Word had it that in the face of this unprecedented, terrifying threat, the Governor flew into a rage, flew into another rage, and then threw several more fits of rage.
In short, he was furious.
Extremely, utterly furious.
However, even before his impotent rage could play out, the power armor was gone.
After crushing several Celestial Chosen under Lei Yaoxing to death, before it could even make a run for it, it was dispatched by the military's urgently deployed rapid-reaction forces.
No survivors, no communication, no surrender protocols whatsoever.
Only a single command had come down from the Haizhou Garrison Base Command: [Terminate].
At the order, a combat squad equipped with four suits of Hurricane-class power armor descended from the sky out of an airship that broke through the clouds. They tore the rebel along with his stylish mix-and-match suit into shreds no bigger than a palm, evenly scattering the pieces across a three-hundred-meter radius.
Only a head was left behind, placed right at the center of the ruins.
To show anyone harboring ill intent the fate of crossing the line.
Word had it that after Tong Shan returned from the Governor's Mansion, his face was darker than ever before. Meanwhile, although Lu Shenzhou—Director of the Security Bureau in Nanlu District, where the incident took place—had said nothing, one of his team members had just posted a picture on Moments.
The background was the gym billed as Yacheng's largest, and the main subject of the photo was a mountainous pile of barbell weight plates.
Each weighed twenty kilograms, stacked over two meters high. Every single one was shattered, crushed into mashed metal in a fit of rage!
The handprints were clear as day.
One could imagine who was on Director Lu's mind when he vented his wrath on that pile.
Faced with an underworld war spiraling out of control, all sides were on the verge of losing whatever patience they had left...
[Sister Wen told me to pass on a message: sit tight, keep your head down, and don't make trouble. This'll all be over in a couple of days.]
[Understood.]
Ji Jue replied, pairing it with an animated GIF of a rose blooming in a pink halo to show how well-behaved he was.
After locking his screen, he looked at his own grim reflection in the glass and couldn't help sighing.
Heart weary.
Turning back to see Chen Yubo in the living room cheerfully holding up the cat and going "meow~ meow~", an inexplicable fire flared in Ji Jue's chest. He felt an intense urge to stride over, kick him, and roar:
You damn bastard, I'm your daddy!
Even a real father wouldn't do this much, would he?
Once you leap out of this cesspool, you'd better show some damn filial piety! Come the holidays, if there's even one stick of incense missing before my longevity tablet, I'll fly over and give you two big slaps in the face.
"What's wrong, Old Ji?"
Noticing his complicated gaze, Chen Yubo looked back in confusion. Ji Jue forced out a benevolent, fatherly smile, shaking his head: Dad's fine, you go play.
Only when you grow up do you realize that a father's sorrows and tears can only flow in silence.
.
"Speaking of which, Ji Jue-ge, why aren't you taking any money?"
In the garage's temporary workshop, Xiao An, fiddling with his phone behind Ji Jue, suddenly asked, "Ji Jue-ge, aren't you really strapped for cash? Dad used to tell me that whenever an Embers Celestial Chosen asks to borrow money, you must never lend them a cent. No amount of money is ever enough for them—they're bottomless pits, and aside from a 'thank you,' you never hear a peep back."
"Huh?"
Ji Jue turned around, dumbfounded, not knowing whether he should first correct Xiao An's 'mistaken' impression of Embers Celestial Chosen or answer the question.
Even by the most exacting moral standards, at a critical juncture like this where Ji Jue was risking his life to save Chen Yubo, taking money was completely justified—in fact, entirely expected.
No sum he demanded would be considered excessive.
As long as he asked, he could easily claim half. Even if he wanted it all... knowing Chen Yubo's personality, as long as he applied the right pressure, leveraged trust, and chose his words well, spending a bit of effort might well achieve that goal.
Such a massive inheritance looked astronomical at first glance, enough for someone to squander for a lifetime without running out.
