Chapter 80: Nuclear Iron Experiment

Chapter 80: Chapter 80: Nuclear Iron Experiment

Within the blue Life Domain, two unusual fluctuations were particularly glaring.

They were not only completely inconsistent with Chen Qi’s Life Magnet Field, but they were also entirely different from the other 23 minor vulnerabilities.

’I really never expected that traitors would emerge from within my own body.’

’I knew too little about the Devouring and influencing of Spirituality before. I was careless!’

Chen Qi’s expression was quite displeased, even if it was just some of his own cells that had betrayed him.

That, of course, was even more unforgivable!

Chen Qi hadn’t expected that Red Heart 7 had not only Devoured some of his Spirituality but had also "tainted" some of the cells in his body.

The Spirituality of certain cells in Chen Qi’s body had "defected." The Life Magnet Field they emitted was naturally incompatible with his original Life Magnet Field.

These guys lurking in Chen Qi’s Life Magnet Field were a bunch of inside agents.

That was why Chen Qi considered them to be the truly major vulnerabilities.

No wonder it had been so easy to take out Feng Xingyun before. These vulnerabilities were already detached from their host, so naturally, they wouldn’t trigger any alarms.

’Looks like I need to re-examine the clashes between Spiritualities.’

’Spirituality Devouring... what exactly is being Devoured?’

Although according to that Patriarch’s definition, the essence of Spirituality is cognition.

But Spirituality is more than just cognition, because it can also interfere with the real world (the Life Magnet Field).

Chen Qi believed that what Red Heart 7 Devoured was the power contained within Spirituality that could interfere with reality.

Pure cognition is equivalent to knowledge. How could a life-form like Red Heart 7, which possesses little more than biological instinct, possibly have the ability to Devour it?

After two spiritual clashes, Chen Qi had a fairly good understanding of Red Heart 7.

The creature’s Spirituality was incredibly simple, almost like a single-celled organism.

But such a simple Spirituality was somehow able to contend with a human’s, and even gain the upper hand.

Chen Qi was now starting to wonder if the essence of a Card was actually just a sloughed-off cell from some greater being.

For a life-form that operated almost purely on instinct, survival was paramount. The mysterious power contained within Spirituality was the most likely candidate for its food.

Besides, when Chen Qi had sorted through his worldview earlier, he hadn’t found any part of his "cognition" to be missing.

And none of the players he’d met seemed to show any signs of being mentally handicapped.

Of course, the most important piece of evidence was that skill advancements needed to be directed by the player.

The Card Devours the "power of interference," the player sets the direction for the skill’s improvement, and the skill advances according to the player’s design.

This was the complete process of a skill advancement.

If a Card could truly Devour "cognition," it should be able to directly consume Chen Qi’s design and advance on its own, instead of being directed by the player.

And once their cognition was Devoured, the player should be completely unfamiliar with the advanced skill, utterly unable to understand it.

But that wasn’t how it worked in reality!

That was why Chen Qi concluded that what Cards Devour is the power of interference.

And Chen Qi’s intuition told him that this was the right answer.

After his Spirit Awakening, his innate talent seemed to have grown even stronger.

...

As for the influencing of Spirituality, that was fairly easy to understand.

It was simply a matter of a weaker Spirituality being assimilated by a stronger one. That was how the traitors inside Chen Qi’s body were born.

Even if Red Heart 7 had no intention of recruiting underlings, its powerful Spirituality acted like a magnet, assimilating weaker ones.

However, it was like painting on a white sheet of paper—easy to dye it black, but incredibly difficult to wash that group of traitors white again.

One wrong move, a little too much force, and those tiny Spirits would be directly annihilated.

If that were the only issue, Chen Qi could still eliminate these internal traitors as long as he was willing to pay a certain price.

But when Chen Qi tried to use Red Heart 7’s ability, he discovered a horrifying truth.

Red Heart 7’s ability had no effect on those traitors.

’Could it be that these cells in my body are already considered a part of Red Heart 7 itself?’

