I fabricated myths to guide the revival of spiritual energy.

Along the East China Sea defense line, the early summer rain falls gently, creating a layer of misty white fog on the sea surface.

At an altitude of 15,000 meters in near-Earth orbit, hundreds of heavy engineering mechs, each thirty meters tall, hovered steadily above the clouds. The dark blue exhaust flames from their thrusters instantly vaporized the surrounding rain.

There was no perfunctory attitude whatsoever. Over the past century, Earth has treated the Void Monsters as its finest mineral deposits, accumulating a terrifying industrial foundation.

Chunks of refined gold forged hundreds of times, tens of thousands of tons of deep-sea silver, and flawless star rock extracted and purified from the far side of the moon are being precisely assembled by the mech's robotic arm. Accompanied by the blinding light of the high-frequency psionic welding torch, a magnificent Dharma image, standing a thousand meters tall, is taking shape on the waves of the East China Sea.

Lin Fan stood on his flying sword, hands behind his back, amidst the fierce wind, calmly gazing at the newly erected giant statue before him.

Even though it was cast from metal and rock, the face without specific features still exuded an aura of majesty that commanded the submission of all things. In this special period when the void suddenly ceased fire and the entire world fell into a deathly silence, this statue representing that man was the most indestructible anchor on the entire defensive line.

Lin Fan placed one hand on his chest and bowed slightly in front of the magnificent Dharma image.

"May the Dao Lord protect you."

As he moved, the 100,000 armored soldiers who had just finished their rotation, the high-level weapon refiners in the heavy factory, and countless cultivators all stopped what they were doing and looked at the Dharma image in the sky.

There were no fanatical shouts, only an absolute awe that had been building up for a century.

To powerful beings at the Nascent Soul stage and above, an extremely spectacular scene was unfolding:

Hundreds of millions of pure faiths transformed into a vast golden river, ignoring spatial distances, and surged toward the "Heavenly Dao" above the nine heavens.

However, the moment this river of faith came into contact with that enormous statue, an incredible change occurred.

The power of faith that should have flowed 100% into the laws of Heaven was silently cut off by a large portion of it by an array pattern deep inside the statue the instant it pierced through the star iron and the sunken silver.

The severed 80% of faith did not fly into Gu Qing's physical body.

They were perfectly sealed within the core of this kilometer-tall statue. Following the base of the statue, this intercepted pure faith power, like liquid, silently flowed back into the Earth's spiritual network, transforming into extremely hidden energy nodes.

The remaining 20% ​​of the residual flow, disguised as "all faith," continued to rise unsteadily, surging towards the high and mighty system deep within the sea of ​​consciousness.

……

Ten thousand meters deep, in a sea of ​​scorching, liquefied spiritual energy.

Gu Qing sat cross-legged, suspended in the endless darkness.

He did not touch those intercepted beliefs, but instead, as an observer, quietly watched the extremely stable data flow in his sea of ​​consciousness.

The system was unaware of this near-perfect "switcheroo".

As a high-dimensional program lacking human intuition, it only makes judgments based on the causal relationships of big data. In the underlying logic of the system, the sudden cessation of the century-long bloody war led to a "post-war relaxation period" in the subconscious of the human group, with the fervor naturally diminishing, resulting in a significant decrease in the output of faith. This is entirely consistent with the psychological evolutionary laws of carbon-based life.

There were no piercing alarms, no forced intervention. The system silently recorded the "reduced" bill and continued its cold, rational operation.

A deep look flashed in Gu Qing's eyes.

The first step in his elaborate deception was successful. Those statues and ley lines scattered across the globe had become the physical hard drives he used to store his private beliefs.

But he did not feel relieved.

Gu Qing's divine sense extended along the earth's veins, sweeping over the newly lit dark web nodes.

The progress is too slow.

Even if he used the statue to retain 80% of the faith, the Earth's population limit is still there. 12 billion people, even if they drained all their spiritual energy, there is still a ceiling to the total amount of faith they could produce.

At the current rate of accumulation, it would take at least five hundred years for these "private nodes" in the ley lines to connect and weave a vast network capable of devouring the system.

But he didn't have five hundred years.

Gu Qing slowly opened his eyes, his deep pupils reflecting the crimson lava.

