Nine Transformations of the True Spirit.

Chen Yuan accepted the stone box and two jade slips with both hands. The stone box was not sealed with any spirit talisman, but it was covered with a wisp of spatial power, as if it were in another space. Chen Yuan had no way to open it.

One of the two jade slips was locked by a wisp of divine consciousness; it was vast and profound, and its contents were invisible.

The other jade slip was a map, quite detailed, recording a cave dwelling, which was the residence of Master Fu's friend.

"Thank you for the generous gift, Sect Leader." Chen Yuan put away the two jade slips and the stone box, and clasped his hands in thanks.

Another pill appeared in Master Fu's palm. It looked like an ordinary gray color, but it seemed to contain all the colors in the world. Various strange phenomena appeared above the pill, and the void around the pill became distorted.

"Please accept this Origin Pill. Remember, this pill can only be stored in your dantian. Never take it out, or it will dissolve on its own and merge into the world."

"You will be able to refine this pill once you advance to the Integration stage; otherwise, its effectiveness will be greatly reduced."

Master Fu stretched out his right hand, and the pill flew towards Chen Yuan, landing in his palm. It slowly merged into his body, appearing in his dantian, floating and sinking uncertainly.

Chen Yuan sensed the profound aura emanating from the pill and forcibly suppressed the urge to refine it immediately.

"Besides that ferocious tiger demon core, I also want to give you a treasure below the Mahayana level. Have you thought it through?"

Chen Yuan had already thought it through, and immediately replied respectfully, "I ask for nothing else but to repair this Xuan Yin Armor."

As she spoke, the Xuan Yin Armor appeared in front of him, and the figure of a delicate young girl materialized, bowing gracefully to Master Fu: "This servant greets Master Fu."

Master Fu's gaze fell on the huge wound on the chest of the Xuan Yin Armor, and he said calmly, "This treasure was injured by a Mahayana cultivator, and its origin is damaged. It is destined that it will never be able to recover to its original state, but repairing the wound is not difficult."

“I will give you another letter. Go and find a weapon refiner who is an old friend of mine. He is extremely skilled in this art.”

He took out a letter, entered it with his divine sense, and withdrew after a moment. He then took out the jade bowl that was filled with ink and flew towards Chen Yuan.

Chen Yuan accepted the jade slip and the jade bowl. A vast wisp of divine consciousness remained in the jade slip, which outsiders could not perceive.

The jade bowl landed in Chen Yuan's hands, and it felt as heavy as a mountain. He slightly lowered his hands and then stopped firmly.

The ink, formed from the condensed true demonic energy, was thick and stagnant, rippling slightly, yet it couldn't escape the bowl's opening, as if an invisible barrier was isolating the ink from the outside world.

Master Fu then took back the jade tablet containing the map, added a new map, and returned it.

Chen Yuan stored the two jade slips and the jade bowl into his inner space, then clasped his hands in a fist and bowed, saying, "Thank you for bestowing these treasures upon me, Sect Leader."

"The World-Destroying Warship is of paramount importance; this matter must not be divulged," Master Fu added.

"Yes." Chen Yuan replied respectfully. Now that he had offered up this treasure, why would he publicize it?

"Go ahead. Within a hundred years, our sect will build a city on Turtle Island. As an elder, you have an inescapable responsibility. If you can advance to the Integration stage, repair spiritual treasures, and make more contributions, I will not be stingy with rewards."

Chen Yuan's expression turned solemn: "I will obey the sect leader's order and do my utmost."

He clasped his hands in a bow, and when he straightened up, he was already standing outside the Hall of Ten Thousand Stars.

But this time, he sensed an extremely faint spatial fluctuation.

Chen Yuan stepped out of the array and took to the air, leaving Tongtian Peak. However, he did not rush back to his cave. After pondering for a moment, he turned and flew towards Huayu Peak.

Huayu Peak is short and beautiful, but the surrounding mountains are majestic and imposing. Among them is a thousand-foot-high peak covered with snow, cold and desolate, which is where Han Xuan's cave is located.

Chen Yuan's escape light landed halfway up the mountain, where Han Xuan's guardian spirit beast came to greet him; it was a very common white crane.

