving in its pupils, much brighter than the pair of eyes outside.

The process of absorbing the Giants did not require his worry.

One hundred years ago, when he fell into this small realm, he crashed into the bottom of the Heavenly Fall Abyss, breaking a major portion of the bones all over his body, and his cultivation plummeted directly from Soul Transformation Stage to Nascent Soul Early Stage, almost causing his cultivation to scatter.

That period of time was the most grueling.

At the bottom of the abyss, there was no light, no sound, and the Spiritual Qi was so sparse that it was as good as non-existent.

He lay in the pile of rubble to recuperate from his injuries for three years before he could barely stand up, and then spent another five years figuring out the situation of this small realm.

There was too little Spiritual Qi.

It was countless tens of thousands of times sparser than the Upper Realm.

If he relied on meditation to absorb Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi to recover his cultivation, based on this concentration, he had calculated that it would take roughly ten thousand years to recover from his injuries.

Ten thousand years, he could not wait.

The other three people who fought to the death with him in that great battle also fell into different small realms.

They were also recovering from their injuries.

If he recovered slower than the others, once the others returned to the Soul Transformation Stage first and came looking for him, he would be dead for sure.

Therefore, Daoist Spirit Control chose another path.

At the bottom of the abyss, there were native indigenous humans.

Their numbers were not large, scattered in tribes, gathering in groups of hundreds or thousands, living in caves and surviving on groundwater and fungi.

These aborigines had no Spiritual Root and could not Cultivate, but they were living people with vital essence of life inside their bodies.

Vital essence and Spiritual Qi were not the same thing, but they could be converted.

What Daoist Spirit Control had his eyes on was not their vital essence.

It was their bodies.

His natal Divine Ability was Puppet arts.

When he was in the Upper Realm, he was famous for controlling Puppets, having thousands of Puppets under his command made of various Materials—wooden Puppets, iron Puppets, jade Puppets, everything was there.

But the best Puppet Materials were never wood or iron blocks, but living people.

Puppets refined from living people naturally had the highest compatibility with the caster's Divine Sense, making manipulation as effortless as moving one's fingers.

More importantly, Puppets refined from living people retained some characteristics of living organisms.

They could eat, digest, convert the ingested organic matter into vital essence, and then have it extracted by the caster.

He captured the first batch of aborigines, about two to three hundred people.

The process was very simple.

With the Divine Sense of a Nascent Soul Cultivator pressing down, these Mortals without any cultivation could not even conceive the thought of resisting, and obediently knelt on the ground trembling.

Then he began refining.

Infusing spiritual power into the bodies of living people, modifying them one by one from Meridians to blood vessels to bones.

Muscle fibers were catalyzed by spiritual power and proliferated wildly, while bones expanded, thickened, and hardened under the stimulation of spiritual power.

A few days later, a person who was originally 1.7 meters tall turned into a 3-meter-tall monster.

The skin split open and healed again, becoming thicker after healing, like a layer of rough leather.

Their facial features became blurred, their eyes shrank into two small holes, and their mouths split to the roots of their ears.

This thing was no longer human.

But it was still alive.

Its heart was beating, blood was flowing, and the digestive System was still operating.

Moreover, it would feel hungry.

The refining process consumed almost all the energy reserves within its body, and the newly refined Puppet was driven mad by hunger, eating anything—stones, soil, fungi.

But the conversion efficiency of these things was too low to fill them up.

And eating living creatures was the fastest.

Eating living people was even faster.

The vital essence inside living people was readily available; after the Puppets ate them, they absorbed it directly, and the conversion efficiency was hundreds of times higher than eating stones.

When in the Upper Realm, this method of feeding Puppets with living people was strictly prohibited by explicit orders.

Once discovered, the lighter punishment was to abolish cultivation and expel them from the Sect, while the heavier punishment was being hunted down jointly by several major Sects.

Even Cultivators at the Soul Transformation Stage did not dare to openly do such things, and could only sneakily refine a few in the dark; if the quantity became too large, it was easy to slip up.

But in this small realm, there were no Sects, no Heavenly Dao covenants, and no one could manage him.

He could refine as many as he wanted and feed as many people as he wanted.

Therefore, he began capturing aborigines in large numbers, refining some into Puppets and feeding others to the Puppets.

Puppets that ate living people grew faster, from three meters to five meters to ten meters, and the vital essence in their bodies surged accordingly.

When the Puppets grew to a certain extent, he would extract the vital essence, convert it into spiritual power, and replenish his Dantian.

A perfect cycle.

Capturing people, refining Puppets, feeding people, extracting vital essence, recovering cultivation.

He built a set of Puppet Formation at the bottom of the abyss.

