After Huiwu's bones were stripped away, the corpse was thrown into the Bottomless Pit like garbage, drifting away with the gale to an unknown place.
The thousand-year lifespan had very likely disappeared because of the bone's aberration.
The monks carried the bones back to Vajra Temple, while the other monks dispersed.
Ren Qing separated a strand of ghost shadow and attached it to one of the Vajra Temple monks, then continued investigating the situation in Heaven Above Heaven.
He discovered that not only were the monks in the city all male, but there were not even any cultivated fields.
Ren Qing also did not see any stalls or shops selling food. In the entire Heaven Above Heaven, aside from the strange acts of skinning and bone extraction, the monks within seemed to have no desires at all.
Let alone greed, anger, hatred, and ignorance, even appetite seemed nonexistent.
The land area of Heaven Above Heaven was extremely vast. At least several hundred thousand monks lived there, nearly ten times the size of Wuwei City.
The number of temples was also exaggerated, reaching several hundred, and the scale of Vajra Temple could already be considered a large temple.
Vajra Temple mainly cultivated the Maitreya White Bone Sutra, and even the young novice monks practiced it.
Ren Qing did not find any clues about the Buddha corpses. After the hundred-meter behemoths crawled onto the surface, they seemed to vanish like wind.
The sky gradually darkened, and the monks all returned to their homes.
They struck wooden fish and carried out evening meditation, making the entire city resound with deafening murmurs, causing the ground to tremble slightly.
Ren Qing noticed that the monks in Vajra Temple were grinding Huiwu's bones into powder.
However, because the bones were as tough as metal, the grinding efficiency was extremely low. They could only chip away at the bones little by little with stone tools.
The ghost shadow hid in the courtyard's shadows, watching Vajra Temple's movements at all times, while Ren Qing decisively drilled into the Bottomless Pit.
Although the surface of Heaven Above Heaven seemed calm, for some reason he felt no sense of safety, as if a man-eating beast lurked in the dark.
Ren Qing deliberately dug out a cave beneath the stone bridge spanning the Bottomless Pit. It was relatively secluded and perfect for hiding.
He decided to observe quietly and see what would happen in Heaven Above Heaven.
To ensure he would not undergo Spirit Division, Ren Qing also did not perform aberration fusion, instead choosing to meditate to stabilize his cultivation while observing Vajra Temple.
Time passed like a white colt through a crack.
By the time the morning sun rose on the horizon, not the slightest abnormality had occurred in Heaven Above Heaven.
The several hundred thousand monks of the entire city meditated until the latter half of the night, then simply washed and slept. Their disciplined lives hardly resembled those of living people.
Ren Qing frowned slightly.
It seemed obtaining the secret behind Cishi's thousand-year lifespan would truly not be easy.
Perhaps he could only wait until another Buddha corpse appeared...
Just as this thought arose in Ren Qing's mind, he suddenly sensed something. His expression became extremely shocked, and he immediately attached his consciousness to the ghost shadow.
His perspective switched to inside Vajra Temple.
The temple's scale was not small. More than a thousand monks lived inside, and at the center stood a statue of the Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva.
Even in the middle of the night, several monks still went to wipe the statue.
Ren Qing's gaze fixed on a novice monk about thirteen or fourteen years old who was attentively handing a cloth to an elderly monk.
At the moment the morning sun broke from the horizon, sunlight covered the earth.
The originally noisy Heaven Above Heaven suddenly turned silent. Every sound vanished, and the several hundred thousand monks froze in place.
Time seemed to stop.
Ren Qing frowned and used the ghost shadow to coil around the novice monk's body.
The sun fully appeared.
The novice monk underwent drastic change. The sound of bones colliding echoed inside his body. From an original height of about 1.2 or 1.3 meters, he grew until reaching 1.7 meters before stopping.
Right before Ren Qing's eyes, the novice monk changed from a teenager into a man in his twenties or thirties.
Even his internal organs seemed to have consumed more than ten years of time, and his soul likewise became that of a middle-aged person.
It was not just the novice monk. The elderly monk aged visibly at a speed discernible to the naked eye, yet his intelligence seemed preserved.
The elderly monk's expression was incomparably excited, as if he had seen some kind of existence.
Yet at the same time he felt incomparable terror toward his imminent death. He muttered the name of the Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva before finally turning into dry bones.
Immediately afterward, crying came from the dry bones. At some unknown moment an infant had appeared within them, and within several breaths it grew into a child of seven or eight years.
Ren Qing finally understood why the monks of Heaven Above Heaven were at most three years old.
One year was childhood, two years meant growing into adulthood, and three years meant an old man on the verge of death.
One day equaled one year, three years a withering and flourishing.
They seemed trapped in some endless cycle, experiencing the suffering of reincarnation every three days, unable to escape for eternity.
Only some monks like Huiwu were forcibly stuffed into clay jars to undergo seated nirvana, yet it seemed that by doing so they escaped the endless cycle.
This was most likely the method of the Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva. After all, the Maitreya White Bone Sutra and Maitreya Skin-Sutra were both techniques created by him.
Heaven Above Heaven returned to its lively state. Those monks did not notice the changes at all and continued acting according to fixed routines.
From time to time several lucky ones would inexplicably transcend, forcibly skinned and have their bones extracted, their corpses thrown into the Bottomless Pit.
The human skins and bones were guarded by the various temples. Ren Qing used ghost shadow to steal a small portion for examination.
Formed from the completion of the Maitreya White Bone Sutra. After consumption it can extend lifespan by one hundred years, but will cause the body to gradually transform into an Indestructible Golden Body.
