Immortality begins with meditation puppets

"You controlled me? You're despicable!"

Upon hearing that the Great Emperor of the North Pole, Ziwei, was now being managed by Su Qing, the snake Buqun, which it considered to be the most noble and supreme demonic sword demon, lost control and stabbed itself. At this moment, the snake's face was twisted with rage and resentment.

As despicable as it may be, that's just how it is by divine design. If an evil god doesn't forget kindness and righteousness, then it's still an evil god. But you, Su Qing, as the ruler of a country, a candidate for the Human Emperor, and a Heavenly Emperor, handling all internal and external affairs, as a person and a ruler, you must be trustworthy!
"We agreed that joining the Divine Spirit Team was entirely voluntary, and that our divine bodies would be free from constraints after joining. But you are so vicious that you have unknowingly taken control of my divine body. Tell me, is there a problem with the salary and incense you are paying me, or with the spiritual fruits and longevity peaches you are giving me every month?"

Snake Buqun shouted at Su Qing, and these words caused the expressions of the many gods in the divine team behind Su Qing to change.

Once born into this world, we are disturbed by worldly affairs and human relationships, and by the mundane world, making it impossible to achieve true freedom.

The same applies to deities. The very nature of deities has already severed the possibility of them obtaining absolute freedom. So-called deities are those who are given authority by heaven and earth to help govern heaven and earth and protect all living beings. Their divine duties and divine markings are given by heaven and earth, and their divine power and might are determined by the amount of incense offerings from living beings. They are subject to the mandate of heaven above and human sentiments below, and they rarely have freedom.

Even evil gods like the Snake and the Earth Demon, who may disregard fate, cannot ignore their own followers. They may use coercion, enticement, deception, or fraud to unite a group of beings under their command to provide them with faith and incense.

Gods cannot enjoy absolute freedom, but they must strive for relative freedom.

In ancient times, most gods had no choice but to either become indentured servants in the Heavenly Court or laborers in the Underworld. Freedom was not something easily won. The gods of cattle and horses could not compare to the carefree immortals. Those who wanted freedom and had the ability could establish their own territories and become kings, like the God of War of Guanjiang Estuary, who had his own base of influence and could obey orders but not proclamations, thus possessing a certain degree of autonomy. Those who lacked the ability could only become outlaws, becoming grass-root gods unprotected by the Heavenly Court. They could fight and kill any high-ranking cultivators of various sects, immortals, and demons at will, without any divine authority. They could not even spread their faith in the mortal world. Once discovered, they would face the righteous gods summoning heavenly soldiers and generals to destroy their temples and shatter their divine bodies.

In the present world, before the Heavenly Court was established and the Underworld was opened, the two organizations that controlled the gods had not yet been re-established. The gods of the Heavenly Origin enjoyed a period of freedom, possessing the right to be free from the troubles of cultivation and the worries of lifespan, and not having to bear the obligations that gods should bear. They truly enjoyed a period of the benefits of heaven and earth.

This period of prosperity came to an abrupt end with the complete recovery of the Tianyuan Realm. Su Qing and Tong Chang, one acting as the Heavenly Emperor and the other as the Heavenly Master, acted as the Heavenly Emperor in the present world before his appearance, effectively controlling the gods who only received the fortune of heaven and earth but did not work for them. Furthermore, forces such as the Xingsha Divine Kingdom and Penglai Immortal Kingdom, which were essential places for gods to work, colluded with Su Qing and Tong Chang. As a result, gods had to enter the temporary divine system established by Su Qing and Tong Chang to survive and develop in the present world, and abide by their restrictions such as not wantonly killing and not recklessly using their divine power.

What makes the gods of the mortal world feel a little better is that, compared to the Xingsha Divine Kingdom, which whips them to improve and takes them to fight to the death at the drop of a hat, claiming that those who cannot be killed will only become stronger and that everything is for their own good, and the Penglai Immortal Kingdom, which whips them to be obedient and locks them in cages to be whipped at the drop of a hat, treating them like cattle and horses, and the Langya Immortal Kingdom, which does not whip them but is even more hateful than those who whip them, not only not giving them the power of faith and incense as wages, but also requiring them to offer incense, the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom's temple district is relatively humane and quite divine. Every year, countless gods apply to come to this temple district, and very few gods stay here for a while and then run away.

Good and bad are relative. Just like these gods who joined the divine team, they went from enjoying a comfortable life of being fed by believers in the Immortal Kingdom to now facing the Evil Sword Realm, one of the strongest forces of all the evil demons, not long after joining the team. If they are not careful, they will die as gods.

