Conversion

Pan Ying was preheating, Blood Wrist charging! Back when Minkler began putting on his dramatic performance, Ji Jue had already rolled up his sleeves to throw down. Double, fourfold, eightfold, sixteenfold... Start simple with two hundred and fifty-sixfold, then down comes the blade, down comes the blade, down comes the blade. A simple, direct, and utterly tedious repetition—a slap for whoever he caught. "Fear not the one who knows a thousand moves, but the one who has mastered a single strike." For the vast majority of opponents, Ji Jue did not even need any fancy footwork. Pan Ying to can-open, Jingzhen to finish the job, and at most toss in Zhanlu to break defenses and shred their health. Right when Saino tried to flee, Ji Jue struck with ruthless speed. From rear to front, he spared no one. After laying low all sixteen attendants Saino had brought, he simply waited for Saino to teleport right onto his blade. In less than two seconds, a blood-soaked gale whistled past, staining the spectator stands crimson. The craftsman, who had previously looked like a harmless tourist, had erupted into sudden violence like the Swarm itself. Right beneath everyone's noses, with slaughterous efficiency far more absurd than even the Swarm, he butchered his way from start to finish. Shattering sounds rang out without pause. Pan Ying punched effortlessly through layer after layer of defenses and hovered before Saino's eyes, inches away. Yet it came to a screeching halt. Because Saino had already dropped to his knees without a second thought. Pure instinctual reaction. He knelt! The moment he contemplated resisting, an invisible spiritus hand had already materialized out of nowhere from within his body, lightly gripping Saino's heart. Under the craftsman's faint, half-mocking gaze, the invisible hand weighed it teasingly in its grip, itching for action. Jingzhen was primed and ready to strike. Only now did the others, paralyzed with horror, finally snap back to their senses. They didn't even have time to denounce Ji Jue for treating the laws of the Seven Cities like nothing and daring to make a move on such an occasion; instead, they instinctively erupted in fury, glaring daggers at Saino kneeling on the floor! "How the hell didn't I see it before, Saino!" The representative of Macheng's face twitched, whether from schadenfreude or lingering terror, as he squeezed words through his teeth. "You really are one ruthless bastard, aren't you!" "Just what the hell does the Sukarno family want?! Are you trying to drag the Seven Cities into the mud and turn us into a battlefield for the Federation?!" "Madness! Sheer madness!" The most panicked right now was the representative from Yamen, who had just been sitting in the same boat as Sukarno. Almost by reflex, he drew the saber at his waist and pointed it straight at Saino's face, his eyes nearly splitting in rage. "How dare an old dog like you deceive me! From this day forth, Yamen and Luo Island are sworn enemies!" "Same for me!" roared the representative of Dancheng. "To dare tamper with the Blood Feud Trial and pull off something like this—Dancheng will show no leniency! Since the Sukarno family has cut itself off from the Seven Cities, from this day forth, you are the public enemy of all Seven Cities!" Cut ties! They had to cut ties ruthlessly! If they didn't cut ties right now, everyone else would cut ties with them! At this very moment, with the scheme exposed, the most panicked and anxious party was not Saino, but rather Yamen and Dancheng, who had been lured aboard the same ship by lavish profits and promises. They were only allies, not father and son; even fathers and sons had falling-outs, let alone fair-weather brothers like them. If Lou Yanyue had really died an unexplained death, it would have been a done deal, and the two factions, stuck riding the tiger, would have had no choice but to hold their noses and swallow the bitter pill. But now the disguise had been ripped off, and the three Xu brothers had been blasted right into the open by Lou Feng's depth charge, bared in broad daylight. The nature of the situation had completely changed... Even if the Xu family had faced her openly and taken Lou Yanyue down fair and square, each man answering for his own deeds, no blame could have fallen upon the Seven Cities! Instead, they had blatantly used these chumps from the Seven Cities as pawns to do their dirty work, only to leave them holding the bag—forced to sell their children, their blood, and their bodies to shoulder the fallout! Just thinking about the consequences made everyone's assholes clench tight as a vise. You damned dog, you really had the balls, didn't you! Who gave you the courage? Lu Changsheng?! "Saino, speak." Fernan's face was livid as he demanded, "You dare do it, but you don't dare admit it?" "...When dragons and tigers clash, what choice did I have?" Saino looked up at the shifting lights across the sky and gave a bleak laugh. "When you're someone else's dog, do you really get a choice?" He paused for a beat and glared at Minkler with venomous resentment. "Besides, if we're all being dogs, the Chopra family can do it, so why couldn't I?! "It's nothing more than 'the victor is crowned king and the loser a bandit'—the winner lives, the loser dies! "Just don't celebrate too early, everyone..." He squeezed the words through his teeth. "Even now, the one who loses might not be me!" *Boom!