Wei Yuan flicked his fingers, picking up a grain of soil from the ground with each of his ten fingers before adding ten grains of star sand. Green immortal light flared at his fingertips, and he began the refinement immediately.
What he was refining with this move were engineering cultivators; using a grain of soil for each was somewhat wasteful. Fortunately, there was Flourishing of the Many Realms. Once it had sufficient data, it quickly provided a solution.
Amidst the flickering immortal light, the vital soil on Wei Yuan's fingertips gradually took shape as crude humanoid blanks, though some were joined in triplets and others in pairs. Once the blanks were refined, a streak of sword qi swept past, severing them apart before sending them off to the workshops.
Whether they were cut into two or three depended on the size of the adhered soil grains. With this method of refinement, the speed of producing engineering cultivators was faster than ever before, yet Wei Yuan's brows were tightly knitted, feeling not the slightest bit of relief.
Suddenly, a bright flash erupted before his eyes. Not far away, a battle fortress exploded with a thunderous roar. Countless avatar puppets fled from within, but even more were streams of light formed from true spirits. Extremely colossal individuals had also appeared among the sin-beasts—some had necks that could extend tens of li, moving swift as lightning, devouring the fleeing true spirits one by one.
The situation at another battle fortress was equally precarious. Countless sin-beasts had already crawled onto its surface and begun gnawing voraciously. These sin-beasts were covered in a faint sheen of light, innately possessing some sort of defensive divine ability.
Sin-beasts that could previously be slain with a single Dao technique now required two or three. Fortunately, the star sand dropped after slaying these advanced sin-beasts was of higher grade, allowing the war to continue.
The number of engineering cultivators that needed refining was already substantial, leaving Wei Yuan barely able to keep up. To make matters worse, Flourishing of the Many Realms had finished designing a brand-new avatar ahead of schedule—one that template cultivators could pilot to perfection.
The new avatar puppet was only half a zhang long and two chi tall, with six legs and a pair of wings. No matter how one looked at it, it resembled a bee with a human head.
The divine sense of template cultivators was feeble, and what they could do was quite limited. Therefore, the avatar puppets designed specifically for them had exceedingly rudimentary functions: just the basics of carrying, assembling, cutting, and excavating. In addition, by swapping out tools on their front limbs, they could handle some advanced tasks such as maintenance or simple carving.
This avatar was named the astral worker bee, born specifically for large-scale construction in the outer realms, and was the core task Wei Yuan had assigned earlier.
Because its functions were so simple, the astral worker bee completely relied on sheer numbers to win out. Just for the initial phase, five hundred thousand worker bees needed to be refined. Moreover, Flourishing of the Many Realms gave Wei Yuan no breathing room at all; downstream workshops had already received the blueprints and were revising their workflow processes, waiting solely on Wei Yuan to refine the crude blanks. Wei Yuan looked at his hands, then at the order of five hundred thousand, and then looked at his hands again.
He took a deep breath—a futile gesture—then reached out to tap the ground, picking up ten grains of soil. Loading each with a grain of star sand, he began a trial refinement. Moments later, the blanks were finished, each blank containing four worker ants. After severing and sending them off with sword qi as usual, Wei Yuan paused.
He looked at himself. Currently, he had a hundred arms and a thousand fingers, but to take on this order, that was clearly far from enough. With a thought, Wei Yuan sprouted several dozen more arms, but the result was that his upper body was entirely covered in hands; any more, and there would be no room left.
Wei Yuan reflected upon his own form with divine sense, and his current appearance immediately sent a shiver down his spine. Then again, if Wei Yuan were to visit the Wu domain right now, he would probably whip up a sensation, universally irresistible to male and female alike.
Too thin an arm looked unsightly, while too thick left no room... An idea struck Wei Yuan. Thus, the arms across his body began to extend, and their ten fingers elongated and thickened, turning into new arms. From these new arms sprouted new palms, which grew ten fingers each.
With secondary arms, Wei Yuan instantly evolved from a hundred hands to a thousand hands and ten thousand fingers. His entire being resembled a lush sea anemone, dancing merrily in the Chaos Sea.
Wei Yuan silently crushed the shadow-recording orbs, leaving not a single one intact.
