Chapter 74: Exchange and Fusion

Chapter 74: Chapter 74: Exchange and Fusion

Marcus’s Soul Core continued to hover in the center of the Rune Array. Its dark gold glow was significantly brighter than before, and ninety percent of its cracks had already been repaired. Only a few hairline fractures remained, which would take about five or six days to fully mend.

But repairing the Soul Core was only the first step. Next, he needed to carve Zhong Kui’s Rune Array onto Marcus’s body. Inscribing runes onto a living creature was no simple task. It required extensive preparatory work, from drafting the runes to debugging, activating, and fine-tuning them. If everything went smoothly, he could complete the entire process in about ten years and obtain a Demigod Level Zhong Kui.

Ten years. It sounded like a long time, but considering the time it took for Natural Creatures to cultivate to Tier Four—hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years—ten years was merely the blink of an eye.

A few days later, his Crystal Plate vibrated. Evelyn had sent a message. "Come to my laboratory. The item is ready."

Evelyn’s laboratory wasn’t far from Chen Shang’s. It was slightly smaller than Solem’s, with structural diagrams of Elemental Runes plastering the walls and several unnamed instruments sitting on the tables. Evelyn sat at a workbench with two items placed before her: a dark red crystal the size of a fist, and a thick stack of notes.

"A Celestial Fire Crystal Fragment," Evelyn said, pointing at the crystal.

Chen Shang looked closely. It was a dark red Crystal Stone covered in cracks formed from a massive impact. A faint golden light bled through those fissures.

"This kind of Celestial Fire Crystal Stone is born in the upper atmosphere, naturally forming at the boundary between thunderstorms and auroras. It’s incredibly rare and precious.

"I picked this fragment up from a meteor crater. Its completeness is low, but the Celestial Fire frequency inside is still intact," she explained, pausing for a moment. "Does this meet your requirements?"

Chen Shang picked up the crystal and inspected it with his Secret Eye. Inside, countless tiny golden specks of light danced at an astonishing frequency, moving faster than any flame he had ever seen. This flame wasn’t burning; it was oscillating. That was because the essence of Celestial Fire wasn’t a conventional combustion reaction; rather, it was plasma generated by high-energy particles accelerating through magnetic fields in the atmosphere. It was a pure form of energy without the slightest impurity.

Suddenly, his interface jolted violently.

[Extractable entry detected: Celestial Fire (Blue). Source: Celestial Fire Crystal Fragment. Completeness: 31%. Extract?]

Extract!

The entry was added to his inventory, but the interface didn’t stop. It was exactly as Chen Shang had anticipated.

[Mythical Resonance conditions met!]

[Collected: Fire in Wood (Blue) + Stone Flame (Green) + Celestial Fire (Blue). Fuse into Mythical entry: Samadhi True Flame (Purple)?]

Chen Shang’s breath hitched for a second.

Purple! This was his first time obtaining a Purple Quality entry. Based on his current knowledge of entry Qualities, gray represented fragments of an entry, white represented a complete ability, green indicated Masterworks, and blue denoted exceptionally outstanding abilities. As for purple... he had only ever seen a purple entry on the Haimer Wizard.

Fuse.

Three streams of light poured out of the interface. One was pure gold—Siwa’s Yang Fire. It surged upward vigorously like a burning tree. One was dark red—Surtr’s Stone Flame. It was heavy and restrained like a silent mountain. One was bright gold—from the Celestial Fire Fragment. It was sharp and blinding like a lightning bolt cleaving the sky.

The three lights converged within the interface, seemingly undergoing miraculous mutations. They devoured, intertwined, and merged with one another until a final burst of bright golden light exploded outward like a supernova.

When the light faded, a brand new line of text appeared on the interface.

[Mythical entry obtained: Samadhi True Flame (Purple)]

[Samadhi True Flame (Purple): Fire in Wood, Fire in the Stone, and Aerial Fire combined into one. Fire in Wood is born from vegetation and fueled by vitality; it can incinerate all things without destroying their physical form. Fire in the Stone is born from rocks and hidden in the Earth Vein; it can melt metals and minerals without dissipating their essence. Aerial Fire is born from the Void and burns upon nothingness; it can scorch the Divine Soul without harming the body. When the three fires strike together, nothing is left unburnt. Completeness: 7%.]

Chen Shang frowned, wondering why a seven percent completeness rate was so low. Could it be that the quality of the three fires he collected was too poor? But it didn’t matter. Now that he had the entry, he could always upgrade it later.

Seeing him frown, Evelyn pushed the stack of notes over. "I know this fragment contains very little energy, so I prepared a second item. This is my advanced research on Flame Compression. It contains my thoughts on Flame Form Transformation."

She flipped to the first page, which depicted a complex Rune Array. "How to turn a flame from a spherical shape into a line, a plane, or even a point can be considered a Fire Control Technique; compression is just one of its applications."

Chen Shang flipped through a few pages and nodded. "Deal!"

Although he had already acquired Flame Manipulation through his entries, making this trade would give him an excuse to use it openly. Moreover, the notes contained a massive amount of data on flame frequencies.

Evelyn was thrilled. She summoned the Wizard’s Will to facilitate the exchange, and their Contract was established.

Upon returning to his laboratory, Chen Shang called for the Golden Crow and excitedly activated the Samadhi True Flame entry. He raised his hand and summoned the three types of flames one by one. Pure gold, dark red, and bright gold intertwined, resembling the solar prominences on the sun’s edge during an eclipse. Then, the three flames merged together into a shade of dark gold—a dark gold of absolute purity.

The flame wasn’t large, only a finger high. It burned quietly, making no sound and radiating no heat. Yet, the Void twisted wherever it existed, as if this flame had no right to belong in this world. The world was rejecting it, and it was rejecting the world right back.

The Golden Crow’s scalp tingled. "Boss, you want me to master this kind of ability?"

"What, you’re scared? Didn’t you leave your hometown and hustle out here precisely for Power?"

Chen Shang probed the flame briefly. The multiplier this flame leveraged was twice as high as his Water-Fire Model. That meant inputting a single point of Magic Power could unleash an attack with a magnitude of ten.

"To think it’s this strong despite such low completeness... I really want to use it for Water-Fire Internal Refining," Chen Shang thought.

A bold idea sprouted in his mind, but he didn’t dare test it. Water-Fire Internal Refining required a balance between Water and Fire. Since he lacked a Water Elemental Power on par with the Samadhi True Flame, attempting it would likely leave him severely burned.

Over the next few days, Chen Shang locked himself in the laboratory, attempting to draft the runes for the Samadhi True Flame.

This thing was far more complicated than Three Heads and Six Arms. The three flames were nested together in an incredibly complex three-dimensional structure. Moving a single rune meant all the others had to be adjusted in tandem. Chen Shang revised the blueprints page by page, making steady progress.

He just found it hard to imagine that the Samadhi True Flame’s rune structure was already this complex at a mere seven percent completeness. If its completeness reached fifty, eighty, or a hundred percent, just how convoluted would its runes become?