Chapter 547: Starlight Breaks the Deadlock

Day four.

The pill room was oppressive, as if lead had congealed.

Qingyang’s gaunt frame was anchored before the alchemical furnace like an old tree root, his fingers twitching occasionally as bright red spiritual energy was precisely fed into the fire eye. His robe was soaked with sweat that had dried into salt crusts.

Su Ming sat cross-legged on his meditation cushion, the water membrane across his body now as thin as transparency, the water level of his spiritual-lake draining at an alarming rate. Shadow hunched at his boots, feathers ruffled, golden eyes full of agitation.

“Master, the phase difference is increasing.” Su Ming traced two wavy lines inside the Consciousness Sea, “On day three it was one third of a breath, now it’s one half of a breath. The earth fire is breaking free of suppression.”

Lin Yu’s soul body flickered with light: “That old man used the Sealing Spirit and Stabilizing Vein Art, he put a rein on the earth fire with divine sense. But the earth fire vein connects to the magma main vein, human power is limited. Once the phase difference breaks through a full breath, the pill liquid will be torn to pieces by the two frequencies. At best the medicinal effect is lost, at worst the furnace explodes and Pill Cauldron Peak’s mid-slope will be flattened.”

Su Ming covertly touched the Grand Teleportation Talisman that Xuanheng had given him deep in his storage pouch, his fingertips sweeping across a battered scrap from the Iron Wall Pass waste depot.

“We can’t withdraw.”

Day five. The temperature in the pill room began to fluctuate subtly. Sharp, bone-deep cold threaded through the heat, like icy needles pricking flesh.

Qingyang’s breathing grew heavy, the twitching of his ten fingers doubled in frequency, veins bulging across his forehead like gnarled roots.

“I can’t hold it.” Lin Yu sighed quietly.

In the “observation micro” view, the red waveline representing the earth fire’s pulse was relentlessly smashing through Qingyang’s divine-sense control net, while the green waveline representing the pill liquid’s echo began to distort and sprout micro-spikes. The phase difference stubbornly approached the lethal boundary.

Late at night, the furnace’s buzzing sharpened, like countless tiny insects clawing at metal walls. Shadow half-spread a wing, feathers taut. Su Ming reached out and stroked its back, “Don’t move.”

His gaze fell on the white jade rack in the corner. Of the twenty-three auxiliary ingredients, eighteen had been added; five jade boxes remained. In one of them, a crimson box engraved with elaborate sealing formation patterns contained the Chi Yang Root—the intensely yang ingredient that in the final stage would ignite the Phoenix Rebirth Branch’s potency.

“If the earth fire’s pulse descends into utter chaos and the hot-cold balance breaks, could the repressed extreme cold of the Nine Netherworld Lotus strike back?” Su Ming analyzed calmly. “Extreme cold and extreme yang have a natural attraction. The residual yin within the furnace might pierce the formation’s blockade and draw out the extreme yang outside.”

Lin Yu’s soul body brightened sharply: “Medicinal resonance?”

Before the words finished, a faint “click-click” came from the corner. The lid of the jade box holding the Chi Yang Root abruptly popped open a hairline sliver. A faint cold flame, blue enough to chill the heart, seeped out silently like an uncanny ghost.

Day six.

That thread of bluish-green cold flame had no warmth, it carried a soul-freezing extreme chill. It crawled down the edge of the jade box, and thick black ice immediately formed across the white jade rack’s surface.

A smell of scorched flesh spread— not from burning wood, but the rule-stench of spiritual energy being ripped and contorted.

Qingyang’s eyes snapped wide, bloodshot, rolling with panic.

“Medicinal resonance!” he roared with a shriek, his dried body lunging forward, “Profound Ice Stabilizing Vein!”

A broad torrent of ice-blue spiritual energy slammed toward the fire eye, attempting to suppress the earth fire’s turbulence with an extreme-cold formula.

“Ssss—”

Ice-blue collided with orange-red, yet the earth fire, as if enraged like a beast, devoured the formula and violently recoiled. Qingyang spat a mouthful of blood.

The first fire-control formula failed.

At the same time the jade box lid was completely flung aside. A fist-sized, aberrant cold flame burning with piercing blue-green light leapt up and raced across the floor toward the alchemical furnace. Where it passed, half of the Greenstone tiles were burned to ash while the other half were frozen into shards of ice.

One breath earlier the pill room felt like an ice pit, the next breath a terrifying wave of heat crashed down. Extreme cold and extreme heat swept back and forth at maddening intervals, and Su Ming felt his organs cry out under the tearing temperatures. The Like Water Art pushed to the limit, Dantian spiritual energy pouring out like a breached dam. Shadow screamed on the meditation cushion, losing feathers en masse; Su Ming shoved it into his sleeve.

