A workshop!
The moment that judgment and conclusion were reached, everyone's eyes lit up.
Every cloud had a silver lining. Just when they thought this trip had been in vain, it turned out that what they had just wiped out was merely the perimeter security team. Once the shell was pried open, it concealed a delicacy inside—soft, juicy clam meat.
Even Tong Shan's face showed a flicker of delight.
Yet amidst the brief silence, Ji Xue quickly sensed something off.
She looked toward the front.
Without anyone noticing, those two eccentric Embers had opened up a subtle distance between them. As they gazed at each other, their smiles grew increasingly genial and warm.
For some reason, though, it gave off a distinct impression that if either stood behind the other, he would seize the first heavy object within reach and bash his friend's skull open.
"A workshop..."
Ji Jue sighed faintly, his right hand resting on his lower back as though he had pulled a muscle while lying on the ground just now.
"Yeah."
Lou Feng had both hands shoved in his pockets, idly fiddling with something trivial inside as he gave a slight nod. "A workshop."
Both wore smiles, yet their locked gazes practically threw sparks.
"I still remember the last time, back in the Border Realm, Brother Ji made quite a grand spectacle," he suddenly remarked with a sigh. "After I got back to the workshop and home, I was in a pathetic state for quite a while. Every time I stepped out the door, people mocked me. I couldn't hold my head up at all. The bitterness of it is truly beyond words."
"Yeah, yeah, I had it rough last time too. I was with my comrades from the Security Bureau, being chased and hacked at through the Border Realm by someone leading an entire pack of Knights of Homecoming, barely escaping with my life."
Ji Jue shook his head wistfully. "Back then, sitting in the tricycle bed, weeping uncontrollably, I had to ask myself if that was the only chance I'd get in this lifetime..."
"Yet the one who got kidnapped, extorted, and squeezed for a massive ransom wasn't you, was it?"
Lou Feng's expression grew stern. "You saved the hostage. You learned the Sage's legacy. Master Ye looks down on us—I get that... But must you really take everything without even leaving behind a drop of broth?"
"That was never what I wanted..." Ji Jue shook his head adamantly. "Opportunity comes but once. If you can't seize it, then let me—"
Seeing their conversation devolve into pure surreal absurdity, Ji Xue tugged at Tong Shan's sleeve, completely baffled.
"What the hell are they blathering on about?"
"You'd better stay out of matters between Embers," Tong Shan sighed, the corner of his eye twitching.
*They've barely touched the edge of the workshop, and they're already plotting how to split the loot?!*
Leave it to Embers. The second they heard a place could be ransacked, what little humanity they had vanished into thin air like a deadbeat dead-set on ghosting after seeing a pregnancy test.
Daggers drawn.
Tender camaraderie gone.
The honeymoon phase had ended so fast that nobody could wrap their head around it.
Ji Jue shook his head. "The Lou family is a vast clan with immense wealth. Why compete with a poor kid like me over scraps?"
"If you're a poor kid, what am I?!" Lou Feng laughed in sheer exasperation. *You only bring up family background, yet you don't say a damn word about the gulf between our workshops!*
"I'm not a pillar of my clan like Captain Tong! The only thing keeping me from being the family clown right now is a red nose—and who caused that! Ji, if you want to hoard all the spoils for yourself, you'll have to ask if I agree first!"
"So do you agree?" Ji Jue asked, curious.
"What do you think?"
Lou Feng exploded, abandoning all semblance of elegance. "Agree, my ass! I couldn't agree less!"
"So in the end, it all comes down to whose craft speaks louder, huh?"
Ji Jue sighed. "Who goes first?"
"Bullshit, who else could it be? You, of course!" Lou Feng scoffed. "Isn't the Dissociation Art made for this exact job?"
Even as they haggled down to the last copper over how to divide the spoils, various bags and cases were already being pulled out from their portable toolboxes and spatial devices, hurriedly set up with cables strewn across the floor.
Just like two thieves squatting in front of a vault arguing over who got what.
Their preparations proceeded at breakneck speed, without a second wasted.
And neither spared so much as a glance toward the workshop below.
Only when the scanned spiritus signals on the devices had all been aggregated and the calculated results appeared...
Did their breathing grow heavy once more.
In silent eye contact, the balefires of Embers flickered unstoppably in their pupils!
Unbearable hunger...
