Chapter 265.1: The Leafway Stage Is Yours. If You’ve Got Skills, Bring It On Part 1

Ember? Are you sure you’re really an Ember-type?

In the deathly stillness beyond the drifting light, Jiang Tongguang looked back toward the Association building. Sure enough, the white emblem woven from three layers of secrecy was still hanging high overhead.

This is fucking Starpivot Isle, all right! It isn’t the Well of the Depths!

For a moment, he almost thought that all it took was a blink for Ji Jue to whisk him off to some Putrefaction Grandmaster Tournament.

No matter how you tried to spin it, there was no way this could pass for the work of some respectable orthodox faction, right? Could the Association even release footage of this exam? The stain on their reputation would be so hard to scrub off that the public relations department would probably start cursing the moment they saw the recording.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The hammer came crashing down again and again. With every blow, the eyes of both men twitched. They winced, as if the hammer were smashing directly into their own foreheads.

And so, in absolute silence, they watched Ji Jue carry out a complete massacre with a level of practiced ease comparable to that of a White Deer-type, pounding every aberrant he had lured over into minced meat. Several of the particularly large ones were deliberately left barely alive. As if he were afraid they would die in the meantime, Ji Jue pulled out surgical instruments and started treating them on the spot.

Seriously, man. With those surgical skills, are you sure you’re not a Vortex-type?

The two men watched numbly as Ji Jue sutured the living aberrants and stopped their bleeding, while cutting the dead ones apart and removing all their organs before sorting them neatly by category.

For some reason, they became afraid that at any moment he would pull out a phone and tell someone on the other end, “I found the organs. They’re fresh, but we’ll need to renegotiate the price.”

“He...” Gustav rubbed his forehead, at a loss for words. Eventually, he asked, “What exactly is he doing?”

Jiang Tongguang said nothing. He narrowed his eyes, leaned closer, and zoomed in on the footage.

He watched as Ji Jue dealt with the aberrants that had been left barely clinging to life. First, he used Solid Alchemy to seal their bodies and turn their own flesh into restraints. Then he used Fluid Alchemy from within, forcibly purifying their insides and souls.

He repeated the process until every trace of consciousness within those aberrant monsters had been completely washed away through Purification, leaving behind nothing but the basic instincts to eat, drink, and excrete.

Only then did he begin operating on them with astonishing efficiency. He removed their limbs and all unnecessary organs, retaining only the brain, spinal column, and digestive system.

Like pickling vegetables in jars, he packed them into enormous containers filled with foul-smelling blood. Spirit circuits were etched into place, branching outward from the containers. Before long, pure spirit matter began to trickle from the containers and flow into a parallel-linked spirit matter cage that Ji Jue had assembled on-site from the skulls of numerous aberrants.

After checking its efficiency, Ji Jue whistled, delighted. “Woo-hoo! Green energy. Clean and hygienic!”

All right. Mystery solved.

Jiang Tongguang rubbed at the corner of his eye, which had been twitching nonstop, and sighed in realization. “He’s making spirit matter batteries.”

The man certainly knew how to make every resource count. He did his best to reduce waste, make the most of what he had, and accounted for every last bit.

With just a dozen or so aberrants, he had solved the severe shortage of spirit matter that plagued the early stages of the exam. The resulting spirit matter was contaminated and difficult to use directly, but with a little filtering, it could still cover more than ninety percent of his needs.

Faced with that, Jiang Tongguang could barely suppress the urge to applaud. Inwardly, he gave the association’s latest prized recruit a thumbs-up. They’d really picked up one hell of a freak this year!

Gustav’s frown deepened. “Reckless fool!”

It was like watching a reviewer scrutinize some scantily clad streamer deliberately dancing right on the edge of what the rules allowed. If you’re going to push it this far, you might as well cross the line outright so I can ban you on the spot and be done with it.

Ji Jue was practically hopping back and forth across the Association’s red line. If he took one step back, you could call it boldness backed by skill. If he took one step forward, it was a one-way ticket straight to prison.

And yet this bastard seemed to take particular pleasure in repeatedly testing exactly where the boundary lay.

Aberrant Alchemy had always been an extraordinarily dangerous and difficult field, and it was by no means exclusive to the Depths. In fact, the association had never been short on research into it or practical applications, whether openly or behind closed doors. But that was the sort of thing people only started studying after becoming masters, and it was not as though there had been any shortage of people who had died or succumbed to corruption because of it.

So why the hell was an apprentice who didn’t even have a craftsman’s license already spending his days figuring out how to play around with nuclear waste?! Worse still, why... was he so damn good at it?

For one brief moment, even someone as stubborn as Gustav found himself wondering whether the times really had changed. Then he looked over at the other examinees, whose perfectly normal behavior was profoundly reassuring, and let out an involuntary sigh of relief.

Fortunately, the times had not changed. Ji Jue was the only freak among his peers. If several more monsters like him showed up, Gustav was genuinely afraid that the Association would be flying the banner of the Depths before he even had the chance to retire.

His face grew darker by the second. “What the hell are examinees thinking these days?”

“What are they thinking?” Jiang Tongguang laughed and glanced at the colleague beside him. “Isn’t he doing exactly what you wanted? He’s trying to challenge himself in the face of overwhelming difficulty and a seemingly impossible situation.”

There were no consequences and no price to pay. With nothing to worry about, they could throw themselves into challenges and climb toward heights they would never dare attempt under ordinary circumstances. They could rebuild everything from nothing and raise towering structures anew from the ruins, free to reshape everything however they pleased.

Jiang Tongguang watched the scenes unfolding on the screens, making no move to interfere. “No matter how badly things turn out, they can’t possibly be worse than reality, can they?”

Gustav said nothing more. He lowered his gaze and continued observing.

On the screen, Ji Jue had finished dealing with the various aberrants and was leisurely hauling his spoils back toward the workshop when he suddenly froze in place. Looking down, he noticed a patch of earth in the corner of the courtyard that had been churned up by the explosions and earthquakes. He moved closer, bent down, and examined it carefully.

He abandoned the whole pile of stuff he had been carrying, jumped down, grabbed an oversized iron shovel, and started digging like mad.

Before long, he pulled a piece of vermilion-red ore from behind a crack in the rock. He stared at it, eyes wide. After a long while, Ji Jue could not hold it in any longer and burst out laughing.

Even though nothing had happened yet, both examiners felt their hearts skip a beat. Every time Ji Jue laughed like that, it meant he was brewing some outrageous new stunt that would stun everyone speechless. Yet no matter how they looked at it, the stone in his hand was nothing more than an ordinary piece of ore.

The Association had certainly conducted a geological survey when the observation station was first built. If any valuable mineral deposit had been discovered, they would have simply chosen another location. There was no reason for someone to suddenly dig up buried treasure after all these years.

The records they pulled up showed that the geological survey conducted during the construction of the Leafway Frontier Observation Center had indeed found a few things, but nothing more than traces of pyrite, siderite, and assorted other minerals scattered through the diabase. None of them were worth mining.

The masters dealt with all kinds of materials year-round, so they could identify the ore at a glance without even consulting a reference book. Even so, just to be safe, they looked again, and again, and a third, fourth, and fifth time.

Gustav frowned. “It’s just mercury sulfide, isn’t it?”

Jiang Tongguang took a sip of liquor to steady his nerves.

“Mm. It is. In the Federation, we call this stuff cinnabar. Aside from using it as a pigment, its main purpose is, uh...” He suddenly stopped, eyes wide. “...extracting mercury?”

He remembered one particularly significant entry in that bastard’s résumé. Jiang Tongguang gasped in shock. “Fuck!”