"Defective?"
Xu Xiaoshou was immediately startled.
He nearly blurted out, Do you know what level of combat power A-Jie has? But Elder Qiao clearly should have known.
Perhaps he knew even more than Xu Xiaoshou did.
"How so?"
Xu Xiaoshou steadied himself.
Qiao Qianzhi sighed. "It's a little too early to be telling you this now."
"But you're growing too quickly. Who knows—after your trip to the White Cavern, you might even run into them."
"So I'll tell you directly!"
Elder Qiao fixed his gaze on Xu Xiaoshou and spoke gravely. "The Heavenly Mechanism Puppet was originally a new experiment by the Holy Spirit Hall, intended to create an untiring war machine similar to a Ghost Beast."
"And then use it to deal with Ghost Beasts."
"But clearly, it wasn't that simple."
"Even someone as powerful as the Dao Hall Master still failed during the first batch of experiments." Qiao Qianzhi lowered his head.
"A-Jie was the only half-successful existence among the first batch of test subjects."
"It successfully developed thought and intelligence, but it could not be controlled at all. Thus, it became something that knew only slaughter, before being sealed away and destroyed."
"So calling it a defective product would not be wrong in the slightest."
Xu Xiaoshou nodded, sharply catching the flaw in Elder Qiao's words.
"Destroyed?"
"Yes."
Qiao Qianzhi did not deny it.
"If it was destroyed, then how did you people bring it back?"
Xu Xiaoshou did not understand.
Could it be that after destroying it, Dao Qiongchang had gifted the thing to Elder Qiao? What kind of connection was that? With such a connection, would he still need to serve as an elder in this tiny Spirit Palace? Qiao Qianzhi paced as he said, "At the time, A-Jie truly had already been destroyed. Even