Ren Qing wanted to find a suitable force among the tens of thousands of souls connected to Matchmaking Immortal, but that was no easy task.
The force had to possess a Heavenly Aberration realm cultivator, and it also had to be easy to manipulate.
He had no idea how the immortal position had selected its targets. The red threads were spread across the world, linking men, women, old people, and children alike, with no discernible pattern whatsoever.
Ren Qing could only inspect each soul one by one. Fortunately, he did manage to gain something.
His consciousness attached itself to the other party's soul, allowing him to observe from an unusual perspective.
Broken Wind Cliff lay at the end of a branch range west of the Bottomless Pit. Because of its remote location, resources were extremely scarce.
Looking around, there was hardly a trace of vegetation to be seen, only a barren Gobi stretching into the distance.
Strange howls could also be heard from afar, piercing the ears like the clamor of gongs and drums.
Violent winds roared through the land, forming towering tornadoes that circled the Bottomless Pit. Mixed within them were many unusual plants.
Wind Companion Grass was a rootless plant unique to Broken Wind Cliff.
Its leaves were highly poisonous, but its stalk was crisp and edible. It survived by absorbing moisture carried within the hurricanes.
A black shadow flashed through the air as a winged rodent glided effortlessly along the wind currents, its claws seizing the stalk of a Wind Companion Grass.
Just as the rodent was about to leave, the mantis stalked the cicada only to be stalked by the oriole behind it. A spear carved from bone shot through the air and pierced its head.
A strangely shaped Wind Hollow Man hugged the prey's corpse and flew toward a cave in the cliff.
Ren Qing's viewpoint remained fixed on the Wind Hollow Man. Its bizarre anatomy left him marveling at the mysteries of this world.
The Wind Hollow People's flesh and bones resembled cotton batting. Not only were they loose in structure, but their bodies were naturally filled with countless tiny holes.
As long as they held their breath, every hole across their bodies opened, allowing fierce winds to pass through them and enabling them to fly through the air.
To Ren Qing, the Wind Hollow People resembled kites. The stronger the wind, the steadier and faster they flew.
The Wind Hollow Man entered the cave. After passing through a stretch of darkness, hundreds of its kin were drawn by the scent of fresh blood from the prey.
However, these companions possessed too few body openings to ride the hurricanes. They had long since been eliminated by their environment and could only survive on scraps.
The limestone cave network stretched in every direction, with at least several thousand entrances and exits covering dozens of li along the farthest reaches of the Bottomless Pit branch.
The scarcity of resources had completely solidified the social hierarchy. At the very top sat a Wind Hollow Man weighing several hundred jin named Feng Ye.
Feng Ye resembled countless sheets of human skin piled together. His cultivation had reached the Heavenly Aberration realm, but his lifespan was already nearing its end.
In Ren Qing's view, the only reason the Wind Hollow People had managed to survive within the Bottomless Pit was because they possessed a Heavenly Aberration realm cultivator. Otherwise, they would have long since become prey for others.
The cultivation method they practiced must have been perfectly suited to their race. That alone explained how someone could still reach the Heavenly Aberration realm despite such a complete lack of resources.
From the scattered memories released while the Wind Hollow People slept, Ren Qing learned that they possessed no spoken language, only an extremely primitive writing system.
Their script resembled pictographs, a recording method evolved from simple drawings.
He immediately began learning the Wind Hollow People's writing and studying their history and culture. With the computational power of tens of thousands of bacterial souls, it took only a few hours.
During that time, Ren Qing subtly influenced the Wind Hollow People's subconscious through the red threads, quietly approaching the central cavern where Feng Ye rested.
Feng Ye noticed one of his clansmen approaching, but old age had left him without the energy to care. He merely rolled over and continued sleeping.
Ren Qing used Zhili Technique to pull Feng Ye's consciousness into the dreamscape within Matchmaking Immortal.
A new figure instantly appeared within the Little Heavenly Court.
Feng Ye crawled forward with his bloated body, his face filled with disbelief as he looked around before his gaze settled upon the dilapidated Southern Heavenly Gate.
Although he could not read the inscription, the relief carvings decorating the Southern Heavenly Gate were clearly extraordinary.
