Chapter 486 - 458: Night at Spirit Platform Palace

Chapter 486: Chapter 458: Night at Spirit Platform Palace

The night was deep in the guest quarters of Spirit Platform Palace. The main Kunpeng Island auction was still half a month away.

The Spirit Gathering Array in the room was running at full capacity. The pure Spiritual Qi condensed into a visible, thin mist that coiled around the room. Li Yuan sat cross-legged on the stone bed. He wasn’t trying to force a breakthrough, but simply absorbing the high-purity Spiritual Qi, which was far richer than that of the outside world.

A full night of cultivation greatly nourished his meridians, and the Spiritual Power within him grew ever more condensed.

At dawn, Li Yuan opened his eyes and walked to the guest room’s one-way jade observation window.

Through the jade window, he could overlook half of the guest quarters below. Li Yuan’s eyes narrowed as he simultaneously activated [Dark Evil Insight] and [Array Core Sense].

In his sight, the air at the perimeter of the guest quarters shimmered. Three overlapping barriers of light, each a different color and made of Spiritual Power, formed an incredibly tight defensive network.

This was the Kunpeng Alliance’s standard method of protecting guests.

Leveraging the keen perception from his traits, Li Yuan quickly unraveled the underlying logic of the three arrays.

The outermost array was primarily for detecting Spiritual Power fluctuations, but its threshold was set high, triggering an alarm only for major disturbances on the scale of a fight.

As for the innermost array, its control hub extended right into every guest room.

Li Yuan returned to the table and reached out, making a small adjustment on an Array Disc inlaid with a Spirit Stone.

Outside the window, the section of the innermost Sensing Array covering his room instantly weakened, becoming almost nonexistent. Guests could fine-tune or even switch off this layer of the array’s sensing from within their rooms. The Kunpeng Alliance really had spared no expense when it came to protecting privacy.

Just as he turned, his perception within a three-foot radius was instantly triggered, and a flash of white light lit up the tabletop.

The source of the light was a celadon Spirit Tea set placed on the table for welcoming guests.

Li Yuan picked up a teacup, left his room, and went to the lobby downstairs.

"This tea set is exquisitely crafted. Might I be able to purchase it?" Li Yuan placed the tea set on the counter, looking at the attendant.

The attendant glanced at it and said with a smile, "Senior, you must be joking. This is just an ordinary welcome tea set from the guest rooms. If Senior likes it, please just take it. It’s not worth more than a few Spirit Stones."

"Thank you." Li Yuan nodded and equipped the tea set.

[Trait Preview: Tea Guide (White)]

[Effect: When drinking Spirit Tea or other spiritual beverages, the absorption speed of medicinal effects is slightly increased.]

[Permanence Condition: Conditions met.]

’A white trait.’

[Tea Guide (White) has become a permanent trait.]

A phantom image of the tea set flashed in his equipment slot, then transformed into a white speck of light that merged into his body.

After leaving Spirit Platform Palace, Li Yuan found an inconspicuous corner on the street and formed a hand seal.

A sliver of his lifespan was drawn out, and the Remnant Heavenly Divination was instantly replenished.

Several consecutive divinations all pointed to trivial, unimportant matters. Li Yuan was just mechanically grinding his proficiency.

[Remnant Heavenly Divination (Green) Permanence Progress: 12/30]

After finishing this, Li Yuan began to wander through the market streets of the trade fair.

Passing by several stalls and shops, Li Yuan learned from the idle chatter of shopkeepers and passing Cultivators that not everyone had arrived on the island yet. The truly big clients and some of the invited High-Tier Cultivators were still on their way.

After he finished looking around, Li Yuan decided to head to another of the affiliated islands to have a look.

There were six affiliated floating islands in the outer area of Kunpeng. The one Spirit Platform Palace was on was the largest and had the most concentrated resources. But the other floating islands each had their own specialties, dealing in niche or black-market goods.

Half an hour later, Li Yuan took a short-range Teleportation Array between the islands and arrived at Liupin Market.

Liupin Market, one of the six affiliated floating islands in the outer area of Kunpeng.

The streets here were noticeably narrower than on the main island, and the buildings seemed haphazard and disorganized, but the flow of people was just as dense. The cries of vendors and the sounds of arguments intertwined, and the air was filled with a mixture of medicinal herbs and the briny smell of the sea.

Li Yuan walked slowly along the street.

Li Yuan stopped in front of a stall specializing in second-hand, broken Magical Artifacts.

The stall was covered with a pile of rusty, broken swords and blades. Among them was a black dagger, broken in half, with several extremely faint Array Patterns carved on it.

Li Yuan could clearly sense a minuscule trace of Demonic Qi lingering deep within the dagger’s engravings.