’This leads to two conclusions. Either Red Heart 7’s ability can’t harm itself...’

’...or Red Heart 7 refuses to use its own ability to attack itself.’

Chen Qi’s intuition told him the second conclusion was the answer.

It made sense when he thought about it. The relationship between a player and a Card wasn’t that of a superior and a subordinate.

Players never truly owned or controlled a Card’s abilities; they could only borrow them due to some mechanism in the game.

A living being’s instinct is to seek advantages and avoid harm; how could it possibly allow someone to borrow its own power to attack itself?

If a loophole like using a Card’s own ability to destroy itself existed, the King’s Game wouldn’t have been able to run for 43 years.

But this meant that if players had no other methods, the vulnerabilities in their bodies would only multiply as their skills advanced.

No wonder each skill advancement for a player was more dangerous than the last.

Having figured this out, Chen Qi naturally saw those two vulnerabilities as a thorn in his eye and a spike in his flesh—something he was desperate to remove.

But Chen Qi wasn’t one of those players who didn’t bother to learn. Having already undergone his Spirit Awakening, he had more than enough ways to destroy those traitors.

The simplest method was to continuously baptize those traitors with his own Spirituality.

According to Chen Qi’s calculations, the probability of these traitors reforming was virtually zero; the only outcome would be the annihilation of their Spirituality.

This method was simple and crude, but it wouldn’t extract any remaining value from them.

Stabbing himself without gaining anything in return—Chen Qi was truly unwilling to accept that.

Fortunately, Chen Qi had another path, one that would let these traitors put their final bit of energy to good use before they died.

Thanks to the Blood Control ability sponsored by Kolos, even the smattering Chen Qi had obtained would be put to good use.

...

SWISH!

A white light flickered at Chen Qi’s fingertip. A drop of blood seeped from his pores and began to joyfully leap and transform.

If old Kolos were here, he would surely cry out again, "That’s my Blood Control!"

Incredibly, however, the Blood Control Chen Qi was using now did not rely on the power of Red Heart 7.

He had achieved this relying solely on his own Spirituality.

This was because Chen Qi had deciphered the secret to manipulating blood.

Chen Qi didn’t know the principle behind Kolos’s complete ability, but from the scraps he had managed to fleece, Chen Qi discovered that the Blood Control ability was related to the Life Magnet Field of cells.

At the very least, Chen Qi could control blood cells at will by controlling their Life Magnet Field.

It was just that before, Chen Qi had relied on Puppet Threads, whereas now, he was using his Spirituality’s control over the Life Magnet Field.

Strictly speaking, the latter seemed to be a more fitting match, and his control over the blood was also much deeper.

Previously, Chen Qi could barely manage to make the blood change shape and was completely unable to use it for combat.

Now, Chen Qi was ambitious, already planning to refine Nuclear Iron.

That’s right. This was the final value of those traitors.

Even if the refinement failed, it could still be considered a sacrifice for a scientific experiment.

As for the method of refining Nuclear Iron, Chen Qi of course had no idea.

But he could guess.

Connecting the abilities Kolos possessed and the various properties of Nuclear Iron, Chen Qi had a bold hypothesis.

At the moment of a cell’s death, besides the three phenomena of spiritual annihilation, Life Magnet Field collapse, and will-shattering, there is also the disintegration of genetic material.

This process mainly occurs in the cell nucleus, and as a chemical change, it inevitably lags behind the other three phenomena.

The creation of Nuclear Iron was invariably accompanied by cell death; Kolos had already demonstrated this for Chen Qi.

So, Chen Qi thought of using his Spirituality to completely seal a cell and, at the instant of its death, infinitely compress the power released by the other three phenomena into the nucleus.

This was the only plausible idea Chen Qi could come up with.

Well, it was an experiment, after all. Boldly hypothesize, and carefully verify.

At worst, he would just refine them one cell at a time. He definitely had enough traitors for that.

If that self-taught Kolos could figure it out, there was no reason he couldn’t.

Time to grind!