This was Chen Yuan's first visit to Han Xuan's cave, and Bai He did not recognize Chen Yuan's identity.

But after Chen Yuan introduced himself, Bai He's eyes immediately showed respect. He turned around, took long strides, and went into the cave to report.

Before long, Han Xuan personally came out of the cave, welcomed Chen Yuan into the mansion, served him spiritual tea, and inquired about his purpose.

Chen Yuan said, "I will be leaving the mountain soon, and I don't know when I will be able to return. I have a favor to ask..."

He recounted how he had asked Bai Zangzhou to send someone to bring back Cangsong Daoist, Zhang Yanwei, and Yun Jinyue, and then said solemnly, "If Elder Bai's spy cultivators successfully bring them back, I would appreciate it if you could take care of sending Yun Jinyue, Liu Tianhan, Huan Yu, and the others back to Shuangling Domain. Yanwei and Cangsong can be temporarily placed in Donghua City. We will discuss this further when I return."

Han Xuan laughed and said, "What's so difficult about that? Don't worry, Junior Brother, I will handle it properly."

"Thank you very much, Senior Brother."

After settling their business, the two sat down for a discussion and exchanged cultivation experiences.

As night fell, Chen Yuan finally got up to take his leave, and Han Xuan personally escorted him out of the cave.

Tongtian Island was much quieter under the cover of night. The number of streaks of light in the sky was much less than during the day, and they streaked silently across the sky like dim shooting stars.

Although cultivators do not need to sleep, they are still accustomed to going out during the day and meditating at night, especially lower-level cultivators.

Chen Yuan went directly to the main hall where the teleportation array was located, where the Foundation Establishment cultivator on duty greeted him.

He revealed the Tai Xuan Token, one side of which was engraved with the two characters "Tai Xuan," and the other side was already engraved with "Ling Yun Chen Yuan."

These are the characters that Chen Yuanjin personally carved after he became an elder.

The Foundation Establishment cultivator on duty sensed the majestic aura emanating from the Tai Xuan Token, immediately clasped his hands in salute, and called out "Elder Chen," inviting Chen Yuan into the hall.

Chen Yuan put away the Tai Xuan Token, stepped into the teleportation array, and disappeared in a flash of white light.

Even under the cover of night, Donghua City remains brightly lit, with cultivators flying between the magnificent buildings. This grand city, which gathers at least a million cultivators, will never be extinguished.

There weren't many Tai Xuan Sect disciples traveling between Tongtian Island and Donghua City. Chen Yuan walked out of the main hall, mounted his escape light, but his direction wasn't the teleportation array connecting the various spiritual domains.

Before visiting Master Fu's friend, Chen Yuan had one more thing to do.

After the Tai Xuan Sect gained complete control of the Xuanli Realm, many dragon people migrated to the Spirit Realm, serving as affiliated alien races of the Tai Xuan Sect.

This is a common practice among various sects in the spirit world when conquering other worlds. In the past, some sects kept alien races who were familiar with the situation in other worlds in order to make it easier to collect cultivation resources. However, what they got in return was not loyalty, but backlash.

Their roots in the other world are extremely deep, and they feel deeply humiliated by the conquest by the sects of the spirit world, always wanting to retaliate.

While mining cultivation resources for the sects of the Spirit Realm, these alien races secretly intercepted a portion of them and learned the various cultivation arts of the Spirit Realm. Feeling that their strength was formidable enough, they brazenly rebelled.

However, these alien races underestimated the power of the spirit realm and were ruthlessly suppressed. From then on, no sect showed leniency towards alien races.

All alien races that pledge allegiance to the Spirit Realm must relocate a portion of their people there to witness its power firsthand, abide by its rules, and risk their lives for its sects in their conquests of other realms. This is the price they must pay to survive.

When they truly develop a sense of awe for the spirit realm, they will return to their own realm and become the most loyal vassals of the various sects in the spirit realm, suppressing those alien races who still harbor rebellious intentions. This conquered little world will never be able to escape the control of the spirit realm.

