Li Mo, apart from cultivating, had always kept an eye on the developments of the Fire Spirit Hall.

Nearly ten thousand sword ghosts had moved into various shops, causing parts of the district to become unnaturally bloated. Each shop's expansion turned them into malformed nests.

Perhaps the Fire Spirit Hall at its beginning had traces of Wumen City's glory from ten thousand years ago, but now only the silhouettes of countless deceitful objects could be seen darting about.

Li Mo vaguely heard the nursery rhymes recited by the human-headed kite with the pig head.

"What a chaotic and mad era this is. What does the broken string of the kite signify?"

"Does it mean the severance of the connection between the mortal realm and the immortal realm?"

Li Mo gazed toward the clouds in the distance. The Creation Book once again spilled forth fragmented and chaotic memories.

Human heads hovered in mid-air, not the pig heads from the Fire Spirit Hall, but their expressions bore an indescribable similarity.

The surrounding clouds surged.

The eerie spectacle grew ever more intense, especially as the facial features of the heads continued writhing.

The memories abruptly ceased, leaving Li Mo with no new insights, only the knowledge that the human-headed kite had appeared during the upheaval of heaven and earth.

Unwilling to accept defeat, he repeatedly scrutinized the memory of the "human-headed kite rising into the sky."

"Huh?"

Li Mo's pupils contracted.

He immediately noticed the peculiar detail: although the human-headed kite soared above the clouds, he could not see traces of the sun or moon, nor could the light in his memory be traced to any source.

Examining the clouds more carefully, Li Mo realized they were not composed of water vapor but were instead dense with spiritual energy.

The spiritual energy carried not the slightest impurity—it was pure energy from before the upheaval of heaven and earth.

Li Mo had grown accustomed to all kinds of alien spirit energy, so upon encountering primordial spiritual energy, he initially failed to react.

"The appearance of human heads should correspond to Wumen City's collapse. The upheaval of heaven and earth likely polluted the spiritual energy, so could it be that the scene in the memory does not belong to the mortal realm?"

"The Immortal Realm?"

"Could it be possible that the truth aligns with the literal meaning of the nursery rhyme?"

If the rhyme's verses were indeed truthful, then Li Mo's conjecture about the source of the upheaval would need revisiting.

Previously, he believed the mortal realm's fall was tied to the Immortal Realm.

Now, it seemed that the upheaval of heaven and earth was far more absurd than anticipated, and the Immortal Realm at that time was most likely unaware of the disaster.

When immortals witnessed mortals ascending to the Immortal Realm by sending up human-headed kites, their shock and disbelief would have been inevitable.

"It makes sense if you think about it. If the Immortal Realm were truly the source of the upheaval, why would the Buddhist sect contemplate something like feathered transformation into immortality?"

"But…"

Li Mo shook his head and murmured to himself, "Whether or not the Immortal Realm is a pure land, how could it remain unscathed beneath an overturned nest? Surely many opportunistic individuals ascended during the upheaval, and the Immortal Realm must have plunged into chaos as well."

"The immortal ladder… was most likely severed by the Immortals themselves."

They were afraid—afraid of mortals breaching the Immortal Realm.

Li Mo's expression grew grave. Even though he still did not understand how mortals posed a threat to sects, or how they might sever the immortal path, it did not prevent him from interpreting the truth behind the upheaval.

"I hope, within my lifetime, to unravel the causes of all this calamity."

Li Mo suppressed distracting thoughts and turned his focus to the promotion of his Beast Infant and Sword Infant to the Divine Separation Stage.

Once his Dual Nascent Souls broke through their bottleneck, the Da Ai Mi Tian would likely reverse-feed and complete its transformation into a high-grade magical treasure ahead of schedule.

"With the Da Ai Mi Tian, the power of my Lifebound Flying Sword could rise even further."

Li Mo had previously experimented and found that the mutated cancer cells could transform the flying sword into a Cancer Dragon, though its external presence was significantly diminished.

He examined the sword pouch.

The Ten Thousand Transformation Sword Infant was rearing thousands of Lifebound Flying Swords anew, each of which had consumed the elixir pills of the Taasu Beast Infant, waiting for the carps to mature.

Li Mo spared no resources. The scale of the Fish Jumping Dragon Gate Wine had expanded to ten corpses, and the daily production of the wine was barely sufficient for the sword pouch.

Under the nurturing effect of the corpse wine, the hundred or so carps were steadily transforming into dragons.

