Ten thousand two hundred and forty-one meters above Luye Island, high within the vault of the stratosphere.
Beneath their feet, dark clouds surged like an ocean tide, sweeping past in furious waves. Overhead, the celestial canopy stretched pitch-black, reflecting the primal darkness of the cosmos, boundless and austere.
At this very moment, Ji Jue sat perched high above the firmament, looking down upon all creation!
"At this altitude..." Ji Jue sighed softly. "No matter how many times I look, it's always breathtaking."
*"Bleeegh!"*
A wretched sound came from beside him. It was Lou Feng, already collapsed on the ground, bleeding from all seven orifices, vomiting violently as capillaries burst across his entire body.
Blood trickled from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
In just a few short seconds, he had been rocketed from the ground straight into the stratosphere. Lou Feng had not fused into one with the Construct of Ten Thousand Hands the way Ji Jue had, and at the same time, he had been forced to mobilize his remaining spiritus reserves to satisfy Ji Jue's bottomless extravagance and squandering.
Now, he sprawled atop the hardened quicksilver, his entire frame convulsing.
His lips, bubbling with crimson foam, parted and closed with great difficulty. Regrettably, the air was far too thin, and his words of praise for Ji Jue were entirely drowned out by the silence.
What a true pity!
"Ah, my bad, completely slipped my mind!" Ji Jue hurriedly waved his hand. Liquid quicksilver instantly twined around Lou Feng, piercing into his body to seize control of his internal organs and sustain his basic vital signs.
Lou Feng rolled his eyes back, already completely past the point of speaking.
Forget talking; he barely had a single intact alveolus left in his lungs. The only reason his brain hadn't hemorrhaged on the spot was that Ji Jue had bled off the pressure in time, brutally stabilizing his blood pressure through crude, artificial means.
Just like the method Ji Jue had used to launch them into the sky.
Pure, brute-force propulsion—with enough thrust, even a brick could fly!
By utilizing the Embers blessing Melting Gold and Liquefying Stone to boost the Crucible's output, he had forcibly converted a massive volume of spiritus within an instant. After vaporizing half of his own physical body, he had used a titanic jet of steam to blast himself up here!
Simultaneously, using the Tianyuan blessing Neither Carried Nor Gathered, he eliminated the interference of gravity, anchoring himself ten thousand meters up in the stratosphere!
Between these two things, one was a blessing meant to instantaneously boost efficiency when processing materials and stripping away impurities, while the other was intended to shut out gravitational interference and maintain a target's elevation... Both were absurdly eccentric, bordering on suicidal!
In other words, that bastard had planned this out from the very start!
The scene before them was identical to what Ji Jue and Andrei had explored and tested during the original simulation: lethal rocketry, detonating leylines...
One on the ground, one in the sky.
Now, pondering the chain of events just a little sent a chill down Lou Feng's spine: back when everyone was still floundering around in the mud, had the two of them already begun scheming for this very moment?
"Unfortunately, I was a step too slow," Ji Jue remarked with a light sigh, shaking his head. "I was still missing quite a few materials."
Had he been allowed to develop for just a little longer, it wouldn't have been this troublesome. Before the duel even began, he could have flown his entire workshop directly into the stratosphere.
When that time came, what fight would there even be left to have?
Firing down from the high ground made the enemy look like utter fools.
At such a terrifying height, utterly unreachable by ordinary constructs, altitude alone was a decisive advantage. Simply chucking garbage downward would be enough to crush someone to death!
And now, he didn't need to disguise his lack of public decency anymore.
"—Time to start littering from high altitude!"
Ji Jue raised his finger. The ten thousand hands unfurled like a blooming lotus. Countless streams of quicksilver and spiritus crystals intertwined and restructured, coalescing within his palms into handle-less, razor-sharp blades.
Even without Non-Offensive's barehanded transmutations, it made no difference. So long as he carried the workshop on his back, he could do whatever he pleased wherever he went!
A bloody radiance surged and coursed along the blades.
As the old saying went—no matter how sweet the childhood friend was, she was no match for the one that dropped from the heavens!