Formed from the completion of the Maitreya Skin-Sutra. After consumption it can extend lifespan by one hundred years, but will cause the body to gradually transform into an Indestructible Golden Body.
Ren Qing remained calm, yet an extremely bold idea arose in his mind. He hid in a cave near the exit of the Bottomless Pit and pondered secretly.
"If I can refine a puppet that is indistinguishable from a real person, could I steal lifespan through it?"
Ren Qing truly coveted the monks of Heaven Above Heaven, each possessing a thousand-year lifespan. Although they were destined to be harvested like leeks, perhaps there was something that could be exploited.
If he personally joined the infinite cycle of Heaven Above Heaven, the risk would be too great. But if he used a puppet instead, it seemed feasible.
Even if he could not directly seize the puppet's lifespan, Ren Qing could still use transactions in the dream market to secretly extend life bit by bit.
As for why he did not simply pull the monks of the town into the dream market and instead take such a roundabout approach..
Ren Qing mainly considered that on one hand he had not yet understood the true background of Heaven Above Heaven, and on the other hand these monks had already been eroded by Buddhist qi, appearing completely devoid of desire.
Making them trade in the dream market was somewhat unrealistic.
However, to refine a puppet indistinguishable from a real human, he would have to imitate Blood Moon's methods.
Ren Qing still decided to risk trying. After all, once the puppet was refined, his main body could completely hide in a Bottomless Pit hundreds of li away.
Of course, although he possessed the method recorded in the Facing-the-Moon Method for refining Rabbit-Toads, reaching Blood Moon's level in a short time was unrealistic.
Ren Qing patiently hid in the cave, while his split soul comprehended Moon Patterns through the Forbidden World.
His main body continued completing aberration fusion. If Eternal Space Prison could form an embryonic divine ability, it would definitely greatly increase his strength.
At the same time he released part of the Facing-the-Moon Method's content into the dream market.
Although Rabbit-Toads were not as powerful as Restraint Officer techniques of the same realm, they were like precise machines, with completely different focuses.
The difficulty of refining Rabbit-Toads could be imagined.
Ren Qing held the mentality of treating a dead horse as if it were alive, hoping that within the Restraint Officers' Hall there might be cultivators capable of overcoming the difficult points of the Facing-the-Moon Method.
Especially the Broken Moon Meteor.
Ren Qing had attempted it in his spare time, but refining a complete artifact soul from remnant souls seemed impossible no matter how one looked at it.
If he had not seen Rabbit-Toads beforehand, he would only think the Facing-the-Moon Method was fabricated nonsense.
When the announcement about artifact refining tasks was posted in the Great Dream Market, several hundred people gathered around and accepted the task without hesitation.
They believed their artifact refining skills were decent, and since the Facing-the-Moon Method was related to Blood Moon, they naturally became interested in its contents.
However, when the cultivators successively received the pages of the Facing-the-Moon Method, their expressions all turned blank.
What the hell?
Beating regenerative metal into threads, melting one hundred threads together, ultimately transforming them into flesh fibers.
Just a single Rabbit-Toad arm required hundreds of thousands of flesh fibers, and any mistake would cause all previous effort to be wasted.
What they understood even less was the Broken Moon Meteor. The method of refining an artifact soul—how was it any different from recreating a living being?
Was this really an artifact refining method that Ghost Envoy realm and Yin Difference realm could come into contact with?
Xiao San'er stood beside the notice board with a hoe on his shoulder. After accepting the Facing-the-Moon Method task, a large amount of information poured directly into his soul.
He pondered carefully for a moment, then shook his head helplessly.
The method in the Facing-the-Moon Method for refining Broken Moon Meteor indeed had some feasibility, but the material required to contain remnant souls was far too difficult to find.
Xiao San'er felt that focusing wholeheartedly on the Facing-the-Moon Method would be worse than cultivating a few more acres of farmland.
Now the hundred-li surrounding Wine Lake had already become farmland. Large numbers of cultivators moved among the fields, using techniques to stimulate crop growth.
Jiang Feng specialized in recording the growth of various crops.
Every patch of farmland had scarecrows placed within it. He attached eyeballs to them to observe how crops adapted to the environment of Eternal Space Prison.
After several years of selection, thousands of crop varieties had been reduced to seventy-five.
They planned to reduce them to fewer than ten varieties before carrying out large-scale crop production, striving to accumulate ten years' worth of grain within one year.
Compared with the nearly completed farming efforts, progress with livestock was slower, because livestock likewise required grain for feeding.
Xiao San'er turned to head toward the lakeshore when suddenly a familiar man appeared before him.
"Senior Li..."
Li Yaoyang had clearly come specifically for Xiao San'er and immediately asked his question.
"Zuosan, what kind of material does Broken Moon Meteor require?"
"Hmm..."
Xiao San'er rubbed his chin and hesitated before answering.
"It needs a certain amount of vitality, preferably something that originally contained a soul..."
"Take a look at this then."
Li Yaoyang took out a half-transparent amber-like insect egg from his robes. Inside was a wriggling maggot, faintly emitting vitality.
He had spent enormous effort trying to revive the dead egg of the Heavenly Dao Insect. The larva indeed revived, but without a soul it could not break out of the egg.
Xiao San'er examined the Heavenly Dao Insect egg with Heavy Child and said enthusiastically:
"It's feasible. I'll take it home and study it slowly."
"It's very precious..."
"I know."
Xiao San'er threw down the hoe and vanished without a trace.
Ren Qing fully experienced the benefits of possessing a small world. In just a few days, cultivators had already begun making discoveries regarding the Facing-the-Moon Method.
He had just planned to review them when he heard the sound of climbing coming once again from the Bottomless Pit.