Chapter 264: Everyone Shows Their Skills

“Fuck this workshop! Fuck this craftsman exam! Fuck the Association, and fuck this aberration contamination.”

Among the ruins of the observation station, a soot-covered Lou Feng painfully reached out and dragged himself from a narrow gap, hauling a sack full of scavenged canned food behind him. Gasping heavily for breath, he reached into his collar, yanked out an insect that had crawled inside, and crushed it between his fingers.

He could not even be bothered to scream anymore, having gone completely numb long ago. He was done. To hell with everything. ⅇ𝒃𝚗ℴ

Never in his life had he cursed this much.

“Why the fuck did I have to compete with Ji Jue? If I’d known it would be like this, I wouldn’t have tried this year.”

After surviving all the ordeals of the night, Young Master Lou found himself facing this absolute disaster. Since he had no intention of being eliminated, he could only desperately struggle, like a salted fish thrown into a vat of brine. After all, he had already made such bold declarations before coming here. If he ended up getting sent home after failing to clear even the first preliminary round...

A few days earlier, Master Kong had told him, “I won’t stop you if you want to give it a try. But if you fail and embarrass me, you know what’ll happen when you get back, don’t you?”

Oh, he knew. He knew all too well.

Besides, even without his teacher’s particular brand of “motivation,” he desperately needed a craftsman certification to salvage his reputation with his family, who now saw him as some delinquent punk. When he had gone to say goodbye to Old Master Lou before leaving, he had accidentally let one of his newly acquired verbal habits slip, making the whole exchange painfully awkward.

As far as Young Master Lou was concerned, there was only one person to blame for this: that fucking bastard Ji Jue, who had taught him so many goddamn curse words!

Yet in a way, he had no choice but to thank Ji Jue. If not for his experiences with the Recycling and Processing Department and the trip to Spring City, there was no telling how much worse off he would have been by now.

BOOM!

The ruins shook. Chunks of earth and stone flew in every direction as a frenzied aberrant smashed through the wall, its mismatched, incomplete limbs flailing wildly. Its blood-red eyes locked firmly onto Lou Feng, ravenous and vicious.

“You’re still here?” Lou Feng pushed himself upright and glanced at the thing, barely having the energy left to curse.

It had been hounding him nonstop since last night. Did it really have to fixate on this one little piece of meat?

The aberrant shrieked and charged. Lou Feng took a brilliant, translucent crystal from his pocket. Since last night, he had relentlessly squeezed what little spirit matter he possessed, using the Lou family’s spirit manipulation techniques to painstakingly accumulate this tiny bit of starting capital.

Complex spirit circuits flashed briefly within the crystal.

Crack!

The spirit matter crystal disappeared from Lou Feng’s hand. Then, from the gushing torrent of light, translucent chains shot out. They crisscrossed through the air and wrapped around the aberrant, binding its joints, suppressing its soul, and freezing the blood coursing through its body. The chains held it fast, leaving it unable to move.

The creature struggled fiercely, causing the chains to grind incessantly against its body, yet it could not break free. Even without Spirit Morph, Lou Feng could still use the Lou family’s techniques and alchemy to create something that seemed to materialize out of thin air.

Heavy footsteps approached.

The aberrant’s eyes widened as it watched the man who, instead of fleeing, was walking steadily toward it one step at a time. Soon, Lou Feng was right in front of it, close enough that the creature could have bitten through his wrist with a single snap of its jaws and feasted on his flesh and blood.

Instead, Lou Feng placed one hand on one of its heads. Then he said regretfully, “Sorry. I didn’t want to learn from that bastard either.”

But this move really was way too damn useful!

Agonized shrieks unlike anything heard before erupted from every one of the aberrant’s gaping mouths. Its eyes burst like light bulbs.

From its eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and even its open wounds, strands of gray-black light emerged, flowing into Lou Feng’s hand. The creature’s soul had been broken into fragments, a chaotic mess barely holding together. Now, it was as though it had been thrown beneath a ten-thousand-ton press. In an instant, every last trace of spirit matter was squeezed out of it, leaving behind nothing but an empty shell.