At that moment, with a motion of Ji Jue's hand, the ten thousand hands parted, like a sudden downpour of blood-red rain.
Countless Ex-Wives and Stepmothers...
Fell from the sky!
There was no need for preparation, nor any charge-up. Relying purely on basic gravity, a distance of over ten thousand meters became the most terrifying form of acceleration.
The battered, ravaged earth shuddered violently once more.
It was utterly, completely unblockable!
Within the ten thousand hands, blood blades ceaselessly restructured and plummeted, wave after wave in an endless deluge. Beneath the piercing crimson flashes, blossoms of scarlet abruptly bloomed across the earth.
It didn't matter in the slightest if they missed their targets. The blood blades that struck the ground detonated violently, scattering countless crystalline shards, as well as... the rampant corruption Ji Jue had violently extracted from the high altitude.
The surging dark clouds all around were the finest raw material.
The thick cloud cover that spawned countless downpours of black rain needed only a little refinement to yield an abundant wealth of aberration—a bottomless reserve to squander!
In the blink of an eye, cracks spiderwebbed across the surviving workshops amidst the downpour of blood blades, leaving them teetering on the verge of collapse. But immediately after, the projection of dragon scales manifested above the workshops, shielding the 'allies' within.
And at the same time, shackling them in place!
"Andrei, what the hell are you doing?!" the trueblood of the Empire roared in fury.
The reply he received was just four words:
*—[Out of my way].*
The chiming of a bell echoed with lingering reverberations. Columns of smoke and dust abruptly erupted from the earth. Swept up by howling gales, grit and sand spiraled toward the sky.
In a split second, the empty wind was actually endowed with spiritus, stirring across the earth like a living thing and cloaking the entire island.
Then, a wind that sounded like a screeching roar surged into the heavens.
The silhouette of a colossal serpent took shape, rising, lunging straight toward Ji Jue... Regrettably, after crossing several thousand meters, it could no longer sustain its momentum.
It fell far too short.
The fading outline of the giant serpent was blown to pieces by a casual blood blade from Ji Jue.
Yet immediately after, he noticed the anomaly.
No, that wasn't right!
This was merely a smokescreen...
A distraction meant to blanket the ground, obscure Ji Jue's vision, and mask the user's real movements.
In that instant, the Construct of Ten Thousand Hands shifted without warning. Steam erupted from a cluster of palms on its left flank, translating his body laterally through the air.
Right then, he saw it—a blazing, blinding beam of light that scorched past him, almost grazing his shoulder!
The storm was torn open with a gaping maw. In that fleeting second, Ji Jue saw a colossal obelisk jutting up from another workshop.
Immediately after came a second! A third! A fourth!
Across the earth, obelisks rose rapidly one after another.
Wringing the spiritus and workshops from his 'allies', Andrei converted them into his personal domain, launching a ferocious assault toward Ji Jue ten thousand meters up in the sky.
"Fantastic, truly fantastic!" Ji Jue remarked with admiration as he dodged left and right, waving his hands to pour another torrential rain of blood blades down upon the earth, the workshops, and the obelisks.
"Fantastic my ass!" Lou Feng couldn't resist rolling his eyes. "What part of this is fantastic?!"
"The fantastic part is teamwork!" Ji Jue burst out laughing, pointing below. "Look! No matter which side wins, it'll be a triumph of friendship, passion, and camaraderie!"
Still retching, purging, and desperately trying to gather spiritus, Lou Feng rolled his eyes so hard he nearly sprained them. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to spit a mouthful of old blood right onto Ji Jue's face.
Friendship? Camaraderie?
You two bastards catch people like someone grabbing toads, squeeze your 'allies' dry like disposable tools, and toss them aside when you're done!
And passion?
You've already chilled my damn heart down to absolute zero!
"Sit tight and hold on," Ji Jue said without looking back as he maneuvered through the air. "I won't be able to look after you for what comes next..."
Uncle here is about to hit the accelerator!
With a flick of his finger, liquid quicksilver enveloped Lou Feng, pinning him firmly and slinging him toward the rear.
The ten thousand hands above the firmament abruptly accelerated. Arms overlapped one upon another until, in the end, countless fingers emerged from the flowing silver and aligned.
