Even If I Can't, I Must!

I can't do it? Who said I can't! A true craftsman never lets anyone say he can't. And he sure as hell wouldn't let a dog like Ji Jue say it! Off form, exhausted, pulled an all-nighter yesterday, too hot, got a cough or cold, interrupted by a roommate, water spilled into the keyboard, mouse battery dead... none of that was an excuse! Even if he couldn't, he damn well had to! Even though he knew perfectly well that dog opened his mouth just to bait him, enduring it for a moment only made his blood boil more, and taking a step back only felt like a bigger loss! Besides, knowing Ji Jue: even if he swallowed this single dog bark, who knew how many years the bastard would bring this up to yap at him... In a fit of fury, Lou Feng got furious several times over. Looking at the Bloodstained Mother descending from the sky, his rage surged. Striking ruthlessly, he activated every single occult ritual he had laid out since arriving that afternoon. The spiritus crystals planted beneath the entire base erupted in an explosive growth, revealing their most vicious form as they burst from the soil and pierced into the vault of heaven. Empowered by spiritus shaping alongside Ember alchemy, guided by Matrix: Deft Craft, they showed their full, ferocious savagery. Even if, by the standards of the Celestial Chosen, this monstrosity was purely of the Transcendent Rank, striking an unprepared foe made all the difference. In their very first clash, it impaled the evil creature's skull. Blood rained down. Amid deafening shrieks, the Bloodstained Mother's body jolted violently. Greyish-black tentacles converged and flailed in wild struggle, attempting to wrench out this crystalline blade, only to find that once it pierced its flesh, it seemed to take root, impossible to shake free. With the other end rooted firmly into the ground like a tether to a post, it actually shackled the beast in place. Even as its unseen controller repeatedly tried to reel it back, the tormenting agony only stoked the abomination's feral fury. Its six arms reached up into the dark clouds, gripping blazing bolts of lightning like blades, and swung them in a wild frenzy toward the earth below. In the most literal sense—Lightning Cyclone Slash! Six dazzling bolts of lightning, wielded like colossal swords, slashed and hacked with abandon, cleaving blindly across the garrison base. In an instant, countless buildings cracked and collapsed, leaving devastation everywhere. As though a natural catastrophe had broken loose, the scorching lightning vaporized iron and stone in an instant. Had the sirens not sounded long ago, and had the emergency evacuation not begun right after Boggio and his entourage stepped out, the entire fleet base would likely have been wiped completely off the map. Even so, it wasn't far from being flattened. The battered ships berthed in the harbor rose and fell with the churning, boiling seawater, colliding with one another in groaning laments. Blinding thunderbolts continually flashed past the window, casting a deathly pale glow across Minkler's face. Ji Jue remained reclined in his chair, examining and studying the matrix in his hands without even looking up. "Relax, relax. It's a minor issue." Not that he was yapping to provoke Lou Feng any further. If he were Lou Feng, he would probably be on the verge of laughing out loud right now. Come on—sure, Lou Feng studied Embers, but the Lou family was most famous for Entropy, possessing countless esoteric extinction formulas... and you dare pull this trick in front of him? It didn't even qualify as teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Not even close! Even before the thunderbolts came crashing down, a faint mist had already risen across the base. Amid flashing spiritus light, scale-like contours materialized from the void, cloaking the base's vital sectors and enveloping Lou Feng's entire body, impervious to all intrusion. Letting the savage lightning strike down directly on his head again and again, he remained unscathed. Sparks and bolts splattered outward, entirely unable to pierce that layer of defense. Dragonscale Armor! A technique Lou Feng once had to cheat to perform had, under the frantic chase and pressure from that tryhard dog Ji Jue, somehow become second nature to him, pulled off effortlessly. In an instant, Lou Feng's nine tiers of spiritus transmutation—far exceeding Ji Jue's—endowed the shaped spiritus with distinct attributes. The moment they shifted and overlapped, they underwent yet another qualitative change. Boom! The furiously cleaving thunderbolt actually snapped mid-stroke and shattered! Not only did it shatter— The lightning dancing across the air wound along the dragon scales, converging at Lou Feng's fingertips, and was flicked right toward that impaled face! A beam of azure light shot through the air, tearing across the night sky in an instant and striking the Bloodstained Mother's body, piercing through the outer shell and detonating completely from the inside out. It blew off half the face of the middle head! Amid deafening shrieks, no minced flesh or bones could be seen beneath the crater, only tentacles spasming and convulsing wildly as they spread outward. It appeared severely wounded. Having lost half a head, it finally wrenched free from the crystalline blade's shackles. Yet before it could react, Lou Feng waved his hand once more. The crystalline blade that pierced heaven and earth transformed again; countless strands of spiritus spread from the giant pillar, turning into what looked like a translucent crystal tree that spanned the sky above the entire base, shimmering with brilliant hues of breathtaking beauty. Yet it was not a tree—it was a cage. A cage sealing the entire base within. No matter how hysterically the Bloodstained Mother slammed and smashed against it, it stood unyielding. And further changes were already brewing... "What the hell is that?" At this moment, not just the puppet master behind the Bloodstained Mother, but everyone watching openly or from the shadows couldn't help but crane their necks. The turn of events had unfolded too fast. In less than a dozen seconds, the