Lock and Precepts

The people at the foot of the mountain reacted in different ways after seeing the sect bell and learning what it was for.

Two more days passed.

At last, inside the sect’s Artifact Refining Hall, Lin Yun and the others heard movement coming from the little black room that had been tightly shut for many days.

“It worked!”

Three hours after Lin Yun heard the one hundred and fifty-sixth muffled boom from inside the little room—each explosion seeming to have been deliberately suppressed—Lin Xiao finally shouted in triumph.

Lin Yun quietly let out a sigh of relief.

Heaven knew how anxious he had been over the past half month, listening every day to the noises Lin Xiao made. He had constantly feared that his little brother might accidentally blow up the Artifact Refining Hall.

Who knew what he had been researching that had taken so much time?

In the past, Lin Xiao had been quick to learn and accomplish anything he set his mind to. This was the first time Lin Yun had ever seen his younger brother shut himself away for so long over something unrelated to breaking through to a new cultivation realm.

Just as he was thinking this, the door that had remained closed for days opened from within. Lin Xiao stepped out lightly, his face practically shouting, “I’m happy, I’m proud, come praise me!”

The moment he emerged, Lin Yun and Lin Lei, who had been completing their monthly production assignments in the Artifact Refining Hall after their daily cultivation sessions while waiting for news from him, immediately crowded around.

“You finally came out!”

“What, what, what? What succeeded?”

Lin Xiao wore a mysterious smile as he reached into his sleeve and slowly pulled something out.

The others watched as he produced a small white jade ring.

Lin Lei asked in confusion, “What is this thing?”

With pride written all over his face, Lin Xiao explained, “This is an extremely practical item I’ve developed recently. I’ve named it the Lock Ring.”

He then began giving everyone a detailed explanation and demonstration of the Lock Ring’s functions.

The Lock Ring had several functions.

The first was its storage capacity.

The model Lin Xiao had designed could hold roughly one hundred cubic meters. That was not particularly large, but it could contain far more than an ordinary storage pouch.

Its second function was the ability to communicate with other Lock Rings in real time, no matter where they were.

For this, Lin Xiao had borrowed the concept of base stations from his previous life.

Clearly, however, it was unrealistic to construct things like base stations all over the world in this place.

Yet long-distance communication inevitably required some kind of medium. Otherwise, relying solely on a person’s spiritual power to support communication over great distances would require an absurdly high cultivation threshold.

Furthermore, since communication took place between one Lock Ring and another, it had to be directed toward a specific target.

That made a medium indispensable.

But building a large number of signal-transmitting base stations outside was obviously out of the question. So what could he do?

That was when Lin Xiao thought of the teleportation function of the Cosmic Shift Disk.

However, considering how important the Cosmic Shift Disk currently was to the sect, he had not dismantled the teleportation array disk to study it directly.

Before entering seclusion, he had gone to the sect’s Scripture Repository and searched out every book related to teleportation arrays. He had also carefully studied all the relevant books produced by the system, reading each of them many times.

He had gathered a great deal of knowledge in his mind, but at the time, he still had not reached a final conclusion before beginning his closed-door attempt to break through to the Nascent Soul realm.

It was only after successfully reaching the Nascent Soul realm that he gained a new understanding of the laws governing all things in heaven and earth.

Spatial teleportation arrays were originally among the most complicated and difficult types of formations. But in Lin Xiao’s eyes, their difficulty had now been greatly reduced.

After carefully contemplating the formation patterns that had once seemed obscure, the ideas in his mind gradually became clearer.

Through unremitting effort and repeated experimentation, he finally developed a super-miniature sound-transmission formation pattern and engraved it onto the Lock Ring.

Although this formation was miniature and its structure extremely complicated, once successfully carved, it was remarkably stable.

Most importantly, it could not only transmit sound across space, but also select and pinpoint a specific target.

The formation patterns of the sound-transmission array could be adjusted in minute ways at any time!

The sound-transmission array on the Lock Ring was mainly divided into a primary formation pattern and secondary formation patterns.

The primary pattern was fixed and unchanging. It served as the foundation that stabilized the Lock Ring’s core communication function.

The secondary patterns, meanwhile, were used to adjust the frequency.

In other words, if someone wanted to establish a real-time conversation with another Lock Ring, they only needed to use their spiritual power to make slight adjustments to the secondary patterns on their own ring, changing them until they matched the fixed core patterns of the other Lock Ring’s primary formation.

The other Lock Ring would then receive the request for communication.

As long as its owner agreed, the two parties could communicate in real time while expending only a small amount of spiritual power.

Of course, the precise amount of spiritual power required still depended on the distance between them.

After all, even a miniature teleportation formation was still a teleportation formation.

Nevertheless, this method of communication was far more convenient, and its range was vastly greater than that of ordinary communication talismans.

As for the so-called frequency adjustment, it sounded complicated, but was actually very simple to operate.

That was because the secondary formation patterns of each Lock Ring differed only slightly. The user merely needed to use spiritual power to shift a few individual patterns.

A cultivator’s memory only improved as their cultivation grew, so remembering a few changes to the formation patterns was no problem at all.

In addition, the Lock Ring was bound using a divine sense imprint.

Unless the Lock Ring’s owner’s divine sense collapsed and dispersed, the ring would never detach from its master.

After listening to Lin Xiao’s explanation and watching him demonstrate each function, Lin Yun and the others were all stunned.

They had been cultivating for three years by now and were clearly no longer the ignorant village boys they had once been.

They had all dabbled in the Four Cultivation Arts as well.

Therefore, they naturally understood how difficult it was to design a tiny Lock Ring from scratch and then produce a finished item.

Even developing that miniature sound-transmission formation was already an extraordinary feat. But merely carving formation patterns so fine that they were almost invisible to the naked eye—and making them function stably without collapsing—was itself an incomparably difficult task!

Who would have thought that Lin Xiao could develop something so impressive with only a little time before and after his retreat?

For a moment, everyone looked at Lin Xiao with undisguised admiration.

“That’s incredible, Brother Xiao!”

“Exactly! With these Lock Rings, whenever one of us goes to the cultivation world in the future, we’ll still be able to communicate with the sect from there!”

Perhaps because the distance was too great, Lin Xiao’s communication talismans could not be used between the cultivation world and the mortal world.

As a result, whenever someone from the Finance Hall went to the cultivation world to conduct transactions or make purchases, there was no way to contact the sect promptly if an unexpected situation arose. They could only wait until they returned before reporting it.

Furthermore, because the travel expenses were not cheap, even when a problem caused a delay, anything that was not truly serious had to wait until the next trip to the cultivation world before it could be dealt with.

Fortunately, no major crisis requiring immediate resolution had occurred during these three years. Still, the many minor inconveniences had certainly caused everyone a great deal of trouble.

The people from the Finance Hall had often brought this up at the dinner table.