Chapter 290: Shocked Selena

Tony Clark stood in the center of his private training yard with a deeply satisfied, villainous smirk.

He did not waste a single second celebrating his first successful creation. His strategic mind had already calculated the exact timeline needed to completely monopolize the academy’s black market before the grand elders could even monitor his hidden resources.

Returning to his private meditation chamber inside the Cloud-Mist Pavilion, Tony locked the heavy wooden doors and laid out the remaining sheets of premium Blank Spiritual Bamboo Paper across the smooth wooden table.

He dipped his silver iron Runic Carving Pen deep into the dense, high-grade Beast Blood Ink, his dark eyes flashing with a terrifying, predatory sharpness as he prepared to begin an absolute, relentless mass production line.

The room fell into an intense, suffocating stillness as Tony activated the Storm Breathing Technique at its absolute maximum capacity, greedily drawing the thick primordial aura of the inner peak directly into his hardened meridians to maintain a constant, unyielding energy flow. His right hand moved with the fluid, mechanical precision of an advanced machine, the silver tip of his pen tracing thousands of intricate, glowing runic curves across the blank parchment without a single millisecond of delay.

The system’s Primordial Talisman-Making Art had perfectly synchronized with his muscle memory, completely eliminating the minor errors and micro-tremors that had caused his initial failures. One by one, the bamboo sheets violently flashed with a brilliant crimson light as the high-tier Blazing Nova arrays stabilized within the ink, stacked in neat, heavy piles across the desk.

Tony worked tirelessly through the entire night, entirely ignoring the physical fatigue creeping into his wrists, his mind completely focused on the absolute fortune he was printing in the dark. By the time the final hour of midnight reached its conclusion, exactly seventy-five pristine, world-shaking explosive talismans sat tightly arranged on the table, their collective spiritual aura humming with enough destructive force to level an entire mountain ridge.

The next morning, the soft crimson rays of dawn slowly pierced through the thick mountain mist, and a polite, hesitant knock echoed against the heavy entrance door of the pavilion. Tony casually leaned back against his rock bed, his signature lazy posture perfectly restored as he called out for his visitor to enter.

The door swung open, and Lady Selena Faith smoothly stepped into the small chamber, her flowing outer disciple robes looking immaculate as she held her wooden sketchboard tightly against her chest. She had traveled to his quarters early to collect whatever ruined, charred remnants of paper his "foolish experiment" had produced, fully expecting to see the arrogant young master coughing in ash after a night of total failure.

However, the exact moment Selena’s violet eyes locked onto the massive, glowing stacks of completed Blazing Nova Talismans lining the wooden table, her entire body completely froze in absolute, jaw-dropping shock.

Her mouth opened slightly, her breath catching painfully in her throat as her brilliant mercantile mind experienced a total, chaotic collapse. She dropped her paintbrush onto the stone floor, completely unable to comprehend the reality before her eyes.

To a seasoned heiress of the multi-billion-dollar Golden Phoenix Merchant Guild, creating a single high-tier talisman required days of painstaking refinement by a master elder, yet Tony Clark had mass-produced a small army of weapons in a single night.

"This... this is absolutely impossible!" Selena stammered, her refined, elegant voice cracking with a sudden wave of frantic disbelief as she rushed toward the table, her trembling fingers lightly hovering over the dense crimson script.

"Seventy-five perfect, high-grade explosive talismans?! The elemental energy balance inside these lines is completely flawless, Tony! Not even the grand instructors of my guild’s private vaults can achieve a success rate of this caliber without causing a total explosion of their own meridians! How can your physical body handle the absolute strain of carving so many high-tier arrays in less than twelve hours?!"

Tony let out a low, amused chuckle, his dark eyes gleaming with an intense, villainous amusement as he looked at her pale, shocked face. "I already told you yesterday, my beautiful painting partner, that you should never measure the absolute limits of my game by the standard laws of this lower world," Tony said smoothly, his tone full of shameless confidence as he casually gestured toward the heavy stacks.

"The inventory is perfectly ready, Lady Selena. Pack them into your guild’s private carriages immediately and flood the central district’s black markets before the sun sets. I expect to see my first massive wave of profit returns by tomorrow morning." Selena could only nod her head in a state of absolute, dazed awe, her previous skepticism completely turning to stone as she realized she had just aligned herself with a literal money-printing monster who would permanently rewrite the economy of the entire continent.

Meanwhile, all the way across the central province, a completely different kind of frantic, dark drama was unfolding inside the grand ancestral hall of the premier Faith Family. The heavy mahogany doors were tightly sealed, and the ambient temperature inside the room felt incredibly cold as the head of the Faith Family stood frozen behind his marble desk, a glowing communication crystal in his hand violently trembling.

He had just received the official, verified reports from the tournament registrars regarding the absolute climax of the Ascension Tournament, and the shocking news had completely shattered his past political assumptions.

"Julian... our premier martial hope... permanently crippled and dismantled in a single shot?!" the Faith Family Head muttered in sheer, unadulterated horror, his face turning an angry shade of pale as a cold sweat drenched his fine silk robes.

"And that talentless orphan, Tony Clark, has not only reached the absolute peak of the outer campus, but he has officially been accepted as the personal, direct disciple of the Academy Grand Elder?! This is a total, unprecedented catastrophe for our lineage!"

For a single, desperate second, the family head’s calculating mind ran through an immediate emergency strategy to save their crumbling reputation. He looked up at his daughter, Julie Faith, who was standing quietly in the shadow of a grand stone pillar.

"Julie... if this boy truly possesses such a terrifying, god-like speed of breakthrough and the backing of the academy’s highest authority, perhaps... perhaps we should immediately rescind our cancellation papers. We can reinstate the original marriage alliance, offer him our main branch estates, and force him back into our bloodline to secure our future!"

"Absolutely not! Reinstating the marriage is nothing more than a delusional fantasy, Father!" Julie Faith shrieked in a fit of sudden, psychotic fury, stepping out from the shadows as her beautiful features completely twisted into a mask of pure, venomous hatred. She slammed her fists onto the marble table, her violet eyes burning with a frantic, lethal intensity that completely rejected his proposal.

"Do you truly believe a cold, calculating monster like Tony Clark will simply forget that we poisoned his body and treated him like a dirty stain on our name just because we offer him a fake smile today?! He publicly insulted our entire lineage in front of tens of thousands of spectators, and he explicitly told me in the corridor that he would use that old token to trample over our family gates! He is a true villain, Father, and his rapid rise to power is an absolute countdown to our total destruction!"

Julie leaned forward, her voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly sharp whisper that carried the full weight of her desperate panic.

"The more time we waste trying to play diplomatic games with him, the deeper the graveyard he builds for us will become! We must ignore his new status and bypass the academy laws entirely!

I want you to immediately mobilize our highest-ranking hidden elders, coordinate with the Vance clan’s shadow forces, and launch a total, merciless assassination strike to deal with Tony Clark as soon as humanly possible! He must be wiped out from the face of this continent before the grand elder can fully integrate him into the inner peaks!"

The Faith Family Head stared at his daughter’s manic, bloodthirsty expression.

-Thank You guys! -P