In the secret chamber, a circle of moonlight stones on the surrounding walls shone with a soft light, making the entire room bright and clean. The spiritual energy in the room was enviably dense; one could almost see it dancing and jumping under the light of the moonlight stones, like dust particles in a sunbeam, only much more lively.
At this moment, two middle-aged men were sitting cross-legged facing each other in the secret chamber! They were dressed in wide robes, with dignified appearances, and their robes were embroidered with totem-like patterns. Both had long braids that hung down to their waists. But what was even more astonishing was that the two men had identical facial features. Even the most similar twin brothers in the world could not look so much alike. Apart from the colors of their wide robes, one black and one purple, there was no difference between them at all.
"This is a good opportunity. You should go and take a look. The moment I go out, I will attract the attention of those two old fellows from the Tingyun Kingdom!" the purple-robed middle-aged man said faintly to the black-robed middle-aged man.
"Dead or alive!" the black-robed middle-aged man looked back calmly.
"Alive, I suppose. A cultivator who can injure even Wutu should be brought back for a detailed investigation of their origins!" This time, the black-robed middle-aged man said no more. He slowly stood up, and with a single step, his figure vanished from the secret chamber.
After the black-robed middle-aged man left, the purple-robed man looked at some of the remaining materials on a high platform not far away, and another pang of heartache shot through him. After a while, a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. "All those precious materials and several hundred years of hard work were not in vain. It was finally successfully refined! People who can seriously injure Wutu and Tie Lianggu are indeed good whetstones!"
With this thought, the purple-robed middle-aged man slowly closed his eyes again. As for Tie Lianggu being left with only a Golden Core, he didn't seem to be in a hurry.
This person was the Great Heavenly Master of the Tianlan Clan, a powerful Mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator. The Verdant Continent was just like the Desolate Moon Continent; Spirit Transformation cultivators were almost never seen, and even Late-stage Nascent Soul cultivators were the stuff of legend. The Tianlan Clan currently had two Mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators and had long dominated the region. Apart from being wary of a few top-tier sects, there were few other clans who dared to provoke them. After all, it was already very rare for a sect to produce even one Nascent Soul cultivator.
Since the purple-robed middle-aged man was the Great Heavenly Master of the Tianlan Clan, compared to the other Tianlan Clan Heavenly Master of the same realm, his strength was a notch higher. The Great Heavenly Master of the Tianlan Clan had already touched the threshold of a great Late-stage Nascent Soul cultivator, and his strength was even more formidable.
The injuries this Great Heavenly Master had sustained in the great war with the Tingyun Kingdom more than three hundred and seventy years ago had also fully recovered a hundred years ago. The reason he had not come out of seclusion was, firstly, that he was secretly monitoring the movements of the Tingyun Kingdom. Before a major war between the races broke out, his appearance would not intimidate the other party and would only arouse the vigilance of their Nascent Soul old monsters.
Secondly, for cultivators at their level, what they lacked most was time. At this point, it was as difficult as ascending to heaven for their cultivation to advance even an inch. He needed to seize every bit of time to cultivate. Even if he could improve his cultivation just a little in several decades, it was worth it.
At the same time, the Great Heavenly Master of the Tianlan Clan had an even more important task to complete. He had been preparing for several hundred years and had spent countless efforts to gather the materials he wanted. That was to refine a clone. If not for the great war more than three hundred years ago, he would have started refining the clone long ago.
Before a cultivator's cultivation reached the Void Refining realm, they could not transform their Divine Sense into Divine Will. Clones formed from a wisp of Divine Will, like those of Dong Fuyi and True Lord Qianchong, possessed world-shaking power. To greatly increase one's strength in a short period, besides finding heavenly materials and earthly treasures to refine rare medicinal pills or magical treasures that could improve one's cultivation, there was another method. That was to try and refine a clone after reaching the Nascent Soul stage.
Refining a clone was very difficult, but compared to painstakingly cultivating for a hundred or a thousand years with no guarantee of progress, it was relatively easy.
First, refining a clone required a spiritually pure host body. This host could be a peerless spiritual grass, wood, stone, or water; a demonic beast with a naturally pure constitution; or a jiangshi from a land of extreme yin that was over ten thousand years old.
Among these, the best hosts were the spiritual items born of heaven and earth. They were a condensation of the world's very essence, making them extremely pure in both body and spiritual intelligence. This purity made it easier to erase their original consciousness during refinement and to fuse them with the main body's soul.
The next choice was a jiangshi from a place of extreme yin that was over ten thousand years old. They were also nourished by the extreme yin qi for ten thousand years, and their physical bodies had long been washed clean. Furthermore, because their memories disappeared at the time of death, their souls would slowly be reshaped in the postnatal period, making them another good choice.
The last choice was a demonic beast with a naturally pure constitution, but they had bloodline inheritance, and their soul consciousness was more complex. During the refinement process, they would face fierce resistance from the original body's consciousness and soul.
And the Great Heavenly Master had only managed to obtain a demonic beast with a pure constitution. It was a "Water-Cloud Beast" that he had obtained by chance. This type of demonic beast lived in the clouds and cultivated by breathing in the water qi and cloud mist of heaven and earth every day. Therefore, its physical body was particularly pure. It was already a very rare material for cultivators to refine a clone. It was precisely for this reason that the "Water-Cloud Beast" had almost become extinct in this realm, and most cultivators believed that this demonic beast had been captured and killed to extinction.
And the Great Heavenly Master had traveled all over the world and finally found a "Water-Cloud Beast." Although this demonic beast was not a cub, it was not yet an adult. For the Great Heavenly Master, it could still be refined. But compared to a cub, the chances of backlash during refinement were several times greater.
