Immortality begins with meditation puppets

The puppet-making room, forged from Xuan Tie Jin Jing, is filled with all kinds of tools and puppets. There are tens of thousands of wood spirits ranging from the third to the fifth rank alone. The dazzling array of materials are all rare treasures from around the world, including ancient artifacts and newly discovered spirits. They encompass everything from heaven and earth. The puppet blueprints flash before your eyes in the form of a light screen. They are all exclusive puppets produced by the system and have not yet been revealed to the outside world.

Thinking back to the first time he made a puppet, he scrimped and saved every penny for a few spirit crystals and spirit stones, even trying to recycle the materials that were ruined during the process. The conditions for making puppets now are vastly different from what they were back then, but Su Qing asked himself honestly, from back then to now, his original intention of making puppets has not changed, and his passion for puppets remains unchanged.

What is a puppet? It is something that brings convenience to people, the best channel for practicing various arts to change the lives of living beings, and a product that can truly meet the needs of living beings.

If combat is required, then craft combat-type puppets. The flesh and blood body hides behind, while the puppet is manipulated to charge into battle. This way, in the cultivation world where fighting is the norm and death is commonplace, many unnecessary casualties can be reduced.

If you need to cultivate, then refine a puppet for teaching and imparting knowledge. Famous sects have high entry requirements, and cultivation families pass down their bloodlines. Traditional channels for seeking the Dao are not smooth, which means that many cultivators are often treated as slaves by their masters in the early stages of cultivation. With the Myriad Laws Master Puppet, you can stay at home to get through the weak early stages of cultivation. Once you graduate, you can enter society and become a qualified cultivator worker.

If you're looking for something more exciting, there's a wide variety of puppets available, including passion-themed puppets, butler-themed puppets, and vehicle-themed puppets, making your life, whether it's a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years, more colorful and free from the loneliness and desolation of being at the top.

Then there are the spider doctors who have spread to every household, relieving countless lives of their suffering; and the tool puppets that have spread to all walks of life, increasing the production efficiency of many industries by several times or even several times, greatly enhancing the productivity of cultivation in all the heavens and myriad realms.

All of this proves one point.

The puppeteers don't need to strive for the highest level of skill to create puppets for the needs of a few powerful cultivators. They can also create a few so-called high-end puppets that are compatible with lower levels of skill. After all, powerful cultivators are few in number, while low-level cultivators and even ordinary people are the most numerous group in the myriad worlds.

There's no need to be aloof; puppets aren't exclusive to high-level cultivators. They should be made available to ordinary people, allowing all living beings to enjoy their benefits. This is the most correct approach for puppeteers.

Therefore, the price of the puppets cannot be too high, because lower-level cultivators do not have that much purchasing power. If the price is too high, the price barrier alone will deter countless people.

He and the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom have devoted countless efforts and resources to solving this problem over the years.

Establish a puppet research and development lab to reduce research and development costs, improve the efficiency of resource extraction to reduce material costs, and build an intelligent puppet manufacturing factory to reduce manufacturing costs, enabling direct production and sales to reduce sales costs.

After all these efforts, the price of puppets, which had always been a luxury in the Tianyuan Realm, was finally brought down by the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom. First and second-tier puppets, which originally cost hundreds or thousands of spirit stones, can now be obtained for only thirty or fifty spirit stones in the Su Clan Puppet Shop. You might say that you can't afford thirty or fifty spirit stones, that you have elderly parents and young children to support and that making money is not easy, but that's okay. Next to every Su Clan Puppet Shop, there is a Xiong Er Money House that provides puppet loans with instant approval and disbursement, and thirty years of interest-free financing. In any case, they will make sure you have access to puppets.

This is also what Su Qing believes to be the strongest advantage of puppetry compared to other craft industries.

It can generate economies of scale, reduce costs, and can be widely used in thousands of households, unlike the beast taming industry, which requires a certain growth cycle to raise a spirit ox or a spirit sheep. Moreover, if you want to customize beasts according to customer needs, crossbreeding takes even longer and cannot be promoted on a large scale. More importantly, even the most obedient spirit beasts have a chance to go berserk and hurt people, posing a great safety hazard. It is simply not suitable for low-level cultivators or even ordinary people to use.

While the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom's strategy of relentlessly lowering puppet prices and using low-priced puppets to dominate the market has won unanimous praise from the lower-level cultivators of the Tianyuan Realm and even the myriad realms, it has also inevitably harmed the interests of many people in the myriad realms.

