The Soul Smithy

On the barren plain, a lizard several feet long cautiously crawled out from under a half-weathered rock, ready to begin its day’s hunt.

But just as it left its nest and moved a few dozen feet from the rock, a yellow monster over ten feet long suddenly burst out from the sandy soil on one side. It pounced on the lizard with both foreclaws and jaws, easily biting through its neck, then grabbed the corpse and raced urgently in a certain direction.

The monster also had four limbs, a long tail, and a pointed snout—it looked very much like a giant lizard as well. But its entire body was stiff and hard, and it made a creaking, grinding sound as it ran. It was clearly a type of mechanical puppet.

After the monster ran over a li, it reached the side of a yellow-robed man who was sitting cross-legged on a flat stone, meditating. It dropped the corpse beside him and ran off again.

The yellow-robed man showed no change in expression, not the slightest surprise.

He unhurriedly raised a hand, and the lizard’s corpse floated steadily in front of him, hovering a few feet off the ground without moving.

Then the yellow-robed man extended an index finger and pointed it at the lizard’s head, murmuring words under his breath.

Before long, the extended finger began to glow faintly, emitting a soft white light.

As he continued to chant, the white light grew brighter, gradually becoming almost dazzling.

“Go!”

Seeing the moment was right, the yellow-robed man let out a low shout.

A thin white thread shot out from his fingertip and pierced deep into the lizard’s skull. Then, with some difficulty, he slowly pulled back, his expression tense and cautious in the extreme.

Finally, under his careful watch, the white thread dragged a green orb out from the corpse. It was light and airy, only about the size of a thumb.

Seeing this, the yellow-robed man acted as if he had found a great treasure.

His other hand flashed, and a small, light-yellow jade bottle appeared in his palm. With a pfft sound, several rays of colored light shot out from the bottle, swept around the green orb, and sucked it inside.

Only then did the yellow-robed man let out a long breath of relief, and wiped the faint sweat from his brow. It was clear that this whole process had cost him a great deal of energy.

“This Soul Tethering Technique really isn’t something an early Foundation Establishment cultivator can easily perform. The success rate is far too low—maybe one in every three or four attempts. I’ll be stuck here all day at this rate.” He looked at the small jade bottle in his hand, muttering to himself, a helpless expression on his face.

This man was none other than Han Li, who was in the middle of cultivating the “Great Derivative Art.”

The reason he was on this desolate land, nearly a hundred li from the Spirit Stone Mine, was exactly as he had been doing: collecting the souls of animals. Such work was usually only done by those on the demonic path. That Han Li was doing it was entirely due to his study of the “Puppet Daoist Canon.”

After a preliminary study of the art of puppet refinement, Han Li had discovered that making puppets required not only the usual materials for crafting magic tools, but also the souls of living creatures to be fused together with the materials. Only then could the work be truly completed. Otherwise, the resulting puppet would have no spiritual nature and would be no different from an ordinary doll.

The higher the grade of the puppet, the stronger and better the soul fused into it needed to be, in order to maximize the puppet’s effectiveness. To this end, the “Puppet Daoist Canon” had appended three common demonic-path techniques: the “Soul Tethering Technique,” the “Soul Condensation Technique,” and the “Soul Refining Technique.”

The “Soul Tethering Technique,” which Han Li had just performed, was a method for drawing a soul out from a corpse.

This technique had low power and a low success rate, and it could only be used on corpses that had just recently died. Compared to those dedicated demonic-path soul arts, its power was virtually nothing!

But its only advantage was that it required very little magical power; a mid Foundation Establishment cultivator could use it normally. Of course, an early Foundation Establishment cultivator like Han Li could barely manage it, but the success rate was not high.

The “Soul Condensation Technique” was a method for condensing souls. After all, finding a naturally powerful soul was not easy. Puppets of a higher grade often used an artificial powerful soul condensed from several, a dozen, or even dozens of weaker souls. While such souls were not as good as naturally strong ones, they were far better than using weak ones. So, this technique was also a required course for anyone studying puppetry.

The final technique, the “Soul Refining Technique,” was, as its name implied, a technique for refining and altering a soul. After all, to be fused into a puppet, an ordinary raw soul would not do; it had to be processed using special methods.

As for the lizard-like machine-beast from just now, it was the first mechanical puppet Han Li had successfully crafted after cultivating the Great Derivative Art and splitting off his first independent divine sense. The soul fused into it was only from a few yellow weasels he had casually caught.

But before this, Han Li had already failed seven or eight times. His success rate was honestly not very high.

When Han Li attached his divided spirit to this puppet and commanded it to act, the feeling was wonderfully strange! It wasn’t like the ethereal sensation of controlling a magic tool, nor was it as real as moving one’s own limbs.