In reality, though, if one truly wanted to accomplish anything with it, it was a drop in the bucket—barely enough to cover the down payment on the workshop construction project commissioned from Professor Ye.
Nowadays, building a highway in the city cost far more than that.
If Ji Jue really wanted money, he wouldn't need to go through so much trouble. He could just sell off a portion of those basically priceless materials he'd brought back, or put out an introductory course on Fluid Alchemy for tens or hundreds of millions; there would be plenty of Embers Celestial Chosen clamoring to foot the bill.
Unfortunately, the former was vital to his future development in alchemy, while the latter concerned his future academic topics, theses, and the stepping stones to the Gate of Masters. He refused to leak a single shred of either.
Whereas this money was tied to Chen Yubo's life.
"Do you know, Xiao An, trust is sometimes a very fragile thing, but suspicion is immensely powerful."
Ji Jue sighed softly.
It was easy to make people believe a poor kid with holes in his shoes had stolen something, but making them believe in that kid's innocence was excruciatingly hard.
Even if you laid the truth right before their eyes, they would only sneer.
And then continue pinning the thief's label on the kid.
Only when that kid climbed to a height they could never reach and glanced back with disdain would those trapped in the shadows lose the courage to doubt.
Or, starving to death in the winter snow worked too—quicker, simpler.
Suspicion was absolute.
Suspicion required no evidence, no clues, especially when even this tenuous trust was built upon rumors.
That was why he had Chen Yubo donate the entire inheritance.
With the Church of Chongguang publicly displaying the donation receipt, everyone would believe he had nothing left.
The number on that receipt: the bigger, the better; the more, the better.
But it could never fall short.
If the money Chen Yubo donated was even a sliver less than the full amount, people would suspect he had secretly hidden away more.
For someone like him—lacking ambition, unarmed, and unable to handle pressure—that would be an utter catastrophe.
For the rest of his life, the fallout would be endless.
"Um... I don't really get it."
Xiao An blinked blankly. "Even if he died, would it really matter? You've only met once or twice anyway."
"While I really hate to admit it, I think he counts as my friend... maybe?"
By the end, Ji Jue wasn't even sure himself, amused by his own words. "I don't really care about his money, but he treated me and my family to dinner, and took the youngest to watch cartoons. Even now, the kid still asks once in a while why that older brother who likes the blue-haired girl hasn't visited lately.
"When a friend is in trouble and asks for my help, if my own actions ended up getting him killed instead... you'd look down on me too, wouldn't you, Xiao An?"
"Don't know."
Xiao An shook his head flatly, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
Just as usual, he didn't grasp hypotheticals or think about 'what ifs.' His likes and dislikes were clear-cut: if he liked someone, he drew close; if he disliked them, he kept his distance; if he was annoyed, he warned them; if they were troublesome, he killed them.
That was why he couldn't understand.
"In short, when a friend needs help, you do what you can!"
Ji Jue smiled and patted his shoulder. "If you ever need me for anything, Xiao An, I'll definitely work even harder—give it my all! When I get stronger in the future, the first thing I'll do is help you pull those nails out. As for life goals and things like that, we can take ten, twenty, thirty years to find them slowly. If your sister disagrees when the time comes, then I'll fight her with you!"
As he spoke, he gave a thumbs-up:
"Guaranteed win, Boss!"
Xiao An didn't speak.
As if stunned, he stared blankly at him.
Soon, though, he lowered his head and averted his gaze.
He only said, "Thank you, Ji Jue-ge."
"..."
Ji Jue's expression twitched.
What was going on?
This ambiguous atmosphere was getting stranger and stranger! It was actually making him blush!
He averted his gaze too.
Burying his head back into his work, he felt as if thorns were prickling his back, as though someone behind him was still staring at him, making him even more afraid to look back.
He focused on manipulating his spiritus.
