Chapter 245: Top 10 Reward: Body Replacement
Song Jiulai was finally getting a real taste of human wickedness.
How could she have forgotten? Even though they were Cultivators, everyone was still human.
And as long as there were people—there would be scammers!
Song Jiulai didn’t bother chasing the female cultivator. She just fumed, "Good thing I didn’t take the bait!"
She had almost fallen for it a moment ago!
This was her first time in the Dragon Frost Swamp. ’A map must be hard to come by,’ she’d thought. She never expected they’d be giving them away for free!
Song Jiulai followed the two cultivators from before and soon arrived at the place in Xuanwu City where maps were distributed.
Quite a few people had gathered here.
The buildings in the Cultivation World had a peculiar characteristic: no matter how small they looked from the outside, the space within was a world of its own.
’It’s all thanks to some minor spatial Spells. Looks like I’ll need to have the players learn them as a secondary skill in the future.’
The Xuanwu City office was indeed giving out free maps.
The map was a stone carved into the shape of a Black Tortoise. By holding it in her palm and infusing it with Spiritual Energy, her current location would pop up before her eyes.
Furthermore, dotted lines in different colors spread across it, indicating the locations of large mines and areas rich with spirit materials.
Naturally, it also marked the territories of demon beasts.
There weren’t many places a Qi Refinement Realm cultivator could go. Important nearby areas would be cleared out, leaving only low-level demon beasts behind.
Venture anywhere else, and the demon beasts would be of a higher rank.
Those in the Qi Refinement Realm naturally couldn’t just run around wherever they pleased.
Song Jiulai discovered that the closest location was a natural mining site dozens of miles away.
The ores in this world also needed to be excavated manually.
Some could be extracted using Magic Treasures, others with Beast Taming.
If you had neither, you dug with your bare hands.
This mine was rich in all sorts of ores used for Artifact Refining. Because of the sheer variety, one could sometimes dig up High-level ores.
For a Cultivator, this was a huge boon.
But Song Jiulai keenly noticed something.
’There are protective forces inside the mine, but what about outside?’
There were already scammers inside Xuanwu City, which meant that along the paths of the Dragon Frost Swamp—there were bound to be plenty of robbers.
However, the map only covered a radius of a few hundred miles around Xuanwu City.
Anything further was just a black void.
As a Foundation Establishment Stage cultivator, Song Jiulai had no use for places that far away anyway. Fifth-rank Demon Beasts roamed those lands; ’How could I possibly dare go there?’
The Sea View Sect had teleported to Xuanwu City because more than half of the spirit materials they needed this year were ores from that mine.
Besides, not all spirit materials produced Dragon Breath Spirit. It was said that the wrong technique could destroy the Dragon Breath.
It was even rarer to find ores that contained Dragon Breath Spirit.
’What ridiculously delicate stuff!’
Materials containing Dragon Breath Spirit couldn’t be taken through a Teleportation Array. They had to be reported to the Sea View Sect, recorded, and then brought back by the sect itself.
Only then could one use them.
Moreover, Song Jiulai had her doubts about whether she could actually keep enough materials for her own Artifact Refining.
Of course, besides all this, the Dragon Frost Swamp had many strange areas. In any case, people often went missing there.
Song Jiulai planned to head to the mine first to check things out. After all, she couldn’t go back anytime soon.
Having sorted that out, she remembered the event she needed to organize.
’I need to motivate the players!’
After some thought, Song Jiulai decided to launch a points event similar to the last one.
But this time, there was a bigger carrot.
She previously had five slots for players to livestream the game. She had already given one each to Han Tian and Lin Yuyu.
That was because those two had their own specializations.
’If the remaining three slots were fought over with points, it would make me, the Sect Master, seem unfair.’
On top of that, Han Tian was petitioning the system, trying to get one for Mu Qiu.
After thinking it over, Song Jiulai decided against offering the livestreaming slots. Instead, she focused on an issue that the players had been concerned about for a long time.
Puppet bodies.
The players had long since reached a tacit understanding about this whole "puppet" business.
After entering the game, any player with even a passing familiarity with Artifact Refining would see that the Feique Sect specialized in puppets and immediately figure out where their bodies came from.
But ordinary puppets were made from pure medicine powder. The materials were very common, with no real substance.
And the ones Song Jiulai made were ugly.
Puppets weren’t invented for no reason. In the late game, one could use better materials to create superior puppet bodies.
Some puppet bodies even had innate defensive properties against certain things.
Cultivators used puppets as substitutes. The better the materials used, the higher the chance of creating a special puppet.
For example, powerful puppet bodies that were poison-resistant, could withstand Spell attacks, or even resist the control techniques of some high-level Cultivators.
The kind that manipulated one’s consciousness, for instance.
However, Cultivators made them so they would be safer while the puppets were out and about, but if a puppet was destroyed, it was gone for good.
But for the players, it was a tangible safeguard.
At her current stage, Song Jiulai couldn’t get her hands on top-tier puppet materials, but she could try making better ones—for instance, puppets that were waterproof and fireproof.
With this in mind, Song Jiulai decided what to do.
She had the system send out an announcement directly.
[Ding! To celebrate the initiation of new players, and with the New Year approaching, the Sect will be holding a welcoming event!]
[For the next half a month, starting today, all points earned by players will be doubled. This bonus will stack with the point multipliers already enjoyed by new players.]
[After half a month, the point rankings will be finalized. The top three players will receive a special puppet replacement as a reward. The next seven players can choose to replace their puppet once.]
For players who wanted it, this "replacement" simply meant changing their puppet’s face.
By putting it this way, Song Jiulai was essentially making the secret public.
The Sect channel immediately burst into activity.
[Gu Yunxi: So they really are puppets...]
[Wu Dahu: Awesome! I can finally change my face!]
[Daoist: To the guy above, ever considered if you can even make it into the top ten?]
[Su Daqiang: Sigh, I’m already on good terms with the other sects. Changing my face wouldn’t be right. You guys can have the reward.]
[Ma Xiaoniao: If Su Daqiang isn’t taking it, then neither are we.]
[Ma Xiaoben: If you guys aren’t taking it, I’m not either.]
[Ye Xuan: If you guys aren’t taking it, I’m not either.]
[Zhou Nvzi: If you guys aren’t going to Harvard, then neither am I.]
...
Of course, some people keenly spotted a potential loophole.
Jiang Tianya asked the system, "Does a replacement puppet body count as an extra life for us?"
It was an ironclad rule that there was no resurrection in this game.
The system was quite blunt: "Useless. Replacing a body and having an extra life are two different things."
As long as a player didn’t suffer an instantaneous, fatal injury, the energy system could still save them by moving them elsewhere.
But if their points were insufficient, the system wouldn’t perform charity.
Because the players’ physical bodies weren’t here; the system was merely maintaining a connection.
Switching bodies required it to expend energy to completely transfer the player’s soul and consciousness, which was not something that could be done in an instant.
A fatal injury would cause the player’s soul to detach from this world immediately, making it too late to switch puppets.
Having more puppet bodies was useless in that case.
This was also why Song Jiulai could casually whip up puppet bodies for the players to switch into, but couldn’t make them serve as second lives.
This game was destined to never provide a safety net for the players. Otherwise, the system’s energy reserves wouldn’t be enough to support such a huge drain.
If players could be revived at will, to the point that even Great Power Cultivators couldn’t stop them, why would the system have needed Song Jiulai to bring players here in the first place?
Although it was a bit of a shame, changing one’s face was still a big deal.
Jiang Tianya touched his own face.
’It really is time for a change.’