All phenomena took shape of their own accord; everything appeared just as nature and reason dictated.
Including the victory and defeat before them.
There was no room for surprises or accidents.
Ji Jue raised his hand. A wisp of spiritus flowed forth, effortlessly condensing into a blade. Entering where there was space without thickness, it dismantled Fernand's counterattack with casual, understated ease.
This was not limited to transmutation.
When this power was applied in combat, from the vantage point of lofty insight, every consequence and possibility, every permutation and shift, became crystal clear and distinctly visible.
There was no need to laboriously control and hold sway over every single element at all times. One needed only to reach out at the precise moment and give the gentlest push...
And so, all things occurred naturally; all things self-transformed.
It was that simple.
Was not the so-called All Things Self-Transform precisely this pristine naturalness born of heaven?
As the proof of achievement bestowed by the Embers, the existence of All Things Self-Transform could even be called a form of consequentialism.
Half was Heaven's Mandate resting upon him; half was the natural course of things. Half was the artisan's consummate skill; half was Crafted by Nature.
Before even firing up a furnace, a single glance over the raw materials was enough to discern the quality of the final product.
Once all possibilities and changes were seen through, even unexpected accidents and mutations became merely predetermined links in the natural order.
"Do you still want to continue, Fernand?"
Ji Jue lowered his gaze to look at the shattered face before him, entirely devoid of impatience. "There's plenty of time. We can go again, and then once more after that...
"Until you give up."
Fernand said nothing more.
He simply looked at him in silence. After a long while, his fractured expression twitched slightly. Amid the calm, he sighed silently and opened his hands.
The Masterwork tumbled into the dust.
"It's already over, Ji Jue."
He lifted his head, gazing at the illusory shimmer of the blazing sun faintly rising on the distant sea horizon, and sighed wearily. "Perhaps it should have ended long ago."
Struggling beyond his depth, self-righteous arrogance, or perhaps all these years of sinking and endurance...
There was no longer any need for a deathbed struggle, nor was there any fluke or possibility left.
He chose to surrender.
In that instant, the sound of fracturing rang out. Behind Fernand, the tottering afterimage of the Celestial-Human could no longer hold. After being overdrawn through the entire night, it dissolved completely into ash and smoke.
Amid the ascension of the Seven Cities, it met its fall.
Passing along with it were life, soul, obsession, and everything else...
"You won."
Fernand's frame gradually hunched over, like stone weathering away in the wind.
As the cracks spread, the face bathed in sunlight blurred as well.
"Ha... A lifetime of torment, rising and falling in vain, only for it all to end in emptiness. No matter how high the ascension, in the end lies sinking... Radiant Heaven's Mandate, why have you treated me so harshly?"
In his finest hours of surging ambition, he had recklessly run headlong into Cast Plowman; and when he was closest to ascension, he had met an opponent like Ji Jue.
Refining through sinking was ultimately an unreachable summit.
Yet as resentment and hatred churned, the thousands of words converging on the tip of his tongue dwindled down to a single remorseful sigh:
"I have failed Elder Zhen..."
Not only had the guidance along the path of sinking and the nurturing within the Profound come to naught, but now even the Profound's century-spanning grand design—the westernmost pillar among the thirty-one pillars across the Endless Sea—had been lost on his account.
Ten thousand deaths could never atone for his guilt.
At that moment, with the collapse of the Celestial-Human's remnant projection, the lighthouse snapped in two with a roar.
The residual flames of Stagnant Rot erupted in a blowout, rising futilely into the air, yet they could no longer corrode or spread. In the end, as if possessing a will of their own, they swept off toward the far distance in a grand, surging torrent...
The entire world seemed to shudder violently for a single heartbeat.
Ji Jue looked up, sensing the distant tremor, though it was too faint and muddled to perceive clearly.
All he could sense was the contamination of Great Sin circulating, raging across the mortal world like a burst dam, sweeping back and forth across the entire Endless Sea.
From the bird's-eye view of satellite cloud imagery, massive greyish-black pillars shot straight into the sky. Immediately following, greyish-black cloud layers unfurled like a curtain over the ocean surface.
Viewed from outside the mortal world, anomalies surged one after another like rising tides.
Amid the ravages of the Blightwind, an aberration that had been prepared for untold years erupted into full view!
The corruption billowed outwards.
Across the Endless Sea, were the Seven Cities the only place that had long been sinking?
Among the Thousand Islands, was Fernand the only one stirring up wind and waves?
Now, in his final, dying moments, Fernand witnessed all of this and could no longer hold back a smile of release.
With Elder Zhen's sheer breadth of vision, how could a surging momentum accumulated over a century of planning fall short of success merely because of the loss of a single city or territory?
Ascension was merely an incidental occurrence; sinking was the norm.
Now, right before Ji Jue's eyes, a single corner of the change enveloping the entire mortal world had finally unfolded...
Ji Jue fell silent.
He even ignored the approaching storm clouds in the distance, as well as the Extinction-rank calamity beast, Charybdis, whom everyone had cast to the back of their minds.
The wounded beast was concealed within the thunderclouds and downpour, hurtling toward them, famished and impatient!
Destruction had never truly been halted.
At best, it had merely been delayed for a fleeting moment.
"The bait luring it... is inside my cane..."
Amid the dead silence, Fernand's voice sounded, feeble and breathless. "I left it... in Pucheng's council..."
At the very, very end, he chose to accept reality as an artisan.
Neither rancor nor malice remained.
Only composure.
Since victory and defeat were settled, what was the point of clinging further?
Ji Jue was momentarily taken aback and cast a glance at Fernand. Unfortunately, there was not the slightest trace of tension or urgency on his face; he simply did not care in the least.
