Chapter 1600 - Rude Not To Repay The Courtesy

Liu Wuxie needed to strike that delicate balance—enough brilliance for the upper echelons to notice him, but not so much that he looked monstrously abnormal.

After forcing the outer disciple back, Liu Wuxie lunged forward and executed a movement technique.

"Seven Divine Profound Steps!" The Heaven Gaze Realm cultivators who remained seated in the main hall watched with a flicker of confusion in their eyes.

The Seven Divine Profound Steps was a high-grade martial technique of the Immortal Slaughter Palace, and outer disciples had no right to touch it. Only inner disciples were qualified to learn it, so it made no sense for Meng An, a miscellaneous disciple, to possess it.

"Meng Hong must've taught it to him," someone concluded.

𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

As an elder of the inner sect, Meng Hong naturally held enough status to know the Seven Divine Profound Steps. Teaching it privately to his nephew violated the sect's rules, yet the elders turned a blind eye and let it pass.

Under normal circumstances, they would have punished it. But nothing about these circumstances was normal, as the Immortal Slaughter Palace desperately needed talent. If anything, they prayed a few monstrous prodigies would emerge from this batch, because Yu Wentai's detonation of the martial souls had smashed the Immortal Slaughter Palace's foundation.

The three disciples who had ganged up on Liu Wuxie stared at him, disbelief written across their faces. "What terrifying speed! Is he really a miscellaneous disciple?"

They clearly held higher cultivation than Liu Wuxie, yet they couldn't catch him, no matter how hard they pushed.

After Liu Wuxie shook off the three outer disciples, he sped up. The Seven Divine Profound Steps truly revealed the foundation of the Immortal Slaughter Palace, and he threaded his way through the wilderness like a fluttering butterfly.

"Something isn't right!" Liu Wuxie slowed down abruptly. A crawling unease pricked along his spine as he sensed danger waiting after this stretch of barren wasteland, right before the Myriad Profound Pagoda.

A violent buzz rippled through space, and the grass churned as puppets rose into view.

"Puppetry art!" Liu Wuxie murmured.

Puppetry art could also count as a mechanism art, and craftsmen built each puppet from countless interlocking components, fitting them together with ruthless precision. In the Laman Astral Domain, the Immortal Slaughter Palace ranked first in puppetry art, and even the Azure Thunder Sect couldn't compare.

The puppetry art demanded a level of complexity that only a few in the Indigo Bamboo Astral Domain understood.

Puppets came in countless forms, such as demonic beasts, humanoid, astral beasts, and even abyssal king puppets.

The ones blocking Liu Wuxie took the form of astral beasts, baring their claws and snarling as if they breathed.

Puppetry required terrifying precision in every joint, every angle, and every detail. Even the simplest puppet needed over a thousand materials to assemble.

More advanced puppets required tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of materials. The hardest to craft were humanoid puppets, and rumor had it that the Immortal Slaughter Palace could implant strange runes into their brains, making them believe they were real humans.

That meant those humanoid puppets could speak, imitate, and even fight on their own.

An Immortal Emperor wasn't omnipotent. Even in the Fleeting Cloud Celestial Realm, many people practiced puppetry, and Liu Wuxie had encountered it before. Still, he refused to delve into the details here.

If a chance came, he wouldn't mind making contact and learning from them. After all, more skills never became a burden in life.

The puppets that charged him were ordinary astral beast puppets with relatively fixed attack patterns. They were only slightly stronger than ordinary astral beasts, but their true terror lay in their durability. They were tough as iron, encased in thick armor like moving fortresses.

Destroying them wouldn't be easy. The instant the two astral beast puppets locked onto Liu Wuxie, they lunged from both sides and snapped into a pincer.

"What a powerful puppetry art!" Liu Wuxie muttered. The two puppets looked terrifyingly real despite lacking fur, and two astral crystals served as their eyes. Someone had carved a strange rune onto each astral crystal.

Those runes were what controlled them. Normally, puppetry required someone to manipulate them from the shadows, but with those runes embedded, the puppets could move on their own.

Once they had a fixed target, they could fight independently.

The two puppets clearly intended to keep Liu Wuxie from reaching the Myriad Profound Pagoda.

More astral beast puppets lurked throughout the area, forming an encirclement that blocked disciples from slipping past. Anyone who wanted to enter the Myriad Profound Pagoda had to push through them.

Liu Wuxie stayed calm and raised his sword, executing a sword technique that flowed like water. None of the moves looked profound, yet every strike landed with uncanny precision on the puppets' bodies.

When his sword met the puppet, sparks burst, and his arm went numb. The puppet felt like a weapon itself, and he couldn't break their defense easily. After he landed a cut, he executed the Seven Divine Profound Steps again and kept closing the distance toward the Myriad Profound Pagoda.

The puppets pursued without pause, and several more thundered in from the distance to block him head-on.

"Damn it!" Liu Wuxie roared in frustration.

The puppets even adjusted their speed to match him. His only option was to destroy their eyes and blind them, so they could no longer track him.

He tried to strike their eyes several times, but special materials reinforced them, making them absurdly tough. By rough estimation, each puppet carried combat strength comparable to the higher levels of the Transcendent Realm.

