Cultivation is just so scientific! Chapter 1550 - 821: Preparation (Part 2)

"Mr. Li, I won’t let you down—I’ll get in touch as quickly as I can!" After pouring in tremendous effort to rush the array materials over at top speed and at last securing his reward, Master Liu Ziyun declared with bubbling excitement.

Li Shiming kept his eyes locked on the array materials stored in the Mustard Seed Ring, ignoring him completely.

As a sharp businessman, Master Liu Ziyun instantly caught the implication.

"I’ll rush back and reach out right away—every second counts!" Master Liu Ziyun assured Li Shiming, then launched himself skyward and vanished from sight.

Li Shiming tracked Master Liu Ziyun’s fading form, a grin tugging at his lips while he shook his head lightly.

He held zero trust in Master Liu Ziyun; the man was a skilled merchant who’d eagerly trade heaps of secrets for gain, even spilling details on Central State Commerce’s operations.

Even if the leaked intel came from rival groups inside Central State Commerce, it showed Master Liu Ziyun’s moral threshold sat perilously low.

Yet so what? Li Shiming knew this flaw well, and that made exploiting the man all too easy.

Turning his focus forward once more, he pulled out a batch of Fourth-grade Array Materials from the Mustard Seed Ring and flung them into the controlled space.

He channeled the ‘Nanming Leaving Fire’ into that controlled space, employing five separate minds to forge five array bases all at once.

Limiting it to five array bases per batch stemmed not from his own constraints but from the controlled space’s capacity.

This controlled space remained quite confined, leaving him occasionally frustrated since it stood as his most distinctive area, one that had journeyed with him into this realm. It fell short of the IBMz15’s prowess in data analysis, mental amplification, and indirect boosts to his fighting strength.

Still, the controlled space played no small part. Thanks to his command over this special domain, he could etch runes with pinpoint accuracy to 0.05 nanometers during artifact crafting.

Beyond that, in tasks like alchemy or anything demanding exactness, the controlled space delivered flawless support.

Array base creation flew by swiftly; IBMz15’s intricate designs turned straightforward once inside the controlled space.

Days of nonstop work later, eighteen hundred array bases stood neatly arrayed at his side.

For assembling this grand array, he burned through every bit of Fourth-grade Array Materials from Master Liu Ziyun, plus a hefty chunk of his own stockpiled Fourth-grade Array Materials.

With the array bases ready, he dove into laying out the formation.

Eighteen hundred array bases made for a massive setup—even a team of ten Array Masters would toil for months to finish, and snags could drag it out further.

Yet Li Shiming’s formation work felt as effortless as scattering objects at random.

Guided by Divine Sense, he positioned each array base precisely where it belonged, wrapping up the eighteen hundred in mere hours.

With utmost care, he set the jade compass at the formation’s heart and sparked the array to life.

A fierce wave of spiritual power erupted as the formation ignited—luckily, no cultivators lurked close by, or the uproar would’ve drawn a swarm of them.

Though Li Shiming outshone today’s Cultivation World Array Masters in formation knowledge, this marked his debut with a setup this enormous.

He stationed himself at a key node in the formation, shielded by its multilayered defenses; should cataclysmic forces shatter the array, it’d buy him precious moments to flee.

He refused to take Half-step Great Power or their grotto heavens lightly. Since he posed no direct threat to a Half-step Great Power’s existence yet, and with them tucked away in shell-like grotto heavens, absent any aura of doom, they wouldn’t lash out in frenzy.

His goal was to force a Half-step Great Power toward ruin. Should the foe strike back in desperation, he’d merely forfeit eighteen hundred Fourth-grade Array Bases and the formation itself.

To him, such a formation held little true value.

Through Divine Sense, he commanded the formation, summoning a cluster of arcane runes on the jade compass at its center.

These converging runes served one aim: to pull out, to drain the spiritual energy from the target.

In the tight confines of the grotto heaven, Yang Xing’s face twisted in heavy gloom.

Unlike the sprawling grotto heavens of the Cultivation World’s Great Powers, this one spanned just thirty meters across, its standout trait the thunderclouds dominating its upper reaches.

Lightning crackled through the thunderclouds, warding off total blackness in the grotto heaven.

Among the grotto heaven’s governing rules, the Thunder Rules in those thunderclouds reigned supreme, forming the most robust framework throughout the space.

Thunder Rules alone sustained the grotto heaven’s framework, bolstered by lesser Fire Rules and Wood Element Rules, plus faint rules propping up its physical structure.

Naturally, the grotto heaven’s material foundation stayed underdeveloped, providing only a basic split of sky and earth—or more precisely, an upper section mimicking the heavens and a lower one echoing the ground.

That upper part served as sky, though so tiny it barely qualified as a sliver of the heavens.

The lower section, akin to earth, amounted to no more than a scrap of land.

Yang Xing floated amid this heaven and earth, gripped by despair and mounting frustration.

He’d been deep in grasping the grotto heaven’s rules, so normally he’d stay put within the sect, shielded by its safeguards.

Exiting the grotto heaven carried dual outcomes: failure meant its collapse and his demise alongside it, maybe catching one last view of the outer world before the end.

Success would see him burst forth under the vast sky as a Mahayana Realm powerhouse.

But Li Shiming’s overwhelming might—slaying multiple Great Cultivators and crushing Central State Commerce’s Peak Great Cultivator Ren Mu—had upended everything.

Li Shiming had slipped away traceless earlier, enraging Yuqing Sect’s Great Power. The loss of the ‘Shenxiao Thunder Pearl’ gutted his battle prowess, breeding suspicion toward Nascent Soul cultivators and prompting him to send Yang Xing instead.

To Yang Xing’s shock, he’d nabbed the ideal moment, striking at Li Shiming with ironclad confidence of trapping him.

Yet Li Shiming hadn’t yielded to the seal; he’d surged with power out of nowhere, overpowering two Peak Great Cultivators and locking down Yang Xing’s grotto heaven.

Now cut off from the outer Cultivation World, Yang Xing couldn’t send or receive messages, nor pull in external spiritual energy.

Thankfully, the grotto heaven brimmed with spiritual energy still, and he could tap some from the void—since he wasn’t pushing heavy cultivation or draining vast amounts, the internal reserves held steady.

But isolation from the outside world gnawed at him with profound worry.

He realized the compass holding his grotto heaven now belonged to Li Shiming, leaving him to pray that Li Shiming lacked the know-how to handle it.

Mid-thought, a sudden pulling force arose from every direction around the grotto heaven.

Spiritual energy inside the grotto heaven poured out through its barriers under that pull, swiftly thinning the once-dense atmosphere.

Yang Xing scrambled to stem the spiritual energy’s escape, but no single breach caused the leak—it seeped from every inch of the grotto’s walls.

He knew full well his grotto heaven remained brittle, not fully tucked into the void. Even a perfected hidden grotto heaven kept a tether to the Cultivation World, one that could pierce inside.

That said, a finished grotto heaven would conceal its tether expertly, slashing detection risks, while its master could shift it at will.

Unlike Yang Xing’s flawed version, where the tether stayed fixed, and with the grotto heaven now fully sealed in space, he couldn’t budge it an inch.

He couldn’t fathom the technique Li Shiming wielded to yank spiritual energy straight from the grotto heaven by force.

He had no clue that draining his grotto’s spiritual energy required Li Shiming to deploy an array rivaling a mid-sized sect’s defensive one in scope, harnessing its might to siphon the energy—a feat that guzzled immense resources, where the materials paled against the grueling labor of erection.