A complete minor divine ability requires comprehending the corresponding laws of profound meaning.
The same holds true for Suppress the Realm, though it isn’t limited to a single type of profound meaning law.
Beyond its fundamental spatial profound meaning law, Suppress the Realm can also incorporate other profound meaning laws.
The more profound meaning laws integrated, the stronger the sealing effect becomes.
But for now, Ye Qingxuan only needs to condense a divine ability seed—he doesn’t need to comprehend profound meaning laws themselves.
All he has to do is grasp the corresponding profound-meaning law patterns and inscribe them within his spiritual sea.
In truth, with his current comprehension ability, coupled with the fact that the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise allows him to meditate without reservation, it wouldn’t be difficult for Ye Qingxuan to comprehend profound meaning laws.
The only issue is that his cultivation is still too low, which passively limits his ability to grasp the power of profound meaning.
Though he can fully control whatever power he comprehends,
once he does comprehend a profound meaning law, the power of that law will begin to manifest within his body—and even his spiritual energy, physical body, and divine sense will become tainted with it.
At that point, his body and cultivation wouldn’t be able to support the weight of that profound meaning power, and he’d have to constantly suppress it himself.
Comprehending profound meaning law power now wouldn’t just fail to strengthen him—it would drain a massive amount of his energy and delay his cultivation progress.
His body’s self-preservation mechanism is precisely what’s holding back his comprehension of profound meaning law power.
Still, having low cultivation only prevents him from comprehending the power of profound meaning laws—it doesn’t hinder his ability to study the law patterns themselves. That’s why he can quickly comprehend and condense divine ability seed patterns.
For this process, Ye Qingxuan doesn’t even need the assistance of the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise; he can just go into seclusion and comprehend them on his own without much difficulty.
Profound-meaning law patterns are essentially small fragments of rules dismantled from complete profound meaning laws.
Through these fragments, Ye Qingxuan can unleash a sliver of the power of profound meaning ahead of time—which is what we call a divine ability seed.
In less than a year,
relying solely on his own comprehension, Ye Qingxuan successfully condensed the divine ability seed for Suppress the Realm once again.
After the seed was formed, he had Ye Zhaoheng go to the Tianfu Shop to pick up the Realm-Settling Stones and refined three nine-tiered, glazed-colored Suppress the Realm Pagodas.
Each pagoda is now at the lower-grade spirit artifact level.
Once they were refined, Ye Qingxuan refined one for himself and sent another to his external incarnation, Gui Xuanzi, who was far away in the Endless Sea.
But since his incarnation is currently aboard a Tianyuan Merchant Guild ship, and he doesn’t know if any surveillance measures have been left in the cabin,
to avoid being detected by the guild’s cultivators, Ye Qingxuan didn’t transmit the pagoda over immediately.
He plans to wait until his incarnation reaches the Eastern Extremity Domain and leaves the Tianyuan Merchant Guild’s ship before sending it over.
The remaining pagoda is reserved for his explorer incarnation, which he hasn’t re-condensed yet.
Whether that incarnation can take this pagoda with him will depend on how generous the origin feedback is when the Cave Heaven Paradise advances to the third grade.
After finishing all this, Ye Qingxuan didn’t rest.
The Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise is on the verge of advancing, and when it does, its area will inevitably expand dramatically.
If he had to tend to all the spirit plants inside the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise by himself, it would be far too tedious.
But the Cave Heaven Paradise holds too many secrets—secrets tied to his future path to the Great Dao.
Before he has the strength to protect himself, Ye Qingxuan doesn’t intend to let anyone else enter.
That’s precisely why, despite having taken in the two brothers Ye Zhaoheng and Ye Zhaoyu as attendants, he’s never let them into the Cave Heaven Paradise to help him with the spirit plants.
Back when the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise was still at the second grade, Ye Qingxuan could handle everything on his own with his cultivation—from planting spirit plants to their subsequent care—without breaking a sweat.
The Cave Heaven Paradise worked in synergy with the plants, so the low-grade spirit plants had a high survival rate; all he needed was to occasionally cast the Spring Breeze and Rain Transformation Art a few times, and that was enough.
But once the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise advances to the third grade and expands tenfold in size, if he still handles everything personally, it’ll start holding back his cultivation.
