So many things arrive without warning.
Like upheaval and collapse; like calamity and death.
Even if there had been countless clues to keep people vigilant, none could know how those spreading traces would intertwine deep beneath the earth, nor when they would sprout into monstrosities of disaster.
Against this, of what use were endless purges, relentless vigilance, repeated scrutinies, and careful calculations?
When it finally broke through the soil, when the flood surged over the dikes, when torrential rain poured from the heavens, and when a tsunami ravaged the land, there was nothing left to do except mount a desperate, passive response with whatever meager preparations existed.
Just as it was now.
Ten minutes before the Quancheng cataclysm.
A soaring blaze erupted from the wilderness beyond the outpost.
The Association's construction site.
Piercing sirens abruptly cut out as power circuits blew apart. Across the vast expanse of the worksite, towering structures reaching toward the sky crackled with brilliant electrical arcs. Countless streams of spiritus surged wildly out of control, painting the pitch-black night sky in a sickening array of colors amidst the blasts and turmoil.
What followed close behind was a terrifying contamination that eclipsed even what lay inside Quancheng.
Deep within the primary materials warehouse, massive storage vats that had been moved in without anyone realizing triggered a chain reaction of explosions. An ocean of corruption and mutational dust collected from the Recycling and Disposal Department billowed into the sky upon the storm, transforming the entire worksite into a demonic realm in an instant.
The very contamination that countless artisans and apprentices had spent days and nights painstakingly extracting and siphoning away was now dumped back onto everyone's heads in this horrific fashion.
Mutations sprouted like bamboo shoots after rain—bursting from the ground, the walls, the conduits, and every inch of the air. Elusive phantoms flickered into view, while wailing figures crawled out from mud and gore.
Only seconds ago, everything had been proceeding as normal, with everyone carrying out the emergency construction around the clock. Yet in just a few blinks of an eye, the entire scene had become unrecognizable.
Above the severed towers now overgrown with flesh, bizarre eyes opened one after another, glaring down at everything below.
Under the erosion of corruption, the overall design—once perfectly ordinary, if slightly complex—offered no resistance whatsoever. It was as if it had been meant to be this way all along, succumbing naturally to its present form.
As countless spiritus circuits disassembled and reconnected, everything rapidly warped beyond recognition.
It was like a classical landscape scroll transformed into the infernal pits of Naraka after someone added just a few strokes and splashed filthy ink across the parchment.
With its disguise stripped away, the malice woven into the design from the very beginning showed itself, revealing a sinister face that even its creators had never anticipated.
A hideous, manic laugh.
Wailing echoed everywhere, drowning the air in screams and weeping.
Amidst the billowing smoke and contamination, survivors struggled in panic.
What is happening? What the hell? Just... what went wrong?
After surviving the initial blast and the surge of corruption, apprentices and artisans who had narrowly escaped the blast core struggled desperately, crying out for rescue.
Yet the clever ones concealed their presence the moment the initial chaos subsided, slipping into hiding and fleeing for their lives without a backward glance.
A river does not freeze three feet deep in a single cold day.
Now that this fortress of utter evil had been erected, anyone facing the bloody ruins before them knew better than to attempt to turn the tide. Preserving one's life came first.
Whether this was the work of an insider, an ambush, or a pawn on some grand chessboard...
Neither the Association nor the Security Bureau could be trusted anymore!
"Teacher, save me! Save me... Teacher! Teacher..."
Behind a door, cries came from within a sea of flames.
Covered in blood, a master artisan dragged himself up by a length of rebar, staring blankly at the gruesome sight. He watched helplessly as his student burned in the fire, watched as tentacles and mutated organs burst from the boy's body.
For a moment, Zhou Chong opened his mouth, desperately wanting to say something.
Yet amidst the smoke and ash, he could make no sound. Raising a maimed arm, he pointed his remaining fingers toward his student's face from afar.
The cries abruptly stopped.
The corpse in the flames ceased its thrashing, reducing to ash.
As the smoke churned, turbid tears mingled with blood trailed down Zhou Chong's face, though it was impossible to tell how much of it was sorrow...
He turned his head away, pushed himself up, and stumbled out of the inferno. His mouth opened in a soundless roar—screaming, cursing, his voice burned away by the flames alongside his white hair.
When he finally broke free of the ruined temporary workshop, staggering and gasping for breath, he saw a figure standing in the center of the construction grounds.
She bore neither wounds nor panic. Her mottled short hair swayed gently in the scorching wind.
It was as if she had been waiting for a long time.
She looked back over her shoulder.
"Hm?"
The corners of her eyes lifted slightly as she inspected him. "You actually survived?"
Seeing her cold demeanor and looking down at the artisans and apprentices lying around her feet—half-dead, teetering between life and death—Zhou Chong's eyes turned bloodshot, and he could no longer hold back.
"Ye Xian!"
Zhou Chong's face contorted. "Have you lost your mind?! How could you... Even if you bear a grudge against me, what did the others do to..."