Under Non-Offensive's interference, the bullets on the workbench took on a faint golden sheen—after a simple alchemical procedure, Purification stripped away impurities to enhance their material properties, while Ascension imbued them with spiritus for easier manipulation.
Finally, simple spiritus circuits were inscribed around the emblem of Entropy on the inside, ensuring that after penetrating a target's body, they could detonate the heat carried within the warhead to explode, achieving maximum destructive power.
The clash between spear and shield was never-ending.
Faced with harder and thicker defenses, what Ji Jue needed now was a bigger, more ferocious gun!
In fact, if he wanted to enhance the bullets' lethality, the simplest way was to craft each entire bullet into a blessed relic. Combined with a specific blessing, its full destructive power would be completely unleashed in a single shot... Unfortunately, such bank-breaking extravagance was something Ji Jue wouldn't dare dream of.
Selecting the very best from state-level supplies, cherry-picking from identical blessings, and finally having an Embers Master Craftsman preside over the entire process—Ascension, Purification, Transmutation, Harmony—to ultimately forge a lethal weapon capable of leaving permanent scars upon the body of a Celestial-Human.
Not to mention that bullets of such caliber were beyond his current skill and financial means to produce; even if he could make them, not a single nobody in the Wild Gathering right now was worthy of facing them.
Looking across all of Yacheng, the only one worthy of having his head blown off by one was probably the Governor of Yacheng appointed by the Midtown supreme government.
Still, thinking about it was pretty thrilling.
That prick of a Governor hadn't done a single good thing since arriving, focusing purely on raking in cash. Given the chance in the future, sending him on his way would make great target practice.
For now, though, he had better keep his feet on the ground.
"Xiao An."
He tossed a bullet behind him, and the youth caught it, only to freeze for a moment. When Xiao An came to, he looked as though he wanted to say something.
"What is it?" Ji Jue asked, puzzled.
"Nothing, it's just that I'm currently in the stage of sword qi Transmutation. Almost no spiritus can emanate from me, so I can't be of any help," Xiao An answered dejectedly, gripping the bullet.
Ji Jue blinked, then chuckled. "It's fine, no big deal."
Without sword qi enchantment, there were other ways.
When the time was right, after confirming via surveillance camera that Xiao An had gone to watch TV dramas, Ji Jue finally opened the trunk in the corner and undid layer after layer of wards on top.
Revealing, deep within, a pile of pitch-black matter resembling lumps of charcoal.
The final remains left behind by that corrupted Celestial Chosen from before.
Originally, after extracting the blessing, standard procedure called for Professor Ye to throw it into a hazardous waste incineration furnace to burn it completely to ash. The ash would then be treated with neutralizing agents, and once the reaction was complete, discarded into a waste bin to be sent to a specialized facility for absolute annihilation once enough accumulated.
Yet Ji Jue had taken the initiative to ask for it.
Professor Ye had given him a deep look, as if seeing right through the wicked scheme he was brewing, and merely said he was responsible for his own things before washing her hands of the matter.
What else could a monstrous thing stained with the aura of the Nine Vices after mutation be used for besides harming people? Protecting world peace?
Doing something this devoid of conscience couldn't be seen by a child. What if it ruined Ji Jue-ge's 'glorious and towering' image? Even if it didn't, what if Xiao An jotted down in that notebook: 'Ji Jue-ge is very thrifty and never wastes anything; he even turns the corpses of his enemies into bullets'? Wouldn't that be an utter disaster?
"Now it's time for you to contribute your last bit of heat, buddy."
Ji Jue rubbed his hands together, a sharp gleam flashing in his eyes.
Next, witness the true skill of Ji Jue, genius craftsman—
His right hand pressed toward the pile of remains from afar, followed by:
"—Cousin, come on out!"
As the saying goes, the most precious materials often require the simplest methods of preparation. Master Ji, having busily prepared for a whole day, began crafting bullets for his enemies.
