Cultivating for a hundred lifetimes to ascension Chapter 1329 - 718: Spirit Core Secret and Entering the Mountain Gate

A short while later, a streak of emerald light burst from the heart of the Cloud Mist Mountain Range, soaring toward the boundless Cloud Sea.

Standing outside the bamboo pavilion, Zhao Sheng watched the light vanish into the misty horizon before turning back to step inside.

Once back within the room, he looked upon the mountain-like hoard of treasures with a flicker of eagerness in his eyes. With a sudden wave of his expansive sleeves, the massive Treasure Mountain disappeared. In its place stood thirteen Spirit Core Law Puppets featuring beast heads and human bodies, each showing varying degrees of damage.

The thirteen Puppets were quite large, and as they lay scattered across the floor, they occupied nearly every inch of the pavilion’s space.

Zhao Sheng paced among the mechanical constructs, his eyes scanning them intently. With practiced precision, he began identifying specific Puppet components that remained useful.

Pa!

Suddenly, the silence was broken by the sharp snap of his fingers.

In the following instant, the pavilion was filled with the rhythmic sound of soft creaks, mimicking the noise of grinding gears and shifting mechanisms. Under the precise control of his Divine Thought, the Law Puppets began to unfurl like "blooming flowers," dismantling themselves into thousands of complex Puppet Mechanisms.

In the blink of an eye, the floor was buried beneath a dense layer of intricate mechanical parts.

Zhao Sheng drifted into the air, his fingers dancing and twitching as though he were pulling on a multitude of invisible strings.

Within seconds, Five-Colored Crystal Beads the size of fists emerged from the inner cavities of the Puppet heads. These beads ascended and began to slowly orbit Zhao Sheng. Some radiated a soft, five-colored glow, while others remained dark and lifeless, appearing utterly ruined.

These Five-Colored Crystal Beads served as the Central Spirit Cores, the most vital components of any Spirit Puppet.

As Zhao Sheng channeled waves of Divine Thought and willpower into the beads, the hidden complexities of the Central Spirit Cores began to reveal themselves.

The deeper he went into "decoding" their structures, the more shocked he became by the Spirit Cores' sophistication.

Each Spirit Core functioned like a miniature, highly complex "planet" protected by multiple "crusts." Countless ancient symbols were etched into every layer, possessing a level of detail and density that rivaled the Primordial Cells of a human body.

Luckily, the vast passage of time had nearly drained the "energy" from the Spirit Cores. This caused their original defensive Prohibitions to fail, allowing Zhao Sheng to claim them with relative ease.

Naturally, had he not attained the Returning to Void Realm, the deepest mysteries of these Central Spirit Cores would have remained hidden from his perception!

While Zhao Sheng was lost in the process of unraveling the Spirit Core secrets, time seemed to accelerate by a factor of billions.

It was only when a cold, silent Dead Star manifested in his "vision" that Zhao Sheng suddenly broke free from his trance, quickly shifting part of his consciousness to a different "perspective."

“Has it already arrived? Time truly escapes one!” he whispered. He reached out a single finger, lightly tapping one of the Five-Colored Crystal Beads.

Immediately afterward,

The Five-Colored Crystal Bead flared to life. Its surface erupted with concentric rings of brilliant spirit light that surged outward in every direction.

The array barrier protecting the bamboo pavilion reacted instantly to the surge of spirit light. The array map scrolls hanging on the walls shimmered with power, manifesting illusory mountains and rivers to contain the energy. However, their efforts were largely futile; the spirit light possessed such intense penetration that it bypassed the array barrier almost entirely, expanding at the speed of light.

Startled, Zhao Sheng immediately pulled back his external Will Field, solidifying it into several "Barriers" that trapped the five-colored spirit light within the pavilion, suspending it in mid-air.

Ka-ka!

Sharp cracking sounds emanated from the Five-Colored Crystal Bead. Its once smooth, translucent surface began to bulge with thick Crystal Clusters before rapidly growing in size.

In just a few breaths, the Spirit Core had swollen to a diameter of nearly forty feet, looming in the air like a massive "Small Mountain."

By then, the clusters had matured into finger-length "Crystal Columns." These were covered in three-dimensional symbolic engravings that bore a striking resemblance to individual threads of Tao True Text.

“Tao True Text... It appears these... all stem from the same origin, representing the Tao True Text for ‘Emptiness’.” Zhao Sheng reached a conclusion instantly.

During his previous life, he had committed several threads of Tao True Text to memory, including the one for ‘Emptiness’.

It was a stroke of luck that he recognized this Daoist script; otherwise, he would have been utterly baffled.

After a brief observation, he peered into the center of the Crystal Ball. Through the various Crystal Shells, he could faintly discern a "fragmented" Spiritual Light Cloud.

The Light Cloud was gathered in the vague shape of a "leopard," perfectly mirroring the external form of the Leopard Head Human Puppet.

Zhao Sheng stared at the Spiritual Light Cloud for a long duration, continuously probing it with his Divine Thought. Suddenly, his mind was overwhelmed by spirit light, and a flood of Puppet-related secrets began to pour through his consciousness.

Twin sparks of light ignited in his eyes as a shroud of lightning flickered across his skin. At that moment, an aura as heavy as a mountain erupted from him.

The void for hundreds of miles trembled violently, and the natural spiritual energy of the world began to rush toward the bamboo pavilion. Dark clouds swirled in from all sides, quickly followed by the roar of thunder and the glare of lightning.

This drastic shift in the heavens immediately put the entire Zhao Family clan on high alert. Many disciples ran outside to look at the sky, but their attention was quickly drawn toward the Ancestor’s secluded residence.

“What is happening? Is the Ancestor achieving a breakthrough?”

“Look! The spiritual energy is forming clouds—a Heavenly Tribulation is coming! Which Foundation Establishment senior is attempting the Golden Core Thunder Tribulation? Is it that senior from the Hai branch, or perhaps the ‘Qingfeng Sword Obsession’ Zhao Youge?”