Lingxiao Daoist had died far too suddenly, to the point where it even felt somewhat theatrical.
But at the same time, it also proved just how dangerous the Pill Dao Method was. In a certain sense, pill poison was even harder to control than eerie objects.
Ren Qing settled the giant corpse Buddha among the towering hills of White Bone Mountain and chose not to continue deeper into the forbidden zone for now. He planned to first figure out what exactly was going on.
What exactly did the immortal gate represent? Why had so many factions fought over it two hundred years ago? And why had it eventually become something no one dared approach?
Dead Man's Forbidden Zone was filled with mysteries, and Ren Qing could not help but feel as though he were surrounded by layers upon layers of fog.
He reopened the rift to the stomach world, and the cultivators immediately returned from within to the intestines and stomach, continuing the construction work on the giant corpse Buddha.
The expressions of the cultivators varied. Quite a few Cishi people wore mourning clothes and hemp sashes, unable to suppress the grief from the deaths of friends and family.
The corpse hordes, meanwhile, struggled to contain their excitement because they had gained access to the stomach world, especially the prosperous Immortal's Dream within it.
Just from the scale of the stomach world alone, one could already realize how unfathomable Ren Qing's divine abilities were.
From high above, they could see at a glance that even though the stomach world was currently in an ice age, with the land covered in silver frost and snow, life still lurked everywhere beneath the surface. It did not resemble a small world created through techniques at all, but a genuine world.
What shocked the zombies most was that beside Dream City stood a living town.
Wuwei City possessed limbs, and even its walls had enormous facial features. From time to time, it would use its tongue to snatch wild beasts and swallow them whole.
Compared to the marvels of the stomach world, even the giant corpse Buddha seemed rather ordinary.
Restraint Officers' Hall quickly returned to their respective duties. Under Li Tiangang's arrangements, the wounded rested in the temporary camp, while the dead were handed over to Ren Qing.
For cultivators, as long as they were still alive, no injury was particularly difficult to recover from.
Even missing limbs could be regenerated through various techniques that stimulated bodily regeneration, at most consuming some lifespan that was not considered especially "valuable."
Jiang Feng briefly tallied the casualties.
Ren Qing was fairly satisfied with the losses. Aside from the Cishi people, all losses had been kept within double digits, and most were newly advanced Ghost Envoy realm cultivators.
Even the fallen cultivators were not useless. The eerie objects born from them were valuable resources in themselves, not to mention the corpses...
Logically speaking, ever since the Corpse Refinement Method had been perfected, turning ordinary corpses into zombies was not difficult. In just a few days, a large batch of fresh Purple Zombies could be created.
Purple Zombies retained fragments of memories from their previous lives, which could be considered a unique form of resurrection.
However, after hesitating for a moment, Ren Qing ultimately chose not to place the corpses into the Yin Gathering Formation.
Zombies were definitely connected to the immortal gate, perhaps even the so-called "people from behind the gate." For now, it was unsuitable to create too many zombies.
Ren Qing was also wary that cultivators from Restraint Officers' Hall might choose to transform themselves into zombies voluntarily.
Although fertility naturally declined as cultivators advanced in cultivation, low fertility and complete extinction were entirely different matters.
Now that universal cultivation had already begun, he did not want the population of Restraint Officers' Hall to stagnate.
Ren Qing stored the cultivators' corpses on an iceberg within the wine sea. After all, low temperatures could preserve corpses in the state they were in immediately after death, and the remnant souls within the Mud Pellet Palace would remain dormant as well.
He then focused on analyzing Lingxiao Daoist's memories while assigning Restraint Officers' Hall the task of constructing new mutated organs.
After facing Pill Dao Sect, Ren Qing realized the giant corpse Buddha still had quite a few shortcomings.
The first was its limited combat methods. Only the Heart-Burning Method could really count as a spell, while everything else, including the natal flying sword, amounted to physical attacks.
If they encountered enemies similar to Ghost Shadow, it would be difficult to deal with them.
Ren Qing planned to expand the giant corpse Buddha's mutated organs, though with their current manpower, refining two organs simultaneously was already the limit.
