Even though he had also been bounced back by Feng Tingyu, she had at least possessed a good deal of softness; only when compressed close to the limit did her elasticity turn terrifying, shooting up in a near-vertical spike at the end.
This time, however, Wei Yuan had bounced off something rock-hard. There was not the slightest trace of give. Its hardness rivaled nether iron; Wei Yuan felt it was hard enough for someone to carve rifling into a cannon barrel with bare hands.
Only with great difficulty did Wei Yuan steady himself before he slammed into the wall. Having gotten a clear look at the person before him, he could hardly believe his eyes.
"Eldest Senior Sister?"
Ji Liuli tidied her disheveled hair. "What? Are you so surprised to see me?"
"Weren't you in secluded cultivation? Have you consolidated your gains already?"
"With my innate talent, do I even need to consolidate? Come, let me show you my dharma body."
Ji Liuli picked up an ornamental magic treasure dagger displayed in the Dao Comprehension Chamber. Plucking a single strand of hair from her head, she blew it gently against the dagger. The hair drifted past, and the dagger sheared cleanly in two. Literal blade-severing hair.
Only then did Wei Yuan understand why he felt like he had slammed into a mountain of nether iron. Eldest Senior Sister's dharma body was truly absurd—even the Hall of the Bright King was not that exaggerated.
Wei Yuan decisively abandoned any thought of sparring with her. His dharma idol was vast and sprawling, like heaven and earth itself, practically an established mindscape world.
Ji Liuli, on the other hand, had pursued extreme condensation. Such compact perfection was the natural counter to his vast dharma idol. Judging purely from her demonstration just now, Wei Yuan knew that even if he wielded the Giant Yin-Yang Sword to unleash Sweeping the Four Barbarians, he would probably only manage to cleave halfway into her dharma body.
Upon asking further, Wei Yuan learned that it had taken Ji Liuli only seven days to consolidate her dharma idol. She had then studied the principles of the Dharma Idol realm under True Monarch Yanshi, and once her studies were finished, she came straight to Qingming.
She happened to see the notes on the Five Elements Dao Soldiers that Wei Yuan had left in the Hall of Merits, so she exchanged merit for a copy of Immortal Monarch Tinghai's treatise as well. After consulting some materials on the otherworldly realms, she threw herself enthusiastically into studying the true essence of the Dao arts right here in the Dao Comprehension Chamber.
Once immersed in her research, she lost all track of time, and several days passed in the blink of an eye. Only when Wei Yuan entered the Dao Comprehension Chamber again did he discover her presence.
After they exchanged accounts of what they had been up to, Ji Liuli picked up a sheet of jade paper and scribbled down half a page of numbers. "I just looked over the notes you left behind. Your understanding of the water-attuned Dao soldier is somewhat off-track. In truth, this problem is quite simple; there are just a few added variations on the fundamental principles. Immortal Monarch Tinghai explained it very clearly. Look, it's these passages right here—"
Wei Yuan had read those passages multiple times. He recognized every character.
Ji Liuli rolled her eyes at him, realizing he hadn't understood a single thing. She patiently explained, "To give a water-attuned Dao soldier the movement agility of an early Dharma Idol cultivator, the system needs to be configured with at least four thousand and ninety-six controllable nodes. Each node acts like a feature vector, responsible for directing different parts of the body to move in different directions. Combining multiple nodes forms a 'basic movement,' which functions much like a higher-order motion feature derived from feature crossing.
"However, if you control every single node independently, that's equivalent to constructing an immensely complex, high-dimensional control space. It is not only inefficient, but the redundancy is sky-high. Therefore, we introduce a set of foundational control instructions. By combining these basic instructions, we can generate complex yet orderly sequences of motion.
"The combination logic can be modeled using a recursive tree structure, such as employing the node-splitting mechanisms of decision trees or random forests to optimize the action generation path. Each layer of nodes represents a decision point—such as raising a hand or turning left—ultimately outputting a 'Water Blade Launch' action through a series of rule paths.
