Chapter 98: The Spirit-Splitting Technique
The old man lifted the little girl's right hand and held it out before Andy. The girl blinked her quick, bright eyes, full of curiosity.
Andy extended one finger, rested it lightly on her wrist, and fed in a fine thread of spiritual power, reading the answering fluctuations as it moved through her body.
"An ice-attribute mutated spiritual root! Truly excellent aptitude!" Andy said with mild surprise. He had seen only that the girl's aptitude was good—he hadn't expected her to be that rarest of things, a mutated-root cultivator.
"Wha—truly? Senior isn't jesting?" The old man's mouth fell open, joy and disbelief warring on his face as he pressed for confirmation.
Andy nodded. "There's no mistake. But with a mutated root like hers, the water-attribute technique she's practicing now isn't the best fit. She should switch to an ice-attribute technique."
The old man beamed and nodded again and again. "Thank you, Senior, for the guidance!" Privately he thought: ice-attribute techniques were sold in the market, but they started at two or three hundred spirit stones—far beyond his means. Yet with a mutated root's superb aptitude, placing Qianqian with a great sect as a core disciple to be carefully nurtured would pose no difficulty at all. Her path would be boundless from there, and he need never worry again.
In high spirits, the old man launched into a stream of curiosities and hidden lore about the Immortal Island of Penglai. His cultivation was low, but he had lived here for decades, and much of what he related was entirely new to Andy, who listened with real pleasure. The old man's occasional asides and reflections, especially, gave Andy a taste of the bitterness and helplessness of a low-level cultivator's lifetime of toil.
Half an hour later, the old man pointed at a building below. "Senior, this is the Clever Craft Pavilion. It deals in puppets, mechanisms, and the like—the largest shop of its kind in the market. Truthfully, its goods are no better than anywhere else; its advantage is simply breadth and stock. There's a smaller shop, too—less business, but actually cheaper."
"Very good," Andy rasped. "Take me to every shop that sells puppets. I intend to compare." He wheeled the Wind-Treader Dragon around and descended slowly.
"Yes, Senior," the old man agreed.
At the Clever Craft Pavilion's entrance, however, Andy swept his sleeve at the pair. "The two of you needn't come in. Wait for me here." Without pausing for a reply, he walked straight into the shop.
The old man could only assent, waiting on the street with his granddaughter.
"Qianqian, what if Grandfather sent you into the Orthodox Dao Alliance? With roots like yours, they'd be sure to raise you as one of their treasured disciples!" the old man said fondly, stroking the girl's glossy black hair with his thick, calloused palm.
"What about Grandfather? Will you come too?" The little girl tipped her head up, blinking her bright eyes, her sweet child's voice full of the question.
"Grandfather is old, my cultivation is low and my aptitude poor—why would the Orthodox Dao Alliance take someone like me?" The old man shook his head with a soft sigh.
"Then I won't go to any Orthodox Dao Alliance either. I want to stay with Grandfather." The little girl stuck out her lip.
"Be good, Qianqian. Once you join the Alliance, you can become a great cultivator of vast powers like that Senior just now—long-lived, mighty in magic. Never mind flying through the sky—you could even fight the terrible beasts of the sea!" The old man pressed on patiently, holding up Andy as his example and painting bright pictures to persuade her.
"No, no! Qianqian just wants to be with Grandfather! Doesn't Grandfather love Qianqian anymore? Are you throwing Qianqian away?" The girl's lip pushed out further still as she tugged his hand and swung her whole body back and forth—a display of wheedling mischief that filled the old man's heart with tenderness and ache at once.
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An incense stick's time later, Andy emerged from the Clever Craft Pavilion. He gave no word as to whether he'd found anything to his liking—only motioned for the old man to lead on. The three of them set off for the next shop.
In this manner Andy visited three shops selling finished puppets and their crafting materials, one pill shop, two formation shops, two text shops, and three material shops, spending the better part of the day.
Thoroughly satisfied, Andy at last concluded the old man's engagement. Before leaving, he made the girl an extra gift of a leaf-shaped flying artifact, leaving grandfather and granddaughter overwhelmed with delighted surprise.
The leaf artifact was a low-level flying artifact he had made while practicing with cheap materials before forging the Wind-Treader Dragon—long since useless to him. The sight of the girl's sweet, well-mannered manner had put him in mind of Jian Xin'er as a child, and he had given it away on impulse.
After that, Andy flew straight to one of the market's teleportation formations and returned to West Star Island.
He did a modest round of shopping in the West Star Island market as well. Since coming into spirit stones beyond any hope of spending, he had formed the habit: every time he passed through a market, he bought whatever might prove useful—never much in one visit, never enough to draw notice—but the accumulated total across all his trips was staggering.
His one disappointment: the Mystic Change Pavilion had, for some unknown reason, closed temporarily a month earlier and had yet to reopen, so his plan to add another formation or two came to nothing. It hardly mattered—formations were no urgent need of his at present, and he had already bought two or three sets on Penglai. He could pick up two more the next time he passed through West Star Island.
So Andy did not linger, mounting the Wind-Treader Dragon for Luojia Island.
Flying through the open sky, Andy touched the seven or eight puppets in the storage pouch at his breast, and a faint, mysterious smile crossed his face.
Qi Condensation grade puppets, it turned out, were genuinely cheap. A humanoid puppet capable of wielding artifacts, equal to a fifth- or sixth-layer Qi Condensation cultivator, cost less than a hundred and fifty spirit stones. The simpler beast-type puppets like the ones Di Er used ran about a hundred. So he had bought four or five humanoid puppets and a large stock of crafting materials across the three puppet shops—along with a jade slip titled Essentials of Elementary Puppets. The slip recorded in detail the materials and methods for making Qi Condensation grade puppets, and after one rough read-through, Andy was certain that with his current crafting skill, producing such puppets would pose no problem whatsoever.
The primary materials were metals and ores of good hardness, resilience, and workability, plus extremely dense ironwood aged ten years or more. Beyond that, one needed a fair quantity of low-grade spirit stones—and one very particular ingredient: beast souls. The text explained that in a certain sense, a puppet too was a living thing with a soul—merely one without consciousness or intelligence of its own, wholly obedient to its master. But a suitable soul had to be incorporated during the crafting, or the result would be a lifeless mechanical doll rather than a true puppet.
Accordingly, puppets could not simply be directed by spiritual sense at will, the way artifacts were. Controlling them required a special art called the Spirit-Splitting Technique.
The jade slip appended the technique's complete formula: how to peel away a small portion of one's spiritual sense into an independently existing strand of thought, lodge that strand within a puppet, and operate the puppet through this split-off spirit. Used this way, puppets consumed far less spiritual sense than artifacts did. The technique's demands on spiritual sense were extreme—a secret art only Foundation Establishment cultivators could master. The stronger one's spiritual sense, the faster one recovered after each split, the sooner one could split again, and the more puppets one could run at once. An ordinary early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator could control perhaps twenty or thirty puppets simultaneously. Those who specialized in the puppet path controlled far more, and most of them also practiced special techniques to strengthen their spiritual sense—reportedly, some could direct upward of a hundred puppets at once.
Against monsters like that, hardly anyone at Foundation Establishment could stand. Even puppets of mere mid-tier Qi Condensation strength, attacking several hundred at a time, would overwhelm an ordinary late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Andy intended to forge a batch of elementary Qi Condensation puppets in his dwelling and raise his strength to a terrifying height. He was confident: if all went smoothly and the crafting held no major mishaps, then within a few years this batch of puppets would let him effortlessly destroy late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators—and even facing a Core Formation senior, he would have some real means of self-preservation.