Chapter 89: Blueprint of the Intelligent Soul Banner

Lu Yan’s spirits soared.

Though still a vague concept, the idea of intellectualizing the ghosts within the Soul Banner was enough to open up a world of possibilities!

While the Soul Banner looked formidable with its legions of malevolent ghosts, the truth was that weaker ghosts posed little threat to powerful cultivators.

In real combat, most of the ghosts served as support to shape eerie battlefields. The true fight always relied on the Main Soul.

The main reason for this was simple: ghosts refined into the Soul Banner lacked intelligence. They could only obey crude commands—relying on sheer numbers to overwhelm foes with basic ghost claws and ghost mist.

But if these ghosts could be granted the computational intelligence of a cerebrain, they could wield ghost energy to cast spells, greatly enhancing their power. Even a single ghost could rival a cultivator of the same stage.

And because of the cerebrain’s massive computing power and logical precision, with some simple design, they could serve as ideal array nodes.

Even an expert Array Master could only control the overall flow of an array. They couldn’t precisely dictate the mana output or spiritual energy fluctuation of each individual array pattern.

But a cerebrain could perfectly calculate and optimize every single rune, crushing even long-practiced Array Masters through pure computational strength—maximizing the array’s full potential.

A single Foundation Establishment cultivator could easily dominate a hundred Qi Refining cultivators, since the former’s spells and movement speed utterly outclassed the latter.

A Foundation cultivator could kill from hundreds of meters away, while the Qi Refining ones wouldn’t even land a single hit.

However, if those hundred Qi Refining cultivators could link their minds and form a Second-Tier Formation, they could easily surround and defeat a Foundation cultivator.

And this was just scratching the surface.

At the end of the Soul Computer hierarchy stood the God of Intelligence, the peak of the cyber version.

If the Soul Banner could one day be upgraded to the level of the God of Intelligence, then no version of reality would be out of reach.

Excited by the idea, Lu Yan dove into the sea of information returned by the cerebrain spirit, searching for anything related to soul modification technology.

But after scouring the data, he was disappointed.

Although the cerebrain spirit held a vast amount of data, none of it included the actual technologies behind soul modification.

Which, thinking carefully, made sense.

Soul modification was the core technology behind cerebrain creation. Even within the Universal Megacorp, it was likely classified at the highest level.

Lu Yan’s cerebrain spirit was just a portable unit. It would be strange if it carried such top-secret knowledge.

Still, Lu Yan didn’t feel discouraged. The spirit was filled with complex soul energy code, many segments of which didn’t even appear in the textbook Foundations of Energy Code.

Lu Yan realized—this must be the essence of soul modification technology. If he could just decipher those coded sections, he might uncover something valuable.

And so, having just finished forming his artificial spirit vein, Lu Yan once again entered seclusion.

This time, his focus shifted to the very foundation of the cyber version:

Energy Code.

The more he explored this version, the more fascinated he became by its unique structure.

Spiritual energy mechanics, the God of Intelligence, soul modification—at the root of them all lay energy code.

In the past two months, Lu Yan had focused mostly on improving his cultivation and creating the artificial vein. His study of energy code had been somewhat neglected.

Now that his priorities had shifted, he began to truly appreciate the mystery and elegance of energy code.

Due to the knowledge blockade imposed by the Upper City, the Lower City lacked a systematic compiler training system. Studying energy code in isolation would likely yield limited results.

So, Lu Yan chose another route.

He started with the two books: Mysteries of Formations and Foundations of Energy Code, using the logic of array patterns to uncover commonalities between different versions.

Back when he first obtained Mysteries of Formations, Lu Yan had also attempted to study formations.

But at that time, his lack of foundational knowledge and weak cultivation prevented him from making much progress.

Now, however, after his experience in the Azure Wutong Sect’s library, Lu Yan had gained a solid theoretical base.

His cultivation had reached the Twelfth Layer of Qi Refining, significantly strengthening his soul. Combined with the Moonlight Spiritual Energy he absorbed, his soul strength had already surpassed most of his peers.

With soul strength nearing Foundation Establishment and enhanced mental agility, low-level arrays now felt much easier to understand.

The core of Xianxia-style formations was calculation—meticulously linking thousands of runes together through complex math.

In the energy code system, everything depended on the structure and sequence of energy patterns. Every rune combination was like a software function, producing different effects depending on context.

Each system on its own was incredibly difficult.

In Xianxia, there were no external aids for computation. High-level cultivators had to manually calculate everything with their own soul power, which meant it often took years to master a single array.

This high complexity made formations an elite field—usually only practiced by top-tier sects.

But in the cyber version, technology had evolved into the personal terminal era. With breakthroughs in both math and computing, basic calculations had become trivial.

Any equation that could be described in text could be solved by a terminal—making array comprehension and deployment far more accessible.

Of course, this only applied to low-tier arrays. High-level formations involved fundamental laws of nature that couldn’t be expressed in equations—personal terminals simply couldn’t handle them.

But what normal computers couldn’t understand, Soul Computers could.

The cerebrain’s capabilities made it a perfect match for complex formation logic.

As long as the soul computing power was sufficient, even legendary Immortal Arrays might one day be cracked.

As for the energy code combinations, Lu Yan found inspiration in the logic of Xianxia formations as well.

In cultivation, formation arrays were never rigid stacks of runes—they were living systems that constantly adapted to environment, timing, and human intent.

The arrangement of runes in Xianxia was already at a masterful level of flexibility.

So why not apply the same logic to energy code?

If code structure was difficult to manage, then let it be dynamic—changing in real-time based on environmental variables, just like a living array.

By using the array framework to express energy code, Lu Yan was pushing the entire energy system in a brand-new direction.

Cross-version integration, combined with personal terminal assistance, caused Lu Yan’s expertise in both formations and energy code to skyrocket.

And as he continued on this path, the vision of the Intelligent Soul Banner in his mind became increasingly clear.

(End of Chapter)