What he aimed to utilize were the remains left behind by the corrupted Celestial Chosen.
More precisely, the corrupted residual soul that Professor Ye had sealed inside the remains. Under the allure and mutation of the Nine Vices, a Celestial Chosen's soul and flesh would undergo irreversible transformations, tainted by completely out-of-control blessings and wicked, deranged madness. What remained in the end was this fractured remnant saturated in the aura of the Nine Vices.
It possessed no consciousness, no thought, and no hope of salvation. If left alone and touched by ordinary people, over time its contamination might spawn some ungodly monstrosity.
Something this dangerous... it would be a total waste of heaven's gifts not to put it to use.
Snap!
The moment his outstretched palm contacted the remains, a crisp cracking sound rang in the air—the abnormal sound of spiritus bursting.
The instant contact was made, the eerie aura dormant within the remains seemed to spring to life. It swiftly surged along the spiritus Ji Jue injected, attempting to flow upstream and invade his soul, yet it couldn't breach the barrier, entirely unable to break free of the spiritus cage Ji Jue had woven. Non-Offensive's spiritus manipulation functioned like a one-way check valve between them, allowing only Ji Jue's unilateral spiritus output and infusion.
And the moment the seal broke, Cousin's long-unseen pop-up began flashing incessantly.
[Warning, warning. External aberrant spiritus detected.]
And just as Ji Jue's spiritus completely activated the dormant corrupted aura, a brand-new pop-up appeared:
[Extract?]
With a shift of Ji Jue's thoughts, a terrifying suction beyond his imagination emanated from the wristwatch. Layer upon layer of intricate spiritus circuits expanded, seamlessly interfacing with Non-Offensive's matrix as if the two had always been one!
Cracking sounds rang out in rapid succession.
At a speed visible to the naked eye, the carbonized fragments rapidly disintegrated until, in the end, they turned into a pile of snow-white ash.
Countless wisps of pitch-black aura manifested from the rising spiritus, coalescing and falling into his fingers.
This time, however, Ji Jue did not allow Cousin to drain away all the corrupted spiritus. Instead, he forcefully intercepted it using Non-Offensive, funneling every bit into the pre-prepared quicksilver medium.
Whether it was because Ji Jue's clearance had increased after becoming a Celestial Chosen or because of Non-Offensive's influence, the wristwatch actually halted its operation on its own under Ji Jue's interference, no longer competing for this spiritus.
Every bit of the corrupted spiritus was channeled by Ji Jue into the dormant quicksilver via Ascension. In an instant, ripples spread across the quicksilver, writhing like a living creature as if trying to break free and flee from this husk devoid of blood and soul.
Yet immediately afterward, Ji Jue shoved it mercilessly into the furnace that had already been preheated for a long time.
—Purification, begin!
Bang!
The moment the Purification phase of Fluid Alchemy began, a sudden burst of spiritus fluctuations whipped up a gale within the cramped room. The lightbulb overhead shattered on cue, the light flickering before dying out.
Immediately following was a screeching friction like an agonizing shriek, rising abruptly from the flames—so piercing that it resembled the wailing of specters and the mourning of the dead.
The corrupted spiritus had been fully aroused!
The core of Fluid Alchemy was to bring external form closer to essence. As the quicksilver gradually shifted toward the corrupted spiritus, violent disturbances and eruptions surfaced continuously from the liquid.
Even the entire second-hand furnace shook violently, strained beyond its limits.
Had Ji Jue not set up insulating spiritus circuits on the outer layer, the racket by now would have alerted everyone.
He pressed both hands against the furnace's control panel, running Non-Offensive at full throttle. To avoid having the corrupted spiritus erode him through his senses, he didn't even dare use Deus Ex Machina.
Corrupted transmutation was an exceptionally dangerous and complex discipline; even masters who spent their lifetimes studying it could hardly predict what might happen during the refining process.