“The pill liquid’s alternating cold and heat is happening too fast, it will congeal!” Lin Yu warned, “If it solidifies, spiritual power has nowhere to vent, the furnace will explode instantly!”

Qingyang’s face drained of color as he switched four different fire-control formulas in rapid succession. Pillars of light—crimson, cyan-green, dark yellow, ghostly blue—wreathed the furnace like chains, trying to rebuild balance through the five-element counteraction.

Yet the earth fire’s pulse heaved violently, and the four formulas collapsed one after another. The skin on Qingyang’s ten fingers cracked inch by inch, revealing pale bone shards; veins on his forehead burst, blood running down his cheeks.

Five fire-control formulas— all failed.

The bluish-green cold flame had crawled to the furnace base, only half a foot from licking the outer wall and triggering a cataclysmic detonation.

Lin Yu exhaled in frustration: “Prepare the Grand Teleportation Talisman. With this kind of world-vein turbulence out of control, unless a mighty being forcibly suppresses the entire earth vein, we can only wait for death.”

Su Ming did not reach for a talisman. The “observation micro” glow in his eyes surged into overload, blood tears welling at the corner of his lids.

“No…”

“There’s another trump card. The earth fire went berserk because the fluctuations are violent and the frequency is chaotic; any suppression or guidance will be countered. If you can’t suppress it, then find something more stable, purer, and absolutely unaffected, and forcefully cut its contact with the pill liquid at the furnace bottom!”

Su Ming’s mind raced to the extreme. He remembered the calm, steady energy on the full-moon nights at Gazing Star Cliff, and he remembered the scrap of junk metal from the waste depot that had accompanied him for two years, worn smooth from countless rubbings.

At the moment Qingyang was nearly despairing, about to burn his Golden Core to thrust into the furnace, Su Ming spoke coolly:

“Use starlight.”

Qingyang’s bloodshot eyes goggled at Su Ming, his cracked lips trembling as he hissed, “What nonsense! This is thirty feet underground in the heart of the fire vein, surrounded by tens of thousands of years of dead spirit rock! How do you draw starlight here?!”

Before he finished, Su Ming pulled out his right hand from the storage pouch.

Resting quietly in his palm lay a palm-sized metal shard, darkly rusted— a remnant of star-pattern steel unearthed from the Iron Wall Pass scrap depot. Two years of rubbing and study had made it familiar; now it was the only hope to break the deadlock.

Su Ming did not stand. Residual spiritual energy flowed into his fingertips as he precisely traced three intricate lines across the shard’s surface.

“Star-attraction pattern, activate.”

“Vrrrm—”

A clear, swordlike chime rang. The shard erupted in brilliant silver-white radiance— not blinding, but carrying a chilling absolute calm. The light condensed into a beam as thick as a baby’s forearm and shot straight at the pill room’s dome.

This was starlight— not drawn from the sky, but the star-pattern steel’s own stored essence of pure stellar origin, slowly absorbed and retained in the material’s depths over the ages.

The beam ran against the rock’s tiny vein nodes and flowed upward, refracting into dazzling spots on the dome before plunging like a sharp sword into the furnace bottom, precisely inserting into the last half-inch gap between the bluish-green cold flame and the furnace wall.

A miracle unfolded, quietly.

Starlight possessed neither extreme cold nor extreme heat; its singular trait was constancy— an absolute steadiness unchanged through countless cosmic shifts.

When that slender beam was lodged beneath the furnace, the nearly solidifying emerald pill liquid abruptly stopped its dangerous oscillations and resumed a slow, subtle rotation.

The bluish-green cold flame writhed desperately, as if striking an invisible wall, unable to advance an inch.

Qingyang’s curse choked in his throat. His bloodshot eyes locked on the silver-white beam, his gaunt face convulsing violently.

A frenzied thought had hit the mark perfectly.

Qingyang took a deep breath and formed seals with his fingers again. This time he no longer tried to “suppress,” but issued a gentle cyan-green spiritual current to subtly guide the earth fire’s erratic pulse.

“Go with the flow, guide the spirit back to its source!”

His fire-control rhythm began to synchronize perfectly with the starlight’s pulse. A strange, stable balance was reestablished.

Yet the crisis was not over. The star-pattern steel shard bore dual pressure from the external high heat and the internal eruption of starlight.

“Crack.”

Spiderweb-like fissures suddenly appeared along the shard’s edge.

This thing was about to give.