The carcass collapsed to the ground and rapidly rotted away, dissolving into foul-smelling pus. Only a fist-sized, black and purple crystal remained, landing in Lou Feng’s hand. It was clear and lustrous, reflecting his eyes, along with the delighted smile he could no longer suppress.

There was quite a lot stored inside. Although the contamination level was a little high, after some purification, it would be more than enough to forge a spirit matter weapon!

“It’s just an aberrant. Nothing I can’t handle!” Lou Feng’s confidence soared, and he threw his head back with a laugh. “Ji Jue, just you wait! You’ll be dying of envy! I’m passing this craftsman exam for sure!”

When it came to spirit manipulation, the Lou family were the real experts! Even without Spirit Morph or the Exquisite Work Matrix, they still possessed countless secret techniques and skills passed down for over a thousand years. And as for a certain insufferable bastard everyone hated, what did he have left once Pacifier and Deus Ex Machina were taken away?

Well, nothing except Master Ye’s personal teachings and the Dissociation Technique, Fluid Alchemy passed down from a Sage, a whole pile of secret techniques he had somehow gotten his hands on from who knew where, and Aberrant Alchemy that he practiced more skillfully than even craftsmen from the Depths.

Lou Feng kept laughing. Then, little by little, his smile disappeared. In the end, he could not stop himself from swearing. “Fuck!”

How the hell was anyone supposed to compete with that?

***

Inside the Myriad Transformations Tower, countless scenes shifted across the floating screens.

As time accelerated within the simulated world, the initial panic and chaos gradually passed. Most of the remaining examinees had begun doing everything in their power to save themselves and fight their way through the ordeal.

Just as Gustav had said, even the most perfectly designed examination paper could sometimes fail to reveal a craftsman’s true abilities.

Reality, on the other hand, made the best test of all, providing the most indisputable answer and the most irrefutable proof. Either you could do it, or you could not. No amount of excuses could change that.

After at least half of the examinees were eliminated during the opening stages, those who remained finally came to terms with their situation. At that point, none of them could afford to hold anything back or make excuses anymore. Each of them showed what they could do.

In the ruins shown on one screen, a wary aberrant crouched among the debris, gnawing on the corpses and flesh beneath it while the eyes along its back scanned its surroundings.

Then, from a narrow gap hidden in the darkness, a small tube silently emerged. The dark-skinned examinee took a deep breath and blew hard into it. Without a sound, a faint, green glimmer shot from the tube and sank into the aberrant’s body.

A moment later, the creature began trembling. It struggled violently, yet could not make a sound.

Gray-black spikes of solid matter pierced its body. Soon, even its blood rapidly hardened as its flesh swelled and stiffened. Before long, the entire creature had turned into a lump of gray-black stone, staying utterly still.

On another screen, a burly examinee with intricately braided hair had taken up a freshly forged axe and short sword and plunged into battle with the monsters amid the ruins in a brutal contest of strength. Across his crude suit of iron armor, as well as the axe and sword in his hands, strange totemic patterns traced in layers of blood shone brightly. As they absorbed fresh blood, they grew in size.

On yet another screen, not a single aberrant or trace of contamination could be seen anywhere among the ruins of the observation station. Instead, mutilated corpses were rising from the ground. At the command of a flute’s melody that resembled a mournful sob, the walking dead dragged their entrails and organs behind them as they staggered about, carrying stones and bricks.

Inside the dim workshop, another corpse that had just been stitched back together slowly rose from the makeshift operating table, stumbling to join the others at work.

Impressed, Jiang Tongguang rubbed his chin. “Tsk, tsk. This year’s examinees really do have some impressive tricks up their sleeves. The Lou family’s spirit matter transmutation, the Gorgon clan’s petrification sigils, the berserker curses of the Central Lands... Oh, and there’s even Corpse Alchemy from the Northern Wastelands. There are so many signature techniques. This really is an eye-opener.”

As it turned out, when people were pushed hard enough, there really was nothing they could not do. They could even do advanced calculus.

Right. Even Modern Alchemy required advanced calculus. If someone knew absolutely nothing about it, they probably could not even work out the fundamentals of balancing the Four Aspects[1].

After enjoying the spectacle for a while and ejecting two examinees who were on the verge of dying from the simulation along the way, Jiang Tongguang eagerly turned toward a special window he had deliberately kept open. He wanted to watch the livestream of the candidate with the best performance of the year, yet there was not a single living person visible on the screen.

