Chapter 295.1: Benevolence and Abomination Part 1

Try another way?

Ji Jue spent the entire day racking his brains, only to come up empty. At this point, he wanted a new brain.

Or a new Examiner. That would work too.

That bastard is targeting me! Ten thousand percent!

But with no other choice, he threw himself back into research. If he couldn’t solve the problem through sheer quantity, then perhaps he should focus on quality instead. If Mr. Worm had no interest in his mechanical engineering, Ji Jue happened to have a Sage’s Remnant Shadow or two lying around that could have a friendly chat with it.

A sage and a dragon stood at opposite ends of the same spectrum. One represented the beginning, the other the end. So using a Sage’s Remnant Shadow against a dragon that hadn’t fully taken shape yet wasn’t too unreasonable, was it?

Once Creation Mode was activated, he could have whatever he wanted, with an endless supply of materials and blessings at his disposal. Time acceleration eliminated much of the waiting as well, and even if he made a mistake somewhere, all he had to do was hit rewind and return to the moment before everything went wrong.

Ji Jue could feel himself becoming addicted to it. It was just too damn convenient! Once he left the simulation, he would probably go through withdrawal for quite a while.

Even while pouring his efforts into recreating the Sage’s Remnant Shadow, Ji Jue didn’t forget to squeeze every last bit of value out of the simulation. By reconstructing, studying, and dismantling the Sage’s Remnant Shadow, he once again applied what he learned to his research into Fluid Alchemy.

With an unlimited supply of resources at his disposal, he barely even needed to worry about theory. He could simply brute-force his way forward through trial and error. Sooner or later, one approach was bound to work.

If he couldn’t achieve exactly the effect he wanted, he simply settled for the next best thing, reproducing or compensating for it with blessings from the same sequence or with the properties of other materials. It almost felt as though he could do anything!

By the time Ji Jue came ?to his senses, more than two months had passed from his perspective, while ninety years had gone by within the simulation. And now, standing before him was a huge crystal rooted in the seabed and rising all the way beyond the atmosphere.

It was a perfectly precise cube, its dimensions uniform from top to bottom. Within it, tens of millions of vein-like structures spread outward like grasping hands, blazing with brilliant, dazzling light. As the veins intertwined, an unprecedented Sage’s Remnant Shadow emerged from an ocean formed by unlimited spirit matter.

Ji Jue had spared no expense, cramming in hundreds of blessings spanning from Ascension to Ruins. All twelve Supreme Benevolences were represented, while the internal structure contained more than ninety-one blessing sequences.

He had packed in everything he could think of, including blessings that could strengthen the cube’s structure, interfere with the outside world, sustain it, suppress opponents, attack one’s soul, destroy one’s flesh, alter phenomena, create illusions and turn them into reality, grant the cube lightning-fast speed and rapid regeneration, resurrect it, drive it into a battle frenzy, drain blood, and break through defenses.

This was unprecedented overkill! Forget a Sage’s Remnant Shadow, even a sage in the flesh probably wouldn’t have had this many blessings at their disposal! Even Mercury, back when she was alive, had never fought a battle with resources this lavish. Even if those Onyxists killed every last one of their own people, they still could not scrape together this many precious materials.

This had gone far beyond merely having an overwhelming advantage. At this point, the only thing missing was for a Supreme Benevolence to descend in person. How could he possibly lose? How?!

“Come on, simulation! Let me see just how far you can go!” Ji Jue laughed wildly and activated the sequences.

All spirit matter furnaces overloaded and exploded. With a terrifying roar that shook heaven and earth, the enormous crystal disintegrated into a gargantuan tide of spirit matter. Within that raging torrent, dazzling radiance illuminated everything.

Arms too bright to look at unfurled one after another. Countless wings spread across the sky, blotting out the heavens, while eyes embedded in innumerable palms looked down upon all things.

It was going to destroy everything! With a mere wave of its hand, it raised a raging tide. Then, with a single spread of its wings, it... shattered.

BOOM!!!

Ji Jue stared in disbelief as the Sage’s Remnant Shadow he had placed such high hopes on broke into countless pieces before the Nethersea Worm had even appeared.

Its internal components were incompatible. Conflicts between two blessing sequences had triggered a chain reaction, causing vast amounts of spirit matter that had undergone different qualitative transformations to clash and annihilate one another like fire and water.

Thus, it blew up.

“Holy shit!”

Ji Jue hurriedly rewound the simulation, inspected the design, and eliminated the potential problems before running it again. This time, it blew up even faster.