The same applies to dragon people, but because dragon people and humans share the same origin and fight side by side with humans when facing demons, they receive some preferential treatment.

However, this only applies to a few tribes such as the Yingqian tribe, Yingshan tribe, and Cangnan tribe; other tribes still have to serve the Taixuan Sect to the death.

Several tribes that had allied with the demon race, such as the Yingmo tribe, the Yingmang tribe, and the Yingtian tribe, were punished, and most of their people were forced to migrate into the spirit realm.

They were placed in a sacred land 200,000 miles away from Donghua City. Because the distance was too short and there was no teleportation array connecting them, Chen Yuan had to fly there on his own.

Originally, dragon people relied heavily on dragon energy for cultivation, but dragon energy comes from a mutation of spiritual energy and is essentially no different.

The Tai Xuan Sect's array masters carefully studied the array in the Dragon Breath Platform, completely mastered it, and set it up in the Spirit Realm, allowing dragon people to smoothly improve their cultivation.

More than two hundred years have passed, and the dragon people have gradually integrated into the spirit world. When Chen Yuan visited Duobaoge, he saw the dragon people in Donghua City.

Donghua City is home to a million cultivators, not only from all over the Xuanling Domain, but also from other spiritual domains for various reasons, making it a diverse and mixed place.

Only through strict control can those audacious cultivators be deterred from acting recklessly, and other cultivators who wish to purchase treasures and spiritual materials in Donghua City be prevented from doing so. This requires a large number of people; the cultivators of the Tai Xuan Sect alone are not enough, and the efforts of affiliated sects, outer disciples, and cultivators from other races are also needed.

Dragonmen possess formidable physical strength and bear an appearance remarkably similar to humans. By simply concealing their dragon scales, they can appear indistinguishable from humans, making them an excellent choice.

In addition, the dragon people also undertake many tasks of mining spirit stones and minerals and collecting spirit herbs and plants because of their powerful physical bodies. They can even be found in the minor worlds that the Tai Xuan Realm has conquered.

Spiritual material veins are not all like ordinary iron and copper mines, buried underground waiting to be mined. Some rare spiritual material veins are accompanied by spiritual fire, or grow in heavy water, or attract poisonous insects and demonic plants to live with them, making them extremely dangerous for low-level cultivators.

The same applies to some spiritual herbs. Not all spiritual herbs can be cultivated artificially, grow in dangerous places, or are even very dangerous in themselves.

Even in the vast Spirit Realm, very few cultivators can form a Golden Core; the vast majority of cultivators are still at the Qi Refining and Foundation Establishment stages.

Core Formation cultivators look down on the meager spirit stones obtained from mining spirit ores and herbs. Lower-level cultivators take on these tasks, but due to their limited true essence and mana, their efficiency is extremely low.

Ninety-nine percent of human cultivators are magic cultivators, and this is even more true for these mediocre rogue cultivators.

Even if they obtain body cultivation techniques, they do not have enough cultivation resources and can only cultivate the most common techniques. Their advantage lies in having more abundant true essence and magic power and a faster recovery speed, but they are not good at fighting against others.

True essence and magical power are their only reliance when mining spiritual minerals and herbs in dangerous environments, but no matter how fast they recover, they can never keep up with the consumption.

Dragon people, on the other hand, are born with the ability to cultivate both physical and magical powers. Although their strength is not as great as that of the disciples of those sects, it far surpasses that of these rogue cultivators and other alien races with weak physical bodies. They are more likely to complete these dangerous missions and naturally have gained the favor of the Tai Xuan Sect.

Han Xuan told Chen Yuan that over the past two hundred years, two hundred thousand low-level dragon people had entered the Spirit Realm and other minor worlds, serving the Tai Xuan Sect in mines filled with poisonous gas and scorching lava.

It should be noted that there are not many dragon people to begin with; the total number of dragon people in the entire Xuanli Realm is less than a million, and two hundred thousand is already quite a lot.

On this basis, a continuous stream of dragon people left the Xuanli Realm, completely changing the way of life that had existed for hundreds of thousands of years.