Instead, a huge mob of bizarre aberrants had gathered among the ruins of the observation station, gnawing away at the flesh and corpses littering the ground as though they owned the place. The feast was already in full swing!

Jiang Tongguang stared in astonishment. “Where is he? There’s no way he got eliminated that quickly, right?”

Gustav didn’t respond. After a while, he pointed toward the very back of the screen at one particularly furtive-looking aberrant. “Isn’t he right there?”

They zoomed in on the creature. At the very back of the swarm of aberrants drawn in by the smell of charred flesh, a massive figure had crept up stealthily, crouching on the ground. As though intimidated by the other aberrants, it did not dare move any closer.

Instead, it could only fiddle with the scraps of meat that happened to fall near it. Even those were repeatedly snatched away by the other monsters.

At last, once it was finally certain that no one was paying attention to it, that grotesque, blood-smeared figure slowly reached out and pulled the incessantly screaming hammer from between the stones of the ruins, bringing it down with all its strength!

BOOM!!!

With a deafening blow, an aberrant resembling a giant octopus had its head smashed apart in a single blow.

The figure then cast off the useless bulk covering its body. As it straightened, broad patches of rust-colored metal came into view, along with thick plates that looked as though they had been forged from bone. With a loud, mechanical roar, plumes of black smoke poured from the monstrous contraption tangled in flesh across its back.

Jiang Tongguang strained his eyes before he finally managed to recognize the thing beneath all those outrageous modifications. Wasn’t that... the diesel generator from earlier?! What the fuck was this thing?!

Jiang Tongguang leaned closer, narrowing his eyes as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. That thing had just leapt into the air and came crashing down among the aberrants, charging straight into the middle of them to fight—was he supposed to believe that was Ji Jue?!

BOOM!

An arm woven together from flesh, steel, and bone rose into the air. The wailing iron hammer swept sideways, instantly sending several massive monsters at the front of the pack flying.

Claws, tentacles, bone spikes, and even sprays of venom struck him, yet none could so much as pierce the outermost layer of his defenses. Across the pale, bone-like armor plates, thick vein-like ridges bulged and intertwined. Gray-black flesh and steel had fused together so thoroughly that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. On the skull-like face, two blazing blue flames of spirit matter burned within the pitch-black eye sockets, flaring with dazzling light.

How could that possibly be an aberrant? Ji Jue had used an aberrant as raw material, fused it with that outrageously crude exoskeleton from before, and turned the whole thing into powered armor. It was an entire set of powered armor that was practically alive!

What the fuck kind of powered armor was this?!

At that moment, the armored man charged into the swarm like some humanoid monstrosity that had crawled out of hell, swinging his wailing iron hammer and slaughtering everything in his path, fearing neither collision nor damage. Even when cracks or wounds occasionally appeared on the surface, the armor only had to writhe grotesquely for a moment before restoring itself.

Afterward, the armor only grew hungrier. It did not spare the other aberrant creations. Monstrous faces embedded across the armor opened their jaws and greedily drank in every drop of blood they could reach, using it to repair the suit and even make it stronger.

“Hehehehe!” Amid the high-pitched roar of the engine, the armored man stomped and crushed the struggling aberrant beneath its feet. His bloodstained, bone-white face twisted into a maniacal grin. “Today, I shall use every last one of you to prove that Ember’s supreme arts are unrivaled beneath the heavens!!!”

1. In Buddhism, the “Four Aspects” mainly originate from the Diamond Sutra. They refer to four mistaken forms of attachment and perception that sentient beings have toward the self and the objective world.

The Aspect of Self (我相): Clinging to the belief that one possesses an independent, permanent “self,” treating the body or mind as an absolute self.

The Aspect of Others (人相): Based on attachment to the “self,” distinguishing between oneself and others and believing that there are other people apart from oneself.

The Aspect of Sentient Beings (众生相): Clinging to the various forms of life in society or across the Six Realms, believing that sentient beings are distinct, separate, and truly existent.

The Aspect of Lifespan (寿者相): Clinging to the duration of life, fixating on the length of one's lifespan, birth and death, and the idea that life continues uninterrupted through time. ☜