Not Quite Human

"Didn't I just pinpoint the problem for you?" Ji Jue started gesturing and offering critiques. "You should add a spirit capacitor to the sensor module up front to prevent miscalculations from sudden environmental shifts. No, wait, we can even upgrade this feature so it monitors the surrounding environment in real time and raises alarms! Ha, look at that, another selling point!" Lou Feng blinked, instinctively reaching to take notes, only to see Ji Jue's expression shift abruptly, his face instantly turning solemn and stern. "Wait." "What is it?" Lou Feng was puzzled. "Implementing that isn't hard at all. After all—" "No, I don't mean whether it's hard or not." Ji Jue broke into a sudden grin. "I'm saying we should decouple this feature first. Don't add it in. The base model just needs an added capacitor to ensure stability. "This will be sold as a premium upgrade feature. For extra money..." *Ji, you absolute bastard...* Lou Feng's eye twitched uncontrollably. Unlike the Celestial Rail wristwatch's complete control and insight into one's condition, Haian Tech's watch operated on entirely different principles despite having similar features. Its core lay in the Lord of the Flies spirit fused inside. Unlike the massive number of fragments Ji Jue had scattered previously, this design utilized the spiritus seeds that could divide indefinitely inside the Lord of the Flies as long as spiritus was supplied. They had no inheritance from the Lord of the Flies swarm, nor any capacity for thought. They were mere unsprouted embryos, possessing raw spirituality and nothing more. Once severed from the swarm, they would rapidly collapse and disperse. Now, the Lord of the Flies swarm had grown to a certain bottleneck. The number of Spirits of Creation was gradually reaching its ceiling. These fragmented bits of spirituality had no chance of developing within the system, and even existing there served no purpose at all. Yet spirituality was still spirituality. Among the four arts of alchemy, Ascension came first; granting spirituality to dead matter was the indispensable first step. It was like the melding of Ascension and the Desolate Ruins, the overlapping of soul and substance. Without this initial step, everything built after was just a castle in the air. Moreover, precisely because of its blank nature and fragility, it held infinite possibilities! By slowly infusing external spiritus, gradually steeping and nurturing it with a Celestial Chosen's aura, this spark of spirituality could blossom, bear fruit, and grow anew outside the swarm. At the same time, it would react differently depending on the properties and fluctuations of the injected spiritus—which was the working principle behind displaying tiers and progress. Yet that was merely the most trivial of its functions! Crucially, because the seed of spirituality was personally gestated with the Celestial Chosen's own spiritus, it naturally carried the user's specific traits and aura. It would never accept spiritus from anyone other than its first user, effectively eliminating the risk of theft or seizure. As spiritus was gradually infused and the spirituality steadily grew and expanded, this stray spirit would become more and more like its user. Channeling spiritus between them would suffer no obstruction or lag whatsoever. Eventually, it would become the user's secondary soul. That meant... just like a Celestial Rail wristwatch, it could store extra spiritus for a Celestial Chosen. The longer it was used, the more it held. Depending on the watch's specifications and internal capacity, it could hold up to half the spiritus of a peak Metamorphosis rank on the Association's standard scale! In other words, a Tier 6 Celestial Chosen in the Metamorphosis rank wearing it would see their mana bar expand by fifty percent out of thin air! Even a Regeneration-tier practitioner would gain a decent emergency reserve by putting it on. Furthermore, unlike spiritus tonics—which absorbed slowly and caused internal spiritus disruption if overused—this spiritus originated from the user. It was like transfusing one's own banked blood back into their veins: zero conflict, instant draw, zero resistance! What was more, once the spirit inside the watch fully matured, it could even slowly absorb spiritus from the atmosphere to recharge itself! A rank monitor? Trivial. An alarm that tracked corruption taint and physiological health? All right, interesting. But an extra mana bar... I'm sorry, who on earth could resist that?! Tell me: do you want it or not?! If you don't, plenty of others will. If you don't buy it, your rival will! If you don't nurture one, everyone else is nurturing theirs! As for who would actually own the resulting Spirit of Creation in the end... Why overthink such pleasant things? With something this good, would I ever harm you? Stop whining, just open your wallet and pay up! "Is this really okay?" After hearing Ji Jue's plan, Lou Feng started wiping sweat from his forehead. "If this ever leaks out..." Making Celestial Chosen use their own spiritus to nurture the Lord of the Flies' Spirits of Creation, and charging them through the nose for the privilege... Honestly, even by an artisan's moral standards, this was utterly shameless! "If you don't say anything, and I don't say anything, who's going to know?" Ji Jue smiled faintly and patted his shoulder. "You wouldn't blab, would you, Feng?" In the momentary silence that followed, Lou Feng felt the hand on his shoulder—so gentle, completely devoid of malice. It wasn't a threat, nor a warning. Because... Lou Feng had boarded the same damn ship a long time ago! Besides, Ji Jue had merely pitched the requirements; Lou Feng had built the whole thing himself! If word got out, he would be the first one to take the fall. At most, Ji Jue would be guilty of poor judgment in associates. When the time came, he'd wring his hands, squeeze out two tears, bow, apologize, and the matter would blow over. Lou Feng's eyes filled with righteous