Without a doubt, the workshop lay right beneath their feet!
Beneath the ruins of the department store, under pallid lights, shrill alarms echoed incessantly.
Du Deng gasped desperately for breath, staring at the message flashing on the screen—[Signal Disconnected]—his entire body already frozen cold, drenched in sweat.
Just a moment ago, when the blaring alarm interrupted his work and he stormed out of the production room in a fury, he had thought some idiot had tripped a sensor or violated protocol again.
Yet the projection had not displayed morons dumping trash where they shouldn't or tampering with spiritus circuits; it showed a sea of crimson.
A slaughter.
A pack of fucking Celestial Chosen had dropped from the sky without warning, hacking the guys outside into minced pieces across the ground like chopping vegetables. Within less than two minutes, before he could even register what was happening, it was all over.
Dead.
Every single one of them was dead!
If not for the preset module in the temporary workshop activating its camouflage the instant it sensed environmental changes, a blade would probably be at his throat right now.
*What is going on? What happened? Where the hell am I?*
*Did those bastards from the Dragon Sacrifice Society turn on us? Did the Evil Transmutation Cult welsh on their deal? Did the brain-dead monks of Wulou Temple forget to take their meds? Or did Teacher find out I've been secretly meeting with people from the Tianxin Society behind his back?*
*No, none of that makes sense. They didn't look like Corruptees at all; in fact, they looked like...*
*Fuck! Did the Security Bureau raid us?!*
The moment he realized, the last stubborn holdout was crushed into paste like a chicken by Jiang Xuan.
Only Du Deng, an artisan hiding inside the workshop, sat slumped on the ground in a cold sweat, barely able to climb to his feet.
*Calm down, calm down!*
*Even if it's a temporary workshop, my preparations were thorough. The entire workshop is anchored into the Earth Bone, fused with the territory across several kilometers, stable as a mountain.*
*The hyper-realistic illusion on the outside overwrites reality—a defense personally crafted by Teacher. They won't find anything, and then they'll leave.*
*There's no way they can see through it. There's no way they'll discover m—*
At that exact moment, the eyes of those two sons of bitches sprawled on the ground looked straight down toward the workshop!
*They saw it! They fucking saw it!*
Du Deng swallowed dryly and instinctively scrambled backward, crawling rather than rising, having completely lost his wits. *Don't panic, Du Deng, don't panic!*
*No matter what, this is my workshop. They definitely can't crack it.*
*As long as I don't make mistakes, sit tight in the workshop, and wait for rescue, everything will be fine...*
And then, he saw the variety of specialized breaching equipment Lou Feng pulled out, tailored specifically for external workshop defenses. He could no longer hold back a shriek!
Only a peer longed for a peer's death; the one who coveted an artisan's workshop the most was always another artisan!
Seeing Lou Feng come so thoroughly prepared, cold sweat poured down Du Deng's spine, and a scream caught in his throat.
Then, he watched as a pretty boy with a slight scar on his face pressed both hands directly against the workshop's outer entrance. Immediately, the alarm detecting a spiritus probe blared once more!
*He's going to crack it with his bare hands?!*
As a fellow member of the Embers lineage, he knew the routine all too well: first sense the spiritus, analyze the main architecture of the workshop, then find weak points... Wait, this didn't look like a probe at all!
It looked more like... an intrusion?
After a momentary fright, Du Deng froze, and then fury surged through him.
*Who the fuck are you looking down on?!*
Rank suppression was the most common phenomenon across Celestial Chosen lineages. When two practitioners belonged to the same lineage, suppression, subjugation, and control of the weaker by the stronger were everyday occurrences. With Tianyuan in particular, once there was a disparity in rank, that suppression was virtually absolute!
The Embers lineage went without saying.
A piece of work an apprentice spent heart and soul crafting would take an artisan mere minutes to reverse-engineer and dissect completely, laying bare every secret.
What was more, when the disparity exceeded an entire rank, the stronger could even forcibly wrest control of the weaker's alchemical creations and manipulate them at will.
*But who the fuck are you!*
Du Deng shakily put on a pair of spectacles. He analyzed again and again, observing closely, pondering carefully. But no matter how he looked at it, this was just a punk in the Calling stage! He hadn't even touched the periphery of being an artisan; hell, he was probably a wild-grown stray who hadn't sat through a single proper lesson, yet here he was trying to turn heaven and earth upside down against him?!