So he rewound again, checked everything again, and it blew up again.

In the end, Ji Jue had no choice but to grit his teeth and ruthlessly strip away numerous conflicting sequences and modules, finally producing a streamlined version that could actually function. Now it had only two hundred blessings left, less than half the original number.

When the Sage’s Remnant Shadow finally manifested successfully, Ji Jue nearly burst into tears. He looked like a programmer seeing his code finally run after one too many failed attempts. All he was missing was an incense burner so he could put it on an altar and kowtow a few times.

With an earth-shattering upheaval, the Nethersea Worm manifested. The moment it cried out, cracks appeared across the once-radiant Sage’s Remnant Shadow. As vast torrents of spirit matter surged and the blessings operated under overload, streaks of dim shadows appeared across it. It looked like a piece of porcelain riddled with cracks.

The Nethersea Worm did not even need a special technique. At such a terrifying scale, the tide of aberration contamination it released was already the most horrifying form of attack imaginable. Its cry was like the crushing pressure of the deep sea. Under that overwhelming contamination, every flaw was instantly laid bare.

Before the worm had even truly made a move, the colossal projection stretching between heaven and earth had already begun to slow. Corruption seeped through the cracks in its structure, spreading unchecked throughout its form.

Boom!

A chain of blessings combining Ascension and Origin activated, purging the corruption from within and forcibly suppressing it. Then the many blessing sequences Ji Jue had painstakingly configured activated in succession and launched a full-scale assault.

The battle lasted for one hour and forty-one seconds. For most of that time, neither side could do much to the other, leaving them locked in a war of attrition.

At some point, the Nethersea Worm’s enormous body suddenly tore open from within. A pair of grotesque wings, hovering somewhere between illusion and reality, unfurled as though it were a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Its level of corruption increased once more. Faced with this unexpected attack, it had evolved!

Motes of scale dust drifted from its enormous wings and settled over the Sage’s Remnant Shadow like seeds. Then, just like seeds taking root, they burrowed deep into itself and entwined themselves around its core. The enormous Sage’s Remnant Shadow rapidly dissolved and crumbled, becoming unresponsive.

Left with no other choice, Ji Jue pressed the self-destruct button. As blazing light burst into the sky, every drop of seawater within a hundred li instantly vaporized. Dazzling light detonated beyond the atmosphere, trailing across the sky like an enormous tail. The ocean evaporated, and the seabed fractured. Destruction spread out in waves without end.

Having learned his lesson from the massive barrage of fusion bombs that had amounted to little more than a spectacular light show, Ji Jue had deliberately designed the self-destruct sequence this time to convert every last bit of the Sage’s Remnant Shadow’s power into extreme heat.

For an entire day, the world burned and crumbled until it had become a living hell. Vast quantities of smoke and dust rose into the atmosphere, covering more than half the sky. Countless fish and other marine creatures died in the boiling ocean, giving off an unbearable stench as they rotted. Plagues began to propagate amid the decay, while cracks appeared one after another across the mortal world itself.

Yet the moment the temperature finally began to drop, darkness stirred within the burning hell. The Nethersea Worm, having undergone yet another Metamorphosis, took shape once more.

It was a complete failure!

After another rewind, the Examiner said, “You died. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how. Oxygen deprivation. Still, you did come up with a rather effective way to destroy the entire world. Congratulations. Out of everything you did, the only part remotely worth praising was the self-destruct.”

He made absolutely no effort to hide his delight at Ji Jue’s misfortune. “The Onyxists did indeed inherit the true brilliance of Ember, but the essence of their craft lies in control and manipulation. Its potential is extraordinarily high, but the moment that control is lost, the results can be catastrophically bad. A shadow of Mercury without any flow of spirit consciousness is nothing more than an empty shell. Even with you controlling it, how much of its true power could you possibly bring out?”

The Examiner delivered his verdict flatly. “You took the wrong approach. 10 points.”

Ji Jue lay there gasping for quite a while before he recovered from the suffocating sensation of oxygen deprivation. He dragged himself upright, then collapsed back onto the ground, too exhausted to move. “What’s the maximum score?”

“100.”

“There’s no way I did that badly!” Ji Jue snapped.

“Nine points were out of respect for the sage of old. The remaining point was for the spectacle of your self-destruction.” The Examiner sneered. “Alchemy isn’t engineering, and creating alchemical work isn’t the same thing as building some gigantic robot. Not even the Empire’s Atlas would be loaded with this many blessings.”