Chapter 209.2: A Dead End and a Crooked Path Part 2

Beneath the broken tower that had turned into flesh, amid the dancing flames and thick smoke, a withered, hunched figure slowly appeared as Ye Xian advanced. He had been sitting there from the very beginning, not moving at all. Simply watching everything happen in silence, he looked on coldly as he enjoyed the tragic disaster and drama unfolding before his eyes.

Master Kong looked as if she had been struck by lightning, and cold sweat poured down her back. She had just walked out from there, and because of the chaos and her injuries, she hadn’t noticed him at all.

What frightened her even more was that man’s face. It looked so old. Clearly, it was a face she knew so well, yet at this moment, it felt utterly unfamiliar. She almost couldn’t believe it.

He was the master sent by the Association, the administrator in charge of all alchemy work in Spring City, the one who had proposed and overseen the entire construction project and every part of its process—Duan Mu.

Her muscles stiff, she could only glare at him. Gritting her teeth to fight off the humiliation and fury, she turned and left without hesitation, taking the survivors with her.

Ye Xian continued forward, studying that aged face forever etched with wrinkles and sorrow. Her eyes were full of curiosity. “Still in one piece, Master Duan?”

Duan Mu smiled as he met her gaze. “And you, Master Ye? As I recall, you were working in the deep shaft, the most dangerous part of the site. When the corruption poured in, I thought you would die there.”

“Fortunately, I’m an antisocial and suspicious person. I trust no one, find everyone an eyesore, and can never bring myself to place faith in anyone. So I always make a few little preparations of my own. You, on the other hand, gave me quite a shock, Master Duan.”

Ye Xian kept both hands in her pockets as she studied him solemnly. “To pull off something this enormous without warning... You certainly don’t look like the frail old man you’ve always claimed to be. Should I praise you as an old warhorse still raring to go? This couldn’t have been easy.”

“It was easy. Actually, it was quite easy.”

Duan Mu showed no pride nor joy. As the man responsible for everything that had happened, he should have been gloating over his success and mocking Ye Xian from above. Yet as he listened to her, his sorrowful, deeply wrinkled face seemed to age even further.

He merely sighed wearily. “So long as you are shameless enough, you can always keep fighting after every defeat. So long as you can still crawl back to your feet, you can call yourself unyielding. But praise like that, offered to the defeated, is little more than a comforting lie, like a dose of poison sprinkled over an open wound.”

Duan Mu looked up at the sky and sighed. He couldn’t help but laugh. “For so many years, everyone has treated me as the perfect example of a late bloomer, someone who never gave up, but not a single day has passed when I didn’t wonder why the late bloomer, the indomitable one, couldn’t have been someone else. Why did it have to be me?”

Ye Xian and said nothing.

Within the Association of the Taiyi Ring, and in the hearts of all craftsmen, Duan Mu was practically the living embodiment of inspiration. At thirty-one, he underwent Self-Awakening and joined the Ember Path, but by then, he had passed the usual age for an apprentice. He drifted from workshop to workshop, and although he was repeatedly turned away, he continued trying.

At forty, after nine years of effort, he finally earned his craftsman’s license as a middle-aged latecomer who had entered the Ember Path with no proper foundation. By all rights, his achievement should have drawn endless praise, stunned everyone who heard of it, and remained the talk of the Association for the entire year.

Unfortunately, someone else had taken the same examination in the same hall that year. It was a fourteen-year-old boy with no school, no faction, and no prior foundation. He had neither elders nor a teacher to guide him. Armed with nothing but the Association’s introductory pamphlets, he taught himself alchemy in a single year.

Then, in a paper so badly formatted that even its basic structure was wrong, he presented fourteen conclusions and four principles that laid the foundations for an entirely new field of modern alchemy.

By the time Duan Mu had proven his ability, broken through his own limits step by step, climbed the ranks within the Association, and claimed the title of master, that quiet, taciturn boy had already become an Ember grandmaster, a sage of the world known as the Ploughsmith.

When Duan Mu, already old, rallied others in an attempt to revive the Aggregation Lineage, his suggestion was denied with a single sentence from the grandmaster known as the Divine Furnace.

