Chapter 208.1: Bad News and Judgment Part 1

Dalton Meyer was a thirty-five years old male, and he was a Level Five Ember-type craftsman.

He was born in the Thousand Islands and was of common mixed blood. Like any ordinary Ember-type, he had learned under many teachers and drawn on a wide range of knowledge, which was to say he had drifted from workshop to workshop doing odd jobs.

To become a craftsman, he had pursued corruption, and after obtaining the Putrefied blessing, he bowed his head before the Mentor of the Depths, Jian Yuan, and became one of his nominal disciples.

In name, he was a student. In practice, he was a tool.

Jian Yuan had made a name for himself more than a century ago. After turning his back on the Craftsmen Association, he joined the Nine Abominations. As a master, he became a model example of someone willing to teach anyone.

As for his students, he taught them whatever was useful, then used them until they broke.

After so many years, once the number of students under him grew, his circle looked rather full of talent. He had produced no small number of monsters and freaks, earning himself the title of Putrefied Dire Furnace, referring to the countless monstrosities forged in his furnace.

Dalton was the most useless student from the worst batch. And that wasn’t a metaphor. It was the literal truth.

His foundations were all over the place, and his grasp on the theory was poor. Of the four disciplines—Elevation, Transformation, Purification, Integration—he was passable in none.

He had picked up a jumble of conflicting techniques from all over the place, but he could never make them work together or separate what was useful from what was garbage. He had eaten from a hundred restaurants only to give himself indigestion, and after learning from a hundred schools, he had gone on to embarrass every one of them.

After scraping things together here and there, he had somehow managed to gather enough knowledge to be a craftsman whose skill level could just barely be called passable. In other words, this was as far as he would ever get in life. He wouldn’t be able to improve any further.

Jian Yuan had told him that outright. If they hadn’t been desperately short on manpower, Dalton probably wouldn’t have even qualified to be used as a tool.

But as Dalton saw it, that old bastard was clearly just hoarding his secrets and refusing to pass down his legacy. Those words were meant to crush his confidence on purpose. In any case, whenever Dalton talked about him, the old bastard was as wicked as he could be, as ruthless as possible, the sort of man who would smack a passing cat before letting it leave. He couldn’t compare at all to the senior before him now, who was so open-minded, composed, magnanimous, and kind!

So, in consideration of my full confession, could you please show mercy and spare my life? I am willing to abandon the darkness and join the light. From now on, I will be the Security Bureau’s lapdog, and I will spend the rest of my life thanking you for your boundless grace and kindness.

There was no torture, no coercion, not even a proper interrogation.

Ji Jue had barely begun. They hadn’t even finished the formalities when Dalton started rattling away like a machine gun. He spilled everything without holding back, clearly terrified that if he left out even the slightest detail, Ji Jue wouldn’t spare his miserable life, especially after Ji Jue destroyed a piece of alchemical equipment with the Dissociation Technique right in front of him, then smiled and pressed a hand on Dalton’s shoulder.

After that, there was a long silence. No one said a word.

Tong Shan was about to ask something, but Xu Guan, who had been monitoring the entire process from the side, rubbed his face and sighed. “He isn’t lying.”

There was no trace of deception, nor had he omitted anything important. Either this man was hiding his true strength and was so far above them that he could effortlessly crush everyone present but had chosen to play along out of some twisted sense of amusement, or everything he had said was true.

A chorus of sharp, horrified gasps followed.

Ji Jue remained expressionless. Tong Shan lowered his eyes and said nothing. Lou Feng’s face turned livid, while the other members of the team busted out their hometown dialects or Cliff City curses. All one could say was that this was a freaking convention of monsters and freaks. This was practically a gathering of outstanding talents in Spring City.

Following the orders of the Heretic Cult’s High Priest, Cleric, and Holy Envoy—all three titles belonging to its supreme leader, Lu Changsheng—the followers of the Nine Abominations had stirred into action. Every sort of villain who couldn’t show their face in public had made an appearance. Through the secret paths beneath the vortex, they gathered in Spring City to plot exactly the kind of grand scheme lunatics loved most.

As for what that grand undertaking actually was, a small fry like Dalton, who was barely qualified to work as Jian Yuan’s tool, didn’t know a single thing.

The sheer scale of it said more than enough, however. Every faction was more impressive than the last.

First came the Heretic Cult, which worshiped evil things and spread corruption. Then there was the infamous Dragonrite Society; the Wulou Temple, which followed the Absolute Abyss and preached the extinction of all beings; the Celestial Heart Society, chosen by Evermore, the Great Abomination corresponding to Heart Core; and finally, there were the craftsmen of the Putrefaction from the Depths.

Just look at these five factions. Which one wasn’t packed with hardened outlaws? Which one wasn’t a long-established force of evil, or one of the Nine Abominations’ precious little darlings?