The first to be affected are the forces and merchants in the myriad realms who originally engaged in the puppet industry. In the past, they lived a carefree life, easily selling puppets of the same type for thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of years at high prices, with profit margins starting at hundreds or thousands of times. They never had to worry about finding buyers, and even the third and fourth-tier puppets were sold in limited quantities. Even if qualified cultivators had spirit stones, they could not enjoy their high-end goods.

But the better life was back then, the harder life is now.
The Su Group of Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom is like a monster that crushes everything. It updates and replaces new puppets every year or two, has unique special puppets for exorcising evil spirits and suppressing demons, has prices so low that competitors are moved to tears, has a puppet production capacity that makes people despair, and has all kinds of puppet-related supporting services.

With these things being thrown out, cultivators across the heavens will know which puppet to choose based on their actions. After all, while it's fine to shout slogans of supporting one's own hometown's industries, when it comes to actually spending their own money, everyone still hopes that every penny is spent wisely.

The puppet industry across the heavens suffered heavy blows almost simultaneously. If the market in the myriad realms hadn't been so vast that the Su Group couldn't swallow it all in a short time, these people would have been unemployed long ago. Thus, upon hearing that the Yuanshi Sect had clashed with the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, and that the Dongwang Sect had privately called on all sects across the heavens to unite and suppress the development of the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, the people working in the puppet industry across the heavens all raised their hands in response, wishing that the Su Group would just explode on the spot.

The cheap and high-quality puppets of the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom have not only harmed the interests of the puppet industry in the heavens, but have also inevitably impacted other industries of cultivation and crafts.

Some of the functions that magic artifacts could originally perform can be replaced by puppets, which are intelligent and autonomous, eliminating the need for cultivators to manipulate them with their divine sense. They are more convenient and cheaper than magic artifacts.

Compared to puppets, which only require periodic replacement of spirit stones and are time-saving, effortless, and worry-free, spirit beasts, which require attention to their food, drink, and daily necessities as well as their emotions and moods, are clearly no match for puppets in terms of maintenance and upkeep costs.

As for the promises made by the beast tamers—that spirit beasts, if raised with care, have the potential to advance and increase in value—they won't fool many cultivators anymore. Everyone now understands that spirit beasts with the potential to advance are few and far between, and even if they do exist, most beast tamers will keep them for their own use and won't release them.

On the contrary, the puppets of the Su Group, despite initially having insufficient funds to purchase only low-level puppets, were still modified and upgraded by the Su Group's puppeteers according to Su Qing's instructions. As long as the funds are sufficient later, they can be gradually upgraded and modified. Moreover, after each modification, the Su Group will extend the warranty period by ten, one hundred, or one thousand years, truly realizing that one puppet accompanies you for life and can be passed down for generations. Because of the Kaiyuan Group, this disruptive force, the various arts and crafts industries in the myriad realms have been thrown into turmoil, resulting in very few artisans speaking out for the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom. Everyone, like the puppeteers, is hoping for the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom's downfall.

Besides these industry merchants, some powerful cultivators from all the heavens also had their reservations about the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom.

Indeed, some of the puppet products of the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom are very practical for them, improving their cultivation quality and changing their cultivation methods. However, they have also affected their status.

In the past, the difference in cultivation level between cultivators determined the difference in their social status, and this difference in status was unbreakable because cultivation level was insurmountable.

Those in positions of power live high above, enjoying the respect and fear of those in lower positions. Those in lower positions obediently serve those in positions of power like oxen and horses. This undoubtedly aligns with the interests of powerful cultivators. After all, no matter how useful a puppet is, it cannot provide the same satisfaction as enslaving a living being with flesh and blood, feelings, and thoughts.

The reason why the Su Group unreasonably exported puppets, allowing lower-level cultivators to control puppets that could bridge the gap in cultivation levels, and enabling them to use puppets to resist the tyranny of higher-level cultivators, thus ending the comfortable days of high-level cultivators, was that the upper-level cultivators in the heavens had denounced the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom for dumping puppets in the Anti-Demon Council.

The Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom was also aware of the harm caused by the misuse of puppets. Although puppets are neither good nor bad, living beings are divided into good and evil. If evil people obtain puppets, they will only use them as tools for evil, threatening the peace and tranquility of the heavens.

To this end, the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom has also adopted a system of identity verification for purchasing puppets, which restricts the functions of some combat puppets. For large-scale destructive puppets such as spirit explosion puppets, a multi-layered verification process is required, and the character of the customer in their past three lives must be checked before they can be sold to them.

