[TD]
The screen flashed, and the message was sent.
Ji Jue shut off his phone screen, shaking his head with a sigh. "Unbelievable. Taking time off just because of a bit of thunder and rain? Absolutely hopeless."
He had wanted to say a few more words, but he had just registered an alt named "Yacheng Top-Laner," only to get banned after tossing out a single insult. Those dogs at city hall never did their damn jobs, but when it came to brown-nosing and banning accounts, they were faster than anyone.
Ji Jue's enthusiasm fizzled out. Forget it. He'd make a mental note and switch to another alt to keep cursing them out some other day.
In Yacheng, three things were unavoidable: wind, rain, and cussing out the governor.
Yacheng was a remote place, clinging right to the edge of the Endless Sea. Typhoons came endlessly year after year, and the rainy seasons dragged on forever. The place flooded every few days. The drainage system was a complete shambles—you couldn't say it didn't exist, but it might as well not have.
Over the years, governors had come and gone. All they cared about was lining their pockets, shouting louder slogans than anyone while failing to do a single shred of actual work. Instead, street corners and alleyways ended up lined with trash cans that cost eight hundred thousand apiece.
Who wouldn't spit on the ground in disgust at the sight of that?
The fact that people only cursed out the governor instead of doing anything worse was practically proof of ancient, rustic virtue surviving in the populace.
In just that short span of time, what had been fairly clear weather was once again swallowed by dark clouds.
A light, pitter-pattering rain began to fall once more.
Lightning flashed, followed by rolling thunder.
He yawned and waved his hand one final time.
On the workbench, the crack-riddled alchemical item shattered under the destructive force of the Dissociation Art, crumbling into dust.
A lingering wisp of refined brilliance drifted out from within. Ji Jue snatched it into his hand, and it was immediately absorbed by the power of Deus Ex Machina. Amid the onslaught of visions and sensory feedback, Ji Jue bared his teeth, a wave of nausea washing over him.
It had taken several days, but he had finally finished pulverizing that pile of scrap alchemical items he had hauled back from the villa.
His mastery of the Dissociation Art had seen gratifying growth—though its power remained relatively faint, he was now capable of a one-hundred-percent success rate when casting it with both hands.
Unfortunately, the amount of essence squeezed from a pile of scrapped gear was far too meager.
Better than nothing, at best.
As a result, Deus Ex Machina's growth had been negligible. It was still stuck at ninety-five percent of the second tier, having crept up by less than five percentage points.
It only went to show that some people might look grand and imposing on the outside, parading around with an entourage, yet every alchemical item on them was just scrap. The quality was horrifyingly low, and the craftsmanship was embarrassingly shoddy.
Some of their technical moves weren't just clumsy—they completely flipped the table, managing to spring bizarre surprises in the most unexpected places.
It was just like when Ji Jue worked on cars: taking off a wheel only to find brake pads worn smooth as a mirror, or having an owner report an unusual noise while driving, only to crawl underneath and discover that the driveshaft had snapped clean in half and was dragging along the ground.
It was mind-boggling enough to be an engineering miracle. Ji Jue had half a mind to offer them a cigarette and ask, *Bro, how did you even pull that off?*
By comparison, the Extraordinary Vision pendant from the other day had looked positively respectable and standard.
Having grown accustomed to Professor Ye's creations—rigorous to the point of flawlessness and so fluid they seemed born of nature—Ji Jue's standards had been dragged far too high. He couldn't stomach the shoddy junk circulating on the current market at all.
Just looking at it made his compulsive tendencies flare up.
Yet the reality was that eighty to ninety percent of the ordinary alchemical creations on the market were precisely this sort of garbage.
There were too few qualified artisans, and far too much demand.
Full-fledged alchemical artisans could already take independent commissions and offer one-on-one custom services to patrons; they had no need to hawk their wares at a stall. Even the standard equipment mass-produced by large workshops couldn't satisfy the shortages among major organizations.
Consequently, the vast majority of goods ordinary people bought with their hard-earned money were mere practice pieces made by apprentices.
Their sole saving grace was that they worked. As long as they functioned, that was enough, because aside from barely working, they were terrible across the board in durability, stability, and safety. Advanced creations containing blessings were vanishingly rare. The rest were booby traps—featuring more backdoors than front entrances, burning more energy than setting pure spiritus ablaze, and carrying consequences worse than jumping off a roof.
No wonder Chen Xingzhou had been struck speechless when he heard Ji Jue call the artisan path simple.
In truth, when most people heard such brazen talk, refraining from laughing out loud and telling the kid not to aim too high was already giving him immense face.
From an apprentice's entry to becoming a qualified artisan, under the devoted tutelage and guidance of a master and with outstanding personal talent, the average time required was seven to nine years.