The Formation was engraved on the rock wall, covering the entire bottom of the abyss, and its function was very simple—any Puppet infused with spiritual power by him would be under his mental control.

The control strength was inversely proportional to the distance.

The few close-by ones had the most refined control, able to make every finger's movement obey him.

The distant ones could only receive simple instructions—walk, stop, eat, gather.

The aborigines at the bottom of the abyss were quickly consumed to exhaustion.

But it did not matter.

He had the Puppets climb up from the bottom of the abyss, crawling to the surface to find more food.

There were people on the surface.

On the surface of this small realm, there were cities, countries, and millions of humans.

They had their own civilization, knowing how to forge iron, farm, and build city walls.

But in front of the Puppets, these were all useless.

A ten-meter-tall Puppet charging into a village could eat up the entire village in a dozen minutes.

After eating, it grew a circle larger, changing from ten meters to twelve meters or fifteen meters.

The more the Puppets ate, the bigger they grew; the bigger they grew, the more they could eat, and the more they could eat, the bigger they grew.

Over a century, that initial batch of two to three hundred Puppets had propagated—no, fissioned—into millions of them.

The large ones were hundreds of meters tall, and the small ones were also three or four meters tall.

The largest few were kept by his side for key cultivation, infused with a massive amount of spiritual power, growing to eight hundred meters, becoming his core Puppets.

Later, that group of ants came and called these things "Giants".

They did not know that inside the body of every "Giant", there was once a living person.

Nor did they know that the reason these "Giants" were so huge was because they had eaten too many people.

The civilization on the surface, which originally had a population of several millions, was eaten by the Puppets over a century until only sporadic survivors remained, hiding in underground shelters and lingering on in a moribund state.

Daoist Spirit Control did not care about these.

To him, these aborigines were no different from the mushrooms at the bottom of the abyss; they were all resources.

The only difference was that humanoid resources had a higher conversion efficiency.

These 1.8 million Puppets were his stock saved up over a dozen years, harvested all at once, just to break through the Bottleneck of the Nascent Soul Middle Stage.

Now it was still a little short.

The spiritual power pool in the Dantian had already filled up to ninety percent of the Bottleneck line.

Absorbing another two hundred thousand or so would allow him to touch the threshold.

At that time, entering secluded cultivation for three days and charging with all his might, he would have a seventy to eighty percent certainty of a Breakthrough.

After the Breakthrough, everything would be different.

The gap between Nascent Soul Early Stage and Nascent Soul Middle Stage was not as simple as having a little more spiritual power.

The Nascent Soul of the Middle Stage would undergo a qualitative change.

The purity of spiritual power increased, the coverage range of Divine Sense doubled, and the strength of the Physical Body stepped onto a new level.

Converted into combat power, it was about three to five times that of the Early Stage.

By the Middle Stage, he was confident he could forcefully withstand those white lights.

Those white lights he had carefully perceived.

Last time, that group of ants used dozens of white lights to vaporize 500,000 of his Puppets all at once; he had calculated the energy contained in those white lights—it was roughly equivalent to the power generated by the self-detonation of an Early Golden Core Stage Cultivator.

[Tactical nuclear weapons are equivalent to the self-detonation of an Early Golden Core Stage Cultivator, and large nuclear weapons are equivalent to the self-detonation of a Peak Golden Core Stage Cultivator. Every MIRV nuclear warhead exploding in the Giant World is equivalent to the self-detonation power of an Early Golden Core Stage Cultivator.]

The self-detonation of an Early Golden Core Stage Cultivator was no small matter even in the Upper Realm.

Mountains within a radius of a dozen miles could be leveled, and ordinary Golden Core Cultivators would undoubtedly die if they encountered it.

But to a Nascent Soul Cultivator, the self-detonation of an Early Golden Core Stage Cultivator was not yet fatal.

Taking it head-on would cause injuries, but would not kill him.

The problem was the quantity.

Last time that group of ants released dozens in one breath; what if they had even more in their hands?

He could withstand one self-detonation of an Early Golden Core Stage Cultivator and endure ten, but what about one hundred or two hundred smashing over simultaneously?

He did not know how many of these things that group of ants actually had.

This was the real reason why he set up the protective barrier.

It was not fear, but uncertainty.

Uncertainty about how thick the opponent's trump cards were, and uncertainty about whether something would go wrong if he took several hundred of such white lights while circulating his Qi.

The protective barrier was an insurance.

Just in case they attacked while he was circulating his Qi, the barrier could at least block it first and give him time to react.

Once he broke through to the Nascent Soul Middle Stage, it would be different.