Crack, crack, crack…

Faint sounds echoed as the carp gradually extended into sword shapes, sprouted dragon whiskers, and inscribed lower sword intent into their forms, morphing into Fish Dragons.

"Ah, still too slow. Turning all carps into Dragon Fish will probably take another two days, and ascending to Thunder Snake status will require at least thirty days. As for Flood Dragons, that'll take years…"

The Beast Embryo Technique and Dragon Corpse Technique demanded as many dragon corpses as possible, and Li Mo suspected that the thousand Lifebound Flying Swords would likely be insufficient.

Perhaps several cycles of nurturing would be necessary.

Li Mo rubbed his temples in frustration and muttered to himself, "Damn it, who knows when the Fire Spirit Hall might sink to the second layer of the Copper Mirror."

"For Fish Jumping Dragon Gate Wine to be freely squandered, I would either need to invest thousands of years' worth of innate essence to expand production, or spend seven or eight hundred years brewing the wine."

"There's no use hoping for Divine Separation Stage Corpse Wine, but that doesn't mean all is lost… I've thought of a solution."

Li Mo secretly employed divine skills, and soon a Nascent Soul Stage Corpse Wine recipe began to take shape.

[Jelly Wine]

[Uses the fat of Nascent Soul cultivators as the medicinal catalyst, supplemented by two ounces of the stomach and intestines of deceitful objects, left within a corpse belly for a century to ferment into wine dregs. The medicine aids the absorption of living beings and accumulates excess nutrients as fat.]

"Hehehe, if it can't enhance the nutrition of my Lifebound Flying Swords, it can at least raise the efficacy of the Fish Jumping Dragon Gate Wine in an indirect way."

Li Mo poured the Jelly Wine, mixed with the Fish Jumping Dragon Gate Wine, into the sword pouch.

The nutrients from the corpse wine that the carps failed to digest—which would otherwise fade away over time—were now converted into fat on their sword bodies.

Although this led to the Lifebound Flying Swords developing increasingly stout appearances, the effect was undeniably significant.

The medicinal efficacy of the Fish Jumping Dragon Gate Wine rose by at least forty percent.

Simultaneously, Li Mo used Thunder Attribute Sword Intent to promote the growth of his Lifebound Flying Swords, allowing Spirit Root Worms to crawl into the sword pouch and parasitize the Ten Thousand Transformation Sword Infant.

With the aid of Hidden Thunder Sword Intent, the Spirit Root Worms simulated refined thunder patterns.

Li Mo was unafraid of any overcompensation, repairing his Lifebound Flying Swords with innate essence whenever needed.

Fifteen days later, over six hundred Fish Dragons successfully shed their scale armor, transforming into beings closer to True Dragons—Thunder Snakes that swam around the Ten Thousand Transformation Sword Infant.

The remaining Fish Dragons failed to withstand the baptism of transformation and lost their vitality.

Though Fish Dragons did not qualify as dragons, their bodies were directly fed to the Thunder Snakes as sustenance.

Li Mo was unexpectedly surprised to find that the fastest to evolve were the Thunder Attribute Lifebound Flying Swords.

The Thunder Snakes marked by the thunder attribute were indeed more stunning in appearance, with lightning-like patterns on their bodies and faint electrical light exhaled from their mouths and nostrils.

Regretfully, Li Mo had not yet comprehended mid-level Thunder Attribute Sword Intent, which prevented the Thunder Snakes from becoming Flood Dragons.

Since Thunder Snakes were relatively few in number, their evolution did not hinder the progress of Divine Separation Stage promotion. Instead, they facilitated thunder-based body refinement, so Li Mo chose not to halt their development.

In fact, while observing the sword pouch, Li Mo unexpectedly gained insights into three lower sword intents:

Wood Attribute Sword Intent [Green Bud]

Fire Attribute Sword Intent [Ash]

Thunder Attribute Sword Intent [Lightning Attraction]

Lower sword intents acted much like the roots and stems of a tree, which, if allowed to thrive over time, could give rise to new mid-level sword intents without requiring intentional contemplation of their conceptual realms.

Li Mo poured himself even more readily into the cultivation of dragons.

He ground the broken dragon scales into powder and added it to the corpse wine to enhance its medicinal properties.

After calculating, Li Mo determined that restoring dragon scales with innate essence would cost at least three thousand years' worth of innate essence, which was absolutely unnecessary.

While dragon scales worked excellently for magical treasure crafting, Li Mo had no shortage of those.

