Cultivation is just so scientific!

Chapter 273: Chapter 183 The Ancestral Mansion

The unmanned drone flew over the hall, and Li Shiming thought he would see a room, but to his surprise, a garden appeared before his eyes.

The garden wasn’t very large, roughly a few hundred square meters, and within it, a pond had been excavated with several lotuses blooming in the water.

The lotuses shimmered with a spiritual light, even the pond water flickered with this radiance; all of these were Spiritual Objects.

The ground of the garden was planted with a variety of Spirit Plants, which seemed quite disordered, presumably due to a lack of maintenance.

Above them was sunlight created by a Formation, casting its rays upon the Spirit Plants and the pond water.

This was a garden built inside an advanced cultivator’s cave. Li Shiming had never seen the cave of a high-level Beishu cultivator before; today he had truly witnessed it.

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The far end of the garden had several rooms carved out. The drone surveyed them and found that only one room could be entered; the entrances to the others were blocked by light curtains.

The more Li Shiming watched, the more hesitant he became; from the Magic Artifacts in the hall to the Spirit Plants in the garden, to the only accessible room, everything seemed to be drawing the entering cultivators deeper.

He took out a signal relay and placed it at the entrance to the legacy mansion, and he continued to retreat with Li Yuan Ba. Every so often, they placed down a signal relay to maintain control over the drone and receive its signal.

After withdrawing ten miles, he set up a concealed Formation to mask their presence before commanding the drone to enter that room.

As the drone entered, through its camera he saw a withered body sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion, looking like nothing more than a corpse.

The withered body had snow-white hair and wrinkled skin, and in front of it was a black ancient zither.

Li Shiming controlled the drone to switch to infrared thermal imaging mode. Though the withered body didn’t exhibit the normal human temperature of 37 degrees, it was nonetheless warmer than what a corpse should be.

If it truly had been a corpse sitting in that room for many years, it would have long since matched the surrounding environmental temperature.

There couldn’t be a temperature difference unless the body wasn’t a corpse at all, but a living cultivator.

At this moment, the Six-fingered Sound Demon was also frustrated; after so many years, he had finally received a visitor.

Given the methods he had left behind, which could play the Earth Sound Annihilation Dao Zither to produce the Annihilation Dao Melody, it indicated his mastery of the ancient zither; moreover, those who had heard the melody without dying or going mad, would undoubtedly have the Spirit strength to meet his requirements for legacy transmission.

The methods he used to select a cultivator were tailored to his standards.

After being injured, the Six-fingered Sound Demon forcibly continued his cultivation, leading him into the pitfalls of demonic cultivation. This was a drawback of Demon Cultivation Techniques.

Demon Cultivation Techniques could advance quickly, but their foundations were far inferior to the cultivation methods of Daoism and Buddhism. Moreover, because these techniques didn’t emphasize cultivating the mind, the risk of falling into frenzied cultivation increased even further.

The Six-fingered Sound Demon was already gravely injured, and subsequently, he was unable to move his body; the only thing he could use was his Divine Thought.

All this time, he had been hanging on by a thread, earnestly waiting for the cultivator he had chosen to arrive so he could attempt to Body Seize and gain a new lease on life.

He didn’t need the cultivator to have exceptional innate talent; as long as the person possessed an immensely strong Spirit talent, that would be enough for him to pass on all of his knowledge.

The Earth Sound Annihilation Dao Zither actually had changed hands many times within the Cultivation World. It wasn’t that no cultivators had refined it, but not all cultivators were able to receive the score of the Annihilation Dao Melody after refining it.

To receive the score of the Annihilation Dao Melody, a cultivator’s Spirit needed to reach a certain level of strength, which was the first layer of selection.

An Earth Sound Annihilation Dao Zither that hadn’t been activated by the Annihilation Dao Melody wasn’t even as powerful as an ordinary sound wave Magic Artifact, which allowed the zither to change hands multiple times.

Naturally, among these exchanges, there were cultivators with sufficient Spirit strength, but those eligible who tried to refine the Earth Sound Annihilation Dao Zither and obtained the score of the Annihilation Dao Melody often perished because they couldn’t endure the power of the melody.

Since the Earth Sound Annihilation Dao Zither was merely a Spiritual Artifact, it did not attract the attention of Golden Core cultivators, and so it passed through the hands of many in the Cultivation World, leading to the downfall of countless cultivators.

Eventually, Yi Lingling acquired it at an auction and it ended up in the hands of Li Shiming.

The Six-fingered Sound Demon had finally waited for a cultivator to arrive, but under his Divine Thought, he realized it was an odd flying object, not the cultivator he had imagined.

He refrained from using his Divine Thought and merely observed the drone with it.

Li Shiming, too, was observing the Six-fingered Sound Demon, with the drone scanning his body up and down, eventually noticing the ring on the demon’s finger.

He had seen similar rings; it was only after arriving in Beishu that he learned they were called Space Rings, storage devices that only powerful Golden Core cultivators were qualified to use, essentially having the quality of a Magic Artifact.

Li Shiming pondered the Six-fingered Sound Demon’s situation; if the Sound Demon had been able to move, why then hadn’t he left the cave in hundreds of years?

He deduced this from the outside Formation, judging by the traces of Spiritual Power in the Formation, a capability of a High-level Array Master.

If the Six-fingered Sound Demon was alive and not leaving the cave, instead using the Earth Sound Annihilation Dao Zither to lure cultivators here, there must be some reason for this.

Almost immediately, he thought of Body Seizing.

He himself had narrowly avoided being seized by the Golden Core Sword Cultivator Yun Xingyi, so he was particularly vivid about the Golden Core cultivators attempting Body Seizing.