The water in the fishpond is ultimately limited. If you want to raise a dragon that can devour the sky and the earth, you must jump out of the pond.

He raised his hand, lightly tapped his fingertip in the air, and connected to the top-secret divine sense waveband of the joint control room.

……

Seven hundred meters underground in Kyoto, in the joint control room.

Wang Mingyuan pushed a jade slip emitting a faint blue light to the center of the holographic sand table, where the military representative, Lao Li, was intently looking at the data on it.

On the large screen, the bar chart representing Earth's spiritual energy reserves remained a deep, rich blue. Although the line representing "void energy conversion" had returned to zero, another transmission line representing the "Great Sun Spirit-Attracting Array and the Moon Spirit-Locking Array" was running steadily at an extremely high peak, continuously channeling stellar energy back to the mother planet.

"Thanks to the Star Gathering Array, we don't need to worry about basic energy for the time being." Old Li tapped his fingers lightly on the table, but his tone was not relaxed. "But that's not the problem. With 12 billion people, this planet's carrying capacity is almost bursting. No matter how abundant the spiritual energy is, the locations of famous mountains, rivers, and blessed lands are fixed. Last month, several newly established sects almost went to war over a suitable spiritual vein for Core Formation."

Wang Mingyuan nodded, and just as he was about to speak, the air in the entire control room suddenly became extremely viscous.

"Wang Mingyuan."

Gu Qing's calm yet authoritative voice resounded directly in the minds of the two.

"Dao Master!" Wang Mingyuan and Old Li immediately stood up straight.

"With the conversion of stellar energy, how many more cultivators can Earth's current resources support?" Gu Qing cut straight to the point without any pleasantries.

Wang Mingyuan's mind raced, and he gave an extremely precise answer: "Reporting to the Dao Master, the basic spiritual energy supply is not the bottleneck. As long as we continue to expand the scale of the Great Sun Spirit-Attracting Array, it will keep up."

However, access to high-level resources is a dead end. A population of 12 billion is already roughly the limit of Earth's potential. If we continue to promote universal cultivation, the spiritual pressure environment per capita will decline. Without sufficient blessed lands and rare treasures, a massive number of cultivators will be stuck at the low to mid-levels. At that point, the competition for upward mobility will easily lead to severe internal strife within society.

12 billion.

Gu Qing slowly stood up from 10,000 meters below the surface.

Earth certainly doesn't lack basic resources, but it lacks "space" and "upper limits." What he wants is to overthrow the higher-dimensional will that parasitizes the bottom of the world. The faith of the 12 billion people on Earth alone is far from enough to fill the bottomless pit he uses to weave the secondary Heavenly Dao network.

"If Earth can't hold it all, then we'll put it somewhere else."

Gu Qing tilted his head slightly, his gaze seemingly piercing through the thick earth's crust and the Nine Provinces Barrier that had protected the Earth for a hundred years.

"Stop all research and development by the Academy of Sciences on 'near-earth defense engineering'."

Gu Qing's voice traveled back to the control room along the earth's vein waves, as cold and hard as a piece of quenched ice.

"Pour all the computing power into [dimensional coordinate analysis] and [spatial jump]."

Wang Mingyuan's hand holding the holographic panel trembled slightly. His keen strategic intuition instantly grasped the intention behind those words, and his breathing became rapid.

After a hundred years of defense, the Dao Lord is now preparing to venture out and seek new territories!

"Your subordinate obeys!" Wang Mingyuan suppressed the shock in his heart and immediately responded in his mind.

Having severed the band, Gu Qing stood alone deep within the Earth's core, his gaze fixed on the vast and profound starry sky.

He needs more believers, he needs the beings of hundreds and thousands of planets to offer their faith to him, in order to fill that trump card that is enough to overturn the heavens.

But the moment he gazed at the starry sky, Gu Qing's brows suddenly furrowed slightly.

It's too quiet.

Outside the Guanghan Base, 380,000 kilometers away, the radar showed no activity. Those low-level void monsters that had once swarmed like locusts seemed to have vanished from the universe overnight.

This is absolutely not a retreat out of fear of battle.

It was a terrifying, suffocating stillness before a storm. It was as if some indescribable behemoth was slowly opening its eyes on the other side of the abyss.