"In other words, when our 'divine thought stirs,' what we are fundamentally doing is inputting a high-level command into the model, analogous to an input signal for a neural network. The backend control logic tree will automatically execute the action generation logic to complete the release of the Water Blade. Of course, we can also use a technique called principal component analysis to reduce dimensionality, projecting these four thousand and ninety-six nodes onto a few dozen 'principal axes.' Each principal axis represents a key action feature, such as 'qi gathering,' 'wrist rotation,' or 'blade chop.' That way, the system only needs to process a few dozen 'spiritual dimensions' to reconstruct the entire motion—which also takes nothing more than a stir of divine thought."
Wei Yuan wanted to say that after copying the basic spell model, all it took was a stir of divine thought to fire a Water Blade anyway; there was no need to study so much.
Ji Liuli spent over an hour explaining, finally finishing her breakdown of how a water-attuned Dao soldier unleashed the Water Blade Art. Wei Yuan had understood every single word and memorized them all, but put together, he had no idea what they meant.
Ji Liuli rolled her eyes repeatedly, declaring that rotten wood could not be carved. Wei Yuan felt just as helpless. He had transmitted all of that into the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, but his so-called geniuses had collectively played dead, not one of them uttering a peep.
The two emerged from the Dao Comprehension Chamber, and Wei Yuan led Ji Liuli to the immortal city. There was a courtyard residence prepared for her here as well. Wei Yuan clearly remembered her preferences; from the color scheme to the layout and furnishings, everything was arranged just the way she liked, making her eyes light up.
Afterward, Ji Liuli went off on her own to stroll around and explore Qingming, while Wei Yuan returned to the Dao Comprehension Chamber in the Hall of Merits to keep working.
Ji Liuli had her way of studying water-attuned Dao soldiers, and Wei Yuan had his: first and foremost, he had to be able to cast the most fundamental Dao art.
After several hours of diligent effort, Wei Yuan felt he was a step closer to success. As for how much closer, he couldn't say for sure.
A sudden inspiration struck Wei Yuan. After constructing the spell core, he directly slashed the number of nodes on the Dao soldier by two digits, successfully constructing his very first spell Dao soldier.
This Dao soldier was exceedingly strange. Its entire form was composed of several dozen water-attuned blocks. A single arm had only a dozen or so facets, and its torso was much the same—looking entirely like a few crudely cut cubes pieced together.
To borrow Xu Wenwu's phrasing, it was pixel style.
Thus, Wei Yuan constructed his very first pixel Dao soldier. This Dao soldier had limited strength, roughly at the level of a fresh Dao Foundation cultivator, and a Mortal Tier Dao Foundation at that.
Wei Yuan silently dispersed the Dao soldier. If anyone found out he had used a Scenery Command Dao art to shape a Dao Foundation soldier, his master might well expel him to clean house.
Still, pixel Dao soldiers had their advantages. Wei Yuan went to the Dao arts testing grounds and waved his hand. Several hundred pixel Dao soldiers promptly stood across the field. The sight was undeniably eerie; Wei Yuan felt as if the world itself had glitched.
With his immense divine sense and Dao power at present, he could summon over a thousand pixel Dao soldiers in a single breath. More than a thousand Mortal Tier Dao Foundations possessed terrifying might in their own right.
This followed the same path Zhang Sheng walked: winning by sheer quantity, breaking the deadlock through overwhelming force.
Then, with a stir of Wei Yuan's thoughts, the Dao soldiers began to move on their own, some even pairing off to spar. However, only two hundred or so were able to move; over three hundred remained frozen in place, standing as stiff as wooden blocks.
Wei Yuan dispersed the three hundred Dao soldiers he couldn't control. The remaining two hundred immediately became much more agile, and their details sharpened. For instance, their faces, which had previously been flat planes, acquired a few more facets, and their combat strength saw a minor boost.
Looking at these two hundred comical yet faintly unsettling Dao soldiers, Wei Yuan roughly assessed their fighting power. Combined, their combat strength far exceeded that of a single Dharma Idol-level water-attuned Dao soldier.
Wei Yuan recorded all the data and prepared to begin his second phase of research: using all the Dao soldiers as array nodes to form a battle formation for coordinated offense.
