The hall itself was vast and pristine, its floor made from layered crystal stone etched with thousands of intersecting formation lines. These lines glowed softly, shifting colors as spatial calculations updated in real time. Array masters moved with calm precision, adjusting nodes and feeding immortal stones into the formation cores.
This was not a simple teleportation.
It was a long range spatial channel, one that would carry them across an immense stretch of the Immortal Realm.
Daoist Chu glanced around, instinctively checking the formation layout. His eyes lingered on several sections before he nodded faintly in approval.
"The array is stable," he said. "Well reinforced too. Khwanzim’s array masters are petent."
Cattaleya cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders. "Good. I don’t like it when space shakes too much."
Meng Bai swallowed, then straightened his posture. He had used teleportation arrays many times by now, but long distance spatial channels still made his heart beat a little faster.
Lin Mu stepped onto the central platform first.
The formation responded instantly.
Light surged upward, forming layered rings of spatial energy that enclosed the group. The floor beneath their feet dissolved into a whirl of light, and the world twisted.
For a brief moment, there was no up or down.
Then the pressure eased.
They were inside the Spatial Channel.
The familiar expanse of the channel stretched endlessly in all directions, a flowing tunnel of distorted light and space. Outside the protective barrier of the array, spatial currents churned like invisible storms, powerful enough to tear lesser beings apart in moments.
Lin Mu wasted no time.
With a flick of his wrist, the Mobile Courtyard unfolded, expanding into its full form. The floating estate stabilized instantly, anchoring itself to the channel’s internal spatial rules.
Once inside, the group settled into a rhythm that had bee second nature to them.
Training.
Cultivation.
Study.
And rest, in rare moments.
Meng Bai threw himself into training with renewed intensity.
If anything, the events of the past months had only sharpened his resolve further. The memory of helplessness, of poisoned tea and frozen Qi, still lingered in the back of his mind like a scar that refused to fade.
He trained every day.
Sometimes until exhaustion forced him to stop.
He alternated between spear practice, Water Dao prehension, formation studies, and meditation. His spear strikes grew sharper, cleaner, carrying subtle ripples of water Qi that flowed naturally along the weapon’s path.
More importantly, his mind never stopped working.
The blueprint Lin Mu had given him, the mutated Essence Meridian Casting network, became his primary focus. He studied it obsessively, mapping how the immortal essence flowed, how it bypassed traditional limitations, how it interacted with flesh rather than Qi meridians.
At the same time, he devoured puppet manuals.
Thousands of them.
While puppetry and body cultivation seemed unrelated at first glance, Meng Bai quickly realized there were parallels. Puppet cores acted like artificial organs. Energy channels mirrored meridians. Control arrays functioned like nervous systems.
"What if," he muttered to himself one day, staring at overlapping diagrams, "the body itself is just... the most advanced puppet possible?"
That thought alone kept him awake for several nights.
Lin Mu and Daoist Chu both noticed the change.
They did not discourage him.
Instead, they guided him.
Lin Mu explained the logic behind energy circulation beyond traditional meridian frameworks, while Daoist Chu helped Meng Bai understand how to stabilize plex networks without causing systemic collapse.
Occasionally, Meng Bai sparred with Cattaleya.
Those sessions were... educational.
And painful.
But effective.
Cattaleya did not hold back much, though she was careful not to cripple him. Every mistake was punished. Every hesitation exploited.
"Again," she would say, dragging him back to his feet. "You died there."
And Meng Bai would nod, grip his spear tighter, and try again.
Lin Mu’s own months were equally busy.
The first month vanished beneath stacks of formation manuals.
He read relentlessly.
Not skimming, not browsing, but dissecting every page. He pared schools of thought, identified redundancies, and quietly discarded flawed theories that had been perpetuated for generations simply because no one had questioned them.
By the end of the month, he had refined several formation concepts in his mind, simplifying arrays that once required dozens of nodes into elegant constructs with half the plexity and twice the stability.
The second month was devoted to puppets.
At first, Lin Mu approached them cautiously.
Puppetry was forgiving, yes, but it also had its own pitfalls. Poor energy distribution could lead to unstable behavior. Flawed control hierarchies could cause feedback loops.
Still, pared to immortal tool refining, it felt almost relaxing.
He built his first puppet in less than a day.
A simple humanoid construct, roughly the size of a person, designed for basic movement and strength tests. It walked, lifted, and followed mands perfectly.
The second puppet was faster.
The third was sturdier.
By the end of the second month, Lin Mu had created over a dozen specialized puppets. Some were bat oriented. Others focused on utility. One was designed purely as a mobile formation anchor.
Meng Bai watched these creations with barely concealed awe.
"You just... made them," he said one day.
Lin Mu shrugged. "Formations are formations. Puppets just move."
That casual statement nearly broke Meng Bai’s brain.
Elyon spent most of the journey cultivating.
He rarely spoke about it, but the Dark Halo Beast’s Dao Essence Crystal was always close to him. When he cultivated, shadows thickened unnaturally around his body, forming faint halos that swallowed light.
He had spent nearly a third of all his wealth on this as it was a rare material.
A Dark Halo beast was a rare beast that could reach the Transcendent Level. And while this came from one that was at the Fifth Tribulation Stage of the immortal realm its value was still great.
The beast was said to be one of the Dark Elemental Beasts that had a very high innate prehension of the Darkness Dao and was said to even be born right at the immortal realm with a Dao Embryo.
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