Chapter 126: Illusion Formation of the Mountains
Chapter 126: Illusion Formation of the Mountains
“This should be the area.”
Chen Xiyi checked the map and looked at the surrounding mountains. He felt the map was not very accurate.
Chen Xiyi was on his way to the Shu King Palace, but the embarrassing thing was that he got lost in the mountains.
Three days ago, he had perfected the spell that used souls as nourishment resources. Now he just needed to run it to check for bugs. This spell could not be used casually; starting it up required souls, let alone running it.
He definitely didn’t want to use the test subjects at home, and the NPCs outside had white names and hadn’t offended him. It wasn’t good to kill them randomly.
Then he slapped his forehead and remembered what Li Hao had told him a month ago: there were many rat monsters in the Shu King Palace. So he hurried over.
His spell wasn’t very restrictive; it wasn’t just for humans—demons, ghosts, and monsters could all be used as nourishment resources.
That’s why he had come.
“The Shu King Palace is really poor; not even a blue dot appears.” Chen Xiyi couldn’t help complaining.
The Lady Shu Mausoleum had an item with historical connotation, but the Shu King Palace didn’t. The game map clearly showed that he seemed to be the only one in this area.
He wandered around the mountains following the diary of that craftsman until he got completely lost.
“So, what should I do next?”
Chen Xiyi felt a bit helpless. If the Shu King Palace had an item with historical connotation, he could have followed the game map recklessly. But now he couldn’t; he had no way to determine the palace’s location and couldn’t rush blindly.
“I just came out to rest and test my spell, but I’ve been wandering in these mountains for almost a whole day and got lost…”
“No choice, I have to rely on real skill now.”
He had planned to take it easy, but taking it easy actually made him spend more time. It felt like the loss outweighed the gain.
The Eye of Qi Observation slowly rose into the air. It couldn’t go faster anyway—its movement speed was fixed, whether moving forward, backward, left, right, up, or down. There was no way to speed it up.
The entire terrain was fed back to Chen Xiyi as the Eye of Qi Observation ascended. Chen Xiyi watched the qi mechanism flowing through the mountains and began calculating the location of the Shu King Palace.
Given how lost he was, even if he released Li Hao to lead the way, it would probably be too late. Li Hao might know the way there, but he definitely wouldn’t know where Chen Xiyi had ended up. He would just stare blankly and ask where this place was.
That’s right—Chen Xiyi had brought all his test subjects with him, stuffed them into the alloy carriage, and placed them in his inventory.
If he had left them under the Lady Shu Mausoleum, he would have had to leave enough food as a cost. It was better to put them in the inventory, which saved the cost during this time. He could just release them later.
“Found it. The Shu King Palace is extraordinary, no wonder Li Hao said he would take me there. This place is like a natural illusion array.” Chen Xiyi instantly saw through the mystery.
This illusion array covered a vast range of mountains. In terms of scale, it was much larger than the Qi Reversal Soul-Returning Array back in Dongtai City.
The mountains stretched endlessly, huge and majestic, formed naturally without any carving.
In this situation, Chen Xiyi was trapped in the array without realizing it. It was only when he used the Eye of Qi Observation to see the full view of the mountains that he noticed the clues.
“Such a huge natural illusion array—it’s impressive that the Shu King found such a great location. But what did he want to do here?”
Chen Xiyi precisely calculated the location of the Shu King Palace. The natural illusion array was good, but it was formed by chance. Once he stepped out of the array, the formation looked full of holes to him, even rougher than some simple arrays.
Since it wasn’t man-made, there were bound to be many flaws that couldn’t be fixed. Not everything born naturally was the best. Iron ore and steel—one natural, one man-made—couldn’t be compared directly. The smelted steel wasn’t worse than the mined iron ore; the two were worlds apart.
Now that he had a direction, and with the Eye of Qi Observation acting as a live map in the sky, Chen Xiyi no longer had to worry about getting lost.
He walked straight toward the determined direction, making slight adjustments to his route based on the sound of qi mechanism flowing past his ears to ensure he didn’t stray.
Even so, the mountain path was hard to walk, especially since the mountains stretched endlessly. It felt like running toward a distant mountain only to tire the horse.
This wretched place didn’t allow riding the alloy carriage, or even the alloy horse. After all, the mountains were covered with trees, not bare.
So Chen Xiyi had to walk, at most using a few Jia Ma talismans to speed himself up.
“Ah, why doesn’t this home game have shoe equipment? If it did, maybe I could enchant it with movement speed bonuses.”
Chen Xiyi looked at his feet. He had shoes—the default outfit came with shoes, the alloy full body armor also had shoes, and even the wooden armor included lower body and shoes. Even when he didn’t wear equipment before, he had default clothing and shoes.
This meant one piece of equipment took the place of three, making Chen Xiyi miss out on six enchantments.
He figured it was probably because the game was still unfinished.
Following the route he had planned, Chen Xiyi soon arrived at the core of the illusion array, commonly known as the array eye.
“What kind of person was this Shu King, to have such ability?”
Getting to the array eye wasn’t difficult; the hard part was recognizing it.