The reason they choose to do such high-risk jobs is a result of mutual selection.

Yes, everyone knows this divine team is dangerous. After all, the Lingxiao Palace puppet was created to demonstrate military power and intimidate the heavens. If it doesn't fight or bring back anything from outside, people will say that Su Qing was wasting resources. Therefore, once this puppet is created, it must create battles even if there are none. It must fight with great power, skill, and a sense of worthwhile investment to shut up those fools in the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom who criticize the kingdom for being militaristic and ambitious. As for the gods following this puppet, they cannot remain unaffected. They must always stand with the puppet at the forefront of the most dangerous conflicts or potential conflicts in the wars of the heavens.

But opportunities and risks go hand in hand. As the saying goes, the bigger the storm, the more valuable the fish. Poor people raise thieves, rich people raise loyal warriors. Of the three major battle teams in the Lingxiao Palace, two are puppet teams. Apart from a few puppets like the God of Silver and the Two-Headed Dragon God who have developed self-awareness and are not easy to kill, the rest of the puppets are inanimate objects and naturally care about life and death. Only the gods in the God Team risk their lives.

Therefore, Su Qing treated them quite well, even giving them monthly stipends consisting of sacred items like incense and candles.

The so-called incense and candles are a kind of divine financial management puppet developed by the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom.

This puppet has the ability to absorb and store the incense offerings of living beings and then share them with the gods. The most remarkable thing is that this puppet is anonymous, which means that no matter who offers the incense and candles, as long as their faith is sincere and the incense is of high quality, the incense and faith within the candles can be absorbed by any god. This gives the incense and candles a circulation attribute.

Within the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, Su Qing distributed this puppet as an investment product to various mortal kingdoms belonging to the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom.

Ordinary people have limited abilities and skills, but they have many desires and needs. When they have desires, faith arises. They can then bring incense and candles home. Regardless of whether the incense and candles can fulfill their wishes, they can just worship them. Once the incense has accumulated enough, they can send it to Xiong Er's money shop, which is located in every corner of the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, to be exchanged for spirit stones. With this money, most wishes in the world should be able to be fulfilled. Those who wish for longevity, children, or blessings can exchange incense and candles for blessing puppets. These blessing puppets are a type of puppet specially made for deities to generate income. Energetic deities can infuse their abundant divine power into these puppets to help beings fulfill their wishes within the scope of their divine duties. For example, the peach-shaped blessing puppets sold by Liang Haishun, the God of Longevity in the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, sell extremely well in the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom and surrounding immortal kingdoms. He uses the spirit stones he earns to exchange for incense and candles, which enhances his divine power. He then has even more divine power to create more peach-shaped blessing puppets. This virtuous cycle promotes the development and revival of the Tianyuan divine system, allowing Su Qing to regain his reputation in the world, gain great merit, and take a solid step towards the position of Heavenly Emperor!
Let's talk about the gods in the God Team.

Difficult, difficult, difficult. It's difficult to be a human being, and it's difficult to be a god. Freedom is precious, but the position of a god is even more valuable. However, for the sake of incense and candles, both can be abandoned.

The risks and constraints of joining the Gods Team are nothing compared to the allure of Su Qing's high welfare and benefits. In particular, young male gods who urgently need dowries and money to build temples to marry goddesses see this as a rare opportunity and are willing to fight tooth and nail to serve in the Gods Team.

They still remembered that when they joined this divine team, Su Qing promised them that, apart from the assigned tasks, he would not interfere with their freedom or treat them like puppets.

But now, this Snake Buqun is really like a puppet on his strings, being manipulated at will. Although this Snake Buqun has no professional ethics, takes Su Qing's money to help evil spirits, and has no bottom line, helping evil spirits instead of living beings, he is a scourge that should be nailed to the pillar of divine shame and have his divine runes and divine office stripped away by the God-Slaying Whip of the Penglai Immortal Kingdom. But no matter how much trouble he causes, Su Qing's complete control over him in this way still makes many gods in the divine team feel uneasy.

Since Su Qing can treat She Buqun this way, can he treat them the same way? If so, they've truly boarded a pirate ship once they've made enough money. In the past, they thought they could get off the train once they'd earned enough, but now it seems the doors are welded shut by Su Qing. His control over them is even greater than the Investiture of the Gods in the Penglai Immortal Kingdom. Forget about absolute freedom; absolute unfreedom is definitely the reality!

"Everyone in the myriad realms knows that I, Su Qingding, am a man of my word, famous for my integrity. If I say I won't interfere with your freedom, then I won't!"