*Just with you?!*
*You think you're worthy?!*
Du Deng's expression twisted into a savage sneer. Clasping both hands around the core floating in midair, he pushed the workshop's countermeasure against external spiritus interference to its maximum limit.
He wanted to see how this little brat would scream in agony as he was roasted into charcoal and turned to ash once his matrix established a spiritus link with the workshop!
*Snap!*
In the sudden, dead silence, his expression froze on his face.
As if petrified.
At that moment, the outermost spiritus structure maintaining the camouflage lost responsiveness without warning.
The hyper-realistic illusion draped over the workshop shattered on cue!
As if it had never existed in the first place...
And then he saw that scarred little brat reach out his hand toward the workshop's perimeter defenses once more, wearing a greasy look, a sleazy grin, and an utterly infuriating smirk.
*Snap!*
Alarms blared once again. Right after the camouflage circuits, the Repulsion Perimeter lost responsiveness!
As if torn from the main body of the workshop by an invisible hand, it collapsed and evaporated in a single touch, leaving behind no trace that it had ever been there.
*Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong... This is so fucking wrong!*
Du Deng froze on the spot, fighting with every ounce of his will to suppress the urge to shriek. Yet he could no longer tell which was louder—his ragged, heavy breathing or the phantom ringing filling his ears.
*Gulp.* He forced down a swallow of saliva.
He felt as though he had fallen into a frozen abyss.
*Could it be that today I'm...*
"Phew, that feels good!"
Ji Jue let out a whistle, cocking his ear to listen to the sharp, overlapping hums as countless spiritus circuits shattered. Beneath his palms, illusion and repulsion had completely vanished.
A pitch-black gate finally emerged from the rubble, stripped of all disguise, waiting weak and helpless for the violation to come...
A massive influx of Sovereign Virtue essence flowed into his hands, seized by Deus Ex Machina and instantly refined!
The progress bar surged at a rate visible to the naked eye, almost making him groan in delight.
Now he finally understood why so many peers feared his teacher!
No matter how tightly structured a workshop was, no matter how complex or stable its circuit design, it was utterly useless against an unreasonable monstrosity like the Dissociation Art. Having more layers of defense was like wearing a few extra layers of paper clothes; once gripped, they were torn apart like toys.
Initially, when confronting the illusion, he had found it difficult to find purchase. He had needed Lou Feng's support and Tong Shan's telekinetic disruption to probe for gaps and create an opening for him.
He had no idea who had crafted the spiritus composition of that illusion camouflage. It was disciplined yet frenzied, meticulous yet rugged—a paradoxical union stitched together seamlessly. That outer layer alone had provided him a massive surge of feedback and progress.
In terms of sheer quality, it was on par with Professor Ye's creations!
What he never expected was that the toughest part of the entire workshop was actually just that outer camouflage!
It was truly a case of a glittering exterior concealing rotten fluff inside. Everything else was a by-the-book, uninspired construct—showpieces that barely passed as passable work.
Even when there was an occasional clever twist, Ji Jue could find the exact corresponding answer in the compilation of past exam problems Professor Ye had given him to practice on.
Tweak the frequency a little, adjust the detailed application, and they instantly crumbled like clay chickens and pottery dogs.
One touch made it spasm; one brush made it squeal.
Zero difficulty whatsoever, utterly fragile.
At the very least, he now knew where those bizarre, insidious exam sets had come from...
"What are you standing there for?"
Suppressing the urge to throw his head back and roar with laughter, he shot a glance at Lou Feng beside him. "Hurry up and pin its hands down for me!"
Seeing that the defenses on the outer layer of the workshop were about to shift, Lou Feng had no time to daydream. Beside his feet, two hound-like metal contraptions opened their jaws, extending thousands of spiritus circuits from their maws to burrow into the workshop's surroundings and iron gates.
Once connected, they read, sensed, converted, and even interfered!
Unlike Ji Jue, a wild apprentice raised at home, Young Master Lou lived like a true favored son in Master Kong's workshop. Everything he ought to have, he had; what other people's kids lacked, he still had; and what other kids wouldn't dare dream of having, he possessed in spades!
Even the tools Master Kong had built back in the day to dismantle other people's workshops were tossed directly to Lou Feng. Even without Ji Jue, Lou Feng could have painstakingly dismantled the workshop gates from the outside in using just the intellect and apparatus embedded in those two metal hounds; it just wouldn't have been as fast as Ji Jue.