This wasn’t a coincidence. As Li Yuan continued walking, he discovered similar "Magical Artifacts with black engravings" at two more consecutive stalls.

Li Yuan observed the reactions of the surrounding Cultivators. Some people picked up the Magical Artifacts that had faint Demonic Qi, playing with them and even haggling over the price. No one seemed to care about the residual Demonic Qi on them at all.

In this outer-sea market for Loose Cultivators, as long as an item was usable, it could be traded freely—whether it bore the traces of an orthodox Cultivation Technique or was a defective product refined by a Demon Cultivator. No one would bother to investigate its origins.

Li Yuan didn’t buy any of the broken Magical Artifacts. Just as he was about to turn and leave, he saw several Cultivators in familiar robes walking toward him.

’Primordial Yang Sect disciples.’

The leader was a middle-aged man at the Late-stage of Foundation Establishment. He was leading a few of his junior brothers and was on a shopping spree in front of a shop specializing in High-Tier Spiritual Materials.

"Profound Void Stones, Void Crystals—we’ll take as many as you have. The price is negotiable." The middle-aged man’s tone was urgent as he slapped a large handful of Mid-grade Spirit Stones onto the counter.

Li Yuan walked up, pretending to casually browse the materials nearby, and asked offhandedly, "Fellow Daoists, are you buying so many spatial materials to set up some large-scale Teleportation Array in your Sect?"

The middle-aged man shot Li Yuan a wary glance. Seeing that he radiated the aura of a Late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator and had an unfamiliar face, he replied perfunctorily, "Sect affairs are not for outsiders to know."

Li Yuan wasn’t annoyed. He casually picked up a piece of ore and said, "I am an Array Master and have some small knowledge of Spatial Arrays. The materials I just heard you list sound more like they’re for patching up a spatial rift."

The middle-aged man froze, his expression changing slightly.

He sized up Li Yuan for a moment. Perhaps deciding there was no point in hiding it here in the outer seas, he sighed and said in a low voice, "Since you’ve already figured it out, Fellow Daoist, I won’t hide it from you. A while ago, those lunatics from the Evil Slaying Sect suddenly attacked the Spirit Ruins Secret Realm."

"The Spirit Ruins Secret Realm?" Li Yuan raised an eyebrow.

’Li Yuan clearly remembered this was a Secret Realm left behind by the Profound Nether Sect, now controlled by the Primordial Yang Sect.’

"It is an important resource site controlled by our Sect," the middle-aged man said through gritted teeth.

"I don’t know what got into those Demon Cultivators, but they used some method to forcefully bombard the Secret Realm’s spatial nodes. Now the space inside the Secret Realm is extremely unstable and in danger of collapsing at any moment. The Sect Master has ordered us to gather spatial materials at all costs to try and patch the rifts and stabilize the Secret Realm."

Li Yuan understood.

’No wonder the Primordial Yang Sect came all the way to the outer seas to buy in bulk. The spatial materials in Liangzhou have probably been completely cleaned out.’

Li Yuan left the shop and continued to wander through Liupin Market.

In front of a remote stall that specialized in various Array Discs and carving knives, his trait perception triggered.

’Green light.’

Li Yuan crouched down, his gaze falling on a seemingly ordinary, ancient Array Disc in the corner of the stall.

’Setting up an array on an old site would not only be twice as fast, but it would also make perfect use of existing resources and be far more concealed.’

"How much for this Array Disc?" Li Yuan asked, picking it up.

The stall owner was an old man in the Late-stage of Qi Refining. Seeing a customer, he hurriedly said with a smile, "Senior has a good eye! This is a fine item left over from ancient times. Only three hundred Spirit Stones."

Li Yuan couldn’t be bothered to haggle. He directly tossed out three hundred Spirit Stones and took the Array Disc.

[Equippable Item Detected: Old-style Interlocking Array Disc (Complete)]

[Trait Preview: Residual Pattern Nesting (Green)]

[Effect: When setting up a new array, you can automatically call upon/nest the residual old array patterns at the site to act as sub-nodes. This saves Array Materials and expands the array’s capacity. The effect is positively correlated with your Array Dao Cultivation.]

[Permanence Condition: Set up one interlocking array.]

"Equip."

[Equipped: Old-style Interlocking Array Disc (Complete)]

[Residual Pattern Nesting (Green) is now in effect.]

A green light shone in his equipment slot, and Li Yuan felt his knowledge regarding the connection of array nodes instantly expand by a whole new dimension.

The once-isolated Array Patterns now seemed like modular blocks in his eyes, ones that he could splice together at will. As long as a residual trace remained, he could smoothly integrate it into a new system.