Song Miaozhu began naturally grouping spirit souls with similar effects and using them together. Drawing on the insights she had gained from the craftsmen's memories within those spirit souls, she designed new paper-craft creations and infused them with power.
Take the exorcism-type spirit souls, for instance. She tested them in all sorts of paper creations: rattle drums, green oxen, lanterns, longswords, peach talismans, folding screens.
But after repeated infusion, she started to sense something subtle during the exact moment the paper construct transformed into a spiritual artifact. A strange, elusive feeling that stirred deep in her awareness.
"The exorcism spirit doesn't seem to resonate with this one."
"This one either…"
No matter where the spirit soul originated—whether from a chair, a blade, or a shadow puppet—they all shared similar preferences. None of them liked being bound to a folding screen.
Though she had managed to create an exorcism folding screen, its power was nowhere near as strong as the rattle drum version.
The more she worked with exorcism-type spirit souls, the more she came to understand their nature. Eventually, she crafted what turned out to be the ideal match for them: golden paper bells.
When fused with exorcism spirit souls, these bells became immensely effective, far more so than any of her earlier attempts. They could repel yin energy and spirits with ease.
So she poured all her remaining exorcism spirit souls into making golden paper bells. With each creation, her understanding of exorcism power deepened.
By now, she had already mastered nearly eighty percent of the infusion techniques recorded in the Secret Art of Paper Crafting, and her own insights had begun to crystallize.
Infusion, at its core, was a method of gathering one's understanding of a particular type of spiritual energy and channeling it into paper creations. With enough comprehension, one could formalize that process into repeatable techniques, eventually passing them down to others.
In the previous cultivation era, most infusion techniques were born from enlightenment through exposure to elemental spiritual energies.
In this age, opportunities like that were few and far between. Song Miaozhu had never dreamed she would invent an infusion method of her own.
But as her understanding of exorcism spirit souls grew, a bold idea began to take shape.
"What if I could condense everything I've learned… and summon exorcism energy directly?"
After using up her last exorcism soul, she decided to try.
She made another golden paper bell.
Then, at her fingertip, she gathered spiritual energy—this time fusing into it all her personal understanding of exorcism power, drawn from every spirit soul she had absorbed.
Gradually, the energy at her fingertip began to shift. It became something new, something sharp and heavy, something that mirrored the feeling of a true spirit soul.
Her heart leapt.
She pressed her finger against the paper bell. That spark of energy flowed into it.
The bell flared with light. When the glow faded, it looked exactly like the ones crafted with real exorcism spirit souls.
She pulled out her spirit-identifying bronze mirror. No difference could be detected between the two bells.
"It actually worked!" Her voice trembled with joy. She barely had time to process the sensation before her spiritual platform began to stir.
The flow of energy within it shifted toward the higher edge of the Yellow Spirit Tier. The bottleneck she had been stuck at for so long had finally begun to loosen. Her cultivation, which had remained stagnant, surged forward once more.
Right on cue, the spiritual tides intensified. Streams of energy rushed toward her.
She quickly calmed her heart, focused her mind, and continued crafting golden paper bells—each one infused with her newly created exorcism infusion technique. She guided the energy into herself, drawing closer and closer to her breakthrough.