In fact, the relationship between his divided spirit and this puppet-beast was like that of a superior and a subordinate. He would send a thought, and the puppet would follow his orders. How it actually moved still depended on the puppet itself. But Han Li could still clearly sense everything the puppet-beast saw and heard. This delighted him beyond his expectations.

For the first time manipulating a puppet-beast, Han Li became quite playfully absorbed. Besides this self-made basic puppet, he also guided and played with all the more advanced mechanical puppets he carried with him, thoroughly indulging a childhood dream of directing a puppet show.

While manipulating these puppets, Han Li gradually experienced some of the limitations of mechanical puppets.

Firstly, these puppets could only move within a three-li radius of his body. Beyond that distance, they would become immobile, and the divided spirit would fly back. Han Li guessed that this was related to the maximum distance his divided spirit could travel from his main body. As his cultivation and soul realm improved, this could be improved.

But the next flaw was an inherent shortcoming of puppetry itself, impossible to fix. When the puppets received a command, there was a delay between the order and the action. They couldn’t act with the same instantaneous reaction as a living being, and in a real fight, an opponent could exploit this.

Even with these two flaws, puppetry was still a formidable art. As long as he could split off a few more divine thoughts and master the first layer of the Great Derivative Art, he would be able to contend with formidable Foundation Establishment characters. After all, having a dozen or so helpers by his side, even if they were only at the Qi Condensation level, would be more than enough to ensure his own safety.

At the very least, if he were to be trapped by that Ghost Spirit Sect Young Lord again, he wouldn’t have to fear his endless army of blood ghosts. Low-level mechanical puppets only consumed low-grade spirit stones to operate.

It was only for puppets as powerful as the giant tiger puppet under the Thousand Bamboo Sect’s Yellow Dragon that the power was so immense it required medium-grade spirit stones. But Han Li estimated that tiger must have been a Grade Three or higher puppet-beast. Even the combined protective shields of several Foundation Establishment cultivators couldn’t withstand two of its attacks. Its terrifying power was clear.

Unfortunately, that puppet had been turned to ashes by Senior Martial Uncle Lei’s magic treasure. If he could have gotten his hands on it, it would have been an incredibly lethal trump card.

Whenever he thought of the benefits of that giant tiger puppet, Han Li itched with desire. He became even more devoted to crafting mechanical puppets.

Finally, after churning out several dozen low-grade mechanical puppets, Han Li decided to attempt a Grade Two puppet. This was the standard combat puppet he had seen the Thousand Bamboo Sect members using. If he could craft even this level of puppet, he would no longer need to fear consuming his puppet stock.

But refining a Grade Two puppet couldn’t be done with the same scrap metal as before. The materials were almost entirely of the same grade as an upper-grade magic tool, and large amounts of centuries-old ironwood became the primary raw material. This would cost no small fortune.

In truth, if Han Li had been in his own cave dwelling, cultivating a few ironwood trees of sufficient age would have been nothing. But given his current duties, he had reluctantly asked others to collect a large quantity for him from a market town.

Now he had the materials, but he still needed suitable souls. The souls of the yellow weasels, the most common creatures in the canyon, were far too weak. Even if condensed together, they wouldn’t provide a significant improvement.

So, Han Li had set his sights on the weasels’ natural enemies: the plain lizards.

After three or four months of hard training, Han Li had already split off several divine thoughts. He used these divided spirits to manipulate several low-grade puppet-beasts, sweeping the entire plain for lizard nests. Which was the scene at the beginning of the chapter.

After storing away the vial containing the lizard’s soul, Han Li closed his eyes again and continued cultivating the “Great Derivative Art,” slowly strengthening his primordial spirit.

This “Great Derivative Art” was the key to using puppetry, and Han Li dared not slack off in it for a moment.

But honestly, the “Great Derivative Art” truly lived up to its reputation as the founding technique of the Thousand Bamboo Sect. Compared to it, ordinary spirit-division techniques were not even worth mentioning!

Common spirit-division arts only forcibly split off a small part of the original divine sense. How much could be split depended on the strength of each person’s primordial spirit, and could not be changed post-natally.

The Great Derivative Art precisely made up for this deficiency. Through cultivation, it could gradually strengthen the original primordial spirit, allowing one to rival cultivators with naturally extraordinary soul talent. The method it used to divide the spirit was also far safer and more refined than ordinary methods. It allowed the spirit to be split into much smaller and more numerous parts without harming the main spirit.

With such a comparison, it was no wonder the Thousand Bamboo Sect made the “Great Derivative Art” the very foundation of their sect, and why Senior Brother Lin so obsessively coveted the techniques of the final three layers.

(The author is speechless! He was in a bad state all morning and only finished coding until now. He kept everyone waiting, and he’s truly sorry!)