Ji Jue felt as if he had pried open the gates of hell. Endless wails and laments rose from the flames, and the furnace rattled continuously, like someone pounding against the scalding furnace door from inside, desperate to claw their way out of the abyss.
Soon, though, the wails turned into faint whispers, like someone calling Ji Jue's name—unfamiliar yet familiar, bearing a scalp-prickling allure, both sweet and raspy.
Then, amid dead silence, faint sobs seemed to echo, too indistinct to make out.
In the end, even the weeping vanished.
Only a shrill scream like a dying lament erupted all at once, climbing higher and higher without end, before fading into the resonance of metal.
Spiritus burned out; flames extinguished.
Only now did Ji Jue finally breathe a sigh of relief, collapsing onto the floor, drenched in sweat.
Had it not been for Non-Offensive's absolute control over spiritus, several times he felt he had completely lost control and blown it. Once out of hand, it would either blow up the furnace, blow up himself, or send the furnace, himself, and half the villa straight into the sky.
That was alchemy—living on the edge was part of the fun.
Now, even the furnace had died down completely.
After a brief inspection, Ji Jue found that the internal spiritus circuits had all been completely ruined by the overload, leaving behind a hollow shell practically no different from scrap.
The only fruit of his labor was the eerie crimson fluid slowly pouring from the receptacle at this moment.
One drop, then another.
The quicksilver, fully merged with the corrupted spiritus, had turned the color of fresh blood. It rolled across the workbench like living creatures; upon each drop, faint faces writhing in agony or raging in frenzy seemed to surface.
Even an accidental brush between two drops provoked a shrill hiss, as if they were devouring each other until they fully fused together.
"Is this... Frenzied Slaughter?"
Through his thick mask, Ji Jue whispered in disbelief.
A bizarre existence ranked among the Nine Vices alongside the Stagnant Corruption Furnace, a colossus manifested from countless slaughters, ravagings, enslavements, extinctions, and deaths.
What lay before Ji Jue right now was at most an insignificant trace left by a faint brush with one of Frenzied Slaughter's tens of millions of projections.
Yet it still made his soul tremble, beyond his control.
As he channeled them drop by drop into the warheads and sealed them, the pressure and dread he felt were far more extreme than synthesizing and extracting phlogiston explosives.
The latter would only blow him to pieces; the former would make him wish he were dead.
And likewise, it would make his enemies suffer agony beyond imagination!
"Hehe, hehehehe, hehehehe..."
When Xiao An came knocking to call Ji Jue for dinner, all he saw under the flickering, dim light was an eerie figure chuckling continuously, along with the bizarre bullets lined up on the table before him.
They looked utterly ordinary, having undergone only basic alchemical processing, yet approaching and attempting to touch them sent a sudden chill through the body!
"What are these?" He drew closer, scrutinizing them in confusion.
"Gifts."
Ji Jue smiled, full of delight. "Some gifts prepared for our guests."
Like every well-prepared host, from the moment he tied the bow on the wrapping, he couldn't help imagining the delightful surprise on their faces when the package was opened.
He truly hoped they would like it.
.
Beep— Beep—
Inside the hospital room steeped in the scent of disinfectant, dead silence reigned, broken only by the monotonous hum echoing from the monitors.
And amid this long, tedious echo, the rhythm of the noise shifted for a split second, an almost imperceptible change.
On the hospital bed, Chen Xingzhou's finger suddenly gave a faint tremor.
And then, another...
Through the long stretch of time, it clenched slowly yet stubbornly.
As if straining with all its might to grasp an invisible thread.
Climbing endlessly upward.
Out of hell...
Ding—
At the end of the hallway, the elevator doors slid open.
A nurse pushing a cart stepped out, walking slowly toward the ward.
The cart's wheels creaked and groaned as they turned, leaving behind an intermittent streak of crimson tracks upon the floor...
Outside the window, neon lights flickered in the deepening night.
Chapter 129