Recently, he had completed a new puppet dedicated to fast travel and resource transport.
He had named it the Galestride Puppet.
Built around air, earth, and lightning elements, it was shaped for speed rather than war—long, jointed legs with hidden wheels and stabilising fins, Essence channels running along its limbs, and a slim, aerodynamic frame.
- Air Essence formed a thin boundary layer around its body, cutting drag and allowing it to skim just above the ground.
- Earth Essence reinforced joints and partially cancelled its own weight, giving it stable footing at extreme speeds.
- Lightning Essence pulsed through its "muscles" for instant acceleration and quick corrections.
At full output, the Galestride could race across the land at roughly 3,500 km/hr. It had no combat capability beyond not falling apart; its body was optimised purely for movement and could even dissolve into near‑intangible air form for brief stretches, slipping past obstacles or through narrow gaps.
For now, that transformation only worked with air—the materials Sacral used simply could not handle safe shifting into other elements yet.
Sacral also set strict limits on complexity. With his current skill and resource stockpile, he refused to give any puppet more than three elements.
Anything beyond that risked instability and waste. Air, earth, and lightning were already a delicate balance.
In his Rasa‑maker profession, Sacral was moving up as well.
He was designing new pills specifically with Stage 2 cultivators in mind.
Some formulas focused on cleansing residual impurities from his parents' bodies, others targeted organ strengthening or fine‑tuning blood and nerves. Rows of vials, pills, and powders lined his alchemy room, each labelled and dated.
But his fastest progress wasn't in healing.
It was in poison.
Sacral's affinity for the poison art turned out to be a sharper blade than his healing instincts. Creating a mixture that disrupted enemy Essence, paralysed flow, or slowly corroded meridians was simply easier than crafting something that repaired them perfectly.
To support this path, he had planted a separate, isolated field filled with toxic herbs and flowers. Around it, he erected two dedicated Vyuha:
- one to gather and condense poison Elements,
- another to draw in and stabilise EssenceFlow in general.
Under those conditions, ordinary toxic plants mutated into terrifying materials—some capable of killing a normal human with a single petal, others suited for subtle, long‑term debuffs on cultivators.
For Sacral, poison was not just about killing.
It was about control—slowing enemies, forcing them to retreat, creating bargaining chips, and even using micro‑doses to stimulate a body's resistance. Healing and harm were just two directions on the same path.
He gave this new profession its own name:
Visa Maker—the one who crafts poisons, antidotes, and all the subtle tools in between.
Meanwhile, Root Clone had finally perfected his control over the space element.
What had once felt like fragile glass was now something he could shape—carefully, but confidently. He could:
- Seal a region of space so that nothing entered or left without his permission.
- Fold space to create compressed paths or distort distances.
- Perform space jumps, crossing about 5 km in a single step by walking along a folded route.
- Collapse a small pocket of space into nothingness—though after testing this once and feeling the backlash, he decided not to repeat it until his strength was much higher. The collapse space slowly and automatically heal afterwards.
He knew that as his power level grew, each of these abilities would scale because of his new understanding of space element:
- 5 km jumps could become 100 km, then 1,000 km or more.
- Tiny folded pockets could grow into full pocket‑worlds.
- One day, he might even repair collapsed or damaged space instead of just breaking it further.
For now, this level was enough. He had achieved what he set out to do with gravity and space; it was time to look toward other higher elements.
He also knew this next step would be harder.
Basic elements yielded when you understood their nature. Higher elements, he had already learned, only yielded when you grasped their rules and functions. And now he stood in front of concepts like time, life, death, reincarnation, dream, fear, soul, mind—each one larger and more abstract than gravity or space.
Where could he begin?
Where, in this world, could he "visit" time?
How did one observe life or death directly without simply guessing?
What did reincarnation even mean?
He had no teacher. No senior cultivator of laws. No inheritance crystal explaining the path.
After a long moment, Root Clone came to a simple conclusion:
If he wanted to understand those elements, he would first have to experience them—live through deep time, brush against life and death, taste dreamscapes and raw fear, study souls and minds up close.
Only then would the higher elements stop being words in books and start becoming something he could truly touch.