Bloodstained Mother's savage momentum was thwarted. An evil entity passed down through the Sukarno family for centuries was actually halted in its tracks? Putting the idle onlookers aside, the Five Families of the Seven Cities holding their chips hesitated. Bewildered. They couldn't quite make sense of the sudden shift. To place a bet, one had to see the board clearly first. With huge estates and empires to protect, who went all-in the second they sat at the table, or committed immediately the moment a fight broke out? They had to test Minkler's weight first. The Chopra family's earlier withdrawal had drawn quiet sighs from many onlookers, extinguishing their inclination to follow along. But this sudden turn of events shocked everyone once again. "Wait, that technique... the Lou family?" "Someone from Haizhou?" an old woman asked with suspicion. "Did Minkler cozy up to the Federation's thighs?" "Who the hell knows? Are we supposed to call and ask?" a middle-aged man sneered. "That move is definitely the Lou family's spiritus shaping, no mistake about it!" "So what if it is?" a pompous, aged voice sighed. "No matter how tyrannical the Lou family is, can their reach stretch across the Endless Sea all the way to the Seven Cities? Besides, the rule under heaven says that without a token of authority, once you're three hundred li from home, life and death are left to fate!" "Old bastard, will you die if you don't screw people over?!" another voice snapped irritably. "If you don't know what you're talking about, shut your damn trap!" Indeed, right now Lou Feng wore only the insignia of a craftsman, with nothing but a lapis lazuli brooch on his chest. In other words, the person who had come here was merely Lou Feng the craftsman, not Lou Feng of the Lou family. This was his own affair; life or death had nothing to do with the Lou family. The problem was... Would you believe that? By the rules of the underworld, if you died, you died in vain. But how often did underworld dwellers actually follow the rules? If you people in the Seven Cities didn't even take rules seriously, expecting others to abide by them would make the Federation laugh its head off. Did you really think that just because you were both called 'families,' the Seven Cities could sit as equals with the Lou family? Especially when the old monster of the Lou family was notoriously protective of his own. Back then, Lou Yanyue went on a rampage all the way to Yunzhou, hacking someone else's son to death, and the old man still shielded him stubbornly and pushed back against everyone. Believe it or not, if you truly pissed that old bastard off, even if Lou Feng just tripped and skinned his knee here, the Lou family's tangible iron fist would crush God knew how many dogs' heads! Sorry, that's just how domineering a true great clan operates! Otherwise, what kind of family would they be? How could they survive competitive matchmaking in that madhouse called the Federation?! "Stop arguing. Let's watch first," another steady voice sighed. "Just keep watching." In the silence, everyone's heart sank. People always talked about fishing in troubled waters, but the water wasn't even muddy yet, so why were hands reaching in one after another...? What was going to become of our Seven Cities? BOOM! Enraged and exasperated, the Bloodstained Mother battered and slammed relentlessly against the crystal cage before it. In its fury, three gaping maws opened wide in a soundless roar. Pale ripples burst from its mouths as an Abyssal surge, potent enough to shatter countless souls, gushed forth—only to crash against the giant tree and ricochet straight back into its face. And what's more, super-multiplied! A spiritus shockwave? Did you just say spiritus? Sorry, but you picked the wrong target again... Lou Feng almost felt like laughing. Entropy and Ascension—those were the two things my family excels at most. Why do you insist on throwing yourself onto the blade? Having roared in vain only to take a massive hit itself, the Bloodstained Mother's body convulsed in waves, countless tentacles sprouting from its faces and torso. It opened its mouth again, clinging to the giant tree heedless of the searing burns. Its body suddenly disintegrated into a torrent of viscous black blood, forcibly corroding the crystal tree. Squeezing through the gaps between branches and weathering layer upon layer of occult rituals' obstruction and searing fire, it actually forced its way inside. Ramming through the boughs ahead, it plummeted from the sky! Amid deafening roars, a crimson waterfall flooded in, raging wildly through the base. Hunger and thirst radiated as it sought to hunt souls to replenish itself, yet it could not find a single living soul! A military base was a military installation after all. No matter how perfunctorily maintained, it had standard defenses. Within the bomb-proof underground command post, sealed by Three-Phase Alchemy, the interior and exterior had long been completely cut off. Like a reinforced safe, it could never be broken open on short notice, not to mention Ji Jue was maintaining it from the side. Even if Ji Jue didn't lift a finger, the barrier would take it until next year to tear down. Having prey in sight but unable to take a bite, the ravenous abomination went entirely berserk. Within the tide of blood, the outline of the Bloodstained Mother continually reformed. Eyes, ears, mouths, noses, and hands sprouted haphazardly within the bloody water, wrecking everything in sight without restraint. Yet right before Lou Feng's eyes, within the boiling blood, the silhouette of the Bloodstained Mother emerged once more. It was countless times smaller than before, appearing as a statue a mere few meters tall, yet its menace was incomparably more terrifying... Its three faces were filled with compassion. Four of its six arms splayed out behind its back, dangling a human head, human skin, heart and liver, and bones. Meanwhile, the two arms across its chest cradled a bundle wrapped in swaddling clothes resembling tangled rags. At that moment, the swaddling bundle stirred. An illusory cry of an infant abruptly rang out. A bone-chilling dread!