Once Bai Rou spotted the crux of the problem, she immediately tempted Li Zhaoyan with a great many artifact-refining materials. These were materials she had specially set aside after sorting through them for her precious disciple.
Freed of the burden in her heart and having opened her heart, Li Zhaoyan merely sensed them briefly before becoming instantly excited. She grabbed Bai Rou and began asking question after question.
Bai Rou only had time to greet Wei Zhongran and the others before accompanying Li Zhaoyan to one side of the bamboo courtyard, where they began talking endlessly.
Bai Rou deliberately tested Li Zhaoyan as well, to see whether she had grown slack.
Although she had kept her promise not to pass the Guans' household puppet technique on to her sole disciple, over the years, apart from fighting and killing her way forward, the reason she had rapidly become a late-stage Nascent Soul cultivator was that her horizons had broadened more and more.
She had already begun continually merging the mechanism and puppet arts of the Phantom Sect, the Woodflow Sect, the Celestial Spirit Clan, and the Guans.
The lineage she cultivated had thus already broken free of its former restrictions, gradually taking on the vague embryonic form of an alternative lineage.
Bai Rou herself had not realized this. She merely felt that only by continually combining and experimenting with refining methods could she bring out the materials' inherent functions as fully as possible, allowing her refining arts to steadily approach perfection.
As for the attacks she released—how could they be made fastest, most concise, most powerful, and best suited to her own control? That too was something she had needed to ponder constantly along the way.
Thus, she needed to keep experimenting with merging the four puppet arts, continually discarding and