In this world, every great clan and prestigious house worthy of being called an ancient lineage held vast sway and power over every domain: wealth, status, prestige, and military might.
Take the Tong family, for example. No matter how low a profile they kept, they were still a colossus that could make all of Yacheng tremble with a stamp of their foot and stir waves across Haizhou with a single turn.
The Lou family was no different, yielding nothing to them.
Generation after generation had spared no effort in internal strife, cutthroat rivalry, and ruthless accumulation. Accumulated over decades and centuries down to the present day, their vast riches, unshakeable authority, towering prestige, and deep heritage...
It was not something a wild-grown Celestial Chosen like Ji Jue could fathom or measure up to.
Take spiritus shaping alone. In the hands of the Lou family, it had been developed to peak versatility, synthesizing countless innovations across the various Sovereign Virtue paths.
The purity of Ascension, the destructive force of Entropy, the mutability of Embers, the suppression of Tianyuan... The variations were endless.
What Ji Jue was sensing right now was precisely the spiritus resonance unique to the heirs of the Lou clan.
It was a tracking device that Lou Feng had painstakingly crafted after staying up an entire day and night, made solely to locate his aunt.
With the spiritus fragment he had just retrieved from his toolbox tucked against his chest, the moment Ji Jue stepped onto the third floor, he felt its faint vibration.
Were he to pull it out, he would surely see the flickers of light upon the fragment swirling and converging in the direction of the Precious Material Storage.
Even as he breathed a sigh of relief, his heart sank.
She really ended up inside the material storage...
Could anyone even survive in there?
And even if she were alive, wouldn't it be a living hell?
He wasn't afraid of hard labor or exhaustion, but his real fear was that after straining through hardship and sneaking his way through that door, he'd find some creature covered in fur squatting on the floor, staring back at him.
Even if it didn't call him 'Big Brother,' calling him 'Nephew' wouldn't be any better!
If Lou Feng ended up collapsing on the floor and bawling his eyes out, was Ji Jue supposed to join in for company?
In any case, he had to get the camera ready first.
Just as he was clumsily moving and sorting cargo, heavy footsteps sounded outside the storage room. The bald woman beside him abruptly went pale.
She grabbed Ji Jue.
Yanking him back toward the door of the storehouse, she frantically lowered her head.
Waiting in deferent silence.
Ji Jue didn't dare act recklessly either. He lowered his head and followed suit. Soon, numerous footsteps echoed as a crowd entered through the doors. Several figures clad in black robes led the way, with a dense crowd following behind them.
They marched straight forward without pausing.
They seemed to be carrying something.
Not daring to look up, Ji Jue could only peek through the pinhole camera hidden on the cart. Through an opening on the handle and the reflection of an internal lens, it captured the scene outside in an awkward yet exquisitely concealed manner.
At the head of the procession walked a bald, clean-shaven old man whose face was etched with deep wrinkles. His emerald-green eyes held a contained flame; a single glance from him was enough to make one's blood run cold.
Kanemoto!
Attending him diligently at his sides were naturally his many disciples, while several others carried a massive chest straight toward the back. Eager disciples hurried ahead to disengage the verification wards and locks, and once the heavy door swung open, the group vanished beyond it.
Unfortunately, the space behind the door lay within the camera's blind spot.
Head bowed, Ji Jue did not dare look.
He even pressed down on the spiritus fragment to quell its vibrations, cutting off its effect.
Before long, the group emerged. Unlike their hurried arrival, their steps were slow as they departed.
The bald woman edged forward slightly, pasting on a fawning smile as she pushed the door open for them. The artisan in front gave a slight nod without saying a word.
It was routine.
Yet Kanemoto's footsteps paused slightly. He glanced toward Ji Jue, who stood with head lowered behind the woman, scrutinizing him.
In an instant, Ji Jue's heart leapt into his throat.
His whole body stiffened, his pulse spiking as cold sweat drenched his back.
Still, that was nothing more than the natural reaction of a lowly grunt suddenly caught in the gaze of a powerhouse—hardly suspicious.
He quickly realized the reason...
It likely wasn't that he had made a mistake, but simply that his current appearance was an eyesore. Leaning on a crutch, he stood out far too much in a crowd.
"Who is that?" Kanemoto asked.
Cunling, accompanying him at his side, brightened up and stepped forward to reply, "An apprentice working down in the tra—in the reclamation department. He has decent comprehension and some potential for the future."
"Future?"
Kanemoto could not have cared less. Hearing that, he merely sneered, casting a sideways glance at his student. "Even someone like you dares to talk to me about the future?"
Cunling's face twitched. He lowered his head even further.
"This student was shallow."
There was no cliché of a grandmaster being struck by a sudden whim to test a nobody. Kanemoto's time was far too valuable to squander on irrelevant small fry, so he simply flicked his sleeve and walked off.
The others scrambled to follow.
In just a few seconds, the storehouse fell cold and silent once more.
Only the bald woman was left wiping away cold sweat, letting out a long breath.
"The grand artisan's presence grows sharper and heavier by the day," she murmured in awe, looking over at Ji Jue. "How did it feel?"
"I couldn't really tell you about a heavy presence," Ji Jue replied with a wry smile, dutifully playing the part of a terrified grunt. "All I know is my knees were knocking together, I broke into a cold sweat, and I was scared half to death."
"Having awe in your heart is a good thing. At least the grand artisan looked your way once. If you get another chance in the future, perform well."