Even so, wasn't this...
A bit too fucking fast?!
Cold sweat silently trickled down Lou Feng's back.
The hounds' intrusion merely disrupted the outer spiritus flow for a split second, yet the moment a flaw was revealed, Ji Jue seized it in his grasp. Immediately, under the Dissociation Art, it vanished into nothingness.
*Snap!*
The sound of fracturing rang out once more.
"Heh heh, heh heh heh, heh heh heh..."
Ji Jue let out an eerie chuckle, facing the barriers and seals as shattered sparks of spiritus flashed continuously.
*Go on, resist! Keep resisting! The more you struggle, the more excited I get!*
Under Tong Shan's suppression, the workshop didn't even have time to organize an effective counterattack. And during Lou Feng's breach, even if its response lagged by a split second, it was crushed in ruin by the Dissociation Art!
Facing Professor Ye's Dissociation Art and breach tools personally made by Master Kong, a workshop that could barely be considered passable had no room to resist.
With Tong Shan present, even the preset retaliatory countermeasures and creations couldn't produce the slightest effect.
In less than two minutes, every defense of the workshop from outside to inside had been stripped clean by Ji Jue amid the blaring alarms. In the end, with the wailing of its core, even the Earth Bone Sequence maintaining the defenses was shattered to pieces by the Dissociation Art, leaving behind no security whatsoever.
"Brother Shan, see this spot?"
Ji Jue waved, bossing Vegetative Tong around without the slightest hesitation. Pointing just to the left of the workshop gate's center, he traced a circle. "Right here. Hit it hard, give it a vicious one."
*Boom!*
Before his words even finished, an invisible blade of telekinesis ripped through steel, piercing into the gates like splitting bamboo, breaking through into the darkness behind, and grinding every defense to dust.
"And then?" Tong Shan asked.
"And then there is no 'and then.'"
Ji Jue stepped aside and made an inviting gesture. "Please, everyone. Our attraction isn't that big—just a couple of steps."
*Creak.*
Amid a gut-wrenching screech of metal, the tightly sealed gates slowly swung open.
Tong Shan turned back and exchanged a silent look with his teammates. Then, identical pleasant smiles broke out across their faces. Rubbing their hands, they marched in single file through the door.
*After waiting this long, we can finally vent some pent-up rage...*
Crashing sounds suddenly erupted—booms, explosions, all manner of thunderous noise, hissing gas leaks, screams, bone-snapping crunches... In an instant, the sounds behind the door formed an unending cacophony.
Yet within half a minute, silence returned.
Telekinesis extended outward, condensing into a translucent index finger that crooked toward the doorway.
When Ji Jue and Lou Feng finished packing up and walked inside, they saw a scene of utter devastation. Blood spread across the floor of the hall. A bruised and battered artisan knelt on the ground, stripped naked, both legs broken, his severed right hand lying beside him.
Seeing Ji Jue stride in, he shuddered violently, unable to control himself.
He instinctively wanted to scream.
He was even more terrified of Ji Jue than he had been of the Security Bureau barging in and beating the shit out of him.
If Ji Jue had merely been a little punk in Du Deng's eyes before, the Corrupted artisan had now reached a definitive conclusion—eight thousand percent, this was an ancient terror hijacking a kid's account!
He had never witnessed such bizarre and terrifying craft. The workshop he had poured his all into maintaining and assembling had been torn to shreds in a couple of strokes like cardboard packaging.
Asking him to believe this was a twenty-something artisan apprentice was worse than asking him to scoop out his own brain, stir it into mush, and swallow it!
*This is a Calling?!*
*Why don't you claim that I'm a Calling instead!*
At the thought of just how wicked and savage the ancient alchemical artisans who reincarnated by taking over bodies were in legends, he couldn't stop shivering.
Besides, even if he didn't know how an ancient artisan would torment him, he knew all too well how his own teacher treated materials!
If he caught this person's eye, he would truly beg for life in vain and pray for death in agony...
As he trembled violently, sweating buckets, the screech of a chair dragging across the floor sounded right in front of him.
Without standing on ceremony, someone dragged a chair over and sat down.
Ji Jue looked down, studying the twitching, contorted face.
Suddenly, he broke into a radiant smile.
"Name?"
Chapter 207