"No need,"
Ji Jue smiled. "I have reinforcements."
In the distance, the roar of thunder burst forth.
Without warning, a massive hole was punched through the rain-heavy cloud bank.
Immediately after, bathed in skyward light, the mangled behemoth wailed as it slowly collapsed onto the sea surface, its tainted blood spilling outward in billowing waves.
It struggled in vain for a moment, unable to snap the chains wrapped around its form.
In the end, it died.
Directly ahead of the butchered calamity beast, an unremarkable ship sliced swiftly through the sea of fouled blood, sailing toward the Seven Cities.
All returned to dead silence, yet the world seemed to shake incessantly as loud booms echoed without pause.
From the bird's-eye view of the satellite imagery, those greyish-black rays of fierce light that connected heaven and earth began to waver one by one, snapping in two at a speed visible to the naked eye!
In the blink of an eye, half the light pillars had been completely annihilated, leaving the remainder dim and teetering on the verge of collapse.
Fernand's eyes widened. He gasped for breath, yet no sound came from his throat.
Ji Jue raised his hand, took out a mask from his pocket right in front of him, and held it up against his own face.
"You already knew I was from the Association..."
He asked curiously, "Do I really look that unlike someone from the Absolute Sentence squad?"
As the chosen of the Embers, a pillar of the Association, an exemplar of artisans, a rising star of the new generation, and an absolute certainty to become a Master in the future, what could his first reaction possibly be when encountering the Profound?
To fucking report it, of course!
Making one's way in this world was all about factions and backing!
What kind of idiot artisan rolled up his sleeves and drew a blade to charge in alone whenever trouble arose? Did you take me for one of those uncultured Swarm bastards?!
Even when confronting a single wolf, Ji Jue knew better than to hoard all the spoils himself, to say nothing of running into such a massive upheaval across the entire Seven Cities. If he hadn't known to call Jiang Tongguang right away, his brain would have had to be chewed up by a dog!
Even if he hadn't known the full extent of Fernand's background back then, the mere presence of Xiuyan was more than enough reason for Ji Jue to blow up their phones.
He had already called Hu Jian, so how could he leave out Yellowbeard? Better yet, how could he leave out his own teacher?
The moment he hung up, his message was relayed through Jiang Tongguang directly to the council of the Ring of Taiyi.
The Association wasn't blind either.
Ji Jue could deduce the Profound's research into calamity beasts through Haze Workshop; the councilors and Masters possessed far broader intelligence channels and had seen much more. Once the intelligence was pooled and pursued from multiple angles, even if the picture was not entirely clear, they could certainly conclude that the Profound was stirring up trouble during the Blightwind!
As for the rest, there was no need to dilly-dally.
Deploy the Absolute Sentence squads—deploy, deploy, deploy! Send them all out!
Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
At this moment across the Endless Sea, aside from Ji Jue, there were at least twenty forcibly conscripted Masters and more than six major workshops brandishing hit lists issued by the Association and warrants signed by the upper echelons of the Federation and the Empire, slaughtering their way through with merciless abandon!
Who gave a damn what the Profound wanted to do?
Just kill them all and be done with it!
After their protracted concealment, the moment hidden pieces like Fernand poked their heads out, what awaited them was ruthless, unsparing slaughter.
If not for Ji Jue's meritorious report, he wouldn't even have had the chance to claim the Seven Cities all to himself!
Even so, there was still backup on the way to watch his back.
The plain, unremarkable vessel sailed straight from the sea up onto the shore, parting earth and stone as smoothly as water.
It came to a halt before Ji Jue.
Across the hull, a coat of viscous, bloody gore had not yet dried, while the crusted blood beneath had already hardened into a thick shell.
Even the artisan who emerged from the cabin bore scorch marks on his beard and hair, stained with wet blood.
"My apologies. Ran into a few stubborn bastards along the way, got delayed a bit."
Puffing on a pipe, the 'Captain' dragged a heavy boat hook as he walked out onto the deck and looked at Ji Jue. "Need any help wrapping things up?"
"No need. Thank you for making the trip, Elder. Everything's taken care of."
At that, the bloodstained artisan nodded, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and turned his gaze toward Fernand, inspecting him impassively. "Who's this?"
"Him?"
Ji Jue looked back at the wreckage on the ground, teetering on the brink of annihilation.
Those hollow eyes trembled as they looked up at him, carrying a sliver of supplication and plea.
Fernand was long past the ability to speak.
Yet at the very end, what was he dreading?
What was he afraid of?
What right did a defeated foe have to demand anything?
Ji Jue coldly withdrew his gaze.
"Just a nobody,"
he said. "Not worth mentioning."
In the silence, the lingering light in those pupils faded away, leaving no further breath or sound.
That final tremor in his eyes—whether it was resentment, relief,
or perhaps gratitude, no one could tell.
He had abandoned his former name, abandoned the title bestowed by the Profound, and in the end, even his final life's work had vanished like smoke into thin air.
In a few more years, not even the name Fernand would be remembered by anyone.
What need was there for Heaven's Mandate?
He had already sunk long ago.
And so, the nobody was extinguished here.
Never to be seen again.
On the satellite imagery, the spread of contamination and the expansion of the aberrations had not yet ceased. Under the Association's encirclement and targeted purges, the Profound's counteroffensive had only just begun.
No one knew what would follow.
"Elder Zhen..."
Amid the gradually rising sound of the tide, Ji Jue looked up at the dark canopy of heaven.
He simply wondered: with the mortal world as the furnace, sorrow as the flame, and the Blightwind refining and transforming through such painstaking scheming... what ultimately was to be forged within this sea of bitterness?
Chapter 787