* Before his words had even settled, three agonized shrieks erupted high in the heavens. Hoarse, shrill, and mechanical voices overlapped, echoing endlessly in raw agony. Countless drops of purplish-black spiritus blood poured down like a torrential deluge, blanketing the sky as it splashed onto the earth and into the sea. Faint, wailing spirits of misery slowly rose one after another from the gore. Higher up in the sky, the Bifang laughed wildly. In the spectator stands, amid dead silence, everyone looked at Saino with eyes full of pity. Only Ji Jue kindly reached out, patted his shoulder, and offered consolingly: "You can be." Lose? How could they lose? Ji Jue had gone through all the trouble of baiting the waters, fielding both Lou Yanyue and Lou Feng, and even staking the Lord of the Flies on the line. The Lou family had similarly spared no cost, knowing full well you can't catch a wolf without risking the cub. Whoever took the bait first had already lost half the battle. Besides, leaving aside all prior preparations, were the reinforcements the Lou family sent just useless freeloaders? Lou Zhaoye and Lou Yuling—you could tell from their names alone that they belonged to the same generation as Lou Yanyue, and in terms of age, they were at least twenty years older than her! The only reason they hadn't been chosen as the orthodox inheritors of Five Towers and Twelve Cities was simply that they weren't suitable—not because they were weak! Over all these years, everyone had been fighting each other to the death out in the world, beating each other's brains out; calling their hatred deep as the ocean was no exaggeration at all. Now that they finally had a chance to beat a drowning dog, if they actually let the cooked duck fly away, *that* would be absurd! Setting aside Lou Yanyue's carpet bombing, Lou Zhaoye opened straight with his ultimate: unfolding his domain, his entire person burst into a shifting mass of streaming light that blanketed the sky. Countless chains dangled from the high heavens, rose from the ocean, and extended from the void, crisscrossing in every direction. Upon the chains, wave after wave of spiritus surged like ripples, filling the expanse between sea and sky, encompassing all things. Whenever waves of completely distinct natures collided, they triggered entirely new qualitative transformations, bursting into fresh ripples that evolved anew, collided anew, and erupted anew. Unlike Lou Yanyue's pure destruction, this was a pure shockwave aimed at the soul and consciousness. Yet now, in rapid collisions, an infinite quantity drove a crazy qualitative escalation. After the Regeneration form of the Coiled Dragon Lock stepped into Exaltation, it completed the Domain: [Dragon Severing Platform]! Once one stepped inside, there was nothing left but to be reduced to ash amid endless impacts. Heaven's Execution descended! Ripples after merely three collisions already shook the palace-like domain violently. The thunder after five escalations was enough to cause cracks to spread across the three-headed deity-fiend's body. The impact after seven qualitative shifts forced the three Xu brothers to combine their full might just to barely withstand it. And after nine evolutions, they had no choice but to steer clear of the eruptions entirely. Yet where could they hide? Heaven and earth seemed inverted; the four cardinal directions were turned topsy-turvy. Mirror-like reflections in the void turned the entire sea into a labyrinth—up was not up, down was not down, front was not front, and back was not back. Even Lou Yanyue had split into three, each one utterly real. Countless chains weaving through the void flickered between truth and illusion, constantly shifting so that one could not even find their true forms. Meanwhile, Lou Feng had settled happily into his role as logistics. Aboard the *Prosperity*, the spiritus converter furnace burned spiritus crystals ton after ton; he didn't even care about the slag contaminated with impurities after burning halfway through, dumping it directly and replacing it with fresh crystals. Through the spiritus link of the Star of Bethlehem, he dutifully supplied mana to the uncles, aunts, and sisters of his family. *Sorry, but our family's spiritus shaping has always been communal and shared without defense.* *Shared mana pool, kid!