And that was under cutthroat, grueling grind conditions. If someone slacked off even slightly, possessed lesser talent, or had a half-hearted teacher, taking ten or twenty years was entirely common. There were plenty of people who signed up and tested year after year, only to break mentally in the end and get carted off to an asylum.
The Dragon Gate was hard to leap, no matter where it stood.
Even though Ji Jue's practical execution was infinitely close to a perfect score thanks to the absorption from Deus Ex Machina, his theoretical gaps still couldn't be bridged by cheating.
Out of the sixteen core vessel forms a full artisan needed to master, he had learned less than half. His engraving of multiple Sovereign Virtue insignias and advanced compound circuits was barely at the introductory level, to say nothing of his near-total lack of experience in creating blessed artifacts.
There were simply too many experience bars left to grind.
Still, when you already have too many debts, one more doesn't hurt. How long had it been since he first stepped into alchemy?
Ji Jue wasn't worried in the slightest.
Having wrapped up his morning tasks, he looked up at the clock. It was just past eleven. His mood lightened even further. After washing his face, he hummed a tune and headed for the living room.
The moment he stepped out of the elevator, he ran right into Ye Chun.
Having slept in until now, Ye Chun was yawning, debating whether to go back and lie down a bit longer. But the second she saw Ji Jue, her expression shifted drastically, and she instinctively moved to turn around and flee.
Immediately after, a hand clamped down on her shoulder.
Then, a smiling face poked out from behind her shoulder, grinning with exaggerated surprise. "Hey, how did you know I got the Church's Sublime Virtue Badge?"
Here it came. Here he went again!
Ye Chun desperately wanted to roll her eyes. Who the hell asked you?!
Ever since this bastard came back from his leave a few days ago, he hadn't stopped for a single second! He pinned that Sublime Virtue Badge to his collar, buffing it in front of every person he met. Whenever he had free time, he would sit across from Ye Chun, sighing and waxing poetic about how hard it was to accumulate good deeds and how exhausting it was to secure welfare for the poor people of Yacheng, only to finish by saying that the smiles on their faces made it all worth it, heh-heh-heh... *Right, Senior Sister?*
It had gotten to the point where Ye Chun's nightmares featured a tryhard dog flaunting his badge and chuckling non-stop.
It was pure psychological pollution!
"Sigh, it's been ten whole minutes since I last told a story about Ji the Philanthropist." Ji Jue beamed. "Do you know why the great man of our era, Ji Jue, never hides the painful past of having his senior sister drag him along as second author on her filler papers?"
Before Ye Chun could answer, he slapped his knee and said with solemn gravity, "Because, you see, he is virtuous!"
*Virtuous my ass!*
*Ji Jue, you grinding dog! You even secretly wrote papers on your vacation just to out-compete me! If you had a single shred of conscience left, you wouldn't do something so borderline human!*
"All right, all right, enough. That's plenty."
Ye Chun's eye twitched as she raised her hands in surrender. "Plenty of big shots can't hold a candle to you anymore, Ji Jue. Stop flexing."
Ji Jue's expression instantly turned sorrowful. He sighed heavily, looking wounded to the core. "Ah, aren't I just sharing my joy? Why must you be so cold, Senior Sister?!"
Yet before the sentence even finished, he swung right back to smugness. "Speaking of which, do you want to touch my badge?"
"..."
Ye Chun gritted her teeth, a blue vein popping on her forehead.
Her knuckles cracked as she balled her fists.
Finally, she snapped!
She could bear heaven, she could bear earth, but she could not bear this dog of a junior!
She turned her head with a sigh and looked at her aunt in the living room's main seat. Professor Ye was reading the newspaper, completely unresponsive, showing no intention of intervening. And so, Ye Chun nodded. Through a twitching smile, she squeezed words through the gaps of her teeth. "Fine. Sharing joy, right?"
Without waiting for Ji Jue to react, she held up a hand telling him to wait, turned toward the cabinets, and dragged out a trunk from the bottom. She opened it. Who knew how much stuff was packed inside or how vast the interior was, but she plunged half her body in. After a bout of rummaging, she pulled out a box.
*Slam!* She slapped it down on the table before Ji Jue.
"Are you talking about this?"
The instant the box opened, Ji Jue almost thought his eyes were playing tricks on him... Inside lay a badge nearly identical in make to the one on his chest. In fact, it had one more gold rim than his!
The engraving of the Church of Chongguang was impossible to counterfeit.
When his trembling little hand finally managed to flip the badge over, he saw the name inscribed on the back in both Federation and Empire script: [Ye Chun]!
"Uh..."
Ji Jue's vision went dark. He was utterly flabbergasted.
