Teleport formation he designed himself that teleports twice; one short-distance to get out of perception range and lay a false trail, then a second long-range that gets him to his true destination.
I mean, the guy can do timestop bombs. A double-teleport would be easy in comparison. Maybe his yearly project is the teleporting timestop bomb?
One of the things with Renshu is he's doing layered intrigue.
When we first encountered his remote patsies, he revealed the ability to fake being a weak cultivator with a puppet, but it was a crappy wooden puppet, and he could use what looked like very limited arts through it. Nothing a firstie can't manage.
Then it turns out he has entire underground production facilities and the first time we see his worms. Most of the worms turn out to be everywhere, but underground. Here we learn that Yan Renshu looks 'withered' in some way, but since Ling Qi doesn't know shit she doesn't know what everyone else thinks he looks like.
Our second base raid was the closest to reality that we've seen, and what we learned was illuminating. Even in his own base he runs a double layered bluff, he puts some superficial wealth in a drawer, behind some nasty for a first year formations, and then if you look underneath the underneath, you find the REAL treasure, sealed tight behind traps where even his spirits don't know where they are.
Then we learned more during the chase, where he broke out the metal puppets for the first time. These were a serious threat to lesser cultivators, but he used what, three? Everyone assumed they were too expensive to operate and he broke out his emergency stash.
We learned he knows enough of Formations to create magically binding geas on a limited manner and that for some reason he had invested huge amounts of Qi into them...yet as per Ling Qi's escape he certainly had no lack of Qi to use even then.
THEN we learned he could scry long distance and often enough to cockblock missions. Annoying, but Ling Qi is good at elusive, so it stayed that way.
THEN here finally, we found and looted his stores. What we found was that his worms were weaker, and there was a conspicuous lack of puppets or defenses(even anything comparable to his secondary base's was missing). Anyone who tracked his worms home would have thought "Renshu is at his wits end if this is so poorly defended".
Then we have this last scene. We discovered he had at least SIX more black iron puppets. Six low/mid Yellow emulators. They were not new, since they were hooked up to buffing formations.
Then he broke out the super worms we thought were already wiped out.
We discovered he can make a puppet good enough to:
-Resist a siegebreaker rod, which according to Meizhen would have smashed anything else he had ever done. So he knows how to protect his formations from dispelling, but deliberately does not so as to cultivate a false weakness.
-Completely fool the perception art of a 3rd rank cultivator from an old noble family.
-Use his arts at what is likely close to full power remotely.
-Fight Bai Meizhen, currently the strongest or second strongest cultivator on the Outer Sect for an extended period without taking significant enough damage for her to question the lack of bleeding.
-Include a selfdestruct strong enough to annihilate the whole base, forcing Meizhen to use her perfect dodge and Ling Qi to bust her escape talisman...and destroying all evidence of his base so you can't analyze his formations to figure out how.
And all that was an extended feint for him to finish running away with his puppet factory. The whole thing.
I'd say the Renshu puppet alone would have allowed him to graduate Outer Sect. But he didn't want to.
Also it sounds like some exotic elemental effect. Stasis in that nature is most likely Void, or pure Yin element.
The strangest part is: Why is his qi sickly and his true body withered? How long had he been conducting all meetings via doombot?
