Thoughts churned in Shen Luo's mind as he put away the Divine Artisan Cannon. His interest in puppetcraft grew stronger, and he continued reading the young man's journal.
To his surprise, however, the latter half of the journal had little to do with cultivation insights. Instead, it recorded parts of the young man's past.
His name had been Yuan Wenli, and he had come from the Langxia Kingdom.
According to the journal, although the Langxia Kingdom was a mortal nation, its proximity to Heavenly Mechanism City had made its people skilled in mechanisms and puppetcraft. They had been especially adept at making sand boats, sand carriages, and other vehicles for traveling through the desert. In its day, the kingdom had been wealthy and prosperous, with considerable dealings with the nations of the Western Regions and even Great Tang.
But just over a hundred years earlier, a sudden catastrophe had wiped that once-prosperous little kingdom clean off the map.
Its cities and buildings had remained, but every citizen had been slaughtered in a single night. The sole survivor had been Yuan Wenli, who had already become a disciple of Heavenly Mechanism City.
Heavenly Mechanism City had even sent elders to investigate the Langxia Kingdom and its surrounding regions for years, but they had failed to find the culprit.
Eventually, with no leads to pursue, Heavenly Mechanism City had abandoned the investigation.
As the last surviving subject of his entire nation, Yuan Wenli had lost all his family and friends in that calamity. He had become the orphan of an entire kingdom.
His sect had abandoned the investigation, but he had not.
More than a hundred years had passed in the blink of an eye. Throughout those years, he had continued searching for the true culprit, but sadly, his efforts had yielded