This is not a bad thing for the dragon people. The dragon energy in the Xuanli Realm is becoming increasingly thin, and the Taixuan Sect is constantly modifying the Dragon Breath Platform, making the spiritual energy more abundant and the dragon energy even less. Changes must be made.

Moreover, many wandering dragon people who lost their tribes were unable to break through their bottlenecks using the Dragon Breath Platform, so leaving the Xuanli Realm was actually an opportunity for them.

Even among the four great dragon tribes, those who enter the spirit realm experience faster cultivation advancement.

The Spirit Realm is vast and rich in resources, with abundant spiritual energy. It is constantly conquering new realms, and its cultivation resources are inexhaustible.

Confined to the cramped Xuanli Realm, the Dragonkin race can only face extinction.

After returning to the Spirit Realm, Chen Yuan learned about the current situation of the Dragon People from Elder Yuan, Han Xuan, and others, but he had not been able to find the time to visit their clan's territory in the Spirit Realm until now.

Lingyun Peak did not accept any disciples, but Chen Yuan would not be able to handle all the trivial matters by himself when he conquered the Lesser Thousand Worlds. He would also need low-level cultivators to go on expeditions to help him, guard other worlds, and collect cultivation resources. The dragon people who had a connection with him were undoubtedly the best choice.

The fundamental purpose of the various sects in the spirit world in accepting alien races has always been to conquer other worlds; mining spirit mines, patrolling markets, and cultivating spirit herbs are merely secondary tasks.

With Chen Yuan's current speed, 200,000 li is not far, especially since his understanding of the laws of space has deepened during the journey to collect the World Annihilation Warship, making his speed even faster.

He wasn't breaking through obstacles to escape, but rather merging into the spirit world, already faintly displaying a trace of Master Fu's ability to traverse the void, only his speed was far inferior.

When Chen Yuan arrived at the land of the Dragon People, he saw a peaceful scene.

The dragon people still retain the habit of building houses and palaces with huge stones, creating a magnificent atmosphere. In the center of the building, a lifelike statue of a real dragon, hundreds of feet tall, stands.

Not far away was an ancient and square Dragon Breath Platform, which was spewing out wisps of mysterious yellow dragon energy, and the real dragon statue, the main hall and the buildings were all shrouded in the great formation.

Originally, there was only a small spiritual vein here. After the dragon people offered many treasures, the array masters and spirit seekers of the Tai Xuan Sect joined forces to upgrade it into a large spiritual vein by moving the spiritual vein and setting up arrays to fill it with spiritual energy, which was enough for the dragon people to cultivate.

Zhou Lang, Zhou Muyun, Chu Weicai, and Zhuang Buhui, four mid-stage Dragon Transformation Realm cultivators, were all in their clan's territory. They were overjoyed to see Chen Yuan.

Even after the arrival of the Nascent Soul cultivators in the Xuanli Realm, Chen Yuan, who had slain the divided souls of two great demon saints, still left the deepest impression on them and won the awe of the entire dragon race.

They treated Chen Yuan with the utmost courtesy and wanted to gather all the clansmen who remained in the clan territory to welcome him, but Chen Yuan refused.

He didn't want to make a big fuss; this trip was just to visit Chu Weicai and his three companions.

When the four learned that Chen Yuan's cultivation had reached the peak of the Void Refinement stage and that he held the position of elder in the Tai Xuan Sect, they immediately became respectful.

Zhuang Buhui and Zhou Lang, who had once joined forces with the demon race, were particularly humble.

Even though Chen Yuan took the initiative to address him as "fellow Daoist," Zhou Lang, Zhou Muyun, and Zhuang Buhui did not dare to overstep their bounds. Only Chu Weicai changed "elder" to "fellow Daoist."

The place where the dragon people live is now called the Xuanli Mountains. The area within a radius of 30,000 li is under the jurisdiction of the dragon people. A hundred years ago, the last cultivator of the Tai Xuan Sect left this place and returned to his sect. Now only the dragon people live here.

Chen Yuan stayed in the Xuanli Mountains for three days and three nights, discussing metaphysics and Taoism with Chu Weicai and others. When talking about the great battle with the demon race back then, he felt as if it were a different world.