Amidst his furious roars and accusations, Ye Xian casually looked away, entirely uninterested.
"I gave you too much credit,"
she sighed with regret. "I thought this was a gentleman's radical reinvention; I thought I had underestimated the world's heroes. But seeing you now, Master Zhou, with your courage and magnanimity, you're only fit to squat on your tiny plot of land and squeeze your apprentices dry. You wouldn't dare cross the Association and the Security Bureau...
"Whatever. Just go to sleep!"
With a wave of her hand, bizarre shadows suddenly rose from the darkness dancing in the firelight behind her. Like a pair of strange wings extending without limit, they engulfed Master Zhou in an instant.
In the span of a single breath, the collision, invasion, defense, interference, and correction of spiritus began and concluded at dizzying speed.
The sounds of shattering echoed incessantly.
Heavily injured and dazed, darkness fell across Master Zhou's vision. Stripped of all power to resist, he collapsed to the ground, helpless. The only thing he heard was a cold whisper:
"Lie still and stay out of the way."
The wing-like shadows shifted, coalescing into a giant hand that scooped him up by the collar and tossed him into the pile of bodies. Zhou Chong strained to lift his head, glaring at Ye Xian's back, but in the end, he could hold on no longer and blacked out completely.
Ye Xian looked up, gazing into the depths of the burning site.
Watching a figure stumble out from among the thickets of aberration, her expression shifted slightly. After a long pause, she murmured, "I see. It seems I really did underestimate people."
Emerging through the cleared flames, Master Kong paused, covered in soot. Seeing Ye Xian walking toward her with a deadpan expression, she froze, then shook her head emphatically. "It wasn't me!"
"I know,"
Ye Xian replied as she brushed past, leaving behind a command: "Take care of those burdens."
With that, she walked straight toward the space behind Master Kong.
Beneath a severed, flesh-warped tower, a withered, hunched figure slowly came into view amidst the dancing flames and dense smoke as Ye Xian advanced.
He had been sitting there from the very beginning, motionless.
He had merely watched everything unfold, a cold observer enjoying the gruesome disaster and drama playing out before his eyes.
Master Kong felt as though struck by lightning, cold sweat drenching her back.
She had just walked out from that very area, yet in the chaos and trauma, she had failed to notice him in the slightest. What terrified her even more, however, was that person's face.
It was so old.
It was a face she knew so well, yet at this moment, it felt utterly alien and unbelievable.
The master dispatched by the Association, the director overseeing all alchemical work in Quancheng, the master who had proposed and governed the entire construction project and its every procedure...
Duan Mu!
Master Kong stiffened, glaring at him instinctively. But soon, biting her lip in shame and fury, she turned and left with the survivors without hesitation.
Only Ye Xian stepped forward, gazing at that aged face that seemed permanently etched with wrinkles and misery.
Curiosity filled her eyes.
"Master Duan is unharmed?"
Duan Mu smiled nonchalantly and looked at her. "And what about you, Master Ye? As I recall, you were working down in the deep shaft, weren't you? That was the most dangerous place of all.
"When the corruption flooded back in, I thought you would die down there."
"Fortunately, I have a foul temper. I never trust anyone, I find everyone an eyesore, and I can never bring myself to rely on others, so I always make my own little preparations.
"On the other hand, Master Duan, you've truly shocked me."
Ye Xian kept her hands in her pockets, studying him seriously. "To suddenly pull off something this massive... no one could tell from this that you're the frail old man you always claim to be.
"Should I praise you like an old steed that still yearns to gallop a thousand li?
"It truly couldn't have been easy."
"Easy? Actually, it was quite easy."
Duan Mu showed no pride, nor any delight.
As the instigator of all this, he ought to have been gloating, mocking her from a position of triumph. Yet facing Ye Xian's words, that face full of grief and wrinkles only appeared older.
He merely let out a weary sigh.
"As long as one's skin is thick enough, one can naturally fight on despite repeated defeats. As long as one can crawl back up, one is naturally indomitable... But such praise for losers is nothing more than poison sprinkled over an open wound, meant only to fool people."
Duan Mu looked up at the sky and sighed, unable to keep from chuckling. "For all these years, everyone treated me as an exemplar of a late bloomer, a model of perseverance. But not a day passed where I didn't think to myself: why couldn't the late bloomer, the indomitable one, be someone else? Why did it have to be me?"
Ye Xian fell silent, saying nothing.
Within the Association of the Ring of Taiyi, and in the minds of all artisans, Duan Mu's existence was the very embodiment of an inspirational tale.
He had experienced an Autonomous Awakening at the age of thirty-one, throwing himself into the Embers well past the typical age for an apprentice. He drifted among workshops, suffering rejection after rejection, yet fighting on after every failure.
At forty, after nine long years, he had obtained his artisan's license as an elderly Ember who had entered the craft halfway through life.
By all rights, this should have earned him endless praise, dropped jaws everywhere, and shocked everyone for a whole year.
