Chang Sheng was one hundred percent certain.
Really!
In just the blink of an eye!
The specter, which had been over ten meters away just a moment ago, suddenly appeared right in front of him.
No, that wasn't right—it wasn't in front of his own eyes, but right in front of his puppets.
Immediately after, several puppets were grabbed by the specter and instantly crushed to pieces.
At the same moment, Chang Sheng lost the vision from those puppets.
However, there were still two teams behind them. The second team had five puppets, and the third team further back had four.
Fortunately, these two teams hadn't yet...
Hm?
Just as Chang Sheng was feeling glad about his earlier decision, the specter's figure actually appeared within the field of vision of the second team's five puppets!
Before he could even control the puppets to flee, he had already lost his connection to them.
Next was the third team.
From the moment the first team encountered the specter to the total annihilation of all three teams, less than ten seconds had passed!
Now, apart from the ten puppets he kept by his side for protection, only the twenty puppets at the foot of the mountain remained.
And the half-finished one he was currently crafting in his hands.
“How could this be...”
They shouldn't have been separated by only a hundred meters.
To a specter, a distance of a hundred meters was practically non-existent.
“They need to be spaced much further apart.”
Chang Sheng clenched his fists, forcing himself to calm down.
“It's fine. I still have puppets. I still have plenty of opportunities for trial and error. I can still survive!”
At this moment, he was sitting in the pitch-black guest room without even turning on the lights.
Naturally, the room he was currently staying in was a guest room that hadn't been cleaned before.
The previous room had left a lingering feeling of disgust in his heart.
Even though the corpse had vanished and the room looked perfectly clean, he had no desire to stay there.
Chang Sheng did not rush to control the twenty puppets at the foot of the mountain. Instead, he quickly assembled the remaining few parts in his hands.
Only then did he pick up the other puppet parts beside him and piece them together bit by bit.
Once a complete puppet took shape in his hands, Chang Sheng skillfully cast the Puppet Vitalization Art.
A speck of light emerged at his fingertip, and he tapped it onto the puppet's forehead.
As the light sank into it, the puppet was successfully vitalized.
Just as Chang Sheng was about to put the puppet down as usual and let it go outside to meet up with the others, his hand suddenly froze.
“Hm?”
He brought the puppet back in front of his face and stared at it closely for a moment. He felt that the puppet in his hand seemed slightly different.
“This is...”
The puppet blinked its eyes and then tilted its head, looking at him.
Seeing this, Chang Sheng was visibly stunned.
Blinking?
Although he had carved eyes onto his puppets, he was well aware of his own capabilities. Even after being vitalized by the Puppet Vitalization Art, such a crudely made puppet should absolutely not be capable of blinking or tilting its head to observe him.
“Could this... could this be!”
An ecstatic expression spread across Chang Sheng's face, and he stood up involuntarily.
“I...”
“I broke through!”
“My Puppet Vitalization Art actually broke through!”
The Huasheng Sect's top secret technique, the Puppet Vitalization Art, was designed to vitalize puppets and turn them into true living beings.
And life began with spirituality!
The higher the spirituality, the higher the intelligence the puppet would obtain. Once it possessed wisdom, the probability of the puppet transforming into a living being would be much greater.
The crude puppets he had vitalized previously didn't even have expressions, and their movements were incredibly stiff and rigid. He had to split his focus to control them just to make them slightly agile.
But now, the puppet had expressions and even its own little movements!
Chang Sheng held the puppet in his arms and celebrated excitedly for a good while. Only when he remembered that he was still inside a specter dungeon did he gradually calm down.
“Right, now is not the time to celebrate.”
He placed the puppet on the ground and let it walk out.
Pulling back his smile, Chang Sheng sat back down on the chair.
“The most important thing right now is still to find the path of survival. So... why is the specter wandering along that path?”
Earlier, Liu Da had headed in that direction and encountered a specter attack.
Now, when he controlled his puppets to go there, they still ran into the specter.
Thirteen puppets, all destroyed within ten seconds.
“Is it... guarding something?”
Chang Sheng's eyes lit up slightly.
“It's the path of survival!”
A rather bold hypothesis formed in his mind.
“Yes, it must be so.”
“It has to be because of the path of survival.”
“The path of survival is over there, which is why the specter won't allow any players to get close!”
The more Chang Sheng thought about it, the more convinced he became of his theory.
Right now, he wished he could just rush down the mountain and run all the way to the end of the path.
But before long, he calmed himself down.
“No!”
“Now is not the time to head out.”
According to his deduction, the path of survival was indeed highly likely to be there, but it was still just his guess.
“I must have the puppets go check it out first.”
He controlled the twenty puppets at the foot of the mountain, dividing them into four teams with five puppets each.
He had learned his lesson this time, spacing each team five hundred meters apart.
He absolutely could not let the specter wipe them all out in one go again.
The puppets advanced along the path in batches. This time, he was even more cautious, taking several hours just to approach the spot where they had previously encountered the specter.
He controlled one puppet to climb up a tree, and as expected, he spotted the dark figure wandering ahead.
“I can't keep going straight ahead.”
Making a prompt decision, Chang Sheng steered the puppets away from the path, intending to detour around it from another direction.
Although... doing so was indeed safer, it was also much more time-consuming.
Navigating steep mountain paths in the dark was already difficult enough.
On top of that, he had to ensure the specter wouldn't detect the puppets while making sure they didn't stray too far from the path, to avoid wasting even more time.
Consequently, it wasn't until the following morning that his puppets barely managed to reach the end of the path.
Even so, he had still paid the price of three teams—fifteen puppets in total.
It couldn't be helped; he had still underestimated the specter's perception range.
He could only use three teams of puppets to draw the specter's attention, which allowed the final team of puppets to successfully reach this point.
Yet, what he saw through the puppet's eyes was...
“White mist?”
Chang Sheng's burning hope felt as though a bucket of ice water had been dumped over it.
“It's not the path of survival?”
Five mini puppets stood at the edge of the white mist, pacing back and forth in a somewhat dazed manner, searching for something.
“There's nothing...”
“There's absolutely nothing?!”
Chang Sheng was now thoroughly exhausted.
Having gone without sleep for over two days, he looked extremely haggard.
“Could I have guessed wrong? Is the path of survival not here at all?”
Just as despair was setting in, he suddenly thought of something.
“No, wait!”
He had just remembered the main quest.
“The main quest requires players to survive for three days before opening the path of survival.”
“Perhaps because I haven't completed the first quest yet, the path of survival isn't visible?”
At the thought of this possibility, Chang Sheng couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.
“It must be so.”
“If the path of survival weren't here, why would the specter block the way? It has to be because there's a secret hidden here!”
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