Chapter 217.1: Sweet Rain After a Long Drought Part 1

Boom!

It was as though the entire building had suddenly begun to spin.

As the central hub supporting a critical node, there was no chance they would skimp on its construction. This was tied to Spring City’s grand plans, and no one was going to pinch pennies over such a vital installation. It was practically a stripped-down workshop core.

Calling it a fully automated smart facility wouldn’t have been an exaggeration. Air, temperature, water and power supply, maintenance, internal environmental control, and external defense—it had everything it should have, as well as things it shouldn’t have.

Damn it, there was even a self-destruct button installed. Once activated, it would immediately draw in the omnipresent aberration contamination within Spring City before exploding and pouring it back inside. Combined with the explosion, absolutely no one would be able to leave alive.

Faced with such strict defenses, they needed Lou Feng’s lockpicking, Tong Shan’s suppression, Ji Xue’s time abilities, their teammates’ protection and path-clearing, as well as Ji Jue’s Deus Ex Machina and Dissociation Technique. And, above all, they needed those crucial ten seconds.

Without even one of these pieces, they would have done nothing but deliver themselves straight to the enemy. According to what Ji Jue read from the system, once the core’s alarm was triggered, at least four separate authorities would immediately descend remotely. If that happened, they would face the Heretic Cult’s full-force purge.

The moment Ji Jue realized this, he locked down every function and sequence connected to the alarm. He even manipulated mercury into the system and used Solid Alchemy to quite literally freeze that entire section, rendering it completely inoperable.

“Everything is normal. All is well. There are absolutely no problems whatsoever. The plan is proceeding in an orderly fashion! The situation remains stable and continues to improve!”

With one hand, Ji Jue operated the core while splitting his attention to answer the inquiry that came every ten minutes or so, imitating the tone commonly used by the craftsman in the previous records. With his other hand, he controlled the shifting mercury to relentlessly hound the craftsman of the Depths who should have been operating all of this.

Boom!

The grenade Ji Jue casually threw exploded with a bang. Thanks to the force of the erupting gunpowder, the mercury injected into it also burst, and countless strands of fragmented light bloomed like fireworks and enveloped the entire core.

Another layer of light membrane surfaced under the impact. The craftsman staggered back a step in embarrassment, but he was completely unharmed. His blue eyes glared furiously at Ji Jue as he cursed nonstop in the Imperial language.

Ji Jue showed no courtesy and answered him in the same language. He raised a middle finger and made the gesture clear.

Following the motion, the mercury beneath his feet surged upward. An iron wall in the shape of a raised middle finger sprouted from the ground, blocking the incoming bullets. They were alchemical bullets too, and their power was astonishing.

Flames blazed as explosions thundered through the room. The giant middle-finger-shaped wall had a massive chunk blown out of it, and its Iron Essence began to destabilize. Ji Jue understood at once what was going on.

“Catalysis?”

This was a craftsman from the Empire, at Level Six of the Metamorphosis Realm. His matrix should be Red Anvil, and the ability he had awakened at a higher level was Catalysis, which allowed him to drive any material reaction to its absolute limit. He specialized in forging weapons and imbuing materials with qualitative transformations. Given sufficient preparation, his destructive power wasn’t lower than that of any other type of Chosen One.

After all, any weapon whose power depended on a physical reaction would become at least twice as destructive once he used Catalysis on it. But he was also at a disadvantage because of that.

The central hub was right beside him, and it mattered more than his life. He didn’t dare throw out explosives and risk taking the whole place down with him. Even if he survived, the consequences would be worse than death. All he could do was pray that reinforcements would arrive soon and do his best to stall for time.

Relying on his defensive equipment, he had endured a full round of attacks from Ji Jue head-on and was now covered in dust and soot. Gritting his teeth, he pulled a palm-sized toothpick container from his coat and flung out one tiny iron needle after another.

Before they could hit the ground, the needles rapidly expanded. Some glowed crimson, while others turned icy blue, transforming into swords of different shapes and lengths. They shot into the air and slashed, cleaved, and thrust from all directions.

The air filled with an endless chorus of sharp whistles as sword shadows came hurtling toward Ji Jue from all sides. It was as though countless invisible, intangible master swordsmen had surrounded him in an utterly fearless assault, each one willing to die for the attack.

The craftsman wanted to see just how long this scar-faced brat, who was only at the Resonance Realm, could hold out. Immediately after thinking this, however, his eyes widened in shock.

Silver light rose into the air. The originally unremarkable mercury scattered into countless fine threads, each one thinner than the eye could easily follow. They stirred, tangled, and rushed forth in waves, wrapping themselves around the blades.

