CHAPTER 351: REVISED: CHAPTER 126 [NOT GOING BACK TONIGHT...] (7600 WORDS)

Chapter 126[Not Going Home Tonight...] (7600 words)

Holding this black stone in his hand, Chen Yan had already been playing with it for a long time. At this moment, he sat cross-legged in his room at the hot spring resort hotel.

Gently turning the stone in his hand, facing it towards the light, he could vaguely see traces of runes within the black stone—this was quite similar to the stone he found in Port City last time.

However, this time the black stone was more than twice the size of the one from Port City.

The runes on it were also more than one. Chen Yan looked carefully; there were two runes, one was considered complete, the other was only partially there.

Following his previous experience, Chen Yan took out talisman paper, cinnabar, and a fox tail brush, first writing the complete rune on the talisman paper. Based on his prior method, he performed a ritual to activate the talisman.

Last time, doing this had opened up the Mirror World.

But this time, after the talisman paper inscribed with the rune burned to ashes, there was no reaction at all.

Chen Yan pondered for a moment... So, both runes have to be complete to be effective?

But the other rune is incomplete.

Chen Yan stared at the incomplete rune for a long time, and as before, based on his learned Talisman Art, he wrote down several runes with similar shape and contours, comparing them to the incomplete rune, then attempted to complete it.

This time, however, despite trying over twenty different runes, none had any effect.

"Alright then..." Chen Yan wasn’t disappointed, he just gave a bitter smile.

Actually, the success last time was rather lucky; completing the rune was purely by chance. Chen Yan didn’t expect himself to be lucky enough to do it twice in a row.

With no results from his rune research, Chen Yan took out the stone from last time, and then...

Click.

He placed the two stones together, tried several angles, and to his surprise, they actually fit together!

The connection was seamless!

So... these two stones were originally one piece, seemingly shattered by some force and scattered in this world?

However, even with the two stones connected, they were still incomplete, the surrounding contours remained irregular.

(In other words, there are more fragments out there.)

Chen Yan had a guess in his heart.

The stone from Port City was no longer black—the Primordial Qi it contained had been completely absorbed, turning it into a white, semi-transparent piece.

As for this newly acquired stone, Chen Yan did not plan to feed its Primordial Qi to the ring anymore.

That ring, even after absorbing a large amount of Primordial Qi in the secret realm, still showed no response.

It really is a bottomless pit... Chen Yan was a little helpless.

He subconsciously remembered the words Brother Xiaohai once said from the wax candle: Such a mystical item, you must...

Damn it!

The black stone from Port City created a Mirror World, but the black stone obtained from this secret realm had yet to yield any results.

Chen Yan put the stone away.

With a flick of his sleeve, a golden light shot out, landing on the ground, transforming into a half-man-high rectangular wooden box.

This item given to him by Ouyang was from the lineage of Puppet Masters in Japan’s cultivation realm.

The box itself was a magical artifact. By putting sufficient paper inside—folded into various shapes—and nurturing them with Primordial Qi daily, they could be used as means of combat for the box’s owner.

Chen Yan’s previous assumption was a bit off; he thought the folded paper inside the box could only form cranes or Japanese warrior figures.

But upon obtaining and studying the box, he realized that wasn’t the case at all!

To be precise, the box was merely a container for nurturing folded paper. As for what shapes the folded paper could take, it was entirely up to the owner.

Theoretically speaking, as long as one’s folding skills were good enough, one could fold anything from a Gundam to Ultraman... no problem.

Just that the attack patterns were a bit simple—no matter what shape they were folded into, they’d fly out and attack.

Essentially, it could be considered a physical attack, just driven by magic.

When Ouyang gave the box to Chen Yan, there wasn’t much folded paper left inside—it had mostly been used up during the secret realm battle.

Chen Yan carefully inspected the folded paper inside and even had Chu Keqing take a look. Chu Keqing recognized it as the type of paper commonly used by Japanese Puppet Masters to craft paper figures.

This paper was known as Purple Bamboo Paper, considered a top-grade, precious paper—though the paper itself was not particularly special. It was the manufacturing process that was somewhat troublesome.

It required a specific type of incense for fragrance, and needed to be soaked in a certain secret oil used by the Puppet Master sect, then dried...

Only then could one obtain a qualified piece of paper for Puppet Masters.

The cost... well, a piece the size of a bill would cost about eight yuan. (Mostly because the secret oil and incense were expensive, and the drying process also took time.)

After having Chu Keqing find out all this, Chen Yan was speechless.

Eight yuan per piece! And it was only palm-sized!

If he were to fight someone, throwing handfuls of paper...

Was this fighting with paper? This was smashing people with money!!

That scene of opening the box and a vast army of paper cranes swarming the sky, sure, it looked cool...

Well, a thousand paper cranes, at eight yuan each!

Showing off like that would cost eight thousand!

Folding a paper puppet warrior, wielding a paper sword to slash people, looked pretty cool too.

A paper puppet would use about three hundred sheets!

Showing off like that would cost two thousand four hundred!

Theoretically, as long as one had enough Primordial Qi, the box could nurture even larger paper puppets.