Su Qing smiled, said something to the snake, then turned and smiled at the gods behind her, explaining softly to them:
"Rest assured, everyone. The reason this scoundrel acted this way was because I noticed his unusual behavior and then used the puppet technique—the Soul-Binding Thread—to control him. It's not what this scoundrel thinks—that I tampered with him when he signed with the Divine Spirit Team or during his tenure!"
Puppet Technique - Soul-Tethering Thread: One of the techniques of a seventh-tier puppeteer. It can use divine sense as a thread to forcibly take over another person's physical body. It has no effect on the other person's soul and is not considered a particularly powerful technique, but it is more than enough for a puppeteer!

The strength of a puppeteer lies in the puppets, not in the puppeteer themselves. Without puppets, a fourth-tier puppeteer might not be able to defeat a Golden Core cultivator or a third-tier body cultivator. A tragedy recently occurred in the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom: a fourth-tier puppeteer, highly regarded by Su Qing, had just graduated from the Martial Arts Academy and was at the prime of his life. However, due to poor judgment and a careless choice of love, he was seduced by a woman and became her Daoist partner. Under her gentle advances, when the demonic calamity broke out, fearing that his puppets would have no one to inherit them if he died in battle, he had already handed over the inheritance rights of his puppets to this woman. When this woman was caught having an affair with a muscular body cultivator, the two of them killed the puppeteer who had no puppets to protect him.

This incident enraged Su Qing. In addition to annihilating the adulterous couple, she also thoroughly publicized knowledge about the dangers of society and the complexities of human nature within the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, emphasizing the importance of avoiding scams and deceptions.

Furthermore, recognizing that puppeteers constitute the largest number of people in the Kaiyuan Immortal Kingdom, and that their poor self-defense capabilities are a problem that needs to be addressed, he, as the ruler of Kaiyuan Kingdom and the head of all puppeteers, has a responsibility to make up for this shortcoming for puppeteers in his own country, and even for puppeteers in all the heavens.

Therefore, he worked tirelessly to produce another batch of meditation dolls, and had the meditation dolls develop offensive and defensive skills specifically for puppeteers. In this way, a complete set of puppetry techniques suitable for the puppeteer's own use was established from scratch.

Puppet masters are divided into three categories. The first is the spiritual attack type. Puppet masters' spiritual sense is among the best of all the same level of technicians. They don't need to meditate to develop and refine their skills. Nowadays, puppet masters all over the world try to use their spiritual sense advantage to deal with their opponents. Only the spiritual sense puppet techniques developed by the meditating puppets can better bring out the advantages of puppet masters. For example, the Divine Sense Weapon uses puppet techniques in combination with spiritual sense to instantly turn a certain object in the surrounding area into a puppet for temporary use. There are also spiritual sense walls and spiritual sense spikes, which are both offensive and defensive techniques.

The second category is rune application. This type of application is not only applicable to puppeteers but also to other artisans. Runes are the manifestation of the Great Dao and can be indirectly used by artisans to create magical artifacts, puppets, talismans, formations, and other things, enabling them to unleash incredible power. The meditation dolls allow puppeteers to directly use their respective rune expertise in combat. They choose the rune they are most proficient in or that best suits them and nurture it in the same way that sword cultivators nurture their natal swords, so that they can switch to this natal rune at any time when needed to unleash its corresponding power.

The third category is puppetry skills. This category combines various skills that puppeteers develop while creating puppets. For example, the Unyielding Technique is a powerful Dao heart that puppeteers cultivate while constantly creating puppets. When this technique is used, even if the sky collapses and the earth crumbles, it cannot shake the puppeteer's mind. Similarly, the Soul-Tethering Thread that Su Qing is currently using allows puppeteers to control puppets like marionettes, and they can also treat living beings as marionettes.

This soul-binding thread, though not a sophisticated technique, carries a different significance when used by Su Qing.

Because he is a seventh-level puppeteer, with such a high rank, all puppet techniques in his hands are immortal techniques, divine techniques, supreme techniques, and powerful methods that this evil god She Buqun thought he was possessed by evil!

Su Qing paid no heed to scum like She Buqun, focusing instead on preparing firepower for the fighter and bombardment teams, and giving Zhuo Peiyu and the others time to set up their sword formation. His true target remained the Evil Sword Demon. Having brought the Lingxiao Palace puppet to this Evil Sword Realm, he had no intention of allowing this realm and this demon to continue existing in the myriad realms! (End of Chapter)