Well, the Dragonrite Society only counted as a borderline case, so perhaps they didn’t quite qualify, but in the pursuit of turning themselves into dragons and chasing calamities, the things the Dragonrite Society had done were even more numerous and outrageous.

And now, these five bands of freaks had gathered to pull off something big. Never before had Haizhou seen such a spectacular assembly of villains! Aside from the Heretic Cult, none of them could have possibly mobilized their entire force. Even so, each faction had sent at least some of its strongest and most capable members.

The Heretic Cult would be hopelessly outmatched against the Security Bureau, but with this entire collection of demons and monsters working together, things could turn ugly very quickly. They could have been tearing one another apart internally, with their vicious infighting never letting up, but none of the people involved were fools. With enormous gains at stake, their disagreements amounted to little more than minor squabbles.

Obviously, the grand scheme came first! Not even Ji Jue could imagine what kind of monumental disaster these once-in-a-generation lunatics could unleash after joining forces. ℯℯ𝘭.

His team had originally thought that after severely damaging one of the Heretic Cult’s teams, they would suffer heavy losses. At the very least, they should have been hurting for quite some time.

Now, however, it seemed the loss had barely inconvenienced them. It was nothing to them but a minor irritation, hardly worth worrying about. At this point, they didn’t even qualify as a major threat anymore. Whether this counted as a silver lining was hard to say, but at least there was news of Lou Feng’s aunt.

The good news was that she was still alive. The bad news was that being alive was about all that could be said for her.

The survivors of the resident investigation team hadn’t been slaughtered, nor had they suffered humiliation or torture. Instead, they had all been frozen on the spot and taken away. No one knew their whereabouts.

Lou Feng’s expression darkened. Gritting his teeth, he turned and left without saying anything else. He dedicated himself fully to dismantling the workshop, forcing himself to divert his attention, but the repeated crashes of destruction made it painfully clear how badly he was taking the news.

Ji Jue sighed. At a time like this, there was no point worrying about a few damaged odds and ends. He only hoped Lou Feng could hold himself together.

“I found it!”

Ji Xue finally found the most crucial item thanks to her terrifying speed and efficiency. It was a palm-sized disk engraved with numerous characters, its needle spinning constantly. It looked like a compass.

Everyone immediately perked up and turned to Xu Guan. Once he finished examining it and slowly nodded, they finally allowed themselves to breathe a sigh of relief.

This was Dalton’s geomantic disk.

There was no chance the craftsmen of the Depths and the Heretic Cult were truly on the same side. Even calling them allies would have been generous. During his several trips in and out of Spring City, Dalton had secretly recorded several routes on his geomantic disk. If the situation suddenly changed and the Heretic Cult packed up and left, what were their allies supposed to do? Stay in Spring City and wait to die?

These days, the most important thing wasn’t whether you could accomplish your goal. It was making sure that, even if you failed, you survived long enough to try again.

Now that they had Dalton’s map, as long as they disguised themselves properly, they could actually seize the chance and slip out of here. The opportunity was right in front of them.

Next came the question of what to do with Dalton.

When everyone looked over at him coldly, Dalton widened his eyes in terror. He begged and kowtowed frantically in front of Ji Jue, who was just about to open his mouth when he heard Lou Feng call his name.

Lou Feng pushed open the door of Dalton’s workshop, his expression grimmer than Ji Jue had ever seen it.

“Come here,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

Ji Jue’s expression darkened as well.

Inside the production room stood a massive machine that had already been mostly assembled. It looked like some kind of complex pillar, engraved from the inside out with numerous spirit matter circuits, its structure rigorous yet strange. Some parts of its construction completely violated the principles of modern alchemy, yet somehow they remained compatible with one another and made the whole thing work.

If not for the thick stack of blueprints beside it, along with an instruction manual so detailed that as long as one followed the diagrams step by step, nothing could possibly go wrong, Ji Jue would have had almost no idea what this thing was.

In fact, he still didn’t understand it.

Its maker, Dalton, didn’t understand it either, but since he didn’t understand, he also didn’t dare ask. His teacher had told him what to make, so he made it. Why ask so many questions? What, was he trying to go to graduate school? Under Jian Yuan’s tutelage, “further studies” had never meant anything good.

Ji Jue could only rely on Deus Ex Machina’s incomplete perception, his own theoretical knowledge, and a comparison with the manual to guess what this thing was actually meant to do, but even those scattered guesses were enough to leave him speechless.

“Are you certain?” Ji Jue asked, clinging to one last shred of hope.

After a moment, Lou Feng replied in an equally hoarse voice, “I’m not. That’s why I called you over. But... I have seen these parameters, the modules for the spirit-matter frequency and verification sequence before. That I know for sure.”

Ji Jue was at a loss for words.