Looking up at Ye Chun, who was crossing her legs with a sneer, he couldn't help drawing in several sharp breaths, words failing him.
Such a low-profile demeanor, such a vicious counterattack, and such a familiar plotline... Was this the legendary playing the pig to eat the tiger?
What? He wasn't the protagonist of this power-fantasy novel?!
No, crap... He had turned into the face-slapped side character in the cliché!
*You're the Dragon King?!*
"What's wrong?"
Ye Chun pinned the badge to her chest and crossed her legs, looking down as if from the peak of existence, casting an endless shadow. "Want to touch my badge?"
She took on a majestic, solemn aura, looking down coldly at the unruly monkey before her like a Buddha.
"Wretched beast, having seen the Future, why do you not bow?!"
Dead silence.
In the protracted quiet, Ji Jue opened and closed his mouth several times, stammering before stiffly averting his gaze. "So, uh... let's talk about the blessing I just got..."
"No, let's keep talking about the Sublime Virtue Badge!"
Ye Chun raised her voice. "It's been ten whole minutes since I heard a story about Ji the Philanthropist. I really want to revisit the classics! Come on, tell me more about how Ji the Philanthropist painstakingly persuaded people to turn over a new leaf, or how Chen Xingzhou saw the error of his ways and wept in the memorial hall!"
"Let's talk about the blessing instead," Ji Jue pleaded humbly, swallowing his defeat.
"The badge!"
Ye Chun scoffed, suddenly flashing a crooked smirk. "Do you know why the great figure of our era, Ye Chun, hasn't smashed her foolish tryhard junior's dog head into pieces yet?"
"...I'll go cook."
Ji Jue lowered his head, obediently getting up. Not daring to push his luck any further, he backed away all the way to the threshold before daring to turn and vanish into the kitchen.
"Keep the flavors light today. Just four dishes and a soup, easy on the oil and salt. Mop the floor when you're done, clean up the kitchen, and peel and wash some fruit for me."
Ye Chun called after him, "Move briskly! Tide Sound Workshop keeps no slackers, hear?"
Hearing the clatter of pots and pans from the kitchen, she let out a cold smirk. Leaning back on the sofa with her legs crossed, she beamed with pride. *Hmph, think I can't handle you?*
Little Ji Jue, handled with ease!
Next time she padded a paper, she'd make sure to list him as second author again!
Meanwhile, from the main seat in the living room came the sound of a newspaper page turning.
"Put it away once you're done showing off," Professor Ye instructed calmly. "You've dragged your feet for days. Remember to hand in your revised arguments today."
Right on cue, a familiar wail echoed through the room.
Professor Ye picked up her teacup and took a sip.
Behind the newspaper, the corner of her mouth curved up slightly.
Life was truly getting more and more entertaining.
***
After a flurry of activity, five dishes and a soup were finally served. Seeing that there were extra vegetables in the fridge, Ji Jue had thrown together a cold bitter melon salad as well.
While his culinary skills couldn't be called extraordinary, he had helped Mother Lu in the kitchen for years, so he had picked up a trick or two. At the very least, what he made wasn't bad.
Though Ye Chun, having regained the upper hand, picked and nitpicked for quite a while, Ji Jue at least hadn't lost his human rights and was allowed to sit at the table to eat.
"Because your senior sister, you see, is virtuous. Got it?"
Ye Chun unabashedly snagged the largest cut of cured sausage into her bowl, savoring the spoils of victory.
She had already prepared her critique of his knife skills for the afternoon fruit session. Having finally seized the upper hand, how could she not ruthlessly avenge the indignities she had suffered over the past few days?
As for high-minded questions like *when will the cycle of vengeance ever end*, they were never within her consideration.
The strong were meant to ruthlessly humiliate the weak, aye!
After lunch, while Ji Jue was busy tidying the kitchen, the digital alarm clock on the living room table let out a series of beeps. Ji Jue immediately poked his head out, wiping his hands with a look of delight as he stepped forward to check the time.
"How long?" Professor Ye asked.
"Seventeen hours and forty-one minutes."
Ji Jue beamed. "It broke the previous record."
Before the timer began, Ji Jue had applied Deus Ex Machina to the alarm clock at minimal output. The only command he had given was to stop the timer and sound an alert just before the effect ran out.
As it turned out, his Deus Ex Machina at minimum output could now last nearly eighteen hours!
If he infused more spiritus, the duration wouldn't increase dramatically, but it could easily be maintained for around twenty hours.
And by his estimate, this still wasn't the limit.
With more practice, keeping it going for twenty-four hours wouldn't be an issue at all.
