Above a stretch of empty space, a horned python hovered, its two black horns constantly releasing spiritual light that surged into the void.
In an instant, purple vines sprang out of the void.
The enormous vines writhed and swayed like serpents.
Their numbers swelled like wildly growing weeds, with no end in sight.
Watching from a distance, True Lord Xuan Puppet was deeply troubled.
Although fifth-stage magical treasures could cut these vines apart, doing so released clouds of poisonous mist that stained even the void purple.
Yet if he did not cut them apart, they could easily bind him. He had tried using fourth-stage spirit puppets, but every one had shattered after a single coil wrapped around it.
He finally realized that the seeds of these vines were actually fifth-stage purple crystal blackrock vines.
Only because True Lord Xuan Puppet had two fifth-stage spirit puppets—one capable of casting five-element spells, the other ferocious in close combat—could he barely hold his own.
But as those densely packed vines wore him down, what he struggled most to sustain was his true essence.
Fourth-stage spirit puppets could use high-grade spirit stones as their true essence cores.
Fifth-stage spirit puppets, however, were different. They needed either supreme-grade spirit stones as their cores or a cultivator to supply their power personally.
Although the Xuan Puppet Sect was a sizable Nascent Soul faction, it possessed only a handful of supreme-grade spirit stones. It could hardly afford the extravagance of using them to supply its spirit puppets with true essence.
Sending true essence out of his body to power the puppets also consumed more than using it normally. He had prepared plenty of spirit pills to restore his true essence; otherwise, he would have run out long ago.
But he no longer had any choice. The Demon