Before he could begin, however, the Dao power within his body suddenly surged, its upper limit climbing by leaps and bounds! Wei Yuan mentally cried out in alarm. Looking inside, he saw mist roiling along the borders of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World as new plots of land continuously formed. The entire Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World had embarked on a new round of expansion, and an exceptionally ferocious one at that!
Wei Yuan's divine sense swept rapidly across the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, searching for the source of the anomaly.
He saw a delicate, refined woman standing in the garden, using spiritual qi to irrigate a patch of red, flaming moss on the ground.
Wei Yuan was dumbfounded. He had never expected Fuyao to actually bring this patch of Phoenix Blood Longevity Moss to life! But this meant his path toward cultivation would be extended by who knew how many more years.
At this moment, a bizarre thought crossed his mind: that egg... could something actually hatch from it too?
By common sense, that was virtually impossible, but common sense in the cultivation world meant that anything was possible.
The more Wei Yuan thought about it, the more uneasy he felt. He immediately sent word to Maiden Yin-Yang, instructing her to find a way to suppress the egg and prevent any changes from occurring.
Afterward, Wei Yuan cut off a pinpoint-sized sliver of the Phoenix Blood Longevity Moss and brought it to Xu Henshui for medicinal testing.
At this moment, large-scale construction was underway again at Xu Henshui's alchemy abbey. Numerous alchemists were unpacking array components from stacked crates and setting up a grand formation.
The array was substantial in scale, covering several alchemy chambers and herb storage rooms. Its array patterns were exceedingly profound—so profound that Wei Yuan could not make heads or tails of them.
His inability to understand was not due to a lack of array knowledge; rather, high-tier formations adapted according to their materials, and the rarer the materials, the more unique the array. Wei Yuan's failure to recognize it simply meant it incorporated a massive amount of rare materials he had never encountered before.
Wei Yuan approached Xu Henshui and asked, "Martial Uncle Xu, what array is this?"
Xu Henshui replied, "This is the Subtlety-Discerning Spiritual Array. It greatly amplifies divine sense. Within this array, whether one is refining pills or discerning medicinal properties, one can achieve a state of minute perception. Medicinal herbs that normally only suffice for a single trial can be tested seven or eight times here. Take certain spirit mushrooms, for instance: normally you would need an entire cap, but with the array's enhancement, a tiny sliver of a spore-bearing cap leaf is enough. If a cultivator's divine sense is exceptionally potent, a single spore might even suffice."
Wei Yuan retrieved the Phoenix Blood Longevity Moss and smiled. "With this array's aid, this herb should be plenty for Martial Uncle to work with."
Xu Henshui stared at the pinpoint-sized speck of moss, completely speechless. "You think far too highly of your martial uncle."
Still, once the Subtlety-Discerning Spiritual Array was finished, Xu Henshui estimated that this tiny amount would allow him to research the pill formula three times. As Xu Henshui reached out to take the herb, Wei Yuan suddenly noticed his fingertips were trembling faintly. Taken aback, Wei Yuan hurriedly asked, "Martial Uncle, what happened to you?"
A cultivator's control over their body demanded total precision; an uncontrollable tremor pointed to serious trouble.
Xu Henshui gave Wei Yuan a languid, resentful look and said mournfully, "Liuli had already left, so why on earth did you provoke her into coming back? She tracked me down just now, insisted on sparring, and ended up leaving me like this. That damn woman doesn't know her own strength."
Wei Yuan had experienced Ji Liuli's terrifying dharma body firsthand; she was already a freak comparable to a Scenery Command peak expert. Even he hesitated to spar with her, so Xu Henshui's frail frame had naturally been pulverized.
Sensing trouble, Wei Yuan immediately rushed to the immortal city.
At present, only Feng Chutang was there. He sat quietly at his desk, gazing at the rubbings of the Creation Pool blueprints before him. Everything appeared peaceful and serene.
Wei Yuan breathed a sigh of relief. "Martial Uncle Feng!"
Feng Chutang looked up and asked placidly, "Is something the matter, Nephew?"
Wei Yuan finally noticed something was wrong. Feng Chutang had none of his usual gentle fervor; in the depths of his eyes lay complete deadness.
"Martial Uncle, what happened to you—"
Chapter 678