He soon selected suitable techniques. Most importantly, Restraint Officers' Hall happened to possess eerie objects for them ranging from Martial Practitioner realm to Yin Difference realm.
The technique was called Black Arm Method. Zhang Mu, whom Ren Qing had once known, had used Black Arm Method as his primary cultivation technique, though unfortunately Zhang Mu had died mysteriously within the Food Immortal Forbidden Zone.
[Black Arm Method]
[Created by Ape Demon. Cultivation requires immersing the right arm in poisonous water until flesh and bone dissolve. Survive without dying to successfully cultivate it.]
Among Restraint Officer techniques, poison was always a universally effective method.
There was practically no technique that completely countered it. On the contrary, all fleshly bodies feared poison, and it could work together with Ren Qing's disease strains to produce exceptional effects.
The associated disease strain selected was the Thick Blood disease strain. Its symptoms resembled diabetes, typically manifesting as excessive fat content within the blood.
The Thick Blood disease strain could greatly enhance the toxicity of Black Arm Method. The two complemented each other perfectly.
Unfortunately, disease strains carried too many uncertain variables. Otherwise, Ren Qing would even have wanted to promote them widely.
As for the mutation path of Black Arm Method, Ren Qing had no room to choose because due to the eerie object involved, only the "Poison Tree Person" path could directly reach the Yin Difference realm known as "Hundred-Armed Poison Tree."
Poison Tree Person transformed the right arm into a structure resembling tree branches.
Once Black Arm Method was activated, the right arm could grow like a tree, producing as many as a hundred arms to form a gigantic net of limbs.
At the same time, the giant corpse Buddha's main brain also needed mutation and refinement. The associated technique was the same Ice Crystal Technique used by the jailers.
The Ice Crystal Technique's mutation path selected "Crystal Brain Person," granting tremendous resistance against illusion techniques and soul possession, perfectly compensating for a weakness.
Unfortunately, there were too few eerie objects for Crystal Brain Person, limiting it at most to the Half-Corpse realm.
Ren Qing felt a slight headache. If not for the lack of eerie objects, neither the large-scale eerie fetus vessel nor the giant corpse Buddha would still be trapped at Ghost Envoy realm.
Wait...
He had overlooked something. Back then, he had wanted to use the Longevity Forbidden Zone to cultivate eerie objects. Later, it was proven that eerie objects had to be planted into disease trees, which required sacrificing huge numbers of mortals.
So he had stopped considering eerie object cultivation altogether, but in reality there was still another method.
After the stomach world completed its transformation, jailers could already cultivate independently. Once their cultivation accumulated to a certain degree, they could naturally break through realms.
The Information flow could also forcibly advance them, though it wasted a bit too much lifespan.
Ren Qing could not help but test whether he could separate jailers from the stomach world, and immediately his entire body began radiating a dense aura of techniques.
He was currently inside the camp located in the stomach, instantly drawing the attention of many cultivators.
Under the astonished gazes of those around him, an indescribable eerie object crawled out from Ren Qing's shadow, nearly twenty meters in size.
The eerie object resembled a whale, its entire body composed of fleshly tentacles. Its aura was roughly at Ghost Envoy realm, but exceptionally solid.
Kunpeng had broken free from the stomach world's restraints, yet its first reaction was not escape, but terror as it looked toward Ren Qing.
It knew Ren Qing's methods and feared being used for artifact refinement, trembling all over in fright.
Ren Qing patted Kunpeng's head before returning it to the stomach world, then calmly closed his eyes and resumed thinking as though nothing had happened.
The cultivators had long since grown used to such things. After discussing it briefly, they each returned to their work.
Ren Qing began selecting eerie objects being raised inside the stomach world. The Taotie Method definitely had to occupy part of the slots since it was tied to the Sand Ship.
In the end, he released six Half-Corpse realm Secondary Stomachs and three Ghost Envoy realm Prison Within the Abdomen eerie objects into the land regions of the stomach world.
Their appearances resembled Taotie beasts, possessing terrifying appetites, and their intelligence was too low to properly understand Ren Qing's words.
