The Inferred Truth

However, fast as he was, someone else was even faster.

At the exact moment he turned around.

A palm, just like that, simply slapped down from above his head.

Smack!

A crisp sound echoed, like a watermelon being smashed open.

The lightning talisman that had just formed in Buddha Face's hand shattered upon impact, turning into a sky full of glowing specks.

And half of his head, just like a fully ripe watermelon, cracked inch by inch starting from his cheek.

With Lin Mo's current spiritual power and physical strength, smashing the head of a Foundation Establishment cultivator was hardly more difficult than crushing a block of tofu.

Boom!

Buddha Face's entire body was forcefully slammed into the floor by the tremendous power of this slap.

Half of his body was left dangling through the ceiling of the second floor.

And this was with Lin Mo holding back.

Was it resolved with just one slap?

No, of course it wasn't that simple.

In that human-shaped crater, Buddha Face, with half of his head smashed and a mess of brains and blood smeared across the ground, actually used his hands to prop himself up and staggered to his feet.

His sole remaining eye flickered with toxic resentment and fanaticism.

"Heh, hehe, possessing the Nine Heavens Divine Pill, I am immortal, I will never die!"

He let out a laugh that sounded like a broken bellows, exceptionally chilling to hear.

"Is that so?"

Lin Mo glanced at him, his eyes holding no surprise, only a trace of amusement. "You call this piece of junk a divine pill?"

Before his voice faded, he raised his foot.

Then, he stomped down heavily.

SquELCH!

Lin Mo's foot pierced straight through Buddha Face's chest without any resistance, pinning him firmly against the floorboards.

Even for a Foundation Establishment cultivator, with their heart destroyed and skull shattered, there was absolutely no reason they could survive.

Yet the Buddha Face before him, who clearly only had Foundation Establishment cultivation, had a bloody hole stomped through his chest but still clung to a breath of life, not dying on the spot.

Lin Mo raised his hand and pulled; Zhang Gonglian, who had been pinned to the wall, fell to the ground. Before she could catch her breath, a gentle green light enveloped her, bringing a tingling warmth to her wounds—it was the Rejuvenating Touch.

"He isn't dead yet?"

Zhang Gonglian propped herself up on the ground, ignoring her own injuries, her gaze locked dead onto that pile of mangled flesh beneath Lin Mo's foot.

"He can't die."

Lin Mo's voice carried no discernible emotion. "His life is no longer his own. That Golden Core is keeping him alive, or rather, enslaving him."

"Golden Core?!" Zhang Gonglian was somewhat confused.

Lin Mo didn't say anything more. He lightly flicked the tip of his foot.

Buddha Face's body was effortlessly kicked away like a torn gunny sack, tracing an arc through the air before smashing heavily against a distant wall and rolling onto the ground.

A bizarre scene unfolded.

That broken body actually swayed and stood up on its own!

The bloody hole in his chest healed frantically at a visible rate, and even the flesh and shattered bone of the half-blown-off head were rapidly restructuring.

However, after the restoration, his eyes no longer held any human vitality; all that remained were two clusters of burning golden flames, hollow and indifferent.

He didn't launch an attack. Instead, like a child who had just acquired a body, he raised his hands, turning them over and over curiously.

He then looked down to examine this newly repaired body that still bore the traces of battle.

"Tch."

A shrill and strange voice squeezed out of his throat, carrying unashamed disdain.

"Such a dilapidated vessel, whatever, I'll just have to make do with it for now."

This tone, this posture, made him seem like a completely different person from the previously maddened Buddha Face.

Zhang Gonglian watched with furrowed brows, the chill in his heart deeper than the pain of his wounds.

"What exactly is going on here?"

Lin Mo glanced at him and said in an exasperated tone, "You'll have to ask that good ancestor of yours. His artifact refinement skills weren't up to par back then, leaving nothing but a mess for his descendants."

"A disaster? The Nine Heavens Divine Pill? If the price is consuming one's lifespan, then it certainly counts as a disaster."

In his limited understanding, this was already the biggest problem he could think of.

"Heh."

Lin Mo let out a light chuckle. "Consuming lifespan? That's just a way of feeding it; it doesn't even count as the interest."

He paused, looking at Buddha Face in the distance who was familiarizing himself with the body, moving his joints like a puppet, and continued:

"The true cause is that your First Heavenly Master must have personally slain a mighty expert at the Golden Core stage."

As soon as these words were spoken, Zhang Gonglian jerked his head up, eyes filled with incomprehensible shock.

"He dug that expert's Golden Core out alive and refined it into a so-called divine pill."

Hearing this cause, Zhang Gonglian's eyes widened.

The Nine Heavens Divine Pill wasn't a pill? It was an artifact?!

This thought exploded in his mind, instantly connecting many points of doubt.

"It's just that the First Heavenly Master's refinement techniques were somewhat crude, failing to completely obliterate the sliver of will contained within the Nine Heavens Divine Pill."

The transition from Golden Core to Nascent Soul is inherently a process where a cultivator nurtures their true spirit, allowing their soul and Golden Core to gradually merge until they are indistinguishable from one another.

If one wants to refine a living Golden Core into a magical artifact, the most crucial and troublesome step is to thoroughly erase every last trace of the original owner's soul imprint within the core.

Obviously, the First Heavenly Master's skills were lacking in that regard.

"His idea wasn't bad. He wanted to leave his descendants a super power bank."

"An artifact capable of automatically purifying and compressing spiritual power, making it convenient for his descendants to absorb at any time. This way, even if his descendants were entirely mediocre, they could rely on the massive amount of pure spiritual power to forcefully build up a master, ensuring the Heavenly Master Mansion would not fall for a thousand years."

The plan was rich, but reality delivered a resounding slap to his descendants.

The First Heavenly Master miscalculated one point: the remnant soul hidden in the deepest part of the Golden Core was not completely dead.

Like a starving beast lying dormant in the darkness, relying on its most primal survival instincts, it silently devoured the purified spiritual power, gradually repairing its own wounds bit by bit.

But it was simply too broken; apart from surviving, it had no energy left to do anything else.

Thus, over the long years, it found a new food source—lifespan.

Using the mortal lifespan of generation after generation of Heavenly Masters to compensate for the Golden Core's innate defects, filling in the cracks of its own near-collapse.

This was the cruel truth as to why no Heavenly Master of the Heavenly Master Mansion had ever lived past a hundred years.

At this moment, the somewhat confused student Zhang Gonglian raised his hand.

"Teacher, teacher, then why were the lifespans of the first few generations of Heavenly Masters the same as ordinary people? Besides, the First Heavenly Master should still have been alive back then, right? Did he not notice the problem?"

As soon as the voice faded, a teasing gaze drifted over.

"Is there a possibility that it's simply because they were too weak?"

"Furthermore, abdicating doesn't equate to dying on the spot. They might have just retreated behind the scenes."

Although the words were blunt, the logic was sound.