“Come help me, Oalus”

Master came in without knocking in the morning as usual. Ah, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. How could I, this millennium-old monster, be so petty as to be dissatisfied with master’s conduct? No, no, it must be your vulgar imagination.

“Why are you spacing out, Oalus? Come and help your old master! Young people nowadays…”

Well, some would argue that the older a cultivator gets the more playful he or she becomes… Obviously it’s not about me.

What master is doing right now is quite bizarre, to be honest. He laid out a large mat made out of cheap but thick materials on my floor and began to take out several cow carcasses on it. They’ve been stripped of their skin and processed already at the butcher shop I guess.

Are we going to have barbeque today?

Should I call Natter and my other fellow disciples? Do we have all the seasonings? Is the calorie intake and nutritious balance acceptable?

*Whroomshhhhh*

What a disgusting noise. A proper space ring wouldn’t make any weird noises or look as if they’re distorting space around them every time they’re activated.

Fuck, I have to say, I really hate these low-grade spacial artifacts. Especially the rings. Like, who even came up with the idea of making space rings? Most cultivators use swords and spears and other melee weapons in battle, and I don’t think it’s practical to have accessories on your hands when you wield a weapon. I, of course am an exception for my wrecking ball is equally hard to handle with or without rings.

Also, if you’re interested in how spacial artifacts are usually made and why we still live on planets instead of spacial artifacts that support life despite being able to create such artifacts then let me explain. We can’t. In reality, cultivators have a very poor understanding of space and-

“Oalus, are you going to help me or not?”

“Yes, master. What do I need to do?”

“Please process these carcasses in accordance to these instructions”, with another silent *whrooormshhh* and a small vortex in the air, master took out a small notebook with a lot of text written in a neat font and a drawing every three pages.

Having brought a knife from the kitchen, I began to read through the notebook. It was the description of preparations for a ritual of some sort. The meat and the bones would be used as base materials in order to create a fleshy puppet or something like that. I also think that the original ritual came from the Demon Dao but then was adapted for the use of orthodox practitioners later on.

Using flesh is a very popular method of the Demon Dao. While many times it’s looked at upon with contempt or heavier emotions, sometimes the spells that involve flesh are so useful that other schools of cultivation have no other choice but to adapt them somehow.

Anyway, what I needed to be done had several steps:

First, the meat needed to be cut in the right places. There would be some strips of it left to be used later on in the process.

After cutting the meat where it needed to be cut, came the bones. Some bones needed to be removed outright; some would need to have runes carved on them. What are runes, you’re asking?

Runes… are a very very outdated method of spellcasting. The principles behind them are incredibly complicated and not even their creators realized how they actually worked until some two hundred thousand years ago, when Ponti Wasentom, the person who is considered to be the forefather of modern cultivation theory and the founder of the Divinity sect, proposed the Dao synchronization theory.

Before, people believed that there existed a Divine language that was used in the process of creating the world. People believed in the power of words and there were all kinds of superstitions everywhere. We nowadays call those times “The Dark Era”. But, while we call those times the Dark Era, who’s to say that our descendants won’t call our times “The Dark Era” too? It was so long ago that we only know a bit of hearsay about those times. Maybe the people used to be more prosperous than we are until some major disaster hit them?

Anyways, runes were created during the Dark Era. They were used everywhere: in spells and techniques, in formations, in weapon and tool refinement. There were many freaks that carved runes onto their bodies in order to cast spells faster. This is one of the things we know about the Dark Era from ancient records.

Oh, also spells couldn’t be cast instantly back then. Because of, you guessed it, the runes. It’s actually quite surprising that master would have techniques that involved this outdated technology.

Not to say that runes are unusable or bad. If one masters them far enough, doing some incredible things wouldn’t be impossible. There was a guy I knew back when I was 600 years old. He was called the War Tyrant Racken. His mastery of runes was great and he could be called, if not the most powerful Mind Manifestation cultivator, then, at the very least, the most tricky one.

While I was contemplating on history and nostalgic memories and carved the runes, master finished laying out the array that was needed for the ritual. Arrays are a special case of formations. They are a more standardized kind of formations, so to speak.

The array, according to my analysis, was supposed to intensify the yin attributes of the environment. The array was built using the so-called traditional way, or the way most arrays are built nowadays, by laying out special tools called array flags. Those things are used to quickly set up an already designed array and can be used with little expertise.

It’s quite strange that master’s ritual requires runes that were prevalent more than two hundred thousand years ago and arrays that were invented only fifty thousand years ago.

Immediately after master put the last flag down, it become chilly. The runes on the bones flashed with a ghostly green light and the individual strips of meat I put away were set aflame with a magical green fire and burned without any smell of burned meat or smoke until they turned into thin ash-gray threads.

The meat was being slowly transformed into a different kind of material. The notebook said that it required a whole hour to change completely. After that, the ritual could be carried out.

“What kind of ritual are you trying to perform, master?”

“I am trying to create an inferior substitute body to test your technique before actually using it on you”

Well, I guess it makes sense. Usually it takes a lot of trials and tests for a technique to be considered safe to use. I personally think that in this case testing is unnecessary. I’m confident that my technique works fine… only for me.

My situation is simply too special so I’m afraid that there’s nobody else in the Galaxy who can cultivate this technique. It’s a shame, really. I had the ambition of creating a technique that anybody would be able to use.

A substitute body is a body that cultivators prepare in case their current body gets destroyed. I mean, you can’t just possess any random person in haste if your body gets destroyed, right? Leaving the questions of morality of such an action aside, something that many cultivators do, it may end up very harmful to the spirit.

Besides, there’re countless questions of compatibility, potential rejection of the spirit, the parameters of the body, personal preferences of the possessor… No old man, for example, would possess a sickly young girl’s body. Almost no old man. Cultivators can be weird sometimes but let’s not delve into those depths as not even I have the mental resilience to do so for no good reason.