Ren Qing realized he could not free-range them casually, so he simply sealed them away on another uninhabited island.
If jailers did not cultivate independently through the demon cultivator tribes, their cultivation growth would naturally be somewhat slower, though the stomach world did not have extra population to spare anyway.
The remaining eerie objects were selected from techniques related to the giant corpse Buddha, such as the fireball-like Heart-Burning Method eerie object and the Rebirth Technique eerie object with a taiji pattern on its turtle shell...
He did not dare release too many of them. Even if the stomach world could impose restrictions, the accidental destruction caused by eerie objects would still be enough to cause massive trouble.
Ghost Wolf and the other jailers treated the situation like a great enemy approaching, inevitably uniting together and developing xenophobic tendencies.
Ren Qing did not care. In his eyes, jailers were different from other jailers. Those cultivated from Martial Practitioner realm onward clearly possessed far more complete intelligence.
If nothing unexpected happened, Ghost Wolf and the others would become permanent residents of the stomach world.
Ren Qing then focused his attention on separating Lingxiao Daoist's memories. However, because they contained the thoughts and experiences of tens of thousands of people, the process was extremely difficult.
Fortunately, there was overlap between many memories, and techniques were the easiest category to sort through.
Within just a few days, the Pill Dao Method and Pill Poison Method had already been organized into volumes, allowing Ren Qing to gain insight into these techniques that differed from Restraint Officer methods.
Yet the more he studied them, the stranger they felt. In certain lines of thought, the Pill Dao Method actually resembled Heavenly Dao methods in curious ways.
Pill Dao cultivators needed to refine a pill into their natal golden core, and the golden core acted like a radiation source, gradually transforming the cultivator's physique.
This process was called "refining the great medicine," and indeed bore striking similarities to Heavenly Dao methods.
Of course, the drawback of the Pill Dao Method merely made the user more medicinal in nature. The golden core was not a bizarre object as sinister as Heavenly Dao Insects.
The continent where Pill Dao Sect resided was likely west of Dead Man's Forbidden Zone, known as "Sang Province."
Ren Qing suspected the reason Pill Dao Sect had not been targeted by other factions was because they themselves were deeply involved in human trafficking and other filthy dealings.
Sect disciples relied on Pill Poison Method for self-protection, while ordinary mortals were taught only the Pill Dao Method.
Once the human medicines matured, they would either be refined into pills or sold as medicinal ingredients. Maintaining the stability of an entire province through such means was not difficult.
As for Pill Poison Method, it truly did store memories by devouring souls and preserving them within the Pill Dao cultivator's natal golden core.
Compared to the Buddhist "cloud server" used for storing souls, Pill Poison Method was more like a "hard drive" capable of containing memories.
But the difference between the two was like heaven and earth.
No matter how many memories Pill Poison Method stored, over time they would inevitably become hopelessly mixed together, eventually making the refinement of Dao soldiers impossible.
Lingxiao Daoist had also been consumed by pill poison, ending in complete soul destruction.
After witnessing Pill Poison Method, Ren Qing could not help but entertain a thought. A new soul possessing memories from a previous life should also count as a continuation of life, right?
If he stored the memories of the deceased before death, then injected them into newborn souls after refining the corpses into zombies, would that not be equivalent to reincarnation?
Ren Qing carefully observed the zombies. The more he looked, the more possible it seemed.
He could not help but experiment with beasts first.
Extracting the thin memories of beasts was not troublesome. With dream techniques, injecting them into newborn souls only required some effort.
However, Ren Qing discovered that unfamiliar bodies rejected the memories to some extent.
Memories and bodies had to match one another. Otherwise, most of the memories would not be accepted by the newborn soul.
Cultivators truly could use pill poison together with Corpse Refinement Method to achieve an alternative form of reincarnation.
But it amounted to only a single chance. Once a zombie died again, it would merely become a puddle of rotten flesh, and incomplete memories were also a possible risk.
As for Dao soldiers, these puppets refined through mountains of human lives possessed absolutely no advancement potential. In Ren Qing's eyes, they were completely meaningless.