Old Tales of the Underground Palace

"It took less than a day and night to directly refine the White Corpse Secret Demon Puppet. That really was fast!"

After entering the minor world within Mechanism Puppet City, He Ping could not help feeling deeply moved. Of the Three Corpses, the White Corpse was the hardest to refine and required the longest time. The reason he had delayed refining the final corpse was that he feared the process would take up too much of his time.

"The arts of our Immortal Puppet Sect lineage are centered on puppets. Compared to other sects and schools, puppet techniques are generally easier to refine. As long as the materials are sufficient, they can be quickly completed. That is one of our Immortal Puppet Sect's advantages..."

Refining magical weapons or artifacts was different. If one followed the traditional methods of the cultivation world to forge artifacts, nearly every sect possessed all manner of refinement methods—major and minor restrictions, the numbers of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Fiends, the Eighteen Heavens...

Moreover, refining a single artifact often demanded the unceasing diligence of several generations. Who knew how many days and years of polishing it took? It relied entirely on the slow work of water grinding through stone.

Artifacts, flying swords, and magical weapons crafted through such painstaking effort possessed immense power, but wielding them also required superior cultivation and magical power. This was the style favored by the ancient Daoist sects of antiquity.

After the turbulent era of the Spring-Autumn Great Calamity arrived, however, this water-grinding style of refinement revealed a problem: the inheritances of each sect were not easily preserved. Whenever a calamity descended and the Heavenly Dao shifted through its cycles, the foundations of orthodox methods would also change.

Once cultivation methods were disrupted by the influence of the Heavenly Dao, refinement