Every Time Trouble Strikes, It's You!

Silence—a long, drawn-out silence. Only bloody water seeped soundlessly from the telephone receiver, dripping onto the floor with a sizzling hiss as corruption spread outward. Even without radio waves or signals, the formless curse bridged the vast distance, crashing down upon Tianlu with unreserved malice. A greeting, perhaps, or rather—a lethal strike prepared over countless years! The old geezer Qitan looked as though he had seen a ghost. Snatching up his yarn bag, he turned on his heel and bolted without the slightest intention of lending a hand. You courted death yourself, clean up your own damn mess! Besides, him? Lending a hand? To Tianlu? Was that a joke? And so he walked away without a shred of hesitation. Only Tianlu let out a quiet sigh. His fingers, which had rapidly melted down to bare white bone, restored themselves once more. The aura of withering and decay vanished without a trace. "Your temper is only getting worse, A-Yuan." He let out a sigh, but in the next breath his face lit up with vibrant excitement. "We're fellow disciples after all, is there really any need for this? If you ask me, what's so great about that godforsaken Profound? Why don't you come over to Nirvana early? We brothers can do big things together—big things!" Kanemoto said nothing. He remained utterly aloof. Imagine this: an irreconcilable arch-nemesis you had waged a life-or-death feud against for decades suddenly calls you up out of the blue, cracking jokes as if nothing had ever happened, snooping for gossip and cheap amusement, acting like you were the best of brothers under heaven. And on top of that, without you noticing, he had managed to patch the call straight into your workshop— Suffice to say, under such circumstances, the mere fact that Kanemoto hadn't uttered a single profanity was proof of astonishing self-restraint. Not that Kanemoto possessed much of that virtue to begin with, but he still refrained from cursing. Because it was pointless. Cursing would only make this son of a bitch even happier. "If you are truly bored enough to come looking for fun in the Profound, you might as well find a rope and hang yourself from a tree. It would do both you and everyone else a world of good, Lord Tianlu." "Ah, can't your senior brother show a little concern for you?" Tianlu sighed ruefully with drawn-out lamentation. "Besides, you're living down in the Profound with barely enough food to fill your belly or warm clothes to wear. How could I not worry? I'm terrified my junior brother is suffering. "So... heard any rumors lately? Could I trouble you to enlighten me? What on earth is that old geezer, Elder Zhen, trying to pull? "He's been holding it in for so many years—has he finally reached his limit?" "What business is it of yours?" "True enough, but it's such a pain when that old fossil keeps sneaking around doing annoying little things right under our noses. What I mean is, if talk won't work, why don't we just have it out?" Tianlu scratched his chin and remarked casually, "Open blades and clear spears, a fight to the finish. Think how much trouble that would save! Nice and simple." "Fine by me." Kanemoto replied coldly, without a trace of hesitation. "No need to bother Elder Zhen. I'll do. You set the time, I'll pick the place. The two of us, fight to the death. How about that?" "Could we swap you for someone else?" Tianlu sighed, helpless, sounding sincere from the bottom of his heart. "You're the only junior brother I have left. I truly couldn't bear it. If you die, who else am I going to chat with in the future?" Always so flippant, always so arrogant. Always completely disregarding him— The sound of something shattering rang out. Uncontrollable fury erupted. "Before I pay you another visit, mind your own business, Lord Juzi!" Kanemoto gave one final icy warning: "Especially that Lu Changsheng you nurtured—if I ever see another piece of trash out there stamped with 'Handcrafted by Kanemoto', I will pay him a personal visit!" Click! The moment the call disconnected, the receiver in Tianlu's hand detonated. Amid a surge of blood, a bizarre silhouette expanded and ballooned, a gaping, bloody maw emerging from within to snap shut around Tianlu's head. In the span of just a few brief words, without anyone noticing, Kanemoto had transformed the telephone in Tianlu's grip into a cursed construct waiting to devour whoever held it. Then, as Tianlu's fingers tightened, it shriveled once more like a trapped rat, emitting a piercing shriek before collapsing inward. Finally, fragments of the handset slid slowly through his fingertips. "What an awful temper, A-Yuan," Tianlu sighed with regret. "Just look at what kind of environment that godforsaken Profound is." His temper grew worse, his tongue sharper. Pity his personality hadn't changed at all—still like a pressure cooker, ready to blow at the slightest poke... Over all these years, the two of them had grown entirely too familiar with each other, so much so they could recognize each other even if burned to ashes. Just as Kanemoto knew Tianlu was about to start barking the moment he opened his mouth, Tianlu could always glean something from Kanemoto, no matter how dripping with mockery and venom his words were. This incident had