The living mercury possessed only three abilities.
The first was an extraordinary resistance to magic, engineered through unknown methods by the City of Alchemy, to the point where even a paladin's Divine Smite barely inflicted any damage. The second was the devouring trait inherited from the slime race, though after becoming living mercury, it consumed only metal.
The last was an innate talent that Anbaixiu had expended immense cost and effort to bestow upon it at the soul level—Polymorph.
As a newborn child, the living mercury had yet to master this gift, capable only of crude mimicry.
Thus, it transformed into a mercurial humanoid, bearing a seventy-to-eighty-percent resemblance to the paladin's silhouette, though its features were blurred like a half-melted candle.
Yet crude as its form was, its reproduction of the paladin's earlier movements was remarkably lifelike.
The living mercury's Divine Smite carried no holy light, but the sheer density of mercury packed an immense kinetic punch. When the paladin raised his longsword to parry, the impact forced him back two paces.
Pressing its advantage, the living mercury attacked again, but it could only repeat the exact same maneuver.
Raise sword, slash downward—still swift as thunder.
This time, the paladin would not be driven back by the same move. With a twist of his blade, he met the strike at an angle with the flat spine of his sword, completely deflecting the force of the downward blow. Riding the momentum, the paladin spun his longsword and drove it deep into the living mercury's head.
The blade cleaved the creature's head clean in two. Such a wound would have killed a human instantly, but to the living mercury, it barely amounted to a scratch.
The liquid mercury writhed as it healed, briefly trapping the paladin's sword inside its head. Then, copying what it had just experienced, the living mercury spun its own mercury blade and slashed toward the paladin's skull. But just before the edge struck, a platinum aura flared across the paladin's helmet.
Aura of Protection—the paladin's signature ability. Formed from devout faith, this protective power could shield against a wide variety of harm.
Upon striking the Aura of Protection, the mercury blade glanced harmlessly off the side of the helmet as if skidding across ice, throwing the living mercury off balance instead.
Seizing the opening, the paladin unleashed a dazzling flurry of swordsmanship, carving the living mercury until it lost all humanoid shape.
In a single exchange, the living mercury was utterly defeated, comprehensively overwhelmed in swordsmanship.
Yet by the time the paladin withdrew his blade to catch his breath, the oddly mutilated mass of mercury knitted back together and launched the exact same sequence against him.
Watching this from beyond, Anbaixiu felt thoroughly pleased.
He had meticulously crafted the living mercury's soul. Polymorph required a powerful capacity for imitation and learning to be truly effective. The fact that the creature could perfectly mimic the paladin's swordsmanship after seeing it just once proved that his efforts had not gone to waste.
However, extraordinary as its mimicry was, matching a paladin in pure swordcraft was impossible.
Every paladin's martial arts were forged through countless trials. Though this paladin in the cell lacked adventurous experience, his swordsmanship was undeniably master-class.
Blades flashed as the two swords clashed repeatedly. Though they used the exact same moves, the paladin consistently parried the living mercury's edge and landed blows upon its body. Even with identical techniques, subtle variations in force, angles, and transitions tilted the combat entirely in one direction. Had the living mercury's body not possessed the slime's trait of freely splitting and reforming, it would have been hacked to pieces long ago.
The paladin had also discerned the creature's weakness: it could only copy, unable to distinguish feints from true strikes or weave flowing combos. He could suppress it with ease.
Realizing this, the paladin grew unhurried. Rather than burning through other paladin abilities, he treated the living mercury as a sparring dummy.
This was not out of arrogance, but because he knew his real adversary was not just the monster before him, but the lich lurking outside the cell.
A paladin's strength was not infinite. If he exhausted his holy power dealing with a single construct, would he not be entirely helpless when facing the lich?
So while he still held the upper hand, the paladin exercised restraint, relying primarily on sword technique to wear down the creature's energy. He refused to believe this monster could regenerate endlessly, or wage high-intensity battle without any cost.
The paladin's judgment was sound. Each time the living mercury repaired its body or shifted forms, it consumed stored energy derived from consumed metal, and that energy was bound to run out eventually.
In a battle of attrition like this, the newborn creature might truly fail to outlast a rigorously trained paladin, losing all vitality to repeated cuts before exhausting the man's stamina.
Anbaixiu could not help but marvel. The paladins of the Ryan Empire truly lived up to their reputation; the continent's mightiest empire was not built on empty boasts.
*But if it loses like this, how am I supposed to do business?*
The memory crystal was actively recording. Having to edit and doctor the footage afterward would be an enormous hassle.
Unable to remain a passive bystander, Anbaixiu called out through the iron door, "Silly child, you don't have to keep a humanoid shape! Why limit yourself to one sword? You don't just have two hands! Let your imagination run wild! Learning your enemy's swordsmanship doesn't mean you have to look identical to him!"
At these words, the living mercury—which had just had its head cleaved open and was about to knit back together—abruptly froze. The two halves of its split head stopped merging; instead, they stretched out into two rapiers, thrusting straight at the paladin.
The thrusting technique was no different from what the paladin had used earlier, but with two blades striking simultaneously from an unnatural angle straight toward his face, the paladin was caught off guard, his fluid rhythm broken in an instant.
Though he managed to parry the twin thrusts and retaliated with a pommel strike that left a massive crater in the creature's chest, it was already his last gasp of initiative.
Spurred by Anbaixiu's prompt, the living mercury had cast off its constraints.
In humanoid form, it could never match the paladin in fencing. But what if it wasn't humanoid?
A slime had never been bound to any fixed shape. Why fight in an unfamiliar posture?
The living mercury's body writhed and warped. Numerous arms and longswords sprouted outward, whirling like the sails of a windmill as they chopped toward the paladin.
The paladin suddenly felt as though he were being besieged by several peers at once. Their sword styles were identical, and by watching the swing of the blades, he could tell where every strike was aimed. The problem was... there were simply too many swords!
Chapter 37