Mindless Bullets, Necro-Alchemy

Boom! As the Canaan tore through the station, a massive side panel suddenly tore free from the high-speed bullet train at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. An alert station worker, seized by a stroke of luck, dropped flat to the platform just as a suffocating gale swept over his head. An ear-splitting blast immediately erupted behind him, rattling his bones to jelly. The side panel, at least six meters wide, flew through the air like the scythe of the Grim Reaper. Carried by momentum, it tumbled across the platform, showering golden sparks everywhere. It sheared straight through signboards, smashed a load-bearing pillar to pieces, and finally slid onto the tracks on the far side. If he had hesitated for even a fraction of a second, he would have been reduced to a smear of red paste on the platform. Immense mass combined with staggering speed yielded the rawest form of violence. Yet when the shaken worker stole a look at the torn panel, he discovered something far more terrifying. He had assumed some bandits had sawed the panel off with chainsaws or heavy power tools, but the severed edges were far from even. Instead, the metal was warped and twisted out of shape from bearing unfathomable kinetic energy. How could that be?! The worker knew perfectly well that the Canaan had been hurtling at top speed without suffering any external attack. That meant the damage could only have come from inside the carriage—someone on board was tearing the train apart from the inside! This was a high-speed train! Never mind child's play like bulletproofing or blast resistance; the structural requirements for a bullet train dictated that even if it derailed at maximum speed, the carriage body had to remain intact to give passengers a fighting chance at survival. If the carriages tore open and flung people out, everyone would be smashed into minced meat! Did those bandits shove a dump truck into the carriage?! What was more... The worker rubbed his eyes as he looked toward the direction where the Canaan had vanished. Had he just seen people fighting atop the roof of a train traveling at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour? * The roof had been ripped open, the side panels on both flanks torn away and sent flying, and the passenger seats reduced to scattered debris on the floor. Car 2, now a battlefield, was left with little more than its chassis. Steel, alloys, cutting-edge composites—before a group of flesh-and-blood beings infinitely close to the divine realm, no solid matter could withstand the sharpest techniques. To a gathering of legendary sorcerers, even a flock of clipped-wing legendary sorcerers, the proudest, most advanced mode of transport in the Country of All Stars was still far too fragile. Leaning against the partition door of Car 1, Igola inhaled a lungful of cold wind. Aboard the Canaan at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, it was not the gale lashing them, but rather them tearing through the slipstream. Unfamiliar cityscapes flashed past, and an unfamiliar sky raced backward above them. Just like this unstoppable train, they were hurtling headlong toward the end of their journey with irresistible momentum. *Click, click, click, click, click, click.* Igola held a revolver. It boasted an elongated golden barrel, a silver cylinder, and a white wood grip, while slate-blue wolf engravings turned it into an exquisite work of art. It belonged at a dimly lit ball, where lonely, glamorous noblewomen might stroke it to hint whether Igola needed to clean his gun. This was Igola's sidearm, Dire Wolf. After all, even in the Country of All Stars, revolvers were regarded mostly as toys. Before automatic rifles capable of spitting out thirty rounds in a second, a revolver that had to be loaded and fired one shot at a time possessed an untimely air of theatrical ritual in a life-and-death struggle. Yet the moment Igola clicked the cylinder shut, everyone had to divert part of their attention to him. The shadow wolf etched into the frame seemed to come alive. No longer an elegant art piece, it had become a ferocious, cunning beast, bursting with an eager roar to hunt! *Bang!* With a flick of his wrist, Igola actually aimed Dire Wolf at the back of Harvey's head and fired! Yet nothing happened to Harvey. Instead, across the other half of the battlefield where Niya was clashing with the Curse Elf, the elf's head suddenly jerked back as a bullet tore through her cheek and drilled right through her mouth! "Hiss!" The Curse Elf gasped through the searing agony, leaping back in haste to evade Niya's blade. This was Igola's latest creation—the Mindless Bullet! A bullet that sought out enemies on its own! Even Igola himself did not know where the bullet would fly, so how could an enemy possibly dodge it? Strictly speaking, this was hardly gun arts. The gun arts relied on reading the environment and anticipating the target, constructing a mausoleum of death through precision fire—the law of the jungle between hunter and prey. Igola, however, was no hunter. He had never liked bloody, filthy work. He fancied himself a leader who controlled the grand picture, a commander and strategist, but never a deathsworn charging the front lines. As a sorcerer, he had his own artistic pursuits; even if he had chosen firearms as the simplest and most brutish method to boost his combat strength, he had no intention of "mastering" cold steel. For a deceiver, wielding a weapon directly was tantamount to admitting his own incompetence. What Igola required was loyalty. A loyal bullet would seek out the deceiver's enemies on its own. Igola was not shooting; he was issuing commands. This was the terrifying aspect of the Mindless Bullet: it bypassed a sorcerer's greatest defensive barrier—intuition! When you tried to snipe a sorcerer, whether by direct or indirect aim, your killing intent and threat would inevitably trigger their intuitive senses. Because of this, powerful gun sorcerers often relied on blind fire, zero aiming, and instantaneous shots, striving to reduce aiming time to zero to slip past intuition. Igola's talent for gun arts was thoroughly mediocre—so mediocre that after months of practice, he barely scraped into the silver realm. But he had never planned on mastering the gun arts in the first place. If gun sorcerers sought to tame firearms, he