Three high-grade magical treasures with the potential to ascend to spiritual treasures were already sufficient, and Li Mo's resources were not infinite.

Even a scant amount of powdered dragon scales, being part of a True Dragon's reversed scales, accelerated the evolution of the first batch of Thunder Snakes into Flood Dragons within just three hundred days.

The Thunder Snakes tore at one another's bodies, their bloated fat disappearing in mere moments.

They grew four limbs—but the limbs were small and deformed—and their dragon teeth sprouted as the carp's defining features vanished almost entirely.

In ancient times, Flood Dragons were considered "dragons" in mortal understanding, given that True Dragons generally resided in the depths of the Endless Star Sea.

Li Mo harvested the Thunder Snakes' corpses, ultimately cultivating just over a hundred Flood Dragon flying swords.

Though Thunder Snakes barely qualified as dragons, their bodies were casually processed, and the extracted dragon blood was stored in a Liu Li jar, naturally forming into elixir pills.

The flesh and bones were thrown into the Melting Furnace, where their high temperature slowly refined them into sword embryos.

The elixir pills and sword embryos derived from Thunder Snakes were undeniably malnourished, yet the Dual Nascent Souls still conveyed an urge to devour them.

Li Mo consumed them into his Dantian, using the Beast Embryo Technique and Dragon Corpse Technique to guide the Nascent Souls.

The Taasu Beast Infant swelled by a full circle, its features inching closer to Yinglong; the Ten Thousand Transformation Sword Infant, on the contrary, began shrinking and regressing into the state of a dragon egg.

"Hiss…"

"In the end, will the Ten Thousand Transformation Sword Infant parasitize the Taasu Beast Infant, forming a peculiar symbiosis?"

Li Mo shook his head with a bitter smile.

The fusion of Dharma Bodies followed no predictable patterns, making initial integration exceedingly crucial; therefore, the Profound Magnetic Infant could not be recklessly promoted.

Li Mo gazed at the hundred or so Flood Dragons and shifted to a new nurturing method.

He manipulated the Ten Thousand Transformation Sword Infant to stimulate the Lifebound Flying Swords, amplifying the thunder's might a hundredfold.

"In any case, the likelihood of Flood Dragons becoming True Dragons is less than one percent. There's no reason to continue wasting resources—failures will have their blood extracted for refining swords."

Under the rampage of thunder, most Flood Dragons perished within ten days.

New carps replenished the gaps in the sword pouch, creating a gradually sustainable cycle of nurturing, and the Dual Nascent Souls steadily broke through the limits of the Nascent Soul Stage.

Li Mo watched as his innate essence dwindled visibly, feeling both alarmed and apprehensive.

After consuming five thousand years of innate essence and enduring the deaths of over three thousand Flood Dragons, Li Mo finally sensed the faint signs of his Dual Nascent Souls' promotion.

"Unbelievable. Buddha Demon Dharma Bodies rely heavily on external forces, so I hadn't realized—Dual Nascent Souls' promotion nearly bled me dry."

The Sunlight Dharma Body drew nourishment primarily from the Thirteen Palace, while the Earth Prostrating Dharma Body was sustained by Twelfth Senior Sister's Corpse Immortal Finger, which was an undeniable advantage.

During Li Mo's period of seclusion, Ye Zhuo Daoist frequently ventured to the third floor for investigation.

Yet the sword ghost never made an appearance.

Ye Zhuo Daoist understood that Li Mo intended to lure out the sword ghost and thus ceased hesitating, consistently attempting to use various methods as bait in recent days.

Li Mo was about to advise Ye Zhuo Daoist on several matters.

Suddenly, one of the Flood Dragons in the sword pouch, while undergoing torment, underwent a complete transformation—its limbs became thick and robust, its form inclining towards that of a beast.

"Huh, not Dragon Transformation?"

The Flood Dragon shook its sword body, shedding its scales while growing white fur in their place.

Its head took on a resemblance that was seventy percent Mountain Lord and thirty percent True Dragon.

"Bi'an?"

Among the nine sons of the dragon, the seventh was Bi'an.

"Bi'an loves litigation and is also called the embodiment of law."

The exotic beast statues displayed in government offices were all shaped according to Bi'an.

"Has it become a True Dragon?"

"No. To be precise, it's failed—the bloodline of Bi'an has now become fixed, making future promotion to True Dragon impossible. It's stuck as a dragon species between Flood Dragon and True Dragon."

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