Chapter 207.2: No One Wanted a Craftsman Dead More Than Another Craftsman Part 2

Among Chosen Ones, it was common for those of the same path to suppress one another by rank. When Chosen Ones belonged to the same path, the strong usually suppressed, dominated, and controlled the weak. This was especially true for the Origin Path. Once there was a gap in level, that suppressive force was practically absolute.

The Ember Path needed even less explanation. A work that an apprentice had poured his heart and soul into could fall into the hands of a craftsman and be reverse-engineered and analyzed in minutes. No secrets would be left.

In more extreme cases, when the gap between them was more than an entire realm, the stronger craftsman could even seize control of the weaker one’s alchemical work and force it under his command.

Who the hell did this guy think he was?

With a trembling hand, Dalton put on a pair of glasses and analyzed him again. He observed carefully and thought it over seriously, but no matter how much he stared, this was clearly some brat in the Resonance Realm. He hadn’t even touched the threshold of becoming a craftsman. For all Dalton knew, he could be an independent Chosen One who had barely attended a few classes, yet he had come here trying to overturn the hierarchy?

With what? You think you’re worthy of doing that?

Dalton’s face slowly twisted into a snarl. He gripped the core hovering in midair with both hands and pushed the workshop’s countermeasure against foreign spirit matter interference straight to maximum. He wanted to see exactly how this little bastard would scream and groan as he was burned to charcoal and reduced to ash once the matrix and the workshop established a spirit matter connection.

Snap!

The room fell deathly silent, and Dalton’s face froze, as if he had turned to stone. Without warning, the outermost spirit matter structure maintaining the workshop’s disguise stopped responding. The realistic illusion covering the outside of the workshop shattered, as though it had never existed at all.

That scar-faced brat once again stretched his hand toward the workshop’s outer defense layer, with that lecherous, sleazy, and obnoxious smile. It was downright infuriating.

Snap!

The alarm blared again. Right after the disguise circuit, the repulsion barrier also stopped responding.

It was as if an invisible hand had stripped it away from the main body of the workshop. In the brief moment of contact, it fell apart and vanished like smoke, as if it were nothing but an illusion.

Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Something’s very fucking wrong!

Dalton couldn’t move, and he did everything he could to hold back the urge to scream, but he could no longer tell which was louder: his own ragged, chaotic breathing, or the phantom ringing in his ears.

With a gulp, he forced down a mouthful of saliva. His body went cold, as if he had been plunged into an ice pit.

Could today really be the day he...

***

“Whew, that felt good!” Ji Jue whistled, tilting his head as he listened to the many spirit matter circuits breaking apart. Beneath his hands, both the illusion and the repulsive force dispersed without a trace.

A pitch-black gate finally emerged from the ruins. With its disguise stripped away, it waited helplessly for the ravaging that would follow.

A large amount of Supreme Benevolence essence fell into his hands, only to be seized by Deus Ex Machina and refined in an instant. The visible surge in progress almost made him moan out loud. Now he finally understood why so many of his peers were afraid of his teacher.

No matter how tightly structured a workshop was, or how complex and stable its circuit construction was, it was utterly useless against something as unreasonable as the Dissociation Technique. All those layers of defense were like extra sheets of paper clothing. Once he got a grip on them, he could simply tear them apart for fun.

At first, when he faced the illusion that offered almost no opening, he felt at a loss. He needed Lou Feng’s assistance and Tong Shan’s telekinetic interference to find a gap and create an opportunity for himself.

The spirit matter composition of that illusory disguise was clearly the work of someone extraordinary. Its structure was rigorous yet chaotic, meticulous yet rough-hewn, as if it were a union of contradictions. And yet, every part of it fit with the rest perfectly, linking everything into a seamless whole. Just breaking through that outer layer had given Ji Jue a huge boost and pushed his progress forward.

In terms of sheer quality, this was on par with Professor Ye’s work. But the one thing Ji Jue had not expected was that the toughest part of the entire workshop would turn out to be only that outer layer of disguise.

It was the very definition of gilded trash. Pretty on the outside, rotten within. Everything else was nothing but by-the-book construction with no originality, barely functional pieces that were only passable at best. Even though there were occasional clever touches, he could still find corresponding answers for all of them in the past-exam-question sets Professor Ye had given him for practice.

With a slight adjustment to the frequency and a few corrections to the finer details, those defenses fell apart immediately. They jumped at the slightest touch and screamed the moment he laid a hand on them. This wasn’t challenging in the slightest. They were laughably fragile.

Still, at least he now knew where those strange and tricky exam questions had come from.

Suppressing the urge to throw his head back and laugh, he glanced at Lou Feng beside him. “What are you standing there for? Hurry up and hold it down for me!”