The protective true essence of a Middle Stage Nascent Soul was three to five times thicker than that of the Early Stage; even if hundreds of Early Golden Core Stage self-detonations smashed onto his body simultaneously, it would merely hurt a little longer.

By that time, no matter how many white lights the opponent had, they would not be worth mentioning.

He closed his eyes, feeling the vital essence continuously pouring into his Dantian.

Every time a Puppet fell, the vital essence accumulated inside its body—accumulated from eating who knows how many people—was extracted.

His spiritual power pool swelled a bit, and he came a step closer to the Bottleneck line.

At the same time, he was still thinking about another matter in his mind.

That group of ants.

To be honest, having lived for hundreds of years, he had seen too many Mortals.

There were Mortal kingdoms in the Upper Realm, with billions of people crammed onto a single continent, farming, forging iron, weaving cloth, and living their days.

Cultivators flew over their heads, and they would at most look up for a glance before continuing to work.

Mortals were Mortals.

Ants were ants.

But this group of ants was somewhat different.

They had something he had never seen on the Mortals in the Upper Realm.

It was not cultivation—their cultivation was so low it could be ignored.

Nor was it those iron shells—the iron shells were indeed a bit interesting, but ultimately they were just a pile of iron.

It was attitude.

"This land does not need a master."

After hearing this sentence, he scoffed and found it absurd.

Under the Heavenly Dao, the strong were supreme and the weak submitted; this was an immutable rule since ancient times.

Mortals not kneeling to Cultivators was like water not flowing to lower places—it wasn't that it couldn't be done, but it violated the heavenly principles.

But when that person spoke those words, his tone was very flat.

It was just stating a matter very calmly, as natural as saying "the sun rises from the east".

This made him care just a tiny bit.

Of course, it was only a tiny bit.

But it did not affect his plan.

Three days later, the Puppets would be absorbed, and his cultivation would break through.

By then, once he withdrew the protective barrier, he would control seven Giants with Peak Golden Core Stage strength to trample the so-called base of this group of ants.

He had given these ants a chance.

This could not be blamed on him.

Since these ants were unwilling to kneel, they could die standing up.

Once he obtained that cross-realm teleportation grand array, he could leave this ghost place.

Speaking of which, that array was the most incomprehensible thing he had encountered in these one hundred years.

When he perceived it in the direction of that group of ants' base, his first reaction was disbelief.

Cross-realm teleportation grand array.

Not crossing states, not crossing domains, but crossing realms.

Cross-state teleportation arrays he had seen before.

The major Sects in the Upper Realm had them, laid out at great expense, capable of sending people from one continent to another, crossing tens of thousands of miles in a single step.

That kind of Formation required a Nascent Soul Cultivator to preside over it, consuming a massive amount of Spirit Stones with extremely high maintenance costs, but he understood the principle; if Materials were sufficient, he could have set it up himself during his Peak period.

But cross-realm teleportation arrays were different.

Crossing realms meant shattering the world barrier.

The world barrier was something at the level of Heavenly Dao, not something that could be forcefully chiseled just because cultivation was high enough.

Soul Transformation Stage Cultivators had to lower their heads even standing before the world barrier; that was not a wall, but the rules of the entire world itself.

During his Peak period, he had once tried to perceive the thickness of the world barrier; his Divine Sense stretched out like stabbing into a ball of cotton, without end, without boundaries, completely unable to find a place to start.

But the teleportation grand array in the hands of that group of ants had so lightly torn open a gap in the barrier.

A stable, continuous gap through which people and supplies could pass.

This should not be controlled in the hands of a group of Mortals.

A Formation of this level, even if the several major super Sects of the Upper Realm joined forces and exhausted the painstaking efforts of all Formation Great Masters, might not be able to achieve it.

Having lived for hundreds of years, he had never heard of any Sect mastering cross-realm teleportation technology.

But it was right there, in the hands of a group of ants who couldn't even be considered Qi Refinement Stage.

He had distantly perceived the structure of that Formation, but could not see it too clearly because it was too far away; moreover, the Formation itself seemed to be bound to a specific person, and that person's aura and the Formation's energy lines were intertwined together, inseparable.

This made him very uncomfortable.

Binding meant he could not directly snatch it over to use.

Even if he killed all those ants, without the driver of the bound person, the Formation would most likely stop running.

But it wasn't that there was no way.

After killing the bound person, he would spend time studying the bottom-layer structure of the Formation, find the binding node, untie it, and re-bind it to himself.

Or simply not untying it, directly capturing that person to use as a tool—sparing his life and letting him open the door for himself.

No matter which method, the prerequisite was first recovering his cultivation.

At the Nascent Soul Early Stage, he could not forcibly crack a Formation of this level.

At the Nascent Soul Middle Stage, he might be able to try.