In other words, by that point, a single cast would sustain the effect of Deus Ex Machina for an entire day. And after twenty-four hours, refreshing it right before the effect expired would grant another full day.
He could already effortlessly sustain routine control over multiple targets. Factoring in his spiritus recovery rate and burden capacity, without compromising fine control or his ability to respond to surprise skirmishes, Ji Jue could currently maintain the effect on five targets simultaneously at all times.
In a place like Yacheng, that meant five fully loaded trucks capable of tipping the scales in any battle. Even accounting for drone battery limits and reserving time for recharging, it meant five sets of eyes and ears that could remain constantly vigilant.
Or...
Ji Jue was already contemplating whether he should harden his heart, pull off a crazy heist, and bring a couple of howitzer babies home from the Yacheng garrison base's warehouse.
He had run the numbers: just two pieces would be enough to cover the entire Beishan District plus most of the southern foothills.
Imagine: as long as he was in Beishan District, he could call in fire support at any moment... Life would be beyond sweet, and his safety would be cranked straight to the maximum, wouldn't it?
Unfortunately, the moment his safety hit that maximum, Ji Jue would be completely unsafe.
Setting aside whether the governor could sleep at night with two howitzers permanently aimed at vital Yacheng locations, the Haizhou Military Department would immediately bring down an iron fist to pound Ji Jue into paste.
The ideal was wonderful, but reality was cruel.
With a faint sigh, he pulled one leg back from the brink of crime after all.
As for the other leg, he'd leave it over there—it was nice to keep a dream alive, wasn't it?
"It seems your haul this time was quite plentiful," Professor Ye remarked, shaking her head with a sigh.
She had finally figured it out. A demolition-and-salvage travel frog like Ji Jue only caused headaches when kept at home; he had to be let loose into the wild to scavenge good stuff.
Last time he ventured out to a Border Realm, he had dragged back the long-lost Non-Offensive matrix and a complete set of Fluid Alchemy.
This time, taking just a single week off, he had brought back a crucial blessing.
The duration of Deus Ex Machina had doubled outright!
This dog-like luck could no longer be described as strange or bizarre. It was downright sinister.
Within the Record of All Phenomena compiled by the Aethers, the majority of abilities under the Embers branch dealt with altering the physical properties of matter.
The dissociation of matter, the channeling and transformation of spiritus, the catalysis of reactions—even the name 'alchemy' had originally been forged by Celestial Chosen capable of transmuting stone into metal.
Abilities like Deus Ex Machina were uniformly classified as control-type. And the vast majority of control-type abilities were inherently closer to Tianyuan, Ascension, or Heart Pivot; those that fell under Embers were exceedingly rare.
Breaking down control-type abilities further, they fell into directive, manipulative, and autonomous types, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Directive types, for example, issued direct commands to the controlled object—push the machine gun forward fifty meters, and it would move fifty meters, neither more nor less.
The advantage was efficiency in spiritus consumption. Provided the target had its own power source, issuing dozens or hundreds of such commands wouldn't exhaust the user. The downside was that it was overly rigid and lacked flexibility. If there was a wall along those fifty meters, the command was ruined; until the order was altered, the controlled target would act like an NPC in a video game, constantly grinding itself against the wall.
Manipulative types, as the name implied, overrode the target's own will and preset instructions, piloting it directly like a player controlling a video game character. Navigating around walls, bypassing trenches, fine-tuning every move until satisfied—there was no risk of artificial idiocy. The drawback was the mental tax; the operation was overly complex, making it difficult to control multiple targets simultaneously for intricate coordination.
An autonomous type like Deus Ex Machina was the most complex and consumed the most spiritus. Its precision might not even match the other two types, and against certain targets, its coercive force was somewhat lacking.
Its virtue, however, lay in its extreme adaptability and minimal mental burden—Ji Jue only had to give the order, and figuring out how to carry it out was the target's own problem.
These three categories were not strictly divided. At times, they could overlap. With Deus Ex Machina, Ji Jue could completely override the target and take manual control when necessary. But the cognitive ability and autonomy granted by Deus Ex Machina were so potent that manual control was unnecessary the vast majority of the time.
Under these circumstances, running out of spiritus had become Ji Jue's most lethal flaw. If his tools were destroyed too quickly and he was dragged into a protracted engagement, his spiritus would run dry within five minutes, rendering him entirely useless.
Now, the arrival of an Ascension blessing had compensated for that shortcoming to a certain degree.
Doubling the duration of Deus Ex Machina effectively conserved the spiritus spent on reapplying the ability, while further increasing Ji Jue's spiritus reserves and recovery rate.
Even within the Ascension branch, such an exquisite blessing was exceptionally rare.
—Foundation of Ascension: [Primacy of Mind]!
Chapter 144