Zhou Lang and Zhuang Buhui were somewhat apprehensive when they surrendered to the human race, but the Tai Xuan Sect had not made things difficult for them over the past two hundred years. They had only recruited more low-ranking members of the race, which was nothing to them.

The two have now completely forgotten about the demon race, deeply admire the power of the Tai Xuan Sect, and are utterly loyal to it.

Chu Weicai and Zhou Muyun became the nominal rulers of the Dragon People, receiving even greater rewards and possessing cultivation levels several times higher than Zhou Lang and Zhuang Buhui.

The Tai Xuan Sect has long since ceased its conquest of the Lesser Thousand Worlds; everything is in preparation for the construction of the city on Tyrant Turtle Island a hundred years from now.

The Demon Realm will certainly not allow the human race to build another giant city on Turtle Island, and a great war is inevitable.

After entering the Spirit Realm, the four had no chance to participate in the great battle, nor were they willing to waste immortal spirit stones to travel to other minor worlds. They simply traveled around the Spirit Realm for a short while before returning to the Xuanli Mountains to cultivate and protect their clansmen.

When Chen Yuan proposed to borrow the power of the dragon people in the future, all four readily agreed, and even expressed their willingness to follow Chen Yuan in battle on Turtle Island.

Chen Yuan had no one to rely on, and they also needed a powerful backer within the Tai Xuan Sect.

Because of Han Xuan and Yuan Shuheng, Elder Yuan took good care of the Dragon People.

However, he was ruthless in exploiting the dragon people, sending large numbers of low-level dragon people into various minor worlds to collect cultivation resources.

Chen Yuan had fought alongside the Dragon People and their friendship had deepened. His words also revealed the current situation of Lingyun Peak: there were no low-level cultivators at all, and the need for cultivation resources was far less than that of Huayu Peak. It was obviously more suitable as a backer.

Most importantly, Chen Yuan and Elder Yuan have a close relationship. If they switch their allegiance to Chen Yuan, they don't need to worry about Elder Yuan holding them accountable.

Of course, the dragon people will continue to serve Elder Yuan. With two elders speaking up for them, their situation in the spirit world will improve.

But from now on, the bond between the dragon people and Chen Yuan will be even stronger, and they will both bear the mark of Lingyun Peak.

Chen Yuan didn't stand on ceremony and ordered them to immediately dispatch a thousand dragonmen to accompany him to the Cloud Green Plains to protect the still very weak Green Mantis Clan.

Without the slightest hesitation, the four immediately found one hundred dragonmen of considerable strength, with the lowest cultivation level being the Blood Condensation Realm, comparable to a Core Formation cultivator, and three dragonmen in the late Cloud Ascension Realm, enough to deal with the siege of several Nascent Soul cultivators.

Moreover, after learning about the Green Mantis Clan, the four of them took the initiative to provide a batch of low-level cultivation resources to support the Green Mantis Clan.

Chen Yuan then took his leave, sending the hundred dragon people and cultivation resources to the Cloud Green Plain.

The Green Mantis Clan was extremely grateful to Chen Yuan. They had already built a statue for Master Fu and another for Chen Yuan, and they worshipped them every day.

Fu Luohai had initially felt a pang of regret for giving Chen Yuan the Po Xu Hou Blade Arm, a treasure passed down through his clan for thousands of years, but now that regret had vanished.

High-level cultivators have always regarded low-level cultivators as ants; this is true in the Spirit Realm and also in the Green Mantis Realm.

Fu Luohai offered up his sword arm, only asking that Chen Yuan protect the Green Mantis Clan's lineage so that it would not perish; he would be content with that.

However, Chen Yuan first gave the Green Mantis Clan seeds of spiritual herbs, then sent dragon people to guard the Cloud Green Plain, and also provided the Green Mantis Clan with cultivation resources that they desperately needed. He was truly benevolent and righteous.

On the day Chen Yuan departed, Fu Luo Hai led 100,000 Green Mantises to see him off, a vast green ocean that blotted out the sun. All the Green Mantises placed their sword arms on their chests, bowed in silent reverence. (End of Chapter)