On a barren plain, a lizard several feet long cautiously poked its head out from beneath a heavily weathered rock, ready to begin its day of hunting.
But the moment it crawled away from its lair and had ventured only a dozen yards from the rock, a yellowish monster roughly ten feet long suddenly burst from the sandy ground to one side. It seized the lizard with both front claws and its jaws, savagely clamping down and snapping the creature's neck with ease. Then it snatched up the corpse and bolted off at full speed in a particular direction.
This creature also had four claws, a long tail, and a pointed snout — it looked like some enormous lizard. But its entire body was stiff and rigid, and it made a creaking, squeaking sound as it ran. It was, in fact, some kind of mechanical puppet.
After sprinting for over a mile, the creature arrived at the side of a man in yellow robes who was sitting cross-legged on a flat stone in meditation. It dropped the corpse beside him and immediately darted away again.
The man in yellow showed no change in expression, not the slightest hint of surprise.
He calmly beckoned with one hand, and the lizard's corpse flew smoothly through the air to hover in front of him, suspended motionless several feet above the ground.
Next, the man in yellow extended one index finger and pointed it at the lizard's head while murmuring an incantation under his breath.
Before long, the finger he had extended began to glow, emitting a faint white light.
As the chanting continued, the white light grew brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding.
"Go!"
When the man in yellow judged the timing right, he gave a low shout.
From his fingertip, a thin white thread suddenly shot forth, plunging deep into the lizard's skull. Then, with visible effort, the man began slowly pulling it back, his expression taut and focused to the utmost degree.
Finally, under the man's careful gaze, the white thread extracted a small green sphere of light from the dead lizard's corpse — it drifted lightly, no bigger than a thumb.
The man in yellow looked upon this as though he had found a priceless treasure.
His other hand flashed, and a small pale-yellow jade vial appeared in his palm. With a soft pop, several rays of multicolored light shot from the vial, swept up the green orb of light, and sucked it inside.
Only then did the man in yellow let out a long, relieved breath and wipe away the thin beads of sweat that had appeared on his forehead. It was clear that the whole procedure had cost him no small amount of energy.
"This Soul-Drawing Technique really isn't something a cultivator at the early Foundation Establishment stage can easily perform. The success rate is far too low — only one in every three or four attempts. It looks like I'll be spending the entire day here." The man in yellow glanced at the small jade vial in his hand and muttered to himself, a look of helpless resignation on his face.
This man was none other than Han Li, who was practicing the Great Evolutionary Art.
The reason he had come to this desert region nearly a hundred miles from the spirit stone mine was precisely what he had just been doing — collecting animal souls. This sort of thing was typically only done by practitioners of the Demonic path, but its appearance in Han Li was entirely due to his study of the Puppeteer's Canon.
After his initial study of puppet crafting techniques, Han Li had discovered that creating puppets required not only the usual materials used for refining magical artifacts, but also the souls of living beings, which had to be fused together with the materials in order to truly complete the work. Otherwise, the resulting puppet would possess no spiritual awareness whatsoever, no different from an ordinary toy.
The higher the grade of puppet, the more powerful the soul refined into it needed to be, so that the puppet's capabilities could be pushed to their absolute limit. For this reason, the latter portion of the Puppeteer's Canon included three supplementary techniques commonly employed by Demonic path cultivators: the Soul-Drawing Technique, the Soul Condensation Technique, and the Soul Refinement Technique.
The Soul-Drawing Technique was precisely what Han Li had just used — a spell for extracting souls from corpses.
This technique was not only weak and had a low success rate, but it could only be used on bodies that had very recently died. Compared to those secret Demonic arts that specialized in soul manipulation, its power was worlds apart!
However, its one advantage was that it required an extremely low threshold of cultivation — it could be used normally at the mid Foundation Establishment stage. Of course, a cultivator like Han Li at the early Foundation Establishment stage could barely make use of it as well, though his success rate left much to be desired.
The Soul Condensation Technique, meanwhile, was a spell for condensing and fusing souls. After all, a powerful soul was not easy to come by. Typically, the higher-grade puppets used artificial composite souls formed by merging several, a dozen, or even dozens of weaker souls together. While such composite souls were not as effective as naturally powerful ones, they were still far superior to using low-grade individual souls. For this reason, this technique was also essential study for anyone learning puppetcraft.
The final technique, the Soul Refinement Technique, was, as its name implied, a method for refining and transforming souls. Since the soul had to be fused together with the puppet, an ordinary living soul simply would not do — it had to undergo a special process of refinement before it could be used.