nothing to do with Kanemoto— Given his pride, he would never stoop to lying before Tianlu. If he were truly involved, he wouldn't have offered to fight Tianlu to the death in person. Which meant... after all these years, Elder Zhen was making moves again? Of the three grandmasters of the Profound, Dire Furnace was the most aloof—or rather, detached. He never deigned to bother with petty scheming, treating even the Great Sins as mere materials and resources. Even if his actions were indistinguishable from falling into sin, when it came to his actual relationship with the Stagnant Rot, he was surprisingly the most distant. Griefsmith was the exact opposite; he stood far too close to the Stagnant Rot. There had been no word from him in over ninety years now. Knowing the man's style, he had likely toyed himself to death by now. Even if he wasn't dead, he couldn't be far from total reification. Among the three grandmasters, the one with the highest standing and greatest influence in the Profound, commanding the most formidable and expansive forces, was that old tortoise who rarely poked his head out of the Vale of the Profound: Elder Zhen. After so many years, the old bastard was reaching into the Association again, rummaging around. The recent disturbances within the Association were more or less stirred up by his hand behind the scenes. Just like the corruption of the Haze Workshop. The same old tricks! That same move again! The other party knew the playbook inside and out, having turned it into an established pattern. While it certainly lacked creativity, it proved that the tactic was undeniably effective. After all, when you were trapped in a dead end, unable to make an inch of progress, how could you care where the lifesaving straw dangled before you came from? When you realized that your lineage's research across such vast stretches of time yielded nothing at all, when you saw that the path you staked your entire life upon led nowhere, who could bear to accept reality? And how many had the courage to abandon everything and start over from scratch? Embers lay between Ascension and Huangxu, formed where the two converged and overlapped. In a sense, it also inherited the flaws of both wholesale. Like Ascension, it demanded fierce obsession, where a single misstep meant plunging into the abyss; yet like Huangxu, where fine jade was born of nature, without innate talent one could not take a single step forward. Craftsmen succeeded by obsession, yet often fell by obsession. Like Duan Mu, who marched down a dead end without ever looking back, leaping into the abyss of his own accord just to seek a path forward. Like Berzuna, who gradually succumbed to madness trying to remedy the defects of Haze, stopping at nothing to gamble and collude with Elder Zhen. Thus, they ventured further and further down a deviant, fatal path, unable to turn back. The so-called corruption was merely a symptom, and truly embracing the Great Sin was nothing more than an identity registration procedure. Long before their total corruption, craftsmen were already astray. The distinction between Embers and the Stagnant Rot didn't lie in the eradication of humanity, because in many moments and under many circumstances, craftsmen themselves had little humanity to speak of anyway. It merely made the craftsmen of Stagnant Rot seem all the more devoid of it. Once on a dead-end road, one would resort to any means necessary. To seek a breakthrough, to make progress, they would naturally use whatever worked, regardless of the deluge that might follow. Yet would there truly be a breakthrough? Could there really be progress? Or was it just a self-deceiving illusion and trance? In the stagnant puddle symbolized by the Stagnant Rot, within a desolation devoid of all change, no matter how many variations occurred, they were merely spinning in a closed loop. The path of Embers had always judged outcomes by success or failure. It was too arduous, too perilous. Heritage, experience, theory, even innate talent had their limits. In the cruelty of Embers, no one knew whether they could make it to the end. In their silent forward march, every step was fraught with hardship. No one knew whether holding on would bring a turning point, or if they would ever live to see the clearing through the mist. It was precisely why the Profound was fraught with temptation. Pity that it too was a dead end. Among infinite dead ends, perhaps a rare flower might bloom now and then, but how could mediocre souls ever hope to reach such heights? No matter how generous or lavish the rewards of the Great Sins might be, how could they ever fall to waste and dross? Other Supreme Virtues might have exceptions, but in the lineage of Embers, it was never a matter of growing stronger through corruption; rather, the strong chose corruption for their own ends, their desires, or their grand designs! The vast majority of fools who couldn't see the reality fell into depravity of their own accord; a few clear-eyed craftsmen were forced by circumstances; while the grandmasters who stood at the summit, overlooking all, simply did not care. Perhaps even if they knew, the craftsmen who cast themselves into the Great Sin would feel no hesitation whatsoever. What if it was a dead end? Even with no road