The Era of Old Demons

"Why do you care so much about the Buddha Child, Father?" Fei Yutong asked. Wei Yuan replied, "If a fly were buzzing around you constantly, you would naturally swat it dead at any cost. Besides, the Outer Realm is of paramount importance. The more critical the timing, the less I can afford distractions. That is why I must kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, and the Buddha Child is that chicken." Fei Yutong nodded to show she understood, though a trace of disappointment flickered across her face. Then Wei Yuan asked, "After he captured you, did he do anything terrible to you?" Fei Yutong's expression immediately darkened, and she lowered her head. Seeing this, Wei Yuan produced a box of pills, handed it over, and said, "This is a precious medicine Senior Brother Xu recently concocted. It calms the nerves and settles fright. Take it and swallow a dose." Leaving the pills behind, Wei Yuan vanished on the spot, going who knew where. Fei Yutong was stunned. This was completely different from the script she had anticipated! At this moment, Wei Yuan had something far more important to attend to: the path forward for Golden Pellet dharma idols. Ever since the launch of the shared mind-manifested world, not many cultivators had been willing to walk this road. Anyone who felt they still had a sliver of hope elsewhere was reluctant to rent a piece of a mindscape world. Renting Wei Yuan's mindscape world was equivalent to laying all one's secrets bare before his eyes, leaving no privacy whatsoever. Moreover, the rent for Wei Yuan's mindscape world was exorbitantly high—not something ordinary cultivators could afford. Therefore, when the shared mind-manifested world was first unveiled, Wei Yuan had initiated a new research project to bridge the vast gap between Golden Pellet dharma idols and the shared mind-manifested world. By now, they had finally achieved preliminary results. The first breakthrough targeted the mindscape world itself. The core philosophy of this part of the research could be summarized as: "If heaven is too high, pull it down." The researching cultivators discovered that the twelve islands Wei Yuan provided—each a self-contained system isolated from cause and effect—were essentially no different from ordinary, baseline Scenery Command cultivators. This was why the initial three mindscape worlds had commanded such exorbitant prices: in the eyes of the world, this was genuinely a path to Scenery Command. For the first time in history, Scenery Command carried a clearly marked price tag. However, Qingming cultivators were already thoroughly accustomed to thinking in terms of cost-effectiveness. Given the prerequisite of achieving a stable Scenery Command realm, they believed smaller mindscape worlds were better, and simpler was even better. It wasn't even necessary for each to be a self-contained ecosystem. One could easily churn out a batch of identical mindscape worlds, separate them with only rudimentary partitions, and uniformly isolate the whole entity from outside cause and effect. The new proposal resembled a single pancake sliced evenly into many tiny portions, where each person tasted their own slice without connecting to anyone else. Now Wei Yuan only needed to forge pancakes with different attributes and slice them up, yielding dozens or hundreds of mindscape worlds. Cultivators coined a specific term for these creations: the affordable realm. Naturally, the rent for such mindscape worlds would plummet drastically, bringing them within reach of many mid-tier dharma idol cultivators. Yet in aggregate, for the same amount of effort, the total rent Wei Yuan collected wouldn't merely double or triple—it would multiply several times over. From this, Wei Yuan discovered that the easiest money to make didn't come from high-level cultivators, but from middle-class cultivators desperate to live the high-quality life of a high-level cultivator. *Middle-class money really is the easiest to swindle. Vanity truly is a wonderful thing,* Wei Yuan thought, before realizing something felt off—it seemed he had just insulted himself. This part posed little difficulty for Wei Yuan. In less than half a day, he completed the intricate calculations and divided a single islet into 121 pieces, each capable of functioning as an independent mindscape world. The sole issue was that the partitions between these tiny parcels were somewhat flimsy. But Wei Yuan didn't consider it a major problem. What kind of waves could cultivators who rented such minuscule mindscape worlds possibly make? Even so, to be on the safe side, Wei Yuan added dozens of clauses to the draft agreement. Their general gist was that if a mindscape world's boundaries suffered any damage, the cultivator who caused the disturbance would have to compensate surrounding cultivators and Wei Yuan for their losses, as well as bear the repair costs in full. In truth, ninety-nine percent of the compensation would go straight to Wei Yuan, but roping in the neighboring cultivators created the illusion that those neighbors were receiving just as much as Wei Yuan. One had to admit, the arithmetic mean was truly a magnificent mathematical tool. Yet even after being subdivided into a hundred and twenty parts, such a mindscape world remained far beyond the reach of Golden Pellet cultivators. Jumping up wouldn't reach it, nor would flapping wildly about. There was no helping it; the meager spirituality of a Golden Pellet dharma idol wasn't remotely enough to control a mindscape world, let alone shine a light inside it. However, the group of genius templates led by Wen Guantian came up with another genius idea: since the gap between a Golden Pellet and a mindscape world was too vast to leap across in a single bound, why not build a staircase in between? Thus, the problem became how to make a Golden Pellet give birth to greater spirituality. There were many ways to address this. Nearly all the Three Views and Twelve Halls of the Palace of Grand Beginning possessed relevant methods, and the ancient cultivator inheritances Wei Yuan obtained played around with spirituality in countless brilliant ways. Yet even ancient cultivators could not compare to Wei Yuan, who had restarted the Outer Realm, when it came to awakening spirituality. Over the following months, Wei Yuan focused single-mindedly, continuously conferring with the cultivators on how to endow Golden Pellets with spirituality. Whenever Wen Guantian and the others hit a dead end, Wei Yuan would rely on his own status and the merit of the Outer Realm to point out a new path. And whenever Wei Yuan reached an impasse in his deductions, geniuses like Wen Guantian would crack the problem directly using mathematics. Mutually elevating one another in this manner, an entirely new path was finally born in Qingming that winter! This path treated the Golden Pellet as a seed of life. The cultivation process was a process of gestation and growth, continually developing until it metamorphosed into what was universally recognized as the form with the fullest innate spirituality: an infant. Transforming the pellet into an infant—this brand-new realm was named: Nascent Soul. The Nascent Soul was inherently endowed with immense spirituality. With further nurturing and cultivation, once one's cultivation was sufficient, the Nascent Soul could undergo complete metamorphosis, shed its tangible form, diffuse into heaven and earth, and merge with the world. Through this, one could master a mindscape world. With this, the path connecting Golden Pellet to Scenery Command was completely cleared. The most crucial step in this process—transforming the pellet into an infant—was almost as difficult as ascending to heaven. Yet for Wei Yuan, awakening spirituality happened to be his forte, and he had more than one trick up his sleeve. The Three Realms Path could awaken it; the Dharma God could awaken it; even the Evil Sun Heavenly Pillar could awaken it. What was more, the spirituality awakened by the latter was even stronger—it just tended to leave behind some side effects. In rural regions across the land, folks commonly held unique honorifics for high-level cultivators, such as Dao Foundation Ancestor or Dharma Idol Old Freak. As Golden Pellet dharma idols grew more numerous, they were also called Golden Pellet Old Freaks. Nascent Soul cultivators possessed peerless might. Their baseline strength matched mid-to-late-stage dharma idols, enough to obliterate ordinary Golden Pellets in an instant. Such terrifying power could only be aptly described as that of an "old demon." From now on, Qingming was destined to enter the era of old demons.