Vision

Nie Gan's hands were bleeding, and his countenance was porcelain pale. He felt his head spinning, and his knees nearly buckled. Strangely, he was grinning with utmost satisfaction, staring at the humanoid body in front of him. He had finally completed the assembly of all the puppet's parts, and it seemed there were no flaws in its build. 

Throwing himself onto the stool, he took out a gourd full of fruit wine and started gulping it down. The exhaustion from the four days and five nights that he had been stringing the qi conducting wires was now stacked with the two days he had spent assembling the puppet's lower half.

After resting for some time, his eagerness to test the puppet finally beat him. Standing up with some effort, he took one of the twelve qi conducting wires and entwined it around his right hand's index finger. This wire was specifically used to control the right shoulder's articulation. Having done this, he proceeded to entwine the rest of the wires around his other fingers. However, since there were twelve of them and he only had ten fingers, two had to be tied around his wrists.

Without further ado, he circulated his 5th stage Qi Condensation cultivation to its limit and let his qi flow freely into two of the many wires. Pulling the wires, the puppet propped itself up, sitting straight. He continued, this time with the hip and knee wires, causing it to stand up. The whole process felt much more intuitive than he had expected.

"This is the easy part."

He could feel the many valves that each string ended in. For more complex movements, he would need to select through which valve to direct his qi through. To test this out, he decided to make the puppet clench its right hand into a fist.

The first couple of attempts were unsuccessful, as not all fingers clenched. This was because in order to make the puppet clench its hand into a fist, he needed to pour his qi through five different valves, each belonging to one finger. It was only after his third attempt that the puppet clenched its hand into a fist.

"Truly marvelous!" 

Next, he opted for an attack. Knowing that an attack would require much more force, he directed much more qi into its shoulder, elbow and wrist, causing steam to flow from the qi-steam engine and to come out of the pipe on its elbow at an astonishing pressure. This steam served the purpose of both propelling the arm, and spinning the gears needed to perform this movement.

SWOOSH!

The puppet split the air as it punched out while standing in place. Seeing the force created by this strike, Nie Gan's gaze showed great elation. With this strike alone, he was confident that he could defeat anyone below the 6th stage of Qi Condensation.

However, as he was about to continue his different tests, the puppet's qi-steam engine started vibrating. It shook with such intensity that Nie Gan had to start releasing the wires to not fall over. Before he could release them all however, the engine stopped shaking as a wisp of divine sense contained within came out and entered his mind through the cable. Nie Gan fainted instantly.

While unconscious, he saw a gargantuan, human-shaped, six-armed, metallic being brawling against a gigantic, gray-skinned man in the black void. Just seeing such beings, Nie Gan could immediately tell that even the strongest person he had ever met, his father, would be reduced to smithereens were he to so much as approach these beings.

While the gigantic man was a whole head taller than the six armed metallic entity, he was at a disadvantage. Multiple wounds could be seen on his stone-like gray skin, from which blood flowed out. The six armed metallic being seemed to have razors for fingers in two of his arms, while another two had massive hands that served as shields of sorts. The remaining two were normal, but one was holding a whip and the other a trident.

Time and time again, the gigantic man was forced to retreat. As the saying goes, two fists can't match four palms, or in this case six. At this rhythm, the gigantic man would not last for long. This was also an advantage of puppets. They were not restrained by biology. While there were legendary techniques that could allow one to gro six arms, these usually had extremely stringent requirements on the user's physique. A puppet had no such restrictions. So long as the creator had the knowledge, skill and materials, they could pretty much have any number of arms. Naturally, the more arms a puppet had, the harder it was to control.

At this moment, Nie Gan noticed that standing on top of the metallic humanoid's head, there was a white robed, dignified looking old man holding a cane. This old man seemed to be able to phase in and out of existence in such a way that even when the giant's fist landed on where he was standing, he was not crushed to a pulp.

Although no strings came out of his fingers, from the way the formation underneath his feet lit up before every single action of the metallic being, Nie Gan immediately understood that this old man was also a puppet user, and more likely than not, one of the legendary puppetmasters! 

"This… I never thought puppets could be this big!"  Based on the old man's size, his estimations put this metallic puppet's size at the very least as large as Gray Road City from top to bottom if he were to lie down. From this size estimation, he proceeded to calculate mass considering the density of the alloys he knew would probably be used to manufacture such a puppet. 

His pupils became bigger and bigger due to the incredible interest he had on the puppet, and his mind raced with several formulas that Uncle Xing had taught him, some of which he had not used in quite some time. From mass, he jumped to force, causing him to inhale a breath of fresh air. Of course, in this void there was no air, but since it was all a vision, his true body still did so in the real world. 

"Such tremendous force that a single strike from this puppet must create!" It also did not escape his notice that the old man did not need to use qi conducting wires, for the formation beneath him seemed to fulfill that role. Not only that, but steam was no longer used as a power source. Instead, pistons could be seen making up most of the puppet's articulations. Nie Gan did not know what they were, though. Thus, he only knew that steam was not necessary in higher level puppets.

All of this takes time to explain, but it happened in the blink of an eye. The giant's throat was eventually slit by the six armed puppet's trident, marking the old man's win. At this moment, the old man turned to look in Nie Gan's direction, having felt someone spying on him. Although he could not see Nie Gan, his gaze seemed to come from millennia ago just to reach him in the present.

He immediately felt a sharp pain in his head, causing him to grimace. It felt as if a thousand bolts of lightning had struck him, causing him to fall unconscious within his own mind. This time, there was nothing, just emptiness.

He woke up days later. The vision had left him deeply shaken. For starters, his concept of puppets had been greatly expanded. Now that he thought about it, there was truly no reason why the mechanical principles behind humanoid puppets would not work on puppets of any different builds and designs. However, the fact that all the puppets he had ever come into contact with were humanoid meant he had no references to craft one with a different design.

"But the mass of the puppet is directly proportional to the qi needed to operate it. Whether qi conducting wires or a formation like that old man's is used is irrelevant, you cannot create force out of nothing. A pity I was unable to decipher the structure of that six-armed puppet." He had yet to reach the point where he could design and build puppets on his own. The only reason he had been able to restore the puppet Nie Lan gave him was due to him having a working model, which was in the training grounds. Essentially, he was copying. If he wanted to design his own, 100% original puppets, he still had a long way to go.

Feeling like he had to clear his head after being immersed in his work with puppets, he took a quick bath and went out for a walk. He was intending to find Uncle Xing to get help to solve something that had been bothering him.