So Ye Qingxuan plans to cultivate another technique to solve this problem.
That technique is the Puppetry Art from the Earth Immortal inheritance.
Though the Earth Immortal inheritance classifies the Puppetry Art under “techniques,” most of its content is actually related to artifact refining.
The ultimate power of the Puppetry Art is also closely tied to one’s mastery in artifact refining.
Aside from the methods of controlling puppets, the Puppetry Art inheritance contains mostly various puppet refining techniques.
What pleases Ye Qingxuan most about the Puppetry Art from the Earth Immortal inheritance is that there’s no need to split off strands of divine sense to control these puppets.
After all, splitting off too much divine sense would have a considerable impact on him.
If divine sense were required and a puppet got destroyed, his divine sense would inevitably suffer damage as well.
Not using divine sense does come with a minor drawback:
while the puppets can be controlled through the art and can share their field of vision within Ye Qingxuan’s perception range, he can’t operate them with the same precision as moving his own limbs.
But compared to the advantage of not needing divine sense, this flaw is negligible.
What he cares about most is whether it will affect his main body.
Puppets in the art are divided into support puppets and combat puppets.
Among support puppets, the main type is the wood puppet.
By implanting spirit-plant-related knowledge into the wood puppet, inscribing the corresponding techniques, and setting its activity zone,
the wood puppet can operate autonomously, handling the planting and subsequent care of spirit plants within its designated area.
The primary material for refining wood puppets is the Spirit Puppet Tree.
Among the many spirit plants within Ye Qingxuan’s Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise, the Spirit Puppet Tree is already present, so he doesn’t need to purchase any extra.
As for combat puppets, there are countless varieties.
A puppet is, after all, not a human—it can’t contain all elements and maintain absolute balance like a human body can.
Both the human body and spiritual energy contain all the attributes of the world they reside in, and both can exist in an absolute state of balance.
This is precisely why cultivators can use spiritual energy to cast techniques of all attributes.
It’s also the main reason cultivators abandon extreme attribute-based cultivation methods.
Because training in an attribute-focused method tends to break the internal absolute balance later on, eventually leading to qi deviation and bodily destruction.
But puppets are different. During the refining process, the refiner can decide the primary elemental attribute within the puppet’s body.
However, it’s not easy to give a puppet all attributes while maintaining perfect equilibrium.
The materials used for refining combat puppets vary in properties, so their focus differs accordingly.
Using materials of different attributes yields puppets of different attributes, each with different inscribed elemental techniques.
For example, a metal puppet, made primarily from metal-attribute materials, can only have metal-attribute techniques inscribed into it as means of combat.
If you want to refine a multi-attribute puppet, it all comes down to whether the puppeteer’s skill in artifact refining can integrate multiple attributes into the puppet simultaneously while keeping it absolutely stable.
Refining a multi-attribute puppet is definitely more than a hundred times harder than refining a single-attribute one.
The hardest part lies in maintaining the absolute stability of the puppet’s attributes.
“Absolute stability” means that when unleashing power from different attributes, the various attribute forces within the puppet can convert into and replenish each other.
Without this, a multi-attribute puppet can easily break its balance and self-destruct.
Even for Ye Qingxuan, without a proper foundation, this would require a huge amount of time to study before he could possibly refine a multi-attribute combat puppet.
After browsing through all the inherited information on the Puppetry Art, Ye Qingxuan quickly reached a decision.
Within the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Paradise, support puppets are all he needs to help tend the spirit plants—combat puppets are unnecessary.
But for his incarnations traveling abroad, it would be a good idea to refine a few fifth-grade puppets for them to carry as protection.
Thinking about the description of multi-attribute combat puppets, Ye Qingxuan said with some uncertainty:
“I’ve condensed the divine ability seed for Minor Divine Ability · Minor Five Elements Shield, which uses the principle of the Five Elements’ circulating power. Refining a Five Elements puppet shouldn’t be too hard, should it?”
Then he shook his head:
“Forget it. I won’t waste time on that. A fifth-grade single-attribute puppet is good enough. I can just refine a few extra puppets with different attributes.”
Right now, Ye Qingxuan isn’t very confident about refining multi-attribute puppets.
Multi-attribute puppets clearly involve balancing and converting between different attribute profound meanings.
