385 The Floating Pagoda

Chixinzi, now a living puppet, "awakened." Yet "awake" was not quite the right word for him. He had no mind, no soul; all that remained was a "numinous essence"—the spirit of primal consciousness.

Compared to a soul formed from innate spirits nurtured in the womb, a numinous essence was entirely a postnatal creation. The numinous essence within the void of Chixinzi's mind-sea was an unusual construct modeled wholly after his former soul—a fabricated "program," something akin to an artificial soul.

This "program" was composed of complex memories, memories and information drawn from the old data within the physical shell. In the process of refining someone into a living puppet, He Ping would inject a thread of his own soul-force into it. The puppetized Chixinzi would then use the power of another's soul-thoughts within his body to rewrite itself anew.

It was worth mentioning that only cultivators whose souls had reached completion could be refined into living puppets. Ordinary people's souls were muddled, their thoughts weak and unfocused; they could not endure until the rewriting and transformation were complete.

Once the living puppet's "program" was completed, the accumulated information of its former consciousness—that is, its personality—would surface from the shallows. The cultivation world's research into souls and mental force had already gone very deep, and they understood well the subtle transformations of human consciousness, perception, and memory.

The Immortal Puppet Sect had delved even further into this field and stood among its foremost authorities. In the eyes of the Immortal Puppet Sect's forebears, souls were not unique, memories were not unique, and even the self-will possessed nothing sacred. The enlightenment corresponding to cultivation, the realms perceived by the mind—sooner or later, they were merely information of consciousness that could be analyzed.

Enough idle talk. That thread of He Ping's soul-force crossed