When they set out, the blazing sun shone overhead, the sky clear and boundless for ten thousand li.
Yet barely half an hour later, dark clouds veiled the firmament. Soon after, amid the gusting of a thick, heavy, biting wind, earth-shattering thunder erupted, echoing through the mountains.
Countless boulders tumbled down from the mountain slopes, cutting off the path ahead.
Even that "road" was nothing more than narrow passes left behind in the past or trails carved out by nature. On this plateau where peaks crisscrossed like blades, any so-called "road" was merely a stretch of ground where wheels could barely manage to pass.
Then, as bean-sized raindrops plummeted from the sky with bone-chilling cold, every path and mountainside rapidly turned to mud. The rumble of landslides and the boom of thunder overlapped in an unending roar.
Over the course of the morning, after leaving the plateau's outer rim and venturing deep into Kunwu, even with Little Niuma's mobility, they had managed to advance barely three hundred kilometers... Considering that on any slope short of a sheer ninety degrees, Little Niuma's torque could push through unimpeded, the sheer treachery of the terrain spoke for itself.
Even more lethal were the constantly shifting terrain and the raging flash floods brought by the torrential downpour.
Many routes that originally wound through the angles and crevasses between mountains had now transformed into torrential riverbeds draining the deluge. Above, beneath skies smothered by gloom, not a trace of sunlight could be seen—only the eerie glare of lightning lancing across.
In the pitch-black murk, the entire world was shrouded behind a heavy curtain of rain.
Before signal was lost entirely, the radio had only managed to convey a final disaster broadcast: due to shifts in ocean currents and offshore storms, the chain reaction of massive cold air masses pushing north had brought rainfall unprecedented in decades to more than half the Federation. Haizhou had already issued an emergency downpour warning; City Hall had ground to a halt, and virtually all production had ceased...
The downpour hammered down without end. Occasionally, it paused for a few minutes, only to brew an even more violent storm.
Halfway up the mountain, near a stable shelf of bedrock, Ji Jue pushed open the rear cargo door and launched a third drone into the raging wind and rain that surged inside.
Yet after it flew out, it lost signal within minutes, plunging somewhere far in the distance.
*Boom!*
Amid the deafening roar of a massive rockslide, a flash of lightning slashed across the sky, illuminating a bizarre silhouette between the mountains: a behemoth several kilometers long winding silently past.
Segments of a pale, eerie skeletal body squirmed like a snake's spine. No head or tail could be seen, nor any limbs. Floating in midair like a wraith, it glided effortlessly through the gale and downpour, drifting into the distance.
Now and then it burrowed into the clouds to hunt colossal prey; now and then it dove along the winds into rifts and mountain torrents.
And swiftly, it vanished.
Leaving Ji Jue drenched in cold sweat.
Calamity, Bane, Ruin, Extinction, Demise... The five-tier rating system for calamity beasts had an abyss of horrifying disparity between each rank.
The one that had just passed was at least Bane-rank—it might even be Ruin-rank!
And that was already the second one they had seen today...
Although Ji Jue liked to think he was someone who had seen his share of the world—after all, he had killed a Nether Sea Worm—he wasn't so full of himself that he couldn't tell virtual reality from the real thing.
A big-nosed master had once said: no matter how strong you are in a game, it's all fake... If Ji Jue were truly placed in front of an actual Nether Sea Worm, he wouldn't make a peep, scrambling as far away as humanly possible.
At his current level, he could manage against Calamity- or Bane-rank beasts. But if he really ran into a Ruin-rank, without pulling out his ultimate trump cards, he'd probably be in serious trouble. And even if he did pull them out, if a rival lurking nearby seized the opening, he could easily be wiped out in one stroke.
All he could say was... thank goodness he had eliminated Tiancheng's contestants before leaving the snowfields.
Otherwise, with a woman like Maya and her abilities in these mountains, who knew how many calamity beasts she could have riled up to drown Ji Jue in a tide of monsters?
"Come to think of it, there's a question I've never quite understood."
In the rear compartment, An Ning was squatting on the floor. Even though both of them had faced the raging wind and rain together, Ji Jue was soaked to the bone while not a drop touched her. Observing Ji Jue awkwardly wringing out water, her gaze fell upon his hand—
at the extra ring on his finger.
"What is it?" Ji Jue asked, puzzled. Surely she wasn't spooked because his method had been too sinister—plucking a rival and turning her directly into gear?
"Ji Jue-ge, you're an artisan, right?"
An Ning asked curiously, "Yet you have surprisingly little equipment."
Aside from the dual-blessed fluid quicksilver, the gear Ji Jue carried on his person amounted to just a ring of Transcendent Vision, a necklace of the Mouth of the Ancient, a bone blade, a bell, and a trump-card Mirror of Contained Forms... The strengthening blessings on Little Niuma and Pan Ying didn't even count as gear he wore, to say nothing of consumables like bullets.
Though none was low in quality, and among ordinary Celestial Chosen this collection would already mark him as wealthy, it hardly matched his standing as an artisan—not to mention that Ji Jue came from a prestigious lineage with extraordinary craft.