The reliefs vividly depicted the distinctive characteristics of every branch of the Restraint Officers' Hall. Even the restrained corpses had been portrayed as Giant Spirit Generals guarding the Southern Heavenly Gate.
It was as though the Restraint Officers' Hall hidden within Stomach World truly was the immortal bureaucracy ruling the Three Realms.
Furthermore, under the influence of Ren Qing's Zhili Technique, the Wind Hollow People's unique history gradually merged with the fabricated mythology.
The Wind Hollow People had originally been the result of cultivation deviation from a certain cultivation method, leaving them devoid of intelligence before being abandoned by their original faction.
After reproducing for thousands of years, they had gradually become this bizarre race.
Within Feng Ye's subconscious, Ren Qing altered that portion of history into a tale of them falling from the Heavenly Beyond after the destruction of the Little Heavenly Court.
Back in the real cave system, under the influence of Zhili Technique, the Wind Hollow People began repairing the historical murals carved into the stone walls.
Feng Ye stepped through the Southern Heavenly Gate and wandered through the ruins of the Little Heavenly Court.
Ren Qing deliberately refrained from guiding Feng Ye. Though his intelligence was somewhat lacking, he was still a Heavenly Aberration realm cultivator and not someone who could be easily fooled.
After spending a single night inside the Little Heavenly Court, Feng Ye awoke and hurried straight toward the historical murals within the caves.
The recorded images had undergone only the slightest changes, yet they immediately left Feng Ye uncertain, as though the altered history had truly existed.
Feng Ye grew agitated, and violent winds instantly erupted from his entire body.
Ren Qing withdrew his consciousness. Every night without fail, he pulled Feng Ye back into the Little Heavenly Court and allowed him to freely explore the devastated dreamscape.
It was not until half a month later that Feng Ye discovered the Department of Thunder among the one hundred and eight palaces.
In Ren Qing's memories, the Heavenly Court's Department of Thunder governed not only lightning across the eight directions, but also rainfall, the control of winds, and the prevention of disasters.
Ren Qing could not recognize many of the thunder deities, but that did not stop him from adding Bo Qiang among them. His goal, after all, was to recruit a group of Heavenly Aberration realm cultivators.
As long as more and more people believed in the Little Heavenly Court, then even a lie would eventually become truth.
In the end, Feng Ye discovered beneath the ruins of the Department of Thunder countless broken divine statues, among which only Wind God Bo Qiang remained relatively intact.
Part of the Wind Control Art was carved onto the surface of Wind God Bo Qiang's statue.
The moment Feng Ye saw the familiar script unique to the Wind Hollow People, he treated it like a priceless treasure and from then on immersed himself day and night within the Department of Thunder of the Little Heavenly Court.
The Wind Control Art was an Ascension Method that pointed directly toward the Earth Immortal realm. Even though Ren Qing had revealed only one-third of it, Feng Ye still regarded it as an unparalleled treasure.
As for the Ascension Methods below the Heavenly Aberration realm, Ren Qing was not particularly stingy. He engraved them upon the walls, allowing anyone to piece them together.
The Wind Hollow People were not without cultivation inheritances, but their methods depended heavily on talent. Producing a Heavenly Aberration realm cultivator happened only once in a thousand years.
Feng Ye regarded Wind God Bo Qiang as the ancestor of the Wind Hollow People and spread the belief throughout the tribe.
Only three months after the Little Heavenly Court opened, the idea had already taken deep root among the Wind Hollow People. They had even erected several statues of Bo Qiang for worship.
Soon afterward, the consciousnesses of tens of thousands of Wind Hollow People were all drawn into the Little Heavenly Court.
They cleaned away the rubble within the Department of Thunder, attempted to restore its former magnificence, and explored the various halls throughout the Little Heavenly Court.
By this point, the Wind Hollow People had already begun referring to themselves as descendants of Bo Qiang.
Feng Ye discovered that nearly every statue inside the various halls was badly damaged. Only within the Department of Earth did a statue resembling both insect and human remain relatively intact.
The statue was engraved with the Heavenly Dao Method, although it was written using the script unique to Jingzhou.
Whenever he touched the statue, he could vaguely sense the location of Jingzhou, while the words "Fortune Virtue Earth Immortal" appeared within his mind.
Ren Qing no longer needed to guide them. The Wind Hollow People would inevitably journey toward Jingzhou.
