The Longevity Forbidden Zone returned to calm. Every town had a hundred tasks waiting to be rebuilt, but with the grain provided by the ghost market, the emotions of the civilians remained relatively stable.
Although Ren Qing very much wanted to earn some lifespan through grain trade, in order to complete the popularization of body martial arts as soon as possible he could only choose to provide it free of charge.
Large quantities of meat were transported to the Longevity Forbidden Zone, causing the aroma of steaming and boiling meat to permeate the air from morning to evening.
Children surrounded iron pots playing, stealing freshly braised offal amid laughter and scolding.
Ren Qing's expression carried a hint of regret. Unfortunately Zhang the Butcher had already died from exhausted lifespan several years ago; otherwise they could have drunk wine together and reminisced.
After the ghost market descended upon the Longevity Forbidden Zone, he no longer needed to use his main soul consciousness to possess the split soul. He could directly observe through the stomach world.
He noticed that the sounds of martial practice within the towns were endless, and every martial hall was packed with people.
Even Li Tiangang had to admit that body martial arts, a technique derived from the Six Diseases Method, was indeed very suitable for mortals to cultivate.
In fact, the threshold for body martial arts was not particularly high. There were many diseases similar to fatty liver disease, and the Restraint Officers' Hall could easily spread them in batches.
But cultivating body martial arts required a foundation.
Although Ren Qing obtained instruction in body martial arts quickly, his talent was fully maxed out. Normal people needed several years to temper their bodies.
Even with sufficient resources the tempering process could shorten considerably, but it still had to be experienced.
The Restraint Officers' Hall did not rush for success, otherwise casualties would inevitably occur.
Seeing that the Longevity Forbidden Zone did not require deliberate attention, Ren Qing placed his focus on the outside world.
Currently he only had a rough idea regarding Dead Man's Forbidden Zone. The most urgent matters were increasing his self-preservation ability and determining the forbidden zone's location.
When it came to self-preservation, the series of techniques he created were the best methods.
After much consideration, compared with the ghost gate of the Disaster Dispelling Method and the strange mirror of Mirror Immortal, the drawbacks of Storyteller's ability were actually lighter.
Hiding oneself within another person's body was, in a certain sense, similar to the system of Buddhist techniques.
Ren Qing could not raise Storyteller to the Yang Spirit realm in a short time, so he had to spend more effort improving Fetal Flesh.
Fetal Flesh was a flesh magical artifact he previously refined for using Storyteller. Its appearance was a lump of flesh the size of a fist. Not only was its lifespan extremely low, it also possessed no intelligence.
The advantage was that the ghost shadow could carry Fetal Flesh hidden in shadows through the parasitic aberration.
Parasitic Nurturing: when possessing a host body, strange objects can temporarily parasitize the host, allowing it to possess part of the caster's cultivation.
But the aura faintly emitted by the ghost shadow, in the eyes of Earth Immortal existences such as Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva, would likely be like a torch in the night. It would be better to attach to birds or beasts.
Ren Qing gained inspiration from the ability of Strange Mirror Walker and planned to refine a flesh magical artifact closer to a living creature.
At that time he would possess the flesh magical artifact and see whether it could be controlled through other means.
Fetal Flesh did not even have mobility. Possessing it would only result in waiting to die in place. He dared not gamble that Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva would let him go.
Ren Qing continuously conceptualized Moon Patterns and then attempted the refining steps of Rabbit-Toad. The most critical point lay in flesh fibers.
Flesh fibers were magical artifacts similar to muscles and extremely close to living organisms.
Only tens of thousands of flesh fibers could combine to form a single arm, reproducing the natural structure of living creatures as much as possible.
At the beginning Ren Qing used a kind of tough insect silk from the Restraint Officers' Hall as material. Then he mixed pulped flesh with various materials to gradually complete the flesh-transformation of the insect silk.
But he clearly underestimated the Facing-the-Moon Method.
After all, the Facing-the-Moon Method involved Earth Immortals. Its difficulty was simply not something non-immortals could touch, even if he had reached the Yang Spirit realm.
After all, engraving Moon Patterns on the surface of threads required extremely high precision.
Even using ghost shadow assistance, Ren Qing still developed the feeling that the task was impossible to overcome. After spending more than half a month he had not even entered the basics.
During this period the situation of Heaven Above Heaven took a sharp downturn.
The Shadow Dream Flower discovered that the area covered by Buddhist qi was gradually shrinking, indicating that the giant corpse Buddha's capacity for Buddhist qi was growing larger.
However the giant corpse Buddha clearly could not withstand the corrosion brought by the Buddhist qi.
Her entire body began showing signs of shriveling. The attached Buddha skin constantly fell away, and even the little Buddha skin remaining was covered in corpse spots.
The Buddhist qi could only have tens of thousands of refugees constantly smear Buddha bone powder over the giant Buddha corpse, attempting to slow the latter's rotting collapse.
Ren Qing felt somewhat helpless about this.
His original plan had been to wait until the Buddhist qi was mostly absorbed by the giant corpse Buddha, then attempt to enter the giant Buddha corpse using the Buddhist Dream Flower.
Through the brain of the giant corpse Buddha, he should have been able to obtain clues regarding Dead Man's Sutra.
Ren Qing could now only look for an opportunity before the giant corpse Buddha died. The time left for him might not even reach a dozen years. There was no time to waste studying flesh fibers.
Ren Qing stopped obsessing over flesh fibers and prepared to take a shortcut.
Since flesh-transformation of insect silk was difficult, he would simply use the flesh of living humans as material. After all, the cultivators of the Restraint Officers' Hall had each started their careers by selling their own organs.
However more problems followed.
Maintaining the vitality of flesh was not difficult, but the flesh would occasionally experience instinctive spasms.