Unfortunately, during that very same examination, in the very same exam hall, there sat a fourteen-year-old boy. The youth had no faction, no foundational backing, no elders, and no teacher. Relying only on introductory pamphlets from the Association, he had taught himself the craft in a single year. Using a paper formatted completely wrong, he proposed fourteen conclusions and four principles that laid the foundation for modern alchemy's newest frontier.
By the time Duan Mu proved his worth, broke through his limits step by step, climbed the ranks of the Association, and claimed the title of Master, that taciturn youth had long since become an Ember Grandmaster and a living Sage: the Plowsmith.
When Duan Mu, in his advanced years, rallied his strength to revive the Aggregation lineage, the future of the Aggregation branch was dismissed with a single sentence from Grandmaster Tianlu.
The revival failed. Decades after the branch's decline, Duan Mu bided his time and made a comeback, proposing brand-new theories to rise from the ashes. Yet during that year's Master evaluation, he encountered a rebellious roadblock who had broken from tradition and cast herself out of her sect—a person named Ye Xian...
The theories and achievements he had suffered a lifetime to complete were rendered obsolete and worthless by the paper Ye Xian submitted, less than five days after his own.
Even so, he had not given up. Until today, he had continued his pursuit.
So many tragedies, so many tortures, so many failures.
They had practically filled Duan Mu's life.
Any single one of those blows would have been enough to break an ordinary person, yet he had endured and overcome them all. Today, he was a master standing above tens of thousands, the textbook example of a late bloomer.
Yet no one knew just how much Duan Mu hated the words "late bloomer."
How much he hated himself.
And how much he hated that meager talent of his—far inferior to those above, and only barely superior to those below.
"That year, when I met you during the Master evaluation, I knew that one day, you would reach heights I could never even imagine in this lifetime.
"Even now, I still believe that,"
Duan Mu sighed softly. "All I hoped for was to exhaust what little remained of my years to push forward—just a little further. As long as I could take one more step forward, that would be enough."
Ye Xian asked, "If so, why change your course now?"
"Probably because... I can no longer walk?"
Duan Mu's face twitched, looking caught between tears and laughter. "Seven years ago, I realized that no matter how hard I toiled day and night, it served no purpose other than to move myself and touch others.
"At best, I was merely running in place."
Stuck where he was, unable to advance.
Amidst his futile struggles, he watched figure after figure overtake him from behind. He watched the targets he yearned to pursue drift further and further away. He watched himself grow senile day by day, truly degenerating into a useless old relic.
When he called his student by the wrong name for the fourth time, he suddenly realized just how lofty the Embers were.
And just how mediocre he was...
"Tell me, Master Ye, why should it be like this?"
Duan Mu looked at her without anger or spite. Or perhaps he was simply trying his best to maintain an air of composure, unwilling to let Ye Xian look down on him even now.
"The Embers were generous enough to guide me onto this path, yet cruel enough to drive me to such confusion and despair. Whence came the tragedy of my life?
"Why did the heavens give birth to me, if only for this?"
He raised his hand and caressed his peeling, aged face, whispering softly, "What did the gift of the Embers and the crucible of this world intend to forge me into?
"Scrap in the furnace? Or dross in the ash?"
He looked at the artisan before him and asked solemnly, "Is it truly a delusion for a piece of scrap iron to wish to become gold?"
"It is only natural,"
Ye Xian nodded decisively. "To transcend mediocrity, to turn stone into gold, to cast off one's former husk and form—even ordinary iron can step into the realm of gold.
"Is that not the very purpose for which alchemy exists?"
"Yes. That is why I have made peace with it,"
Duan Mu nodded gently.
A smile finally surfaced on that fractured face. "A crooked path is still a path, so long as it leads somewhere. I still want to keep moving forward, as far as I can go. Taking even a single step forward is better than pacing in place.
"To a genius like you, my shameless display must look utterly ridiculous, doesn't it?"
Ye Xian asked indifferently, "Would you care?"
"...I can no longer afford to."
Duan Mu grinned. Behind his peeling flesh, thick darkness and savagery emerged as scarlet eyes opened one after another from the gloom.
In that instant, countless roars and wails resonated within the churning darkness, overlapping into a bizarre echo:
"Master Ye, please tell me..."
he asked, "Did I walk far enough this time?"
In the distance, a thundering rumble shook the mortal realm. The white mist churned and dissipated, replaced by an endless black tide that surged toward the outpost like a tsunami, carrying a sea of aberrations and lingering spirits!
And right before Ye Xian, Duan Mu's aged body cracked and shattered layer by layer. The corrupt form forged within the crucible of Stagnant Rot slowly unfolded. Swirling darkness coalesced into a four-armed giant over three meters tall, bearing seven eyes upon its face, its gaze alternating between mercy and cruelty. Boundless spiritus circuits wound around its form like gold and glazed glass.
Amidst hysterical laughter, an aura far surpassing the Raw Stone rank surged forth, crushing the surroundings with immense pressure.
—A Celestial-Human!
Chapter 209