Jingzhou's current state had become extremely strange. Insect Nest had transported enormous numbers of Mother Eggs there, causing grotesque brood nests to spread throughout the underground.
Yet Fortune Virtue Earth Immortal had disappeared without a trace, and Taiyin Star Lord had likewise fallen silent.
Even Ren Qing had no idea what Jingzhou would eventually become if this continued. Could Insect Nest really seize control so easily?
The Wind Hollow People set out toward Jingzhou, traveling alongside the Bottomless Pit.
For several thousand years they had never left Broken Wind Cliff, but now, under Feng Ye's leadership, they flew into the wind without the slightest hesitation.
Feng Ye's body inflated like a giant balloon, slowly releasing endless hurricanes while the other Wind Hollow People circled around him through the skies.
Ren Qing had already secretly directed the severed-limb Flood Serpent closer to Jingzhou while simultaneously spreading the dragon-blood ecosystem.
The greater the area covered by the dragon-blood ecosystem, the more dragons would be born, and the faster the Heavenly Dao Crack would heal.
Of course, compared to the forty thousand years required for Dao Gives Birth to One, it was still nowhere near enough.
Ren Qing remained very curious about the later minor realms beyond the Heavenly Aberration realm. He wondered exactly how a mortal body transformed into that of a True Immortal.
He had originally planned to remain within the sea until the Heavenly Dao Crack was at least halfway healed, yet the developments in Jingzhou became increasingly unexpected.
His connection to the Dreamflowers gradually became faint and intermittent.
Even so, he could vaguely sense that the number of Insect Nest people was exploding at an astonishing rate, like a line of dominoes collapsing one after another.
In only a few days, more than a hundred thousand insect people had multiplied into over a million.
Even the Heavenly Dao insect people had expanded into a population of several hundred thousand.
It had to be remembered that, according to the surveillance network Ren Qing had established, Insect Nest had only dispatched a little over seven hundred Heavenly Dao insect person cultivators in total.
Half a month earlier, their numbers had still been smaller than the Insect Vein of the Restraint Officers' Hall.
Ren Qing felt that if another six months passed, who knew whether Jingzhou would be completely overrun with insects. There had to be arrangements made by the mastermind behind all this.
"So you've gotten anxious?"
Perhaps the loss of Wind God Bo Qiang's immortal position had provoked the other party.
The mastermind might not have been completely confident to begin with. Perhaps they were even preparing to overturn the entire table, terrified that years of planning would all come to nothing.
Ren Qing no longer carefully selected cultivators from among those connected to Matchmaking Immortal. As long as a force possessed a Heavenly Aberration realm cultivator, he used Zhili Technique to send them dreams.
He mixed information about the Heavenly Court into the Heavenly Dao Methods before passing them to those Heavenly Aberration realm cultivators.
As the Ascension Methods of Fortune Virtue Earth Immortal, every Heavenly Dao Method could lead directly to the Earth Immortal realm. Yang God realm cultivators could already distinguish what within them was genuine and what was false.
Heavenly Aberration realm cultivators might not dare pursue immortality, but that did not mean they had no interest in immortal positions.
Whatever plans those various forces came up with had nothing to do with Ren Qing. His goal was simply to muddy the waters and find opportunities to plant immortal offices into the immortal positions.
Once the War of Enfeoffing Immortals began, Ren Qing had plenty of ways to make those immortal positions serve his purposes.
What he did not know was that news regarding the "Heavenly Court" had already begun spreading. Even more widespread, however, was the apprehension every force felt toward it.
Using Matchmaking Immortal to manipulate dreams was simply too subtle. Even Heavenly Aberration realm cultivators found it difficult to detect. It was nothing like the methods of ordinary mortals.
They had never before encountered a conscious True Immortal, making the implications all the more terrifying.
No matter how one looked at it, every major force would inevitably turn its attention toward Jingzhou.
Ren Qing did not simply wait idly at sea. Through Heavenly Demon Possession, he arrived directly at the Great Desert Marshes and stared unblinkingly toward Jingzhou.
The blood moon still hung overhead, but it somehow seemed lifeless.
The mountain ranges still rose layer upon layer, yet they looked as though they had already endured a cataclysmic collapse of heaven and earth.