He could destroy them instantly if he revealed his Earth Immortal Realm strength. But he couldn't, not while he wore the disguise of a fourth-level Transcendent Realm cultivator.

The three outer disciples who had chased him earlier tried to break through the encirclement from another direction. More outer disciples also racked their minds for ways to push past.

Liu Wuxie smirked as he had an idea.

He had entered the Immortal Slaughter Palace to tear it apart from within, which meant he needed to turn disciples against each other.

Liu Wuxie executed the Seven Divine Profound Steps and darted toward the three outer disciples, weaving through the puppets with his footwork. In the same motion, he lured the puppets chasing him straight toward the other disciples.

Although strong, the puppets couldn't think. Their instruction was to intercept disciples trying to break the encirclement, not to intercept one specific individual.

The moment Liu Wuxie slipped away, the puppets redirected and crashed toward the nearest targets.

"Brat, you're courting death!"

The three youths had powerful cultivation at the ninth-level Transcendent Realm, and dealing with the puppets didn't truly pressure them.

"It's rude not to repay the courtesy," Liu Wuxie replied, and he vanished the instant he broke away.

They had tried to block his path earlier, so he returned the favor by using the puppets against them. Even so, the three youths were at the ninth-level Transcendent Realm, and they forced their way out from the encirclement of six or seven puppets.

"I want him dead!" they screamed.

However, one of the trio failed to dodge in time, and a puppet's claw ripped into his right arm, spraying blood. When they finally broke through, Liu Wuxie had already vanished from their sight.

In the main hall, the elders exchanged looks.

"Is that allowed?" they asked one another.

They had set the puppets to test combat strength and see whether disciples could break the encirclement. Yet Liu Wuxie had used a tactic by redirecting pursuers toward others.

"We only set the rule that they're required to get past the encirclement to reach the Myriad Profound Pagoda. We didn't specify how they're supposed to pass," Gong Yangbo said with a faint smile.

Liu Wuxie relied on a tactic, but he also demonstrated adaptability and flexibility, unlike disciples who locked themselves into dead-end fights with puppets.

"He might've used a little tactic, but it's reasonable. After all, those three tried to block his way first," Niu Yichang said, stroking his beard.

Many elders quietly approved of Liu Wuxie's choice.

As Liu Wuxie drew closer to the Myriad Profound Pagoda, four entry points came into view. The three youths chased hard and gradually closed the distance between them.

In the next instant, Liu Wuxie vanished into the Myriad Profound Pagoda. The moment he entered, he captured the environment at a glance. There were nine levels stacked above, and he would have to climb them one by one.

"A quasi-immortal artifact!" Liu Wuxie narrowed his eyes as he confirmed it. The Myriad Profound Pagoda turned out to be a pinnacle quasi-immortal artifact with infinite space within, much like Nightmare City.

Most of this region stayed closed to outsiders, and this assessment only unlocked a portion.

When Liu Wuxie lifted his gaze with Ghost Pupil, he saw a checkpoint on each floor, forcing disciples to clear it before advancing.

He had appeared at the entrance and still hadn't truly reached the first floor. Without hesitation, he charged toward the first floor's gate, which manifested as an invisible barrier before him.

With Liu Wuxie's ability, entering would have been effortless. Yet the light curtain displayed a line of text, meaning anyone who wanted to pass had to answer the question it displayed.

"What's missing from the Seven Spiritual Pill's medicinal ingredient?" A list of options appeared beneath the question, with a missing ingredient highlighted. Liu Wuxie had to choose the correct answer from the options.

Liu Wuxie pondered briefly, then filled in the last medicinal ingredient at once. The light barrier opened immediately, allowing him to enter the second floor.

The moment he stepped onto the second floor, a box dropped from above without warning.

"There's a reward too?" Liu Wuxie asked with a faint smile. He opened it swiftly and found a golden pill inside.

"It's a third-grade spiritual pill," Liu Wuxie murmured, then swallowed it in one smooth motion.

If a cultivator at the Transcendent Realm consumed a third-grade spiritual pill, they would have a high chance of breaking through a level.

The pill melted instantly and sent a surge of energy coursing through his body, and his "cultivation" climbed at a visible pace. He had only appeared at the fourth-level Transcendent Realm a moment ago, yet he reached the fifth level in the blink of an eye.

Of course, it was all an act because Liu Wuxie's true cultivation had already reached the eighth-level Earth Immortal Realm. Strangely, the questions weren't identical for every disciple, and the second floor held more than just a single light barrier.

The pagoda's internal space stretched so vast that everyone felt as if they had entered an entirely different world.

After his cultivation "reached" the fifth-level Transcendent Realm, Liu Wuxie moved on at once and stepped toward the next barrier. The Immortal Slaughter Palace had gone all-in and placed a vast amount of treasures inside the pagoda, which meant the higher they climbed, the better the rewards.

The second light barrier raised another alchemy-related question, this time regarding the Indigo Fire Pill. Liu Wuxie considered it for a few minutes, then wrote down the solution without hesitation.

These weren't rare pills, and ordinary outer disciples could refine them easily.