sought to make firearms understand his words, so he could then deceive them into working for him. Up to this point, he had not fully achieved that; bullets could not comprehend speech. So Igola had collaborated a bit with Harvey. Miracles performed within a sorcerer's own body did not trigger the mysterious chains; for example, Yaxiu's Joy Sword could be used without impediment. Igola thus cast a miracle upon himself and had Harvey extract his bone marrow to inject into the bullets. In this way, the deceiver obtained fledgling bullets fused with an intelligent soul. From then on, matters became far simpler. Under the deceiver's tutelage, the bullets matured rapidly. They learned to seek out enemies on their own and to expand and cavitate inside an enemy's body. Given enough time, he could probably even teach the bullets how to roast a Lalafell. Igola felt no psychological burden over this. The very first person a deceiver fooled was himself, let alone bullets merely tainted with a sliver of his spirituality. In fact, he felt he had forged an entirely new path. Deceiving others, after all, always entailed a barrier of communication; people rarely understood one another, and targets might not act according to his wishes. But deceiving oneself involved zero communication loss. Being able to understand oneself meant one could achieve perfect deception. It was also by relying on the Mindless Bullet that Igola had truly stepped across the threshold of the legendary realm. Before this, he had always believed the mind faction was the secret to dominating society, the universal law of an orderly era. But after successfully deceiving inanimate matter, he faintly arrived at a fresh realization: deception meant not only letting money flow into the hands of those more worthy of possessing it, but also allowing everything under the heavens to return to its proper place. Greenhouses were essentially a deception of the soil; water conservancy was a deception of the rivers. When sorcerers interfered with nature, were they not deceiving nature itself? Harvey believed that all things cycled between life and death—that all people lived atop corpses and would ultimately become corpses to nurture new life. Igola, by contrast, believed that deception ran throughout civilization; humans required deception with each other, just as humanity required deception with nature. In the past, he had merely circled within the sphere of social interaction. Only after being cast into the Country of All Stars did Igola finally uncover this vastly broader market. Deceiving a bullet was merely his first step toward deceiving the world. A sorcerer could dodge a bullet only if they reacted before the gunshot, since no human body could outspeed a flying bullet. But Igola's Mindless Bullet chose its trajectory only after clearing the barrel, squeezing a sorcerer's reaction window to the absolute limit. He was no gun sorcerer, yet he was more unerring than any of them. The only drawback was that the Mindless Bullet demanded a heavy sense of ritual, making a revolver and pressing rounds into the cylinder one by one an indispensable procedure. With Igola's coordination, Niya could finally match the Curse Elf's onslaught. Although the Curse Elf was a fire sorcerer, she was equally skilled with the sword and the gun. Wielding a rapier in one hand and a short gun in the other, her style was versatile, blending the orthodox with the unexpected. More importantly, her combat experience far outstripped Niya's; had her teammates not intervened, Niya would have been overwhelmed long ago. Just as Niya prepared to press her advantage and take down the Curse Elf, a dark shadow plunged from above like a pool of undisguised malice. Midair offered nowhere to dodge, a veritable death zone. Niya slashed upward without hesitation, but the dark figure twisted its body in midair to an uncanny, stick-insect-like degree, neatly dodging her strike. It tumbled across the floor, rolled through the battle between Weixi and the parasite sorcerers, and finally returned to its master's side, barely halting Harvey's charge. By now, every inch of Harvey's exposed skin had turned an ashen white. His shirt had long been torn to shreds, and his upper torso was covered in wounds, yet not a single drop of blood leaked out, making him resemble a weather-beaten tombstone. Across Harvey's back, a strap wrapped around his spine, holding thirteen vials of reagents. Five of them were already empty. To bolster the team's combat prowess, Igola had delved into gun arts, while Harvey had minored in a specialized discipline he had long dabbled in: the alchemy faction. Though called alchemy, the core remained corpses. Over the past few months, Harvey had been experimenting with how far he could modify a corpse before triggering interference from the mysterious chains, expending dozens of "family members" in the process. Modifying corpses was only the first step. The second step was the crux—he had to become a corpse himself. The final results were fairly good. The thirteen vials along his back held the distilled essence of thirteen family members. Upon injection, Harvey's sensation of pain dropped to an absolute minimum, his skin's durability increased drastically, and his body mass and movement speed surged. He needed only to barrel forward like a juggernaut to pose a lethal threat—a style remarkably well-suited to an academic genius of his dark-skinned, curly-haired caliber. The sole side effect was that the transformation was irreversible. Injecting one vial meant completely turning into a corpse in about thirty days. Two vials meant twenty days; three vials, ten days; four vials, five days; five vials, three days; six vials, two days; seven vials, one day; eight vials, twelve hours; nine vials, six hours; ten vials, three hours; eleven vials, two hours; twelve vials, one hour. Noticing the firmness of his body beginning to wane, Harvey injected the sixth vial without the slightest hesitation. Though this body's lifespan was reduced to a mere two days, he did not care in the slightest. With an impassive, powerful stomp, he rammed forward like a hearse! *Smack!* Two people reached out together to check Harvey's charge—none other than Tiramisu, the Coffin-Bearing Maiden, and her "family member." "Yejian likes you a lot," Tiramisu said abruptly. "I like you a lot too. You cannot beat me."