Ordinary people couldn’t see the full picture of the mountain illusion array, let alone find it. Sometimes they might pass by without even knowing.
Yet the Shu King not only found this place but also built a tomb here. Not just anyone could do that. Just transporting the building materials into the mountains required significant effort.
The cost for livestock alone would be considerable.
From the craftsman’s diary, it was clear the Shu King Palace wasn’t a small tomb—it could be treated as an underground palace.
The excavated soil had to be carried away; it couldn’t be left on site. If piled up, there might not be any issues in the short term, but over time, as it became part of the environment, it could ruin the feng shui.
“But how come there are no related records for such a big project? He was a king, after all; such a massive undertaking should have been noted down.”
“Maybe it was recorded, but only in a brief, understated way.”
These events had long been buried in the river of history, and Chen Xiyi had no way of knowing.
He simply didn’t know the background of this Shu King.
After retrieving the Eye of Qi Observation, Chen Xiyi started thinking about how to get into the Shu King Palace.
Since the game map didn’t show it, Chen Xiyi relied on his feng shui knowledge to draw conclusions. He had to thank Mi Hong for sending him a legacy not long ago called Hundred Burials for Revival. The way to nurture the primordial spirit was quite unusual: basically, bury yourself in a place with good feng shui, and if you come out alive, you become a qi refiner; if you die, you become a grave.
Although it seemed unreliable, the process was actually very complex. Not only did you have to find a place matching your birth date, name, and other factors, but you also needed specific burial specifications, timing, rituals, etc. Missing one step could ruin everything.
If successful, you gained the ability to command ghosts and control jiangshi, along with a natural affinity for death qi, yin qi, and so on.
In other words, the primordial spirit born from Hundred Burials for Revival wasn’t mainly based on human qi and yang qi, making it a non-mainstream type among qi refiners. But even non-mainstream was much better than Chen Xiyi’s deviant ways.
Of course, the Hundred Burials for Revival legacy was just a small surprise. The real surprise was that Mi Hong, with her 4-star favorability, had started sending him emails. For that, he replied and attached some small gifts.
This meant double the happiness had officially begun. It was a pity the rest of his contacts mostly had 2-star favorability, with no 3-star friends. This made Chen Xiyi a bit embarrassed; he could only hope Li Zhao and Mi Hong would put in more effort.
“The location is correct. So, should I dig down or find the spot Li Hao mentioned before?”
Chen Xiyi’s target was those rat monsters, not tomb raiding.
So digging straight down didn’t seem appropriate.
“Darn, my sandbox game abilities are a perfect match for tomb raiding. Others sweat to dig tunnels, but one swing of my pickaxe does the work of their entire effort.”
Chen Xiyi felt that after climbing out of the pit of scamming, he had fallen into another pit. And digging up people’s ancestral graves seemed even more immoral than scamming.
“I won’t do such immoral things again next time.”
Chen Xiyi suddenly realized he had done something even more immoral: turning Lady Shu’s grave into his own home.
This made him fall silent.
“Forget it, let’s just get into the Shu King Palace first. We’ll deal with it later.”
Guilt? Nonexistent.
As a player who could switch between chaos, order, evil, good, and neutral factions, he had no such psychological burden.
Immoral deeds were done by the past self—what did they have to do with the future self?
As long as he had no shame, nothing would affect the player.
“Maybe I could even pretend to have a firm dao heart. After killing and robbing, I could shout, ‘Treasures belong to the virtuous.’ Hiss, does that mean I have the potential to be a protagonist?”
Chen Xiyi, who was digging the soil, couldn’t help but gasp.
“Thinking about it, if I ever come across an auction or something, I could totally note down the names and ambush them later to steal the goods. After robbing, I could toss out that line to show I’m a righteous person. Tsk tsk.”
Wasn’t that how protagonists in xianxia and fantasy stories acted? In an auction, if they didn’t have enough money and someone else bought what they wanted, they’d ambush them later. They always ended up saying treasures belong to the virtuous.
“But I don’t really need to do that. As long as I have enough friends with high favorability, whatever I want, my friends will send it to me. That’s much more legitimate than sneaking around killing and robbing.”
As Chen Xiyi pondered this, he swung his pickaxe down, revealing a dark hole. For underground palace-type areas, ever since he fell once and lost 99% of his health points, he always held onto a wooden ladder to avoid accidentally falling in.
Although now he probably wouldn’t lose 99% health at once—since he had formless astral energy around him, which had decent defense against physical, elemental, qi mechanism, energy, and other attacks.
Even so, out of caution, Chen Xiyi still held onto the wooden ladder and used the object manipulation talisman to control the alloy pickaxe for digging. This way, it was very safe.
“There’s no movement down here. Did I dig straight into the main tomb chamber again?”
It was pitch black below, and Chen Xiyi didn’t detect any activity. He took out a flashlight to try and see.
As soon as he shone the light, Chen Xiyi felt his breathing quicken.
“That was careless. I should’ve turned on Zhangliu’s shared hearing.” He usually kept it off because Zhangliu’s hearing was too sharp, letting all sorts of sounds flood his ears, which disturbed his research and daily life.