indignation. "Ji, you really deserve to die!" "Together, together." Ji Jue didn't care in the slightest, acting all the more chummy. "Back when you were building it, you worked day and night, having the time of your life. Now that the finished product is out, it's hardly fair to blame only me, right? "Besides, I'm doing this for both of our futures. Ah Feng, you understand me, don't you?" At this point, there was nothing left to say. Lou Feng flared up in anger, flared up once more, and then resigned himself. After all, it was common knowledge that an artisan's moral standards... had a fairly broad range of adjustment. Furthermore, the Lord of the Flies devoured astronomical resources; if they didn't fleece a few suckers to foot the bill, he truly couldn't keep going! He couldn't even claim he had been innocently exploited. At most, it was a meeting of master craftsmen, though outsiders would call it two scoundrels colluding. Having stepped onto this path, he could only walk it to the end. What else could he do? Abandon his project and prospects? Abandon his blood, sweat, and long-sought progress, plus the Three-Phase Alchemy he hadn't fully mastered, just to tell Ji Jue goodbye? Forget it. Life was all about compromise. Endure a little, and it would pass. After turning his fleeting indignation into a two percent bump in sales commission, Lou Feng instantly calmed down. Utterly placid, he thought: *I'm just a simple artisan. Rivers of blood don't concern me in the slightest!* "What about production?" Ji Jue asked. "How much trouble are we looking at?" "How long does it take your lighter factory to stamp out a cheap watch?" Lou Feng rolled his eyes. "How many can your industrial park lines produce a day? Production isn't the problem. The problem is raw materials... The Lord of the Flies has limits on how many spiritual divisions it can sustain. Right now, about a thousand spiritus seeds a day is the cap. Any more will compromise the integrity of the Lord of the Flies itself. "And the core of the watch requires Three-Phase Alchemy in an enriched-spiritus chamber to fuse the movement with the spiritual seed. That takes at least a week." "Understood." Ji Jue thought for a moment, then pointed at Lou Feng. "Your family still has businesses, right?" "What the hell are you trying to pull now?!" Lou Feng went on high alert immediately. Even wealthy families had tight budgets; the Lord of the Flies project had consumed massive investment, and even with the Military Department's orders bringing in revenue, every cent had been funneled straight back into breeding the Lord of the Flies. He hadn't received a penny in dividends, leaving his pockets cleaner than his face. "Relax, I'm not after your shares," Ji Jue said. "I'm a bit strapped for cash lately, short on liquidity. It's most convenient for you to handle this. "Go to your Third Uncle, Lou Guan, and have him help acquire a nearly bankrupt watchmaker. The kind that has zero assets left except history. Even a manual craft workshop is fine. Buy the brand—the older, the better! "The more unsold old inventory, the better! "Then, I'll go to the Tong family and have the Aether branch spin some stories about exquisite craftsmanship, artisan heritage, that sort of thing, to establish our prestige. "A bit of this, a bit of that, and finally, our watches will be ready to ship!" Lou Feng had a sudden realization. He was Young Master Lou, after all; he had seen the world. "You're planning to rebrand to charge a markup?" "What do you mean, rebrand?" Ji Jue declared passionately, "This is reviving the glory of craft! Carrying on a storied heritage! Besides, our production scale is limited. Did you want to compete on volume? Would that even work?" "Then there's no need to look around." Lou Feng pulled out his phone, scrolled a bit, and spoke nonchalantly. "Back when my dad was into watches, he bought shares in one. It hasn't been doing well lately. I'll see if I can take it over, delist it, and take it private again. Mind you, the capital needed will be a bit steep. Be prepared." The Lou family, indeed. Ji Jue's eye twitched once, then twice. He had still underestimated the sheer depth of an old-money family. So, the final hurdle was cleared. Only one tiny detail remained. The retail price. Ji Jue and Lou Feng sat across from each other, staring at the number on the table—already two to three hundred times the cost of production. Both silently thought the other had zero conscience, while simultaneously feeling an unspoken bond: *Across the whole world, only the two of us are true visionaries.* The corners of both their mouths showed a distinct tendency to curl upward. "As expected, you're the bigger dog. Totally shameless." "Not at all, not at all. The Lou clan still embodies the quintessential style of old-money capitalists." "A self-made newcomer like Brother Ji hardly lags behind!" "You're too kind, too kind." "I flatter you, I flatter you." "Well, since we're already here..." Ji Jue suggested, "why not double it?" "Is that appropriate?" "Hey, we're brothers. What's not appropriate?" "If you're calling me brother, what more is there to say!" "Round it up?" "Yeah, rounding up works." Lou Feng nodded repeatedly. "Worst case, we launch a Supreme Golden Collector's Edition first to shear the whales, then slowly roll out the budget version later!" "Exactly, exactly! Exclusive privilege, throw in some cheap, trivial freebies!" "Could we bump it a little more?" "There's room for more?" "Plenty, plenty!" The two of them nudged it up, nudged it again, and added just a tiny bit more. The corners of their mouths arched higher and higher, the zeroes on the sheet multiplying... Finally, amidst tacit, uproarious laughter, the flagship product of their joint workshop—the opening salvo soon to be fired, a creation that didn't even have a name yet—had its retail price officially set! A century of privilege, timeless heritage, artisan spirit, the revival of a classic! Exclusive Collector's Edition! Retail price: 18,880,000!