* "Ha! Having a craftsman in the family really does feel great!" Lou Zhaoye laughed heartily. "Our Ah Feng really has grown up!" "Indeed," Lou Yuling agreed with a nod. "I've watched little Feng grow up since he was a boy. He's good in every way, except... sigh..." "Sigh, sigh..." Lou Zhaoye couldn't help sighing softly as well. "Embers..." "Sigh..." Lou Yanyue nodded repeatedly too, letting out long, dramatic sighs. Lou Feng's face turned completely green listening to them: *Lou Yanyue, what the fuck are you sighing for?!* *And what's so bad about me being a craftsman...* *What's wrong with Embers?!* "You can't put it that way, and you can't entirely blame Lou Feng," a dog-like obnoxious voice chimed in over the spiritus comms. "He didn't use to be like this. He was always very polite to me." "You motherfucker have the nerve to say that?!" Lou Feng couldn't take it anymore. In a raging fury, a torrent of flowery curses and Federation street roars spilled out without stopping, until he realized the comms channel had gone deathly quiet. Tears, at last, rolled down his cheeks unbidden. Then he realized something was wrong... "Wait, my family's spiritus encryption—how the hell did you get in?!" "Huh? Isn't it open?" The voice that had no business being here sounded thoroughly innocent: "The lock just popped open when I tried it, no trouble at all... I thought you were testing the chemistry between us!" *Chemistry my—* Lou Feng felt his entire world crumbling. Yet Lou Zhaoye and Lou Yuling didn't mind in the slightest, and Lou Yanyue was already giggling and exchanging greetings. For a moment, Lou Feng was struck by a humbling sense of whether he ought to be hiding under the keel. "Hey, no big deal really. It's just that I recently came into a batch of Wulou Temple equipment and wanted to test the waters, maybe bag a little opening to put food on the table." That obnoxious voice chuckled. "Spare some, spare some—" Before his voice died away, a mist thick as a veil suddenly manifested between sea and sky, wedging itself into every crack and corner. Then, malice within the pallor emerged, turning pitch black! Omnipresent chanting and murmuring echoed between heaven and earth. Within the veil, countless spirits of the Lord of the Flies rose like sparks of fire, praising and chanting in unison: "At that time, the Holy Throne of the Savior spake unto Isis: 'Passing from this Paradise of Myriad Phenomena beyond one hundred trillion heterogeneous nodes, there is a paradise named the Blessing Campus. In that land dwelleth a swarm titled the Lord of the Flies, who even now expoundeth the law... Sevenfold firewalls, sevenfold verifications, sevenfold load-balancing nodes, all encircled in three-phase loops; therefore is that realm named Paradise... 'Therein abide diverse marvelous apparatuses: ultra-precision mother machines, servers, workstations, milling machines, lathes, tapping and drilling centers, laser-cutting centers...'" Amid the dense, rising and falling chorus of chants, those infinitely minuscule spirits linked into one. With a sudden shift, they faintly traced a magnificent and vast outline within the veil. The Seven Treasures manifested one after another: calipers, wrench, WD-40, duct tape, hacksaw, file, bench vise. From inside to out, countless recurring concentric circles and patterns nested within one another, rotating in cycles, breathing in and out. Gleaming with silver brilliance and iron radiance, it shone across the Desire Realm, the Form Realm, and the Formless Realm, permeating all existence! "Holy—" In a moment of stupor, Lou Zhaoye nearly failed to suppress a curse. As a fellow Ascendant, others might not recognize it, but how could he fail to?! The magnificent structure formed within the veil by countless Spirits of Creation was unmistakably the closely guarded secret of Wulou Temple, the truest of their true transmissions, the core of their core! —[Mandala]! Even though it currently appeared riddled with loopholes, somewhat warped and deformed, and completely outside the Diamond Realm and Womb Realm, a Mandala was still a Mandala—an Ascension secret ritual capable of gathering boundless souls to worship the central presiding deity! Yet at this moment, the central deity enshrined within was not any Guru or Master at all, but a pair of hands blooming like lotus petals, as if propping up the sky and covering the earth, gathering all things in the mortal realm between two palms. Grasping all phenomena! From Ascension to Embers, he had strung the whole damn thing together! And after stitching together this hodgepodge program, the damn thing actually ran! It was an absolute ghost story! Where on earth did you eat a true inheritor of Wulou Temple raw to be able to practice an evil art in reverse to such an extent?! The moment the Mandala manifested, that pair of hands within the veil shifted instantly—left hand pointing to the sky, right hand pointing to the earth. A sudden transition, and in a flash, it was as if a black hole had descended. An