This mutated spirit rice.
Its stalk was as thick as a water bucket, its ears layered upon one another, numbering over a thousand.
Golden light flowed across it, radiating pure spiritual qi like a giant opened umbrella.
Xu Changqing felt that rather than keeping it to produce gold rice, it would be better to refine it into a spirit plant puppet.
Next, he began refining it according to the method used for the Purple Firmament Puppet.
Of course, he also made many adjustments based on the characteristics of the thousand-ear golden-ray rice.
The first step was still extracting the core and shaping the form.
With a wave of his hand, Xu Changqing precisely severed the roots and stalks of the thousand-ear golden-ray rice, extracting a walnut-sized golden crystal core from the densest cluster of ears.
This was the "thousand-ear spirit crystal," the core of the entire spirit plant.
He then mixed the rice stalks with lotus root powder and spirit jade powder, added spirit dew, and molded a body as tall as a human.
Its torso stood erect, and its limbs were long and slender.
It had eyes, a mouth, and ears, while a spot was left at the center of its brow for embedding the spirit crystal.
While shaping it, inspiration suddenly struck Xu Changqing. He deliberately fused the toughness of rice stalks with the hardness of metal, allowing the puppet to withstand impacts like a spirit plant while unleashing tremendous force like a metal puppet.
Only at the very end did he embed the thousand-ear spirit crystal into its brow.
In an instant, fine golden patterns resembling tree rings emerged across the puppet's body.
Then came the second step: inscribing the sigils and melding the laws.
This time, he did not use baleful-quelling fluid. Instead, he took gold