The Tracing Puppet

Parting is always a sad affair. Even though they tried to lighten the mood with some playful banter, the underlying sorrow remained.

Chen Guan disliked such an atmosphere. After spending half a day in Qingshan Town with them, he ventured alone into the Magic Beast Mountain Range early the next morning.

He only knew that the Soul Hall Protector was hiding somewhere in the mountains, but the exact location remained a mystery.

Before Jia Xingtian arrived, Chen Guan hoped to find the hiding spot of the eerie Protector. Even if a Dou Ancestor expert was heavily injured, once determined to hide, it would be challenging for an average person to find them.

However, for Chen Guan, this problem was not as difficult.

Upon entering the Magic Beast Mountain Range, Chen Guan didn't immediately use his spiritual perception to search. Even though his mental power was strong, the mountain range was vast, and combing through it inch by inch was not something he could sustain.

Moreover, it would risk alerting the enemy.

Thus, some minor techniques came into play.

After half an hour, Chen Guan had hunted dozens of offspring of his old acquaintance, the Crimson Ice Snake King.

These creatures were indeed numerous and tended to move in small groups, making them convenient for hunting.

He excavated a cave on a cliffside, leaving a puppet to guard the entrance. Inside, he took out a Crimson Ice Snake corpse.

Because he had exercised control while hunting, the body was intact.

With a dagger in hand, he skillfully made an incision three inches below the snake's head.

A surge of powerful mental energy emerged from between his brows, and Chen Guan quickly etched a simple puppet array inside the Crimson Ice Snake's body. In less than ten minutes, the array was complete.

After leaving a trace of his spiritual imprint, he inserted a tier-one magic core into the array's core to supply energy. Chen Guan immediately felt a mysterious connection established between him and the snake.

Closing his eyes, a radar-like image appeared in his mind, allowing him to clearly perceive the energy fluctuations around the snake.

For instance, at this moment, Chen Guan, without using his own spiritual power, detected a relatively weak energy fluctuation above the cliff, roughly equivalent to a tier-two magical beast, solely through the Crimson Ice Snake's senses.

To verify the accuracy, Chen Guan sent a Dou King-level puppet to hunt. Soon, the puppet returned carrying a fire fox.

(T/N: His beef with Fire Foxes…)

Indeed, it was a tier-two magical beast!

Satisfied, Chen Guan stowed the fire fox's body away and roughly stitched up the Crimson Ice Snake's wound. With a slight thought, the once-dead snake mysteriously came to life. Apart from a faint stiffness and its wound, it was indistinguishable from a living Crimson Ice Snake.

"Although it's a defective product and will be scrapped after one use, being able to detect within a kilometer is still pretty decent."

Murmuring to himself, he let the snake rest to the side and got to work on a second Crimson Ice Snake corpse.

What he was crafting now was a special type of tracing puppet that could be used to scout paths, search for targets, and so on.

However, proper tracing puppets were tier-two puppets, while what he was making was a makeshift, disposable gadget that wasn't even ranked.

A legitimate puppet-making process involves three steps.

First, materials are used to create the puppet's shell.

For example, spiritual woods, rare metals, and the like are needed to craft the shell. The higher the puppet's rank, the more demanding the materials.

This step is relatively simple compared to the others.

After the shell is complete, the most critical step follows:

Etching the puppet array with spiritual power. Different arrays grant various functions, and the number of arrays in a high-level puppet can be quite astonishing.

Combat puppet arrays are the most complex and common, resulting in puppets with straightforward, standardized combat behaviors.

The process of engraving arrays is similar to an alchemist's recipe.

The higher the puppet's rank, the more arrays are required. This step is extremely mentally taxing.

As Chen Guan's teacher, Shu Tianhe, once said, the requirements for a puppet master's spiritual strength are no less than those of an alchemist and may even exceed them.

Etching the arrays doesn't mark the end of the second step. It's like prepping ingredients for cooking—everything still needs to be connected in one go for the process to be truly complete.

If the mental energy falters and the connection fails, all previous efforts are wasted. Arrays that haven't been fully linked will degrade rapidly, akin to ingredients spoiling quickly. Attempting to reconnect them would mean starting from scratch.

One advantage over alchemy is that puppet-making materials, apart from certain special items, can mostly be reused, unlike herbs that are destroyed during failed concoctions.

This explains why Chen Guan's teacher instructed him to dismantle, rather than completely destroy, the puppets that attacked him in the stone chamber beneath the lake.

Returning to the main topic, once all arrays are successfully linked in the second step, the puppet is 99% complete.

The final step is to leave a spiritual imprint to claim ownership. Below tier-eight, puppets lack self-awareness, making this process straightforward.

However, once a puppet reaches tier-eight and gains sentience, imprinting it with a spiritual mark becomes a challenge, similar to an alchemist's pill-condensing phase.

Certain special techniques can make imprinting easier, but that's a subject for another time.

It's worth noting that not all puppets require a magic core for power. Relying on cores is inefficient, as once their energy is depleted, the puppet will 'shut down' until the core is replaced.

Moreover, high-level puppets may have specific requirements for core attributes, limiting their use.

Thus, advanced puppets are usually equipped with arrays that absorb natural energy, allowing them to be self-sufficient.

Due to the complexity of such arrays, lower-tier puppet masters find them unattainable, so lower-grade puppets typically use magic cores as an energy source.

The puppets Chen Guan dismantled earlier, though of low rank, did not contain magic cores because his teacher's spiritual power was sufficient to engrave energy-absorbing arrays.

It's like comparing dumplings: ordinary people use flour, while the wealthy can afford to wrap theirs in gold.

For his tracing puppet, Chen Guan used a tier-one Crimson Ice Snake corpse as the shell and simply etched a basic array driven by a tier-one magic core. It was a patchwork of low-quality materials, not even worthy of being ranked.

He estimated that it would break after a single use. It was a disposable tool.

However, it was quite effective for tracking the hiding Soul Hall Protector without being easily detected, as Crimson Ice Snakes were too common to arouse suspicion.

Additionally, a proper tracing puppet could detect far beyond a kilometer, making Chen Guan's temporary solution an exception.

The detection range is closely related to spiritual power, and this applies to all puppets below tier-eight. Beyond a certain distance, they can no longer be controlled.

Author Notes: I've tried to simplify the puppet-making concepts here. Hopefully, it's clear enough for you all. It's a bit of a hassle introducing new professions since so many details need to be explained. This is just a brief overview, and I'll provide more in-depth explanations as needed, including comparisons with 'unorthodox' puppet techniques.

Also, I'd like to ask for your feedback on update times. Currently, there's one chapter at midnight, one in the morning, and one in the evening, making for a stable three updates per day.

(End of Chapter)

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