That attempt ended in failure, and the discipline languished for decades. Then Duan Mu returned, his long years of accumulated study finally bearing fruit. He proposed an entirely new theory, determined to rebuild the field from its ruins, only to encounter an insurmountable rival during that year’s master assessment. It was a rebellious maverick who had broken away from her own school—Ye Xian.

The theories and achievements Duan Mu had spent a lifetime of suffering to complete became obsolete less than five days after submission, superseded by Ye Xian’s paper.

Even so, he didn’t give up. Until today, he had continued his research. Tragedy, torment, and failure had marked nearly every chapter of Duan Mu’s life. Any one of these would have been enough to break an ordinary person, yet he had endured them all and crossed every obstacle in his path. Eventually, he stood above countless others as a master and was celebrated as the perfect example of a late bloomer.

But no one knew just how much Duan Mu hated the words “late bloomer” and how deeply he hated himself, as well as the meager talent that had left him better than most, yet forever far below the truly exceptional.

“The year I met you at the Master Assessment, I knew that one day, you would reach heights beyond anything I could ever imagine attaining in this lifetime. Even today, I still believe that,” Duan Mu said with a sigh. “All I ever hoped for was to exhaust what little remained of my life, do my best to move forward, and then progress just a little farther. As long as I could still take another step forward, that was enough.”

Ye Xian asked, “If that’s the case, then why change your tune and take another path?”

“Probably because... I could no longer keep walking.” Duan Mu’s expression twisted into something caught between joy and sadness. “Seven years ago, I began to realize that no matter how desperately I worked or how many hours I spent buried in research, it accomplished nothing beyond moving myself and impressing others. At best, I remained stagnant.”

He was stuck in place, unable to move forward. In his futile struggle, he watched other craftsmen overtake him from behind, and the goals he longed to chase grew farther and farther away. Meanwhile, his mind grew duller by the day, and he truly began to decline into a decrepit old man.

When he called the student beside him by the wrong name for the fourth time he realized how lofty and distant the Ember Path truly was, and how painfully ordinary he was.

Duan Mu looked at Ye Xian without resentment or malice. Or perhaps he was merely trying his best to maintain a calm appearance. Even now, he was unwilling to let Ye Xian look down on him. “Tell me, Master Ye. Why is that? The Ember was generous enough to lead me onto this path, yet cruel enough to leave me lost and desperate. Why was I condemned to such a wretched life? What purpose was there in bringing me into this world?”

He raised his hand and touched his old face, which was gradually peeling away, and murmured softly, “The Ember’s blessing cast me into the furnace of the mortal world, but what was it meant to forge me into? Scrap left inside the furnace? Or dregs buried among the ashes? Is it truly delusional for a piece of scrap iron to dream of becoming gold?”

“Of course not,” Ye Xian replied. “It’s not impossible to transcend mediocrity, to turn stone into gold, or to shed one’s old body and form. Even ordinary iron can become gold. Is that not the very purpose of alchemy?”

Duan Mu nodded. At last, a smile appeared on his shattered face. “Yes. That’s why I finally made peace with it. If the only road left for me is the wrong one, then so be it. At least it’s still a road. I still want to keep moving forward, as far as I possibly can. Even taking a single step is better than wandering in place. To a genius like you, I must look shameless and laughable, don’t I?”

Ye Xian calmly replied with a question of her own. “Do you care?”

“I stopped having the luxury to care long ago.” Duan Mu grinned. As his face peeled away, a viscous, monstrous darkness emerged beneath it. Crimson eyes opened within the blackness, and from the rumbling dark came countless wails that merged into an eerie echo. “Master Ye, would you take a look for me? Have I gone far enough this time?”

A tremendous roar and violent tremor came from the distance. The world shook, and the white mist churned before dispersing. In its place came boundless darkness, surging like a tsunami and carrying a massive tide of aberrants and remnant spirits toward the outpost.

Before Ye Xian’s eyes, Duan Mu’s aged body peeled layer by layer, slowly unfolding the corrupted form forged within the Putrefied Furnace. Sheets of darkness gathered into a four-armed giant more than three meters tall. It had seven eyes on its face, each one filled with either mercy or cruelty. Numerous spirit matter circuits coiled and wove around it like ornaments of gold and glazed crystal.

Laughing hysterically, an overwhelming presence far beyond the Raw Stone Stage erupted from him, bearing down upon everything around. It was a Celestial Being!