When parting is imminent, a subtle sadness often lingers, even if both parties engage in lighthearted banter, a true sense of happiness remains elusive.
Chen Guan disliked such an atmosphere. He lingered with them in Qingshan Town for half a day, then, early the next morning, he ventured alone into the Magical Beast Mountain Range.
He knew the Hall of Souls guardian was hiding somewhere within, but the exact location remained unknown. Therefore, before Jia Xing Tian arrived, he needed to pinpoint the lurking expert's hiding place.
A Dou Zong expert, even if seriously injured, would be incredibly difficult for ordinary individuals to locate if they truly wished to remain concealed.
However, for Chen Guan, this problem was not insurmountable.
Upon entering the Magical Beast Mountain Range, Chen Guan did not immediately release his spiritual perception for a broad search. Despite his strong spiritual power, the vastness of the mountain range far exceeded his ability to search inch by inch. Moreover, such a broad search risked alerting his target.
Therefore, a different approach was needed.
It took Chen Guan half an hour to capture and kill dozens of Red Ice Snakes, descendants of his old acquaintance, the Red Ice Snake King. They were numerous, often moving in groups of three to five, making them convenient to hunt.
He found a small cave on a cliff face and stationed a puppet outside as a guard. Inside, Chen Guan retrieved the corpse of a Red Ice Snake. Because he had controlled the hunt, the body was largely intact.
A dagger appeared in his hand, and he deftly made an incision three inches below the Red Ice Snake's head. Powerful spiritual power emerged from his brows, and using it as a paintbrush, Chen Guan quickly began to etch patterns within the Red Ice Snake's body. In less than ten minutes, a simple puppet array was successfully engraved.
Leaving behind a spiritual imprint, he inserted a first-tier magic core into the core of the array to provide energy. Chen Guan suddenly felt that he had established a mysterious connection with it. When he closed his eyes, a radar-like image unfurled in his mind, clearly displaying the energy fluctuations in the surrounding area.
For example, at this moment, Chen Guan did not use his own spiritual power but completely relied on the Red Ice Snake to detect. He found a faint energy signature on the cliff, likely at the level of a second-tier Magical Beast.
To verify its accuracy, Chen Guan deployed a Dou Wang-level puppet for a hunt. Soon, the puppet returned, carrying a Fire Fox.
It was indeed a second-tier Magical Beast!
Satisfied, Chen Guan set aside the Fire Fox's corpse and simply sutured the Red Ice Snake's wound. With a slight thought, the dead Red Ice Snake stirred unnaturally. To the naked eye, save for a certain stiffness in its movements, everything else was no different from a normal Red Ice Snake.
"Though a defective product, destined to be scrapped after a single use, its thousand-meter detection range is quite impressive."
Muttering to himself, Chen Guan set aside the first Red Ice Snake and began to prepare a second corpse. He was crafting specialized tracking puppets, capable of scouting paths, locating prey, and more. A typical tracking puppet would be a second-tier creation, but his were merely disposable constructs, unrefined and temporary.
The process of refining a puppet by an orthodox puppet master can be divided into three steps.
First, one needs to refine the puppet's physical body using various materials. For example, some spiritual wood, rare iron, and similar components are used to create the body. The higher the grade of the puppet being refined, the more demanding the materials required. This initial step in puppet refining is comparatively straightforward.
Once the physical shell is complete, the second and most crucial step begins: using spiritual power to engrave puppet arrays. Different puppet arrays have different functions. A high-tier puppet has an astonishing number of arrays within its body. Combat arrays for puppets are the most complex and common, which is why puppets' attack methods are mostly simple, crude, and standardized.
A puppet array, in some ways, is akin to an alchemist's pill formula. The higher the grade of the puppet being refined, the more complex arrays need to be engraved, a spiritually exhausting process. This is why Teacher Shu Tianhe said that the requirements for a puppet master's spiritual strength are no less than an alchemist's and may even be higher.
The second step does not conclude with the engraving of the puppet arrays. It is akin to preparing individual ingredients for a dish; one must then seamlessly connect these arrays to complete this phase. Once the spiritual strength can no longer support the connection, all previous efforts will be wasted. Before the engraved puppet array is connected as a whole, it is difficult to maintain it for a long time, like a dish spoiling rapidly. If one wants to connect it again, they can only start over. However, one advantage over being an alchemist is that when refining puppets, except for some special materials, most can be reused. It is not like refining medicine, where the raw medicinal ingredients are lost if the refining fails. This was also why, when Chen Guan encountered the attacking puppet in the stone chamber, his teacher had instructed him to dismantle it rather than completely destroy it.
Returning to the process, once all the puppet arrays are successfully connected in the second step, the puppet's refinement is ninety-nine percent complete.
The final step involves leaving one's own spiritual imprint to establish mastery. Below the eighth tier, puppets do not develop independent sentience, allowing for direct imprinting. However, once a puppet reaches the eighth tier, it develops its own sentience. Imprinting it to establish complete mastery becomes far more complex, akin to the final, critical stages of an alchemist's pill refinement. Naturally, there are specialized methods to facilitate the spiritual imprinting process, but those need not be detailed here.
It is worth noting that not all puppets require magic cores for energy. Such a reliance makes them overly dependent on the core's grade; once the energy is depleted, the puppet 'freezes,' necessitating a replacement of the core. Moreover, if it is a very high-grade puppet, there are certain requirements for the magic core attributes, making them very restrictive.
Consequently, high-tier puppets always have arrays engraved within them that absorb ambient Heaven and Earth energy, making them self-sufficient. Because the spiritual arrays consume a significant amount of energy, low-level puppet masters are often overwhelmed by their demands. Thus, among lower-grade puppets, nearly all rely on magic cores as their primary energy source. Although the puppets Chen Guan had dismantled were of very low rank, they did not have magic cores in their bodies. This was because the teacher's spiritual power was strong enough, and he had engraved a spiritual array that absorbed the energy of Heaven and Earth.
The tracking puppet Chen Guan was now crafting used the corpse of a first-tier Red Ice Snake as its ready-made body. Even the array was only simply engraved once, and it was still driven by a first-tier magic core. It was crafted from the most basic components and unsuitable for future upgrades. He estimated they were single-use, disposable constructs.
However, it was quite practical for locating the hidden Hall of Souls guardians, and it was not easily detected, as Red Ice Snakes were too common. Furthermore, a true tracking puppet boasts a far greater detection range than a mere one kilometer; his casual creations were an exception. This range is closely related to spiritual strength, and this holds true for puppets below the eighth tier. Once it exceeds a certain range, the puppet can no longer be driven.
(End of Chapter)
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