Even in the most pessimistic scenario, if this experiment failed, there would be no substantive loss in itself.

Weisheng immediately opened the Chaos Tomb Palace.

To be precise, it was the energy projection of the Chaos Tomb Palace.

Then he sent in the body of Xing Jun, now fitted with Li Gui's head.

Weisheng did not need to search deliberately; every reincarnation of an ancient Chaos Emperor who entered the Chaos Tomb Palace would naturally sense the location of his own coffin.

Sure enough.

The Li Gui version of Xing Jun quickly locked onto a coffin.

Only once the coffin slowly closed did Weisheng let out a slight breath of relief.

Never mind what came afterward—at least for now, this first step had gone smoothly enough.

"Now all you have to do is wait."

Jiang Xiaoshang wore a casual look on the surface, but in truth his mind was hard at work.

According to his plan, swapping Li Gui's head onto the headless Xing Jun and sending him into the Chaos Tomb Palace—all of that amounted to nothing more than preliminary preparations.

The real crux was what came next: how to pull off the deception, how to make Xing Jun's past life accept him and instill in him the inheritance of the ancient Chaos Emperor.

And that was the true technical work.

By comparison, the head-swapping surgery just now amounted to no more than a little warm-up.

Only, when it came to the next steps, Weisheng simply could not get involved. Even as the tomb keeper of the Chaos Tomb Palace, he had no way to influence the specifics inside.

At bottom, he was essentially a gatekeeper.

He had the right to decide who went in and who did not, but what exactly was done once inside—those internal affairs were utterly beyond his interference.

The absurd part was that Jiang Xiaoshang, who by all rights had nothing to do with any of this, actually could.

Still, when Weisheng thought of Jiang Xiaoshang's identity, it was hardly surprising.

The man behind him was, after all, the genuine second-in-command of the Divine Domain, whose schemes and arrangements, overt and covert, even the Creator God could not see through.

Reaching a hand into the Chaos Tomb Palace was, for someone like that, mere routine.

Then again, Weisheng even seriously suspected that his obtaining the Ksitigarbha Blade and opening the Chaos Tomb Palace had all along been part of that man's grand design.

Otherwise, why would it be such a coincidence?

Of course, Weisheng would at most mull such things over in private and would never bring them up openly to ask.

Never mind whether Jiang Xiaoshang, as an avatar, actually knew anything about it.

The point was that some things, so long as the paper window remained unbroken, were one matter; once torn open face to face, they became quite another.

What followed was waiting.

When exactly Li Gui would be able to come out again, no one knew—not even Jiang Xiaoshang could be sure.

Fortunately, Weisheng had never lacked patience.

"Just sit tight and wait. It won't be long before I hand you back a top-tier fighter, I guarantee it."

Jiang Xiaoshang thumped his chest in pledge.

Weisheng nodded. "Then I'll wait and see."

Back in Tianjun.

Weisheng's next major task was to continue digesting the spoils from the earlier admission-ticket auction.

Do not forget—he still had a full-body dharma image quota left unredeemed.

According to what Li Jinwang had said, the God of Wealth Academy had indeed already allocated a full-body dharma image quota, and Weisheng could redeem it whenever he chose.

But a full-body dharma image was not the same as a one-zhang dharma image.

This was a qualitative transformation in the truest sense.

Once a full-body dharma image was achieved, it meant that from then on one had one foot in the realm of the Dharma God—a process with extremely far-reaching implications for all future cultivation.

Li Jinwang's advice was that Weisheng would do well to settle and consolidate himself further, and not rush.

At the same time, he gave Weisheng a set of secret manuals.

"A Dharma God Advancement Manual?"

Weisheng stared at the cover with a strange expression.

Though called a secret manual, it was in fact nothing secret at all—rather, it was a publicly circulated method openly sold in the marketplaces of the Divine Domain's open zone.

Only after studying it carefully did Weisheng suddenly understand.

"No wonder it's sold on every street corner."

As the title suggested, the core of it was about how to cultivate into a Dharma God, including how to climb another level after becoming one.

Normally, when it came to cultivation methods of such a high order, no matter where they were placed, they would inevitably be secrets of secrets.

But this was not the case.

Not only was it not the case, but if one actually went to a place like the Divine Domain's open zone, it was not that any five-year-old child could explain it clearly enough, but at the very least, the old men playing chess by the roadside could genuinely hold forth on it for a couple of sentences with great seriousness.

There was no other reason: this method was simply too simple.

Summed up, it came down to four words.

Fuse divine equipment.

After setting foot in the realm of the Dharma God, if one wanted to climb another level, one had to fuse divine equipment.

The more divine equipment one fused, and the higher the grade of that divine equipment, the more formidable one's strength became.

Its defining feature was simplicity and clarity.

As for the specific methods by which divine equipment was fused with oneself, each academy did things differently, though in essence they were much the same.

Thus the importance of divine equipment—especially high-grade divine equipment—went without saying.

This was hard currency in the truest sense.

The cultivation method itself did not matter; the key lay in how to obtain high-quality divine equipment—that was where the real threshold stood.

An ordinary expert, even if he studied this method until it was crystal clear, without high-grade divine equipment would in the end be like a clever housewife trying to cook without rice—it meant nothing at all.

Weisheng savored it carefully. "By fusing divine equipment, one obtains power at the conceptual level of divine equipment, and thereby gradually rises above the power of rules?"

The principle was not hard to grasp.

In fact, he had long since been walking this path—only what he had used before were killing artifacts, whose grade simply was not as high as divine equipment.

Of course, there were still essential differences.

According to the method Li Jinwang had given him, this fusion of divine equipment was a true merging with one's own fleshly body.

To some extent, it was a physical evolution carried out by means of divine equipment!

Fusing divine equipment required vessels, and every bone in the human body was an innate, superb vessel.

A normal adult possessed two hundred and six bones.

In other words, a person could in theory fuse at most two hundred and six pieces of divine equipment.

Weisheng's eyes lit up. "Then if I plant a few extra bones in my body, wouldn't that greatly raise my ceiling?"

This brilliant idea was snuffed out almost immediately.

After all, what the world never lacked was geniuses who pored over loopholes in every system.

The method of using acquired bone transplants to break through the theoretical ceiling—people were still attempting it to this very day, but without exception, every single attempt had ended in failure.

Never mind acquired transplants—even for those freaks born with a few extra bones, those surplus bones could not fuse divine equipment either.

To some extent, this was the ceiling the Heavenly Dao had fixed for human cultivators.

And what influenced one's final strength, apart from the grade and number of fused divine equipment, was the corresponding attribute of that divine equipment.