"I'd love to be decked out in gold and silver from head to toe, but I haven't had the luxury. I've only been financially comfortable for a month or two," Ji Jue said with a self-deprecating smile and a shrug. "Besides, how long have I even been studying alchemy?"
To truly craft a masterpiece with care, the time an artisan spent was often measured in years—selecting materials, formulating proportions, designing, determining blessing conditions, correcting and guiding the spiritus structure, and mastering the final outcome. The details involved across the four stages of the creative process—Ascension, Purification, Transmutation, and Integration—were countless.
More often than not, it failed to achieve the desired effect in the end, having to be dismantled and scrapped to start over from scratch.
Even after becoming an artisan, Ji Jue's only formal creation was Pan Ying. And that was still a semi-finished piece, built on a foundation that had required a multitude of precious materials and a significant amount of time just to complete.
Even if Ji Jue didn't share the perfectionism of his teacher, Ye Xian, holding to the philosophy that "making do is fine as long as it gets the job done," it at least had to be presentable enough that peers wouldn't laugh him out of the room.
Not to mention the sheer convenience of Deus Ex Machina; relying on it, he could already resolve over ninety percent of his problems. The rest called for targeted reinforcement.
Naturally, quality trumped quantity.
Tools were an aid to an artisan, not a burden. Even Ye Xian, aside from his Guigong and the Omen Series he carried, wore no more than two or three blessed creations.
After all, useful as blessed creations were, they did not come without a price.
Their essence was using materials as vessels for blessings, bound together through the architecture of spiritus circuits—much like an external, general-purpose matrix plug-in interfacing with a Celestial Chosen's matrix to gain effects and functions their own matrix and blessings lacked.
This meant that no matter how good an external graphics card or peripheral was, it still taxed the CPU and motherboard, and still consumed power—often extravagantly so.
Likewise, a Celestial Chosen had to bear the burden imposed by extra blessings.
As for gear that required no infusion or control from the user, could restore its own spiritus and operate itself, possessing an internal, flexible intellect capable of thinking, adapting, and cooperating... Heh. Even some large-scale workshops had only one or two such items—barely enough for their own use, let alone to put up for sale.
If not for his honorary grandmaster casually lending him a helping hand back then, Ji Jue probably couldn't have created a work like Isis in reality even if he went bankrupt.
"Even with Non-Offensive letting me perform refinements anytime and anywhere, crafting blessed creations isn't so simple," Ji Jue said slowly as he returned to the driver's seat. "Sometimes you don't get what you pay for, but if you don't pour any heart and effort into it, you certainly can't produce a masterpiece."
"Hm?"
An Ning caught the underlying meaning in Ji Jue's words, her gaze falling upon the ring on his right hand. "You mean this one doesn't count either? It looks quite exquisite already."
"..."
Ji Jue's expression grew conflicted. "At best, it's just a semi-finished product."
Even though it seemed flawless to An Ning, compared to Ji Jue's initial goal, all that could be said was that small could still be cute.
Poison Heart—that was the name Ji Jue had given it.
Composed of three blessings, it was a piece of protective gear designed specifically against the Ascension and Heart Pivot branches. In terms of purpose, it had accomplished its objective—and then some.
To draw an analogy, it was like the scapegoat doll Maya had used before: drawing on his experience with spiritus refinement and the creation of Isis, Ji Jue had forged an internal spiritus vessel. Stimulating it step-by-step with Deus Ex Machina, he produced a blank virtual intellect. Combining the two, it resembled a fragment of a damaged soul.
When subjected to mind-reading or consciousness links from the Heart Pivot branch, or spiritus shocks and soul blasts from Ascension, it could absorb the attacks and corruption in Ji Jue's place, ensuring his safety.
Not only that, the Ever Unforgetting blessing stabilized the internal soul structure so it wouldn't collapse on itself, while Harboring Resentment turned it into a receptacle for vast amounts of negative emotion and corruption pollution. Corruption alchemy paired with Fluid Alchemy's purification had essentially created an artificial malevolent spirit—one that grew fiercer by the day as spiritus was infused into it. As for Consuming Lust, it served as an ideal vent to violently inflame and unleash the corruption pollution and negative emotions stored within.
It was as if Ji Jue had outfitted his soul with a moat filled to the brim with piranhas, strong acid, and all manner of unspeakable horrors. If someone foolishly tried to pry into him, the instant their consciousness probed inside, they would experience an unprecedented level of agony.
At the same time, if necessary, Ji Jue could intentionally breach the dyke and release the pollution indiscriminately, letting everyone savor the delightful ranked-match experience of swimming the butterfly stroke through a cesspool!
In terms of effectiveness, not only did it provide soul defense for Ji Jue, but it also effectively remedied his shortcoming as a double agent of the Profound—his inability to spread corruption pollution on a massive scale.
Even Kanemoto would probably sing its praises.
Yet unfortunately, that still couldn't change its awkward status as a semi-finished work.
Or rather...
A failure.
Chapter 363