While such measures have prevented some malicious incidents caused by the use of puppets, the ruling position of the high-level cultivators in the heavens has actually been shaken to some extent by the puppets of the Su Group, and the stubborn idea of ​​recognizing superiors and inferiors based on cultivation level has been loosened and liberated as a result.

As a result, the high-ranking cultivators of the heavens both loved and hated Su Qing. The love was simple: the puppet of the Su Group had made great contributions to the fight against evil spirits, saving them from bloodshed and suffering. This merit was known throughout the heavens and the myriad realms, and would last for thousands of generations. Everyone had to remember the good deeds of Su Qing and the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom. The hatred was that he was too good to all living beings, which caused the cost of ruling these people to rise sharply.

But Su Qing didn't care much about any of this. After all, the puppet had to be used by people. The more people who used it, the better, and the more convenience it brought to people, the better!

This is his understanding of puppets, and it can be considered part of his original intention in creating puppets. After all, although his original intention in creating puppets was to become an immortal and ancestor, free from the burden of money and the disturbance of power, in his view, to achieve this goal, he still had to follow this path.

Therefore, for the past few hundred years, he has focused his attention on low-end practical puppets. He has made great efforts in developing low-end puppets, expanding puppet production capacity, and reducing puppet costs. So far, he has seen some results. At least within the Tianyuan Realm, the popularity of Su's puppets is already very high. As for the multiverse market, which still faces many obstacles, he still needs to use high-level puppets to leverage it.

The fact that he hadn't attempted to create high-level puppets for hundreds of years didn't mean he was completely unprepared.

Over the past few hundred years, the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom has witnessed the flourishing development of various industries, including puppetry. Resources from the Tianyuan Realm and even the myriad realms have been flowing into the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, giving Su Qing substantial capital to make large-scale purchases throughout the myriad realms.

In addition, since the conflict between him and the Yuanshi Sect had not yet been exposed and their relationship was still in its honeymoon period, and the Yuanshi Sect did not prohibit the flow of high-level resources from the myriad realms to the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, he used a large amount of spirit stones and funds in one hand and high-level puppets that were scarce in the myriad realms in the other to exchange for many high-end materials of the fifth and sixth rank from various major sects in the myriad realms.

And this was not all of his preparations.

For the major sects of the heavens, fourth and fifth-grade treasures are only worth trading with the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom. However, sixth and even seventh-grade treasures are the lifeblood of each sect. These treasures are becoming increasingly rare. If they are not from ancient sects, there are very few of them. They are used by each sect to cultivate its own cultivators. How could they possibly give them away to outsiders?

Of course, there were also a few major sects in the heavens who were really struggling to make ends meet, or who were more optimistic about the flourishing of cultivation after the revival of Tianyuan, and were willing to take out the sixth and seventh tier good items that they did not need for the time being and exchange them for the resources they could have at the moment. For example, the Luohou Sect exchanged a broken piece of Karmic Fire Black Lotus for three Pengtian Armor Puppets and a whole line of third-tier Spirit Explosion Puppets from the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom.

Then there's the network of connections Su Qing has built up over the years across the heavens. For example, the Azure Dragon King, who already regards him as a dragon among men, gave him the Ancestral Dragon Pearl, a treasure of the dragon race, as well as a random iron rod. Tong Laodao couldn't resist his persistent pleading, and with his sister-in-law, Madam Lanxiang, whispering in his ear, he also exchanged the ancient treasure passed down to him by the Four Heavenly Masters—the Mysterious Heavenly Tortoise Shell—for him.

These alone are enough for him to cobble together and refine three to five sixth-order puppets, allowing the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom to replenish its high-level combat power. Even though it is still somewhat lacking compared to the major sects of the heavens in the seventh-order level, at least in terms of power reserves at the sixth-order level and below, it can already rival the second-tier major sects of the heavens, such as the Peach Blossom Sect and the Pill Origin Sect.

These measures alone are far from sufficient to offset the influence of the Primordial Emperor; he needs to prepare much more.

They couldn't wait for the various rare and precious materials that would emerge after the Tianyuan Restoration. The main reason was that once these rare and precious materials appeared, there would be competition among various sects and realms, and you couldn't compete for them without strength.

He placed his hopes on the Heavenly Talisman Hall, an organization that had never been openly discussed and was deeply secretive about by the major sects of the heavens. Yet, the resources it controlled were comparable to those of a major sect. Crucially, all its resources were open to cultivators from all realms, as long as they had merit! (End of Chapter)