Chapter 213.1: Dearest Friends, Beloved Brothers Part 1

A chorus of startled gasps filled the room. Unfortunately, there was nothing cool to breathe in the sweltering basement. All they got was a lungful of hot, acrid air.

In the blink of an eye, a mercury thread so fine it was nearly invisible to the naked eye and sharp enough to slice at the slightest touch had easily severed Lou Feng’s hair. Most of the people present could easily produce the same result, but doing so without leaving any sign would have been impossible. Besides, there had been far more than a single strand inside the furnace.

Who would have thought that after crouching beside the furnace all night, Ji Jue would come up with such an outrageous little tool for committing murder in a locked room?

For a moment, everyone looked at Lou Feng with newfound respect. Ember craftsmen, despite looking so refined and proper, and being all dignified and respectable, carry a bunch of deadly things in their pockets! Who could have seen that coming?

What other brilliantly deranged creation was he going to show them?

Under the weight of their wildly unrealistic expectations, Lou Feng’s eye twitched. His gaze passed over the cleanly severed hair hanging over his forehead before he glared at Ji Jue. That bastard had definitely done it on purpose just now!

Ji Jue smiled innocently, pretending he had no idea what had happened.

After a brief period of practice, his control grew increasingly skilled. Liquid mercury flowed and shifted between his fingers. Each time he brought his hands together and drew them apart, as though stretching dough into noodles, the number of mercury threads doubled, each strand becoming finer than before.

By the end, flowing silver light seemed to hang between his hands. Many delicate strands spilled onto the floor. Light shimmered along them like ripples across water, swaying with an almost mesmerizing grace.

“Done.” Ji Jue brought his index finger and thumb together and gently pinched along one thread, feeling its silky texture and thickness as he estimated its diameter.

After so much experience with precision work, the blessing of Flawless Craft had developed to the point where a single touch could provide him with detailed measurements. Even when judging down to three decimals, his sense of touch was no less accurate than professional equipment.

It was 0.012 millimeters, roughly one hundredth of a millimeter.

With deliberate control, he could make the strands even finer. Without sacrificing ease of use or precision, he should be able to reduce them to around 0.003 millimeters, but there was little point in going that far. Nothing required such an extreme degree of fineness.

Ji Jue brought his hands together. The countless flowing strands of mercury merged again, or rather, wove themselves together. Guided by the gentle interlacing of his fingers, they tangled effortlessly into one another and transformed into a shimmering silver cloth.

The moment he raised his hand and flung it out, it began expanding without end. Despite weighing barely more than twenty grams, it spread wide enough to envelop the entire shelter. No matter how Ji Jue pulled at it, slashed it with a blade, or tried to pierce it, the cloth merely stretched and changed shape without tearing or breaking.

That durability came entirely from the blessing infused into it. Among the blessings of the Ruins, Ultimate Resilience was almost completely opposite to Iron Essence. The function of Iron Essence was to harden the target and increase its rigidity. Meanwhile, Ultimate Resilience did the opposite, softening the affected substance to its absolute limit in order to grant it unimaginable toughness and ductility.

When the two were combined, Iron Essence’s flaw of excessive brittleness was compensated for. When struck, its flexibility absorbed the force, producing a qualitative improvement in structural stability. Its hardness and flexibility were in perfect balance.

The strength of Ji Jue’s mercury creations had risen dramatically, and their range of applications had expanded even further. With Ultimate Resilience, he was no longer limited by mercury’s inability to replicate cable-like materials.

To compare it to a human body, if Iron Essence was the skeleton responsible for supporting the framework, then Ultimate Resilience was undoubtedly the muscle, providing everything needed for movement and force transmission. If combined and used properly, its applications were practically endless.

“Exquisite Work really does live up to its name!” Ji Jue exclaimed. “Even in all that chaos, it preserved the blessing with incredible precision and extracted it perfectly intact. Thanks, Young Master Lou!”

Lou Feng had obtained it during their earlier raid on a Heretic Cult branch, stripping it from a Chosen One of the Ruins Path at the last moment during a rare opportunity. Iron Essence was fairly common among those on the Ruins Path, but it was exceedingly unusual for a low-level Chosen One to possess such an uncommon blessing as Ultimate Resilience.

For that reason, Ji Jue had voluntarily given up most of the materials from the workshop that he couldn’t use as payment. They had all been free loot anyway, so there was nothing to regret.

Exquisite Work really is useful. Tell me, what kind of genius invented a matrix like Exquisite Work?

Sensing the eager, passionate look in Ji Jue’s eyes, Lou Feng snorted coldly. “The best way you can thank me is to quit scheming to get your hands on my matrix. That’ll be thanks enough.”