Seeing that the defenses around the outer layer of the workshop were about to shift, Lou Feng no longer had time to stand there in a daze. Right beside his feet, two hound-like metal monsters opened their mouths, and countless threads of spirit matter circuits extended from within, sinking into the area around the workshop and into the iron gate. After connecting on their own, they began reading, sensing, converting, and even interfering.

Unlike Ji Jue, an unofficial apprentice who had more or less taught himself, Young Master Lou had been treated like Master Kong’s own son in the workshop. He had everything an apprentice should have, plenty that other apprentices didn’t, and a whole pile of things most people would never dare dream of.

Even the tools Master Kong had once made when dismantling another person’s workshop had been tossed straight to Lou Feng. Even without Ji Jue, relying solely on the spirit intelligence and tools inside those two metal hounds, he could have slowly worn down the workshop door and dismantled it from the outside in. It just wouldn’t have been as fast as with Ji Jue.

Even so, this was still way too damn fast. Cold sweat covered Lou Feng’s back.

The hounds’ invasion had only interfered with the spirit matter flow of the workshop’s outer layer for a single moment. The moment a flaw appeared, Ji Jue seized it. Then, under the Dissociation Technique, it vanished into nothing.

Snap!

The sound of something breaking rang out again and again.

“Heh heh... heh heh heh... heh heh heh...”

Ji Jue let out a strange laugh as he dismantled the seal and isolation barrier in front of him once more. Flickers of spirit matter flashed constantly before him.

Go on, resist. Keep resisting. The more you resist, the more excited I get!

Under Tong Shan’s suppression, the workshop didn’t even have time to organize an effective counterattack. And under Lou Feng’s intrusion, even a single second of delayed response was enough for the Dissociation Technique to tear through it like dry weeds and rotten wood.

Faced with Professor Ye’s Dissociation Technique and the intrusion tools Master Kong had personally made, a workshop that could only be called passable had no chance to resist at all. With Tong Shan standing beside them, even its preset countermeasures and alchemical works couldn’t take effect.

In less than two minutes, every layer of defense of the workshop had been stripped bare by Ji Jue despite the blaring alarms. With a mournful cry of the core, even the Bedrock Sequence that maintained the defenses was torn apart by the Dissociation Technique, leaving the workshop with no protection at all.

“Mr. Shan, see this spot?” Ji Jue waved him over. He pointed to a place slightly left of center on the workshop gate and drew a circle around it. “Here. Hit it hard. Give it your all.”

Boom!

Before he had even finished speaking, an unstoppable, invisible blade of telekinesis tore through the steel and drove straight into the gate. It broke through into the darkness behind the door, shredding every remaining defense into pieces.

“Then what?” Tong Shan asked.

“That’s all.” Ji Jue stepped aside and gestured for them to enter. “After you, everyone. The attraction isn’t big. It’s just a short walk.”

The tightly shut door slowly opened with a nerve-racking scrape of metal.

Tong Shan turned back, exchanging a silent look with his teammates. Identical cheerful smiles appeared on all their faces at once. They rubbed their hands together, lined up, and strode inside. After waiting for so long, they could finally vent some of their anger.

Something fell. Then came screams, explosions, all kinds of thunderous crashes, the hiss of leaking gas, and the sound of bones snapping from beyond the door. Less than half a minute later, everything returned to silence.

Telekinesis extended outward and condensed into a translucent index finger, curling toward the people outside the door.

By the time Ji Jue and Lou Feng finished packing up and walked in, they saw chaos everywhere. Blood had spread across the hall. A battered and bruised craftsman was kneeling on the ground, stripped naked, his legs broken and his severed right hand lying on the ground. The moment he saw Ji Jue stride in, he began trembling all over, unable to control himself.

He wanted to scream. He seemed even more terrified now than when the Security Bureau had rushed in and beaten him down just moments earlier.

If, before this, Ji Jue had still been nothing more than a brat in Dalton’s eyes, then now the aberrant craftsman had reached a firm conclusion. He was eight thousand percent sure that this was some terrifying old freak smurfing on a borrowed newbie account!

He had never seen such a bizarre and terrifying skill before. The workshop he had poured everything into maintaining had been torn apart in a few moves as if it were nothing more than a cardboard box. He’d rather dig out his own brain, mash it into paste, and swallow it than believe this was a craftsman’s apprentice in his twenties.

This guy is supposed to be at the Resonance Realm? Resonance Realm my ass!

The moment Dalton thought of those legendary ancient alchemy craftsmen who had been reborn through borrowed bodies, and of how sinister and brutal they were said to be, he couldn’t stop himself from trembling.

Besides, even if he didn’t know exactly how ancient craftsmen dealt with people like him, he knew perfectly well how his teacher treated materials. If he ended up in these guys’ hands, even death would be a luxury.

While he was shaking in terror, drenched in sweat, someone dragged a chair across the floor, stopping right in front of him.

Without the slightest courtesy, Ji Jue sat down. He lowered his head and studied that twitching, distorted face. Suddenly, he smiled. “Name?”