To refine a clone, besides the difficulty of finding a host body, another difficulty was obtaining a soul separation art. The refinement of a clone involved forcibly separating one's own soul and then refining it into the clone's body, so that the main body and the clone shared the same origin. The soul separation art was an extremely high-level secret art, or more accurately, a divine ability. It was not something that a cultivator could naturally do after advancing to the Nascent Soul realm. Doing so would, in nine cases out of ten, turn oneself into an idiot in an instant.
The soul separation art was also very difficult to obtain. In the major markets, it would occasionally appear like a flash in the pan before being snatched up at an astonishing price. The Great Heavenly Master of the Tianlan Clan also had this heaven-defying opportunity. The clone refinement art he had obtained already included the soul separation divine ability.
Even with these two extremely harsh conditions met, it still couldn't be said that one could refine a clone. When the soul was separated and refined into the clone's body, it was necessary to simultaneously erase the clone's original soul and consciousness. And that was the time when the original soul and consciousness of this clone would resist most fiercely; it was the most dangerous stage. One mistake could lead to the two consciousnesses mixing and the souls fusing. The main body would also be trapped in it, no longer able to distinguish which one was itself. He might even take the host body as his main body, completely transforming into a demonic beast or a jiangshi, completely losing himself, his path to the Great Dao completely deviating.
In order to succeed in the refinement, the Great Heavenly Master had not hesitated to use the full power of his clan to search for auxiliary refining materials, almost using up half of the clan's resources. After all the preparations were made, the great war with the Tingyun Kingdom came, and he was also seriously injured in that battle. It was not until more than a hundred years ago, after the Great Heavenly Master's injuries had healed, that he finally entered the formal stage of refining his clone.
Although he had made ample preparations, the entire process was still fraught with danger, and it almost caused the Great Heavenly Master's soul to fly away and scatter. Every time he thought of the process of separating his soul, even as a Nascent Soul cultivator, the Great Heavenly Master would tremble in his soul. He had no desire to experience that kind of pain a second time. Even if there was another clone for him to refine now, he would definitely give up without hesitation.
Fortunately, all his efforts were not in vain. In the end, he successfully refined a clone. The main purpose of a cultivator refining a clone was to enhance their own strength. After the clone and the main body were connected in mind, the main body of the cultivator could pass on their own cultivation insights. Similarly, when the clone had some insights, it would also pass the new insights to the main body. This was equivalent to one person cultivating two cultivation methods at the same time, but it only took half the time. To achieve this, of course, they had to be of the same origin, that is, the same soul.
When the clone was first refined, its cultivation was not very high. Although the clone could receive the main body's insights and had an unparalleled understanding that others could not comprehend, allowing for rapid fusion, he still needed to cultivate this physical body bit by bit. But even so, this process was still several times faster than normal cultivation. In just a short hundred years or so, the Great Heavenly Master's clone had already reached the Late-stage Golden Core cultivation.
The strength of this clone of his was quite astonishing. Even a Pseudo-Nascent Soul Realm cultivator was no match for him; he could easily slay any cultivator below the Nascent Soul realm. Because he possessed the insights of a Mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator on various magical arts, it was not something that a cultivator of the same rank could comprehend in a day. The same magical art, when he used it, was several times more powerful, making it impossible for others to resist.
Judging from the true strength of this clone, he was somewhere between a Pseudo-Nascent Soul and a Nascent Soul. This was an extremely terrifying existence. In the entire Tianlan Clan, apart from the two Heavenly Masters, even the few Pseudo-Nascent Soul Realm experts like Wutu would probably not last long against him.
A clone being so good was, of course, an important reason why all cultivators wanted to have one. But it had a fatal flaw: the clone could not be too far from the main body, because every so often, the main body had to perform a soul assimilation with it, to instill the main body's consciousness into the other's body. Otherwise, over time, the clone would slowly become more and more independent, and its consciousness and soul would gradually drift away from the main body, forming a truly independent living being. At that time, any command from the main body would only be a reference for him. As for whether to execute it, he would have his own judgment and would have to see if the clone himself agreed.
In the past, in the cultivation world, there had even been cases of a clone killing the main body and then devouring the main body's soul to re-form into a completely different living being. Therefore, for the main body to control the clone, besides assimilating the other party every so often, it was also necessary to ensure that its own strength was always higher than the clone's. Otherwise, as the clone's cultivation became stronger, its soul would also become stronger, and during the final assimilation, the primary and secondary roles would surely be reversed.
After the Great Heavenly Master successfully refined his clone, he had been cultivating in seclusion. Today, under the activation of the "Soul-Ferrying Talisman," he had already learned what had happened before. In his eyes, it was a good opportunity to "test the blade."
…
On the prairie, just as the slender woman and the others were waiting anxiously, seeing that Wutu and Tie Lianggu's conditions were getting worse and worse, a figure suddenly appeared behind them. And they were completely unaware!
"The injuries are really not light!" The figure looked at the unconscious Wutu and his body that was beginning to rot from the bottom up, and frowned.
The slender woman's body trembled violently. She then turned her face, and a look of joyful surprise appeared on it. "Greetings, Master!"
"We pay our respects to the Great Heavenly Master!" Bate, Balu, and the surrounding green-clad guards also showed joy on their faces and kowtowed one by one. In an instant, a large area of the prairie was filled with kneeling figures. This Great Heavenly Master had not appeared in public for several hundred years. They had not expected that today's events would actually disturb him.