Chapter 55: Elemental Qi
Sunny stood upon an elevated obsidian walkway, he casually adjusted his dark-silk robes, ensuring his physical form betrayed none of the internal, civilian panic spiraling within his uncultivated mind. He explicitly hated this subterranean nightmare.
He was surrounded by dozens of veteran flesh-menders and blood-thralls, all of whom were desperately attempting to decipher the biological flaws of the Abyssal Siege-Toads while simultaneously terrified that the Young Master might casually liquefy their organs for incompetence.
Down in the massive, rune-carved testing arena, the golden-hued Siege-Toad croaked aggressively, its massive, dark-muscled hind legs flexing.
Grand Elder Shen He stood beside Sunny, his aged face pale and drawn. He had explicitly dispatched an elite courier unit to retrieve the Calamity-grade Abyssal Thunder Core from the central vaults, essentially mortgaging a fraction of the Vanguard’s war-chest simply to appease the teenager standing beside him.
"Supreme Patriarch," Shen He whispered, his voice trembling slightly. He gestured toward a thick, lead-lined cauldron bubbling in the center of a heavily warded alchemy array. "We have isolated the Toad’s marrow. My lead breeders have attempted to synthesize a stabilizing agent using Petal-Flame Root. The Root possesses a gentle Yang-fire attribute. The Toad’s flesh explicitly showed no necrotic rejection when the extract was introduced."
Shen He spoke with the desperate, frantic energy of a man begging an executioner for a stay of execution, trying to prove his pavilion was not entirely useless.
"However," the Grand Elder continued, his voice dropping into a register of profound defeat. "The Petal-Flame Root is too weak. To permanently alter the beast’s Earth-attribute core, we would need to submerge the Toad in a boiling vat of the Root for a decade, slowly forcing the mutation. We explicitly lack the time. The Carrion-Locust swarm is merely cycles away from the staging camp."
Sunny remained perfectly silent, his glowing crimson eyes boring into the bubbling cauldron.
He explicitly activated the Supreme Merge System, pulling up the floating blue data frames that governed the Siege-Toad’s potential evolutionary pathways. The System provided thirty-seven distinct mutations.
Coincidentally, one of the pathways explicitly required Petal-Flame Root. However, the System dictated that the Root was merely a stabilizing buffer, not the primary catalyst.
Sunny explicitly understood that Shen He had invited him here because the Grand Elder’s paranoid mind believed Sunny was a mad genius who could magically bypass centuries of established demonic alchemy. Sunny was explicitly a fraud who relied entirely on a magic interface, but he needed to maintain the illusion of god-like creativity.
"Your logic is cowardly," Sunny finally rasped, his voice a flat, freezing void that instantly silenced the entire laboratory.
Shen He flinched, instinctively bowing his head. "Please, illuminate my pathetic mind, Supreme One!"
"You treat the beast as a fragile vessel," Sunny stated, explicitly trying to translate the System’s bizarre requirements into terrifying, Demonic Sect terminology. "The Toad is an Earth-attribute entity. The Petal-Flame Root is merely a gentle incense. You cannot forge a weapon with incense. You require a cataclysm."
Shen He swallowed hard. "A... a cataclysm, Supreme Patriarch?"
"We must forcibly break the vessel before we remake it," Sunny continued, desperately trying to sound profound while explicitly demanding an ingredient he saw on the System’s blue frame. "The Yin-Rot Cinder. Introduce absolute, violent corruption."
Shen He’s aged eyes widened in absolute shock.
"The Yin-Rot Cinder?" Shen He stammered, explicitly horrified. "But Supreme One, that is a highly unstable, corrosive catalyst! Humans cannot even touch it without their skin blackening and falling from the bone! It possesses a catastrophic amount of erratic Fire-Qi. If we inject that into the Toad’s marrow, the conflicting elemental forces will violently detonate! It will be like forcing a geyser of magma into a sealed bone-vault!"
Sunny maintained his cold, apathetic stare. Internally, his stomach was tied in knots. He explicitly knew it would explode. The System literally stated that the first step of the fusion required the host marrow to violently rupture so the new core could take root in the wreckage.
"Absolute perfection requires absolute destruction," Sunny whispered, projecting a suffocating aura of lethal arrogance. "Do you explicitly dare to question my architecture?"
Shen He practically collapsed, his knees striking the obsidian walkway. "N-no! Forgive my ignorance! I seek only death for my insolence!"
The Grand Elder frantically waved his hand at a terrified lead breeder in a white, blood-stained robe. "Bring the Yin-Rot Cinders from the quarantine vault! Immediately!"
In less than ten minutes, a heavily armored Abomination-Golem marched into the laboratory, carrying a thick, lead-lined chest. Inside rested a cluster of jagged, violently glowing black crystals that radiated an intense, suffocating heat.
The lead breeder, sweating profusely, utilized a pair of cursed-bone tongs to extract a single crystal. He manually crushed the Cinder into a volatile, glowing sludge.
Sunny watched in silence. According to the System’s hidden blue data frame, this step of the procedure explicitly required the addition of the ’Kinetic Slime Core’ to buffer the explosion.
However, Sunny explicitly could not provide the stabilizing core yet. He had to let the breeders fail first. If he provided the perfect solution immediately, the Grand Elder would suspect he had prepared this exact experiment beforehand, potentially exposing his lack of actual, spontaneous alchemy knowledge. He needed them to witness the catastrophic failure of their own methods before he ’miraculously’ solved it.
Shen He stared at the volatile, glowing sludge, his face tight with anxiety. He explicitly did not know how to buffer the erratic Fire-Qi, so he conservatively ordered the breeder to add several mild, stabilizing spirit-herbs to the mixture.
In the Demonic Path, alchemy was not a science of microscopic cells or DNA; it was a crude, elemental clash of opposing Qi. The breeders could only observe the macroscopic reactions of Yin and Yang, Earth and Fire.
The breeder carefully added a single drop of the corrupted sludge into a massive petri-dish containing a pulsing chunk of the Siege-Toad’s dark-marrow.
Through the heavy spirit-glass, Sunny and the Elder observed the reaction.
The corrupted Fire-Qi violently invaded the marrow. The dull yellow mass of the Earth-attribute flesh began to rapidly expand, turning a violent, glowing red. The marrow pulsed erratically, frantically absorbing the volatile energy, mutating into an unstable mass.
BANG!
The chunk of marrow violently detonated. The shockwave shattered the heavy spirit-glass container, sending jagged shards flying across the laboratory.
The surrounding breeders shrieked, throwing themselves to the floor.
Shen He sighed, a sound of profound defeat. He explicitly expected the failure, but the violent reality of the explosion still rattled his nerves. The Earth-attribute flesh simply could not contain the catastrophic influx of corrupted Fire-Qi.
"The vessel shatters," Shen He muttered, his voice trembling as he looked up at Sunny. "As you predicted, Supreme Patriarch. The conflicting energies are too violent."
Sunny maintained his flawless, chilling silence. He explicitly did not react to the explosion.
"Clear the debris..." Shen He commanded the trembling breeders, his voice thick with despair.