Though this new form was bizarre, it was exceptionally ferocious when it came to getting work done. Wei Yuan extended a hand again, directly scooping up a hundred grains of floating soil, refining several hundred worker bee blanks in one go.
Yet Wei Yuan was still not entirely satisfied. Considering wartime attrition, several hundred thousand worker bees were far from enough; he would likely need to refine upwards of ten million. His current efficiency was inadequate for such an undertaking.
Wei Yuan did not stop his hands. After several days of this, he suddenly noticed that whenever he gathered soil, he would often hesitate for a moment, taking either too much soil or too little. Compounded millions of times, these tiny pauses had an enormous impact on efficiency.
Wei Yuan designed a solution on the spot. In the blink of an eye, the plan was complete, and he mobilized a large host of engineering cultivators to break ground and construct a brand-new soil-refining workshop.
The new workshop specialized in gathering and preparing soil, roughly processing vital soil into standardized blanks before arranging them on 10x10 trays. That way, when Wei Yuan reached over with one hand, having exactly a hundred fingers, a single tap could gather them all—truly swift as lightning! Once the blanks were standardized, Wei Yuan no longer needed to spend divine sense monitoring the refinement process. The power and duration for all refinements were identical, requiring only repetitive movements. The substantial amount of divine sense saved could be redirected toward other tasks.
And once one's thinking was opened up, a whole new world appeared before one's eyes. Thus, all refinement movements were broken down and optimized into fixed routines. Wei Yuan did not even need to think; he could simply let his muscle memory carry out the motions automatically.
After hundreds, even thousands, of such improvements, a ring had been added around where Wei Yuan sat, neatly stocked with processed blanks. Wei Yuan's hands came down like lightning, and the crude blanks converged into a rolling river of stars, flying toward their respective workshops. Swarms of newly created worker ants carried away empty trays and brought in fresh ones, so frantically busy they practically took flight.
Yet Wei Yuan still felt something was not quite right. He thought some more, then swiveled a thread of sword qi and severed an arm clean at the root.
This arm possessed a sufficiently high status; once severed, it shifted and moved on its own, continuing the refinement. A moment later, dozens of arms were darting back and forth, turning into machines that refined avatars.
Sure enough, efficiency surged dramatically. Furthermore, Flourishing of the Many Realms' optimizations of the production process began gushing out, eventually even proposing the ultimate modification goal: encapsulate Wei Yuan's true body, install standard interfaces, and provide energy and status for all workshops and facilities.
Standard interfaces? Wei Yuan rejected it outright and gave Flourishing of the Many Realms a harsh scolding.
Now the new world was fully prepared. All that remained was to see what response the Chaos Sea would mount, and what kind of powerful new sin-beasts it would spawn.
In fact, regarding sin-beasts, Flourishing of the Many Realms had already analyzed them thoroughly: high-tier sin-beasts were only a few times stronger in combat prowess, but the energy contained in the high-grade star sand left behind upon their deaths was dozens of times that of lower grades.
Thus, eliminating high-tier sin-beasts was clearly cost-effective, and eliminating high-tier sin-beasts with low-tier troops was even more so. Consequently, the direction of Wei Yuan's efforts shifted toward finding ways to turn the templates into the main force of conquest, and finding ways to stimulate the Chaos Sea into producing high-tier sin-beasts.
At that moment, a clear chime rang in Wei Yuan's ears; the hour had arrived.
And so, Wei Yuan plucked a leaf from the Tree of the Great Dao, refined it with merit and karmic luck, and flicked it into the Chaos Sea as usual, preparing to stir up a new round of great warfare.
The leaf fell into the Chaos Sea, drifting farther and farther away. The farther it drifted, the wider the area of the Chaos Sea it stimulated. However, Wei Yuan was not greedy; each time, he would withdraw the karmic luck once it reached roughly the intended distance. A war stirred up in this manner would generally require sixty to eighty percent of the expeditionary legion's strength to handle.
Tense and thrilling, perilous yet secure, and richly rewarding—this was the ideal war.
Yet this time, before Wei Yuan could withdraw his karmic luck, he saw the leaf of the Great Dao picked up by someone. That hand was very beautiful.
Chapter 1447