Artifact.

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After manipulating these higher beings to look in different directions like headless chickens, Tian Xing began preparing to enter societal karma by creating his own Bagua Engine, a personal clockwork machine. This would let him log reports on his passive Tian Ming Dao's executions, without needing to constantly check the outcomes himself. In other words, he wanted to create a personal laptop computer, similar to Richard's motivation from the previous world.

However, this time, unlike the Three Sa'angreal that have sentient beings at the helm, the machine he wanted to create would not have any thinking capability to become self-aware and could therefore be truly owned by him. The motivation behind this was to create a personal laptop capable of handling tasks he could not focus on, due to the limitations of sentient beings, who are unable to operate with the broad sense of self.

Even AI or the Heavenly Dao, which have the spirit to become sentient beings, must focus their minds if they wish to possess true souls capable of conscious thought and desire. No matter how good their processing, anyone who wants to become a self-aware entity must first forsake becoming one with the heavens and earths, or the Bagua Engine, which runs independently like a clockwork machine. This prevents them from having broad, natural attention, as they inherently go against the flow of the Dao, which operates infinitely.

That's why he needed this personal laptop, or Artifact, that could maintain a broad focus to provide him with a log record of what his passive Tian Ming Dao had executed. Because his sentient mind was busy comprehending the deeper meaning of something and was occupied with more important matters, which this clockwork machine cannot do because it is not self-aware in the first place.

After considering what material to use, Tian Xing realized that he didn't need anything more grandiose because the features he required were simple and common materials would suffice for creating this personal machine. Looking at the Golden Branch in his hand, Tian Xing nodded and began preparing to re-enter the karma society by transforming this ordinary branch into an Artifact, not an Artifact Spirit.

The simple reason for this was that creating a sentient Artifact Spirit, which would be inferior to him in terms of calculating fate and karma, would be a futile endeavor. His mind was already powerful after becoming a Souls practitioner, and cultivating the Spirit Awakening technique provided practitioners with an advantage in raw computation, making a calculating aid pointless since they are supercomputers themselves.

Rubbing the branch to feel the meridians or cell pathways within it, Tian Xing then produced a golden glow of Shen energy to create a normal, non-quantum circuit board throughout the branch. He chose not to create a quantum circuit board like the Three Sa'angreal, as he did not want to make a sentient being from this branch that would be inferior in comprehension and calculation compared to him.

Not only did he modify the circuit board or formation arrays to lack quantum or spirit effects, but Tian Xing also avoided programming or using glyph runes that could create a neural network capable of self-awareness. Instead, he personally coded every program by hand without any automation to create an Artifact that would always remain an inanimate object, able to become part of the heavens and earths, and subsequently the Bagua Diagram of this world. 

One such program provided him with an updated log record of the progress of his Butterfly Echoes, so he wouldn't have to manually focus on it as he did with the previous manipulation of neighbors, making the karmic evidence left by Ying Yue had transformed the forest into a battlefield, thereby removing the karmic evidence completely.

After completing all this in just a short time—two hours, since he only created a simple Artifact and not an Artifact Spirit—Tian Xing nodded in satisfaction. Now, he no longer needed to manually check the progress of his Butterfly Echoes martial arts, as some of the events he aimed to achieve took time to take effect. With this Golden Branch Artifact, he could simply sit back and relax, providing it with Shen energy from time to time to keep it running. This allowed him to occasionally glance at the report without needing to check it himself.

Activating one of the programs or the array mechanism, he could now also see scenes of his daughter and wife's future fate, which would run in the background and alert him if they were in any danger. Although the Golden Branch could only calculate one future scene, since it couldn't think quantumly to view multiple branches and was linear to begin with, Tian Xing was still satisfied.

Now he could make more accurate judgments about when personal calculation was necessary and when his intervention was unnecessary. Additionally, he activated an array mechanism to report on his passive Tian Ming Dao and its effects on societal karma. Ultimately, his initial motivation for creating this Artifact was to prepare himself for re-entering civilization and subsequently society's butterfly effect, while avoiding being bogged down by certain fates, which he deemed insignificant and not worth becoming a part of.

As for why he allowed himself to be influenced by the butterfly effect, it was because, when someone enters the collective group of sentient or living beings, they are, in a sense, already entering the butterfly effect of the world's fate. This is why, by his default nature, Tian Xing was reluctant to engage in any karmic interaction unless there was something to gain from exposing himself.

However, realizing the speed of this Heaven Chosen Asura—who, in just one and a half centuries, had already ascended to the next heavens—Tian Xing decided it was acceptable to involve himself in a bit of karmic interaction, as he didn't want to become a mere speck of dust in the battle for supremacy due to being too slow to keep up with that man.

Moreover, knowing that there would be many others later, Tian Xing's decision became resolute, as he was confident he could handle everyone else and manipulate them to death, but not the Heaven Chosen. For his daughter's safety and his own entertainment, he decided to enhance his effective grinding method. So rising from his portable chair, Tian Xing went below deck to personally teach Yelena about the Concealment Dao, to speed up her progress, and to assign Ying Yue comprehension tasks that were too menial for him to bother with.

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