As if I don’t know what a bastard like you is thinking. You’re eyeing my matrix again, aren’t you?!

“Oh, come on. How could I ever do that?” Ji Jue shook his head with a sigh. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

Lou Feng almost laughed from sheer irritation. They were both Ember craftsmen. He knew exactly what Ji Jue was plotting. “You know perfectly well what kind of person you are! I might actually believe you if you stopped staring at my matrix with those greedy eyes! If you’re really grateful, stop keeping me in suspense.”

Lou Feng glanced at the mercury creation in Ji Jue’s hands, watching it shift constantly between softness and hardness at will. “I could understand it if you had only added the blessing of Iron Essence. That alone would still amount to little more than a half-finished product. But how did you infuse it with Ultimate Resilience as well?”

It wasn’t as though Lou Feng had never seen or worked with mercury before. It had countless uses, whether as an additive to balance reactions or as a filtering agent to separate impurities.

But the reason so few people used it as a primary carrier for blessings was its inherent flaws. Even after mercury was purified and transformed, it was still difficult for it to carry blessings as effectively as ordinary metals. Its liquid nature also limited it so severely that it could hardly bear even a few slightly complex spirit circuits.

If it were only Iron Essence, Lou Feng could more or less understand this working through a mix of guesswork and deduction. Fluid Alchemy excelled at processing materials of this kind, and improving the material’s fundamental nature could forcibly enhance its physical properties while compensating for its flaws. By strengthening its spirit matter, Ji Jue had indirectly raised the amount the mercury could bear.

But there was still a limit. Once a material had already been enhanced, strengthening it again would only become more difficult, complicated, and demanding.

If there were no limits, then why would anyone bother studying Modern Alchemy? Everyone could simply bow before mercury and devote themselves to Fluid Alchemy. Would that not be perfect? How, then, could the discipline ever have declined until its lineage was broken and its methods lost? Or was Pacifier really just that incredible?

Even for a craftsman, making multiple blessings coexist in a stable form was a delicate undertaking that demanded careful consideration at every step.

This was even more absurd. The two blessings came from the same source, yet their effects opposed one another. Somehow, Ji Jue had made them coexist within a carrier as unstable as mercury and function reliably at that. How was this any different from using a microwave’s motherboard to run two AAA games at the same time?!

Ji Jue merely flashed him a mysterious smile. “Do you really want to know?”

Lou Feng rolled his eyes. “I won’t pry if it’s confidential. But if you’re actually willing to tell me, I’ll pay—”

“No need to pay.” Ji Jue had no interest in keeping the trick behind the magic a secret. “It’s simple. I never solved the problem in the first place. Hell, I didn’t even try.”

He parted his hands. The mercury beneath their feet immediately split down the middle. One half was rigid as steel, while the other flowed softly like water. The distinction was unmistakable, leaving Lou Feng frozen in disbelief.

Ji Jue laughed. “Did you forget? Mercury is liquid. In other words, there’s no need to make things so complicated. I just have to mix the two portions of mercury together and use them at the same time, don’t I?”

How could one half-finished product contain two complete blessings?

Simple. If one half-finished product couldn’t do it, then just use two half-finished products. Mix the two together, make do, and treat the result as the finished product. Wasn’t that basically the same thing? What more could anyone ask for?

Lou Feng stood there in stunned silence, feeling as though his mind were about to be blown. What the hell was this?!

As a formally trained craftsman’s apprentice, he was accustomed to approaching every problem through theory and searching for solutions in the underlying principles. He had never imagined encountering a solution as wild as Ji Jue’s. It was crude beyond belief, almost painfully so, yet it genuinely worked, and worked well.

This was only an emergency measure to strengthen their equipment, anyway.

From Ji Jue’s ruthlessly practical perspective, the goal was to solve the problem as cheaply and effortlessly as possible. Too much water? Add flour. Too much flour? Add water. Why make it complicated? Was there power running through a high-voltage cable? Just touch it and find out!

As far as Ji Jue was concerned, Young Master Lou had been spoiled by a life of luxury. He always wanted everything to be perfect.

But if he had spent just two more years repairing cars, he would have learned every crooked trick there was. Even if the A and B pillars snapped, you could straighten them with pliers, weld them back together, and keep using the car. As long as the car started, that was good enough. As for what the chassis and suspension looked like underneath, it was better not to bend down and check. Nothing good would come of it. The only question was whether someone could still drive the car!

Why all the complaining? Are you trying to weasel your way out of paying? See that huge dark-skinned man picking at his feet on the reclining chair? Think carefully before you answer...

Ji Jue didn’t know much about advanced theory, but when it came to making do with whatever was within his means and pushing that to the absolute limit, he understood it all too well!