A streak of crimson lanced forth from his fingertips!
This was no longer simple high-altitude bombardment. This time, an unbroken thread of quicksilver traversed the ten-thousand-meter expanse, descending straight down onto the earth.
Like a greatsword ten thousand meters long!
In a single flick of the finger, it pierced sky and earth together as one.
A direct thrust!
The veil of sand was completely penetrated. After crossing ten thousand meters, the lightning-fast edge sliced straight along the seams between the dragon scales, sinking directly into the workshop.
It struck and instantly withdrew.
Only then did a torrential deluge of scarlet and corruption erupt from behind the fissure like a geyser!
*Boom!*
An obelisk split right down the middle, collapsing.
More than that, in that brief fraction of a second, the colossal tide of corrupted spiritus injected into it had corroded the vital nexus beyond all recognition.
Yet at the very same time, Andrei seized the critical opening. A streak of scorching light shot up into the sky, barreling straight toward Ji Jue, only to be held at bay by a hardened quicksilver shield.
A chill ran through Ji Jue's heart, accompanied by relief that he hadn't tried to take that hit with his face.
The quicksilver shield severed from his main body rapidly decayed and broke down upon taking a direct hit from that beam of light, slipping entirely from his control and tumbling toward the earth.
The operation of Fluid Alchemy had been disrupted.
No—more accurately, it had been erased!
This wasn't a simple separation of matter and spirit, but some far more bizarre effect lurking beneath the surface—a terrifying threat that rivaled Professor Ye's Dissociation Art!
It looked more like...
Devolution!?
In a flash, realization dawned on Ji Jue: under the opponent's interference, the processing and effects he had applied to the material were rolling back to their initial state!
Just like rewinding a tape, or hitting 'Undo' in a text editor!
No matter how intricate the creation was, beneath Andrei's interference, every trace of post-refinement processing and modification would be stripped away, returning it to its primal essence.
When inflicted upon the Construct of Ten Thousand Hands, its manifestation was to completely knock the quicksilver controlled by Fluid Alchemy back to its original form, reverting it to plain purified quicksilver.
Yet a new question instantly surfaced in his mind.
With an effect this terrifying, how did Andrei prevent it from affecting himself?
It was just like the age-old conundrum of alchemy—even if one truly created a universal solvent, what kind of vessel could possibly hold it?
Unless... it was just like the technique Andrei had demonstrated earlier...
—Constancy!
These were two entirely different spiritus arts and applications: first using the spiritus art of Constancy to maintain his own immutability, then utilizing the devolution effect to force his opponent's creations back to their origins.
The coordination and use of these two might very well stem from Andrei's matrix and innate abilities themselves, just like Ji Jue's imitation of Non-Offensive and his quicksilver workshop!
Fixity and flux, regression and dissolution!
Two vastly different legacies and arts were now clashing head-on in absolute opposition!
"Now things are getting interesting."
Ji Jue gave a soundless chuckle and reached out once more. "A rare opportunity like this... Let's give this a try!"
Once again, memories of the past surfaced in his mind.
Back in the darkness of the hospital, the rising phantom of the Sage, and the formless sword shaped by the grip and mastery of infinite hands.
That was the sublime transformation displayed to the inheritor by the spirit of the Sage of Quicksilver!
Non-Offensive, Universal Concord, Universal Love, Will of Heaven, Explaining Ghosts...
Countless divine essences and variations far beyond Ji Jue's reach had coursed and manifested upon that blade. Even now, he could barely comprehend a fraction of them.
Yet at the same time, the memory of seizing total control above Quancheng surfaced in his mind—the sensation of All-Domain Circulation Control.
When the two overlapped, a hazy epiphany—half-understood, half-obscure—welled up from the depths of his heart.
He knew not whether it was right or wrong, nor could he measure gain and loss.
Under the pressure of reality, the moment all those chaotic insights rose and extinguished within his mind, what flickered before his eyes was an ethereal, shimmering phantom.
A silvery radiance of Revolution, rising from the sparks of the Embers!
It seemed, it looked, it might, it should be—
—just like this!
Chapter 290