The Goddess Statue immediately withdrew its radiance, and the four cultivators who had previously fallen into an illusion collapsed where they stood.
Chen Yang slowly floated before the Goddess Statue. She had exhausted all her strength just to barely manage a posture of clasped hands and worship.
"Greetings, Exalted God... sir!"
"Rise. Now answer my questions."
"Yes..."
The Goddess Statue then recounted her origins.
Only then did Chen Yang learn that this stone statue, which had developed intelligence, was actually the core of the entire Heavenly Talisman Secret Realm!
More precisely, she ought to have been the Spirit of the Secret Realm.
Yet when she was first born, in order to avoid being controlled by human cultivators, she had found this Goddess Statue in the ruins of the Ancient Talisman Sect and fused with the traces of divine power remaining within it, gradually evolving into her present form.
As a Spirit of the Secret Realm, her path of growth was far slower than that of an innate spiritual treasure like Chen Yang.
Thus, for her own development, she later simply turned to a path of growing through divine power.
Thereafter, whenever the Secret Realm opened, she would teleport talented cultivators blessed with luck and fortune here. Then, under the pretext of bestowing insights, she would seize a portion of their fortune power to aid her own growth.
From her initial muddleheaded state to her current level of intelligence, she had spent a full three hundred years.
"The Divine Dao path... is truly fraught with ten thousand hardships..."
By the end, the Goddess Statue simply began pouring out her woes to Chen Yang, speaking of how difficult these years had been for her and the several great setbacks she had endured.
"Exalted God... you are the true... mighty one..."
"The method