The bald woman waved her hand, urging him to finish up his chores before sending him on his way.
Ji Jue didn't dare dawdle. After making his way back down to the waste reclamation area, he sat down in the supervisor's sofa chair, lost in thought.
As for Sun Ci, whose seat had been taken, he didn't dare say a peep. He obediently pulled up a chair nearby and sat down.
A middle-aged corporate drudge who had grown accustomed to the beatings of life had long discarded unrealistic dreams.
What came with that was a crystal-clear understanding of his place.
Though Ji Jue had thoroughly played him, at least he had been fed sweet treats until he nearly burst. Clawing his way out of a desperate dead end and landing this supervisor position was something a low-level manager couldn't have dared to dream of.
Being pushed around a bit was utterly trivial by comparison.
Unlike the small fry of White Stag whose ambitions reached for the heavens, the beasts of burden in Embers were always soberly self-aware. They didn't mind being a big shot's lapdog in the slightest. What was more, he was even hoping that once Ji Jue gradually made a name for himself, he would pull him along for the ride!
As for the possibility that the boss was an undercover agent? Ha, don't make him laugh. That aura of corruption on him was purer than Sun Ci's own—you're telling me he's a spy?
You might as well say I'm the spy!
"When did you get here?" Ji Jue asked, 'snapping out of it' and looking over.
"Just now, just now!"
Sun Ci scrambled to his feet at once, answering deferentially, "The pass and clearances you asked for earlier are all taken care of. From here on, outside the workshop's perimeter alert zones, the use of alchemical creations won't be restricted.
"And the materials you asked for, I've brought them all. They're right here. Please check through them, and if anything's off, I'll go find someone."
"Just leave them there."
Ji Jue nodded and waved his hand. Sun Ci tactfully took his leave to patrol the outer perimeter.
Ji Jue reached out to lift the lid of the metal container, gazing at the silvery liquid shimmering inside. Reaching into his toolbox, he grabbed a handful of hardened beads and tossed them in.
In an instant, the mercury seemed to boil. One after another, mercury spiders the size of a pinky fingernail crawled out, creating a terrifying spectacle that could send anyone with arachnophobia or trypophobia straight into intensive care.
A truly immense swarm of spiders surged and roiled forth, almost submerging his shins and knees.
At Ji Jue's command, they quickly melted into the shadows, slipping down floor drains and into ceiling ventilation grates, vanishing into the distance with faint rustling whispers.
As most of the spiders crawled, they silently burst apart, leaving behind only a slender filament clinging to the drainage pipes or air ducts that stretched ever onward.
The vestigial spirits returned along these fine threads, landing in Ji Jue's palm to condense once more into hardened mercury beads.
Reclaimed.
With the coordinated effort of these numerous vestigial-spirit creations, Ji Jue's network unfolded layer by layer from the subterranean workshop, weaving through the gaps he had scouted over the past two days and extending toward the upper levels.
Yet it halted at the second floor at most, and strictly remained along the perimeter.
Any further inward would likely trigger some alarm.
And if he dared push upward...
He wouldn't even need that old codger Kanemoto to show up; his disciples would throw their heads back in mocking laughter and teach him that the Six Crafts and Six Artisans were never pushovers.
If you were going to cause trouble, you did it quietly in the dark. Going head-to-head with them when outmatched was pure idiocy.
Once the lines were laid, various scenes unfolded before his eyes through the lenses of the pinhole cameras... Right now, in this massive workshop, there were likely over sixty artisans laboring around the clock at a frantic pace.
Their creations and works were all identical to what Ji Jue had seen in Du Deng's workshop.
Fulcrums or frameworks.
It was as though they were preparing for a gargantuan secret ritual, but Ji Jue could not make heads or tails of it. He could only transcribe the interior scene onto a page of a record tome before storing it back in his toolbox.
At long last, in the outermost area, he located an exit.
After a moment's thought, Ji Jue sorted through various components. Soon, three mechanical spiders took shape in his hands. Running them through Deus Ex Machina once, he dropped them into the air duct.
A few minutes later, by the bustling, noisy loading dock, the three mechanical spiders pushed open the ventilation grate, dropped to the ground, scurried onto a crate, and were hauled onto a truck.
Once the loading was finished, an apprentice slapped the truck's cargo bed, and the battered truck slowly rumbled out.
And thus, the chaotic outside world came into Ji Jue's view.
Beneath an iridescent haze over an eternal, gloomy night sky, the distant outskirts of Quancheng thundered endlessly. Streaks of light plummeted from the sky one after another, trailing blazing tails of fire before crashing onto the earth, throwing up violent shockwaves.
Fierce flashes lit up the firmament from time to time, followed swiftly by tremors across the land.
Viewed from the outside, the workshop looked like a phantasm, lingering between existence and nonexistence. Through its translucent outline, one could faintly make out the ruins and buildings behind it.
Walls of containment etched with circuits rose from the earth, encircling the perimeter to seal the deeper interior within.
One could vaguely glimpse a boundary membrane riddled with holes, as well as colossal chains that flashed into view from thin air only to vanish again, binding the thrashing entity trapped inside.
Amid the roaring din, tides of spiritus repeatedly battered the high walls.
The engine of the Celestial Rail train was struggling violently, mired deep in the mire...
For the first time, he was this close.
A mere few hundred meters.
Yet it felt like an insurmountable chasm.
Chapter 226