If a fresh corpse was stimulated externally, its muscles would also easily produce corresponding reactions. It was essentially the same principle.
Ren Qing already had to engrave Moon Patterns within millimeters. The wriggling of flesh increased the difficulty even further, causing him to completely abandon the Facing-the-Moon Method.
A refining method like the Facing-the-Moon Method, which recreated living beings, was indeed not something the Yang Spirit realm could master.
Ren Qing frowned tightly. Nothing going smoothly caused his temples to throb faintly.
Then his gaze inadvertently swept across the stomach world, and his brows immediately relaxed.
If refining a flesh magical artifact failed, then why not simply use Reincarnation Remaining Souls to directly cultivate similar living puppets.
He took out the stockpiled Reincarnation Remaining Souls.
Then Ren Qing exchanged resources with a Rat Mother cultivator to obtain an opossum clone, erasing the technique traces within it.
Using Reincarnation Remaining Souls he stimulated the growth of the opossum clone, then closed his eyes to intervene.
Reincarnation Remaining Souls could allow living beings to rapidly experience their life cycles. Naturally they could also be used on the opossum clone, though it would consume a large amount of lifespan.
After a moment the opossum clone rapidly shed its skin, its appearance undergoing earth-shaking changes and gradually approaching Ren Qing's appearance.
At the same time the opossum clone's lifespan visibly declined. When it fully formed, its lifespan had already reached the point of exhaustion.
Ren Qing calmly stuffed corpse food into the opossum clone's mouth. Its withered body regained a trace of vitality.
The opossum clone now completely lacked rodent characteristics. Its appearance resembled Ren Qing by seventy to eighty percent, though its expression remained dull.
Under Ren Qing's intentional control, the clone did not develop a Mud Pellet Palace.
This ensured that other cultivators could not seize the clone through techniques, nor would it inexplicably develop independent consciousness.
As long as Ren Qing used Storyteller, he could hide inside the clone's body.
If he could find a way to control the clone's actions, it would be equivalent to gaining another life, greatly increasing his means of survival.
As for how to control the clone, Ren Qing could not help looking toward the Nascent Soul stage Dao Dao Dao.
According to his expectations, Dao Dao Dao could attach unique rules to objects, just like the Three Pure Ones statue left behind by Heavenly Daozi.
But before advancing, Ren Qing could not guarantee it.
Even if Dao Dao Dao was useless for the clones, advancing to the Yang Spirit realm at this stage still carried only benefits and no drawbacks, helping him further perfect the stomach world.
Ren Qing did not rush to advance and instead continued cultivating clones.
To handle various unexpected situations, the clones could not be limited to humans. He simply cultivated several clones of birds, beasts, and insects.
Then Ren Qing summoned the information flow.
Whether to advance Wuwei Daoist Grounds, which will consume five hundred years of lifespan
Ren Qing hesitated for a few breaths before silently confirming.
Although the loss of five hundred years might cause him to fail to gather enough lifespan for No-Birth Immortal, it involved his own safety, and the time given by Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva was not sufficient anyway.
The stomach world slowly expanded, but only for a few breaths. In the end the sea surface increased by roughly one twentieth.
Ren Qing had stayed in Heavenly Daozi's Wuwei Daoist Grounds for quite some time.
Even if the small world formed by Dao Dao Dao reached the Yang Spirit realm, its area would only be enough to contain a sect Daoist temple.
The assistance Dao Dao Dao provided to the stomach world lay more in perfecting world rules.
Ren Qing activated Dao Dao Dao and immediately sensed the "crustal movement" of the stomach world, even being able to actively interfere with its evolution.
It was like wielding the authority of a god, able to flatten mountain ranges by influencing land or cause disaster-like typhoons through air currents.
Ren Qing planned to construct islands within the wine sea, but he would have to wait until mountains gradually rose from the seabed until they exceeded sea level.
Soil would be recreated out of nothing. The workload was not small and should require several years.
Ren Qing allowed the islands to slowly take shape, then examined the new ability of Dao Dao Dao.
His expression became somewhat complicated, because Wuwei Daoist Grounds was not the ability he had imagined of directly changing the rules of objects.
Instead it was "transmitting the Dao and teaching."
Cultivators could attach their understanding of techniques to objects. Lower-realm cultivators who contemplated the objects could increase their comprehension of the corresponding techniques.
The composition of Dao Dao Dao consisted of "Heavenly Dao," which changed rules, and "Human Path," which transmitted teachings, representing Heavenly Daozi's hopes for the Wuwei Daoist Temple.
However the Dao Ancestor statue itself was a Heavenly Dao worm, causing the teaching transmission to become distorted, thereby giving birth to delusional techniques.
Ren Qing became even more determined to create a subsidiary small world so that the function of teaching transmission could be maximized.
As long as the environment within the subsidiary small world was suitable enough for cultivation, cultivators would certainly progress rapidly, which would be equivalent to ascending to an upper world.
However he would have to wait until things were stable. Refining a subsidiary small world would not be possible in the short term.
Ren Qing looked at the dozen clones he had just cultivated. It seemed that if he wanted to control the clones' actions, he would have to find another method.
Fortunately with the parasitic nurturing aberration he could use ghost shadow to parasitize the clones. Additionally the clones' lifespans were not high, so killing them would still be easy.
Once Ren Qing used Storyteller, he could no longer interfere with the outside world and could not communicate with the ghost shadow. The clone's behavior would depend entirely on instinct.
While observing Heaven Above Heaven, he searched for a solution.
Before he knew it, more than half a year passed.
Aside from the increasingly bizarre situation of Heaven Above Heaven, everything on Ren Qing's side progressed relatively smoothly.