Anyway, in order to avoid any situations like that, cultivators often prepare custom-made bodies that would be as compatible with their spirits as they could be.

An inferior substitute body is a body made with cheap materials that is used only in order to avoid spirit dissipation. A powerful cultivator would be able to quickly conjure up a body with the spirit alone under a minute, while Nascent Soul stage practitioner would have to use more ingenious and time-consuming methods. Well, Nascent Soul practitioners don’t really need to do something so troublesome. After all, realistically, if their body is destroyed in an accident of some kind they are likely to die anyway…

Not to mention that, an inferior substitute body would be completely worthless to such a cultivator regardless of urgency. A Nascent Soul is kind of like an embryo. You wouldn’t put an embryo into a dirty coarse basket during winter, right?

But an inferior substitute body is good enough to test a cultivation technique for the Qi-Refinement stage I guess.

…

After an hour, the ritual preparations were over.

“What are we doing next, master?”

“Here’s my idea of what we can do…”

…

Master had a white glowing thread in his hand. It was rather long and it was very smooth to the touch. First, touch a piece of lead. Give it the numerical value of 0. Then imagine world’s best silk’s softness, give that softness the value of 90. Take the factorial of that number and you’ll get a rough estimate of the softness of that material.

Well, even if I had a ton of this thread I would not use it to make clothes or touch it too often or even be near it for too long.

After all, the name of the thread was the “dream-connecting thread” and it was a rare natural treasure capable of connecting people’s minds in a mysterious fashion. Being too close to this material is dangerous for the mental health and at my realm if I had as much as a finger’s length of this thread on me for week, I would go insane.

Master came up with a method of making the substitute’s body meridian map similar to mine and giving me a chance to observe the process of the technique at work.

For that I and master would connect our spirits through the thread, master would use some of his Nascent Soul essence to emulate my spirit’s characteristics and I would use my spirit root’s aura to create pseudo-spirit roots for the substitute body. The pseudo-spirit (a bad name. Note to self - rename later) will affect the substitute body roughly in the same way my spirit affects my body and give it a similar meridian map and similar Seas.

All the while master and I would be able to control and observe the process of the technique at work.

Originally it would only be me who would be able to observe the technique at work but I was able to convince master that it would be greatly beneficial to him too and reworked his method to allow both of us to see how all of it worked.

The method we came up together could be considered a full-fledged magical art, and not a simple one at that. Master was amazing to come up with it in such a short time as not to mention a Nascent Soul, even an average Soul Formation cultivator would have a very hard time comprehending it.

The reworked version was something an average Mind Manifestation cultivator would take an hour to understand. A Soul Formation cultivator and those below would have to try very hard just to get a few insights at most.

In fact, I could simplify it to the point where a Foundation Building level cultivator would be able to use with no problem, but I decided to let master go through the whole process of modifying the technique to let him maybe get a few strokes of inspiration.

Dao comprehension is this kind of thing. Even if you know something and use it all the time, you may not understand it. And sometimes all it takes is but a single glance to understand it, while sometimes a lifetime is not enough.

Getting master to operate the technique would be far too risky. No matter how talented, he was still a Nascent Soul cultivator. I wasn’t bored enough of my life to place it into his hands, so I would be the one in charge for the duration of the test.

First, I wrapped the strings that were created from the strips of meat around what the carcasses turned into. That being a pinkish pulsating mass of gore that looked like an oversized cancer tumor. Did I say that the ritual likely had its roots in the Demonic Dao?

After connecting the strips, I cut my wrist and smeared blood all over the carcasses. I popped a few blood-replenishing pills into my mouth beforehand, so I didn’t have to worry of losing much blood. I could leave buckets of the crimson liquid and be fine.

If any of the honest elders or disciples of the sect were to see what we were doing, I’m afraid expulsion would be the last of our worries. These biased pigs. Just why do they hate demonic cultivators so much? Oh, probably because of the many reasons demonic cultivators deserve to be hated. But demonic cultivators have their own uses! They make for great bad guys whenever the so-called righteous cultivators need a scapegoat whenever they screw up, at least…

After the messy and exhausting process was over, master wrapped the dream-connecting thread over all of my acupoints and then wrapped himself like a dumpling too. Despite me looking like an overgrown spider’s prey, master had a tragic but beautiful aura and looked like a wronged Immortal from Heavens, caught by the filthy and dirty humans to satisfy their most basic de-

…

I found myself in a strange landscape. It felt fragile and I couldn’t focus too much on any thought or any object in the space.

The technique succeeded, I hope?

I felt master’s presence everywhere. Even I myself... Ah! It must be that the I here am not the I from the outside. I must be the Nascent Soul essence that was transformed into a temporary spirit-like construct.

I could be described as an artificial ghost created just to test a technique. It’s a bit of a hard pill to swallow that the meaning of my existence is so trivial and shallow.

Hmm… I was wondering why I had self-awareness and even memories but after skimming through all I knew I came to the conclusion that I was like an echo of Oalur Kang’s true spirit. I had memories but they were blurry and didn’t go far into time. An unexpected after-effect of the technique, not an intentional design.

*Ding*

I got a feeling as if I was a piece of a puzzle put into place. I must’ve been integrated into the substitute body. I guess I just have to unleash the technique then?

P-A-I-N

The technique, as expected is very painful. What is pain though? What is… I? What...

…

Hmm, how peculiar. The abnormal behavior of the central controller (the name I gave to the Nascent essence simulating my spirit) disappeared all of a sudden. For a moment there I felt like it was going out of control. The controlling matrix should’ve been impeccable. Maybe it was the connection time? Well, whatever.