ahead, they would take another step; even reaching the end of the line, they would split open a new sky! No matter how many blood-soaked cautionary tales lay before them, it was useless. Whether one brought revolution amidst desperation or sank into the stagnant waters—only by trying could one know! Self-righteous, self-inflicted, reaping what they sowed. Such was the original sin of craftsmen! The boundary between the Association and the Profound had never been clear. Even the existence of the Absolute Sentence squads was nothing more than a low wall, a warning placard before the border crossers. As long as this arrogance and obsession endured, the Profound's erosion and infiltration of the Association would never cease. No matter how many rules successors compiled, errors could not be averted; no matter how profound the understanding, none could escape it. No matter how much was summarized, the victors succeeded on their own. No matter how deep the insight, the defeated failed by their own hands. "All Things Self-Transform," Tianlu murmured with downcast eyes, sighing helplessly. Craftsmen viewed all things as materials, but in the eyes of the Supreme Virtues and Great Sins, weren't craftsmen likewise materials and creations? The triumphs and defeats of a lifetime, the elevation and fall of the soul, the reverence for virtue and the pursuit of sin, the entanglements between Embers and the Stagnant Rot—was this not also a form of nature? In their moments of bewilderment and despair, every craftsman would look up and question: With heaven and earth as the furnace, into what shape will it forge me? Pity that even Tianlu himself could not determine what his final form would be. Was he not also merely one of the creations within the flames of the Embers? At this critical juncture, the old woman Carrion Eater was approaching the end of her natural lifespan, soon to return to the Supreme Virtue. The Profound was stirring once more. It was foreseeable that in the near future, another life-and-death clash between the Association and the Profound was inevitable. Kanemoto knew, which was why he told him to mind his own business. Tianlu knew too, but he didn't care. Elder Zhen knew, and precisely because he knew, he was so cautious. That old fossil had an extraordinary knack for enduring and biding his time. Earlier, when Jiang Tongguang had ridden right up into his face and cursed him pointing at his nose, he hadn't even shown himself. In the end—the Griefsmith, who did show his face, was surrounded and kicked half to death by Tianlu, Carrion Eater, and the newly ascended Plowsmith. After suffering that setback once, he would never make the same mistake twice. As long as Tianlu's condition remained intact, he would never act rashly! Perhaps this recent disturbance was also his way of testing the waters? To see just how much strength the strongest Tianlu in history had left after being wounded? "Aiii—I'm wounded! My blood is spilling all over the floor!" Tianlu leaned back in the lounge chair, his breathing faint, sighing languidly, "This is bad, I'm going to die! Quick, find me A-Xian to arrange my funeral—" "You bastard, still angling for bait!" The old geezer Qitan glanced at him from a distance and sneered. The reason the name Tianlu had degraded to the point where it could be used as an insult—aside from the fact that this dog never acted like a decent human being—was primarily because he was so damn fond of fishing! Ever since his debut, he had been baiting hooks from start to finish. What was worse, after all these years of fishing, he always caught a brimming creel, almost never coming back empty-handed. As a result, his current credit score wouldn't even let him unlock a shared bicycle! Tianlu smiled without a word. He had already thrown himself entirely into his roleplay, and even intended to leak a tiny slip somewhere. By putting on a blustering front, he would make people suspect he was fierce of countenance but faint of heart, his condition far diminished from before. Only... His movements paused. Recalling Kanemoto's final words, he couldn't help feeling puzzled: why had he brought up Ji Jue? He had only served in an Absolute Sentence squad once. Had he somehow gotten himself muddleheadedly tangled up in more trouble? Suffice to say, for a person to be this unlucky was practically unprecedented in history. Every time trouble happens, it's you. How is it you again this time?! You little brat... "Heh, truly fine timber and unpolished jade," Tianlu couldn't help chuckling. Suddenly, he had a premonition—there was going to be another good show to watch. Joy! The fun was starting! Ji Jue was not having fun. No matter who it was, having a scruffy, bearded man in his late thirties or early forties clutching your thigh in broad daylight while wailing at the top of his lungs, you probably wouldn't feel like smiling either. Yet right under the calm gazes of everyone around them, the fellow clinging to his leg refused to let go no matter what. Like clutching a lifesaving straw. Shaking him off was impossible; kicking him away didn't work either. At this moment, Major General Minkler, Commander-in-Chief of the Seven Cities Joint Defense Navy, was weeping torrents of tears: "Wah! Adoptive Father, save meeeeee!!!"