One or two strands were nothing. Ten or a hundred could be cut apart with ease. Even a thousand or ten thousand were hardly worth noticing. But after cutting through thousands upon thousands of them, damn it, there were still thousands upon thousands more.

In an instant, under who knew how many layers of restraint, the leading sword edges sank deep as if mired in mud, unable to advance any farther.

Once the craftsman realized what was happening, he almost wanted to sneer. The Sword-Form Bottle was one of his proudest creations. Even if the brat had managed to take down one sword with an obscure blessing like Ultimate Resilience, there were still seventy-one more. Could he possibly produce seventy-one Ultimate Resilience blessings?

All the remaining blades froze for a moment, as if they had wedged themselves into iron and stone.

Iron Essence!

Before the craftsman of the Depths could pour in spirit matter and trigger their destructive force, his cold laugh caught in his throat. The very first blade, the one ensnared by Ultimate Resilience, had actually vanished from his perception, as if it had disappeared into thin air.

Through the gaps cut open by the other blades, he finally saw it: that painstaking creation of his was now in Ji Jue’s hand, being toyed with casually.

“Pretty average.” Ji Jue used Dissociation Technique to strip away every spirit matter structure inside it, washed it clean into a blank slate, then tossed it into his toolbox. The material wasn’t bad. He could remake it later.

The craftsman of the Depths felt as if he had seen a ghost. What the hell? What had just happened?

Before he could react, Iron Essence abruptly collapsed. The mercury softened back into fine, pliant strands and wrapped around another sword. A moment later, that sword vanished from his senses as well.

Cold sweat beaded across the craftsman’s forehead without end. A bone-deep chill swept through him. He couldn’t understand it, nor could he see through it. Even now, he couldn’t tell what technique this brat was using to control that sheet of mercury. Every part of it was strange and inexplicable.

If the situation had allowed it, he would have wanted to call for a time-out and ask, “How the hell did you do that? How can Ultimate Resilience and Iron Essence coexist inside such an ordinary material as mercury?”

Ji Jue’s smile grew even more mocking and malicious. As long as a magic trick wasn’t exposed, it could pass for a miracle. It was like a magician pouring a cup of ice water and a cup of hot water into the same glass, only for it to somehow become water that was both icy and hot.

In reality, Ji Jue’s vessel had a partition down the middle, keeping each side insulated. Put two half-finished products together, and they were still two half-finished products. They only looked like a seamless whole when together. In truth, the two remained entirely separate.

Within that seemingly uniform mass of silver light were actually two overlapping layers of Mercury. Whenever Ji Jue needed flexibility, he activated Ultimate Resilience. Whenever he needed hardness, he switched to Iron Essence. The Convergent Form allowed him to keep the two layers separate while controlling them, preventing either from interfering with the other.

It was only thanks to the boosts from Pacifier and Flawless Craft that the changes happened fast enough. With the seamless switching and the two running in parallel, it created the illusion that hardness and softness had merged perfectly, and that he could control rigidity and flexibility at will.

No wonder Young Master Lou was so shocked by such a makeshift method. It was ridiculously improvised, but it was also ridiculously effective.

This was a solution that only worked for Ji Jue. As for the difficulty of controlling it? Sorry. That was just how practitioners of Spirit Primacy operated. If one were bad at something, one just had to practice more. In other words, as long as one practiced enough, and for long enough, one would stop being bad at it. He just had to split his attention in two. Very simple.

Hm? Don’t tell me you can’t do that?

A bang erupted without warning.

The craftsman stared in shock. He blurred into a phantom, shattered into streaks of light, and shot away, only to slam headfirst into the central hub’s lockdown barrier, with nowhere left to escape. On the back of his neck, there was now a wound so deep the bone was visible, a wound that had already turned black and refused to heal. Blood poured from it without stopping.

Had the precious life-saving creation he had set to trigger under preset conditions not self-destructed at the critical moment, he would have been decapitated.

Both Ji Jue and Ji Xue clicked their tongues. Ji Jue was lamenting the fact that an Ember-type lacked many things, but equipment was never one of them. With so many tools designed to keep him alive, the man was genuinely difficult to kill.

As for Ji Xue, who had recovered a little by taking spirit matter supplements, she lowered her head and looked at the bloodstain on the short sword in her hand, her expression full of regret. Unlike the difficulty of synchronizing other people’s time, manipulating her own was much simpler. As long as she concentrated fully, even accelerating her flow of time a hundred times was no problem. But now that the enemy was on guard, things would probably become troublesome from here on.

More than fifty blades rose into the air and surrounded her in a coordinated assault.