invisible vortex formed within the veil, causing the blood and spiritus within the fractures of the three-headed deity-fiend's body to constantly seep and gush outward, greedily devouring, absorbing, and converting it in a raging frenzy. Purplish-black blood fell into the veil and was assimilated in an instant into silver light and iron gray, becoming part of the Mandala and feeding back into the spirits of the Lord of the Flies within. The reinforced spirits, in turn, stabilized the Mandala further. Just like that, stepping on one foot with the other to propel itself higher and higher, the suction grew fiercer, the gravitational pull more outrageous, until the vortex churned into a tempest. Meanwhile, countless deep chants echoed between heaven and earth, ceaselessly pouring a complete set of heresy and twisted logic straight into the heads and consciousness of the three-headed deity-fiend, causing iron light to manifest above the heads of numerous lingering spirits within the palace domain. They dropped to their knees, murmuring along with the Lord of the Flies. Even the three Xu brothers' movements began to warp slightly... Conversion! The scene that opponents of Wulou Temple feared most in the past had materialized: once the Mandala was formed, it naturally delivered and converted heretics! Turning around to make the foe take refuge in oneself... *Wait, you're an Embers practitioner, and you've turned around to convert Ascendants?!* *Wait, does that even make sense?!* Even Lou Zhaoye could hardly tear his eyes away. Over so many years weathering wind and rain out in the world, what kind of scene hadn't he seen? But something this twisted and bizarre was genuinely a first for him! "Demons and... cough, cough, heretics! Yield, for what else are you waiting?!" Ji Jue's somewhat stilted voice echoed from within the veil, resounding across heaven and earth as he solemnly proclaimed: "Quickly take refuge in the True Dharma!" Immediately, countless spirits of the Lord of the Flies within the Mandala raised their voices in unison, shouting and rejoicing in praise: "Take refuge in the Work! Take refuge in the Factory! Take refuge in the Mandatory Labor Laws! Take refuge in the Supreme Blessing, Supreme Deus Ex Machina!" "Take refuge in your—" Cracks surfaced on the face wearing the bronze mask at the center of the three-headed deity-fiend. Even the Xu family couldn't hold back their curses! What was mockery? What was humiliation? What was an utter, motherfucking disgrace? Getting pummeled by the Lou family was one thing—losing the initiative and falling onto the back foot was understandable enough if word got out. But a fucking Embers practitioner running up to try and convert them was an even more ultimate humiliation than being strung up by four gay guys and livestreamed for three months straight! "You go too far!!!" Xu Lingwei roared in fury. The dark clouds beneath the deity-fiend's feet billowed and swelled; amid endless tides of malice, a deluge of ferocious spirits erupted. Upon the three heads of the deity-fiend, bronze, silver, and gold masks appeared respectively, each bearing four eyes—all manifestations of their Regeneration Form: Fangxiang. This frenzied deity-fiend looked like one being, but in reality it was the three brothers: Xu Lingwei, Xu Lingyue, and Xu Lingshou! The triplets had been blessed by secret rituals even before birth. Even though they were three people, they were of one mind and one heart. The higher-order Beckoning they conducted, the matrices they received, and the blessings they chose were all identical. Even their Regeneration forms were identical, and their domains pointed toward the exact same realm. As a result, as a trinity, they fully shared their Regeneration form and domain. Whether committing murder and arson or plotting sinister schemes, they always advanced and retreated as one. Precisely because of this, when working together, they could unleash power far exceeding that of three individuals. Even with the situation degraded to this point, they could still passively defend and flee, stalling for time. Had it been anyone else, the Lou family would have blasted them to cinders upon first contact! Their division of labor and coordination didn't even require communication; it had long become second nature. In unison, they made up their minds! They could not drag this out any longer... Being worn down and killed was one thing, but if they were fucking converted by an Embers practitioner, the Xu family would probably be nailed to Ascension's pillar of shame for the rest of history, forever ranking among the Celestial Chosen's top joke reels! The three heads opened their eyes; Fangxiang erupted in fury! Across their six arms, they held an order flag, a ritual ruler, a sovereign bell, a master knife, a blood seal, and a bone sword, all humming and resonating together! *Fuck it, we're taking you bastards down with us!*