Chapter 58: Pacifier
The entire workshop fell silent.
Not only was Ye Chun dumbfounded, but even Professor Ye paused for a moment with a flicker of surprise in her expression, like a guilty FPS gamer suddenly spotting a Paradox player[1].
Your thinking is a little too... modern, isn’t it?
“...Your suggestion is even wilder than mine,” she said, fixing Ji Jue with a deep gaze. “But tell me, where did this habit of casually killing people come from?”
“Huh?”
Ji Jue froze. Wait, weren’t you talking about giving Master Kong a taste of her own medicine, an eye for an eye? Now that I think about it carefully, it didn’t seem like Professor Ye had gestured with her hands at her neck and told me to take her out... Something’s off. Am I getting ahead of myself? Is this downward trend in my mindset becoming more obvious? I’m a normal person! How could I just go around killing everyone who offends me?
Hmm... But it seems like I’ve already taken care of everyone who offended me recently... Although, I’m still missing Yu Hanguang.
“You’re right, I’ll be more careful,” Ji Jue said, bowing his head in shame.
“I’m not blaming you. In fact, I think it’s good to have this kind of attitude. At least I don’t have to worry about my students being overly nice and getting taken advantage of. Your style and preferences are your own business. I won’t criticize you.”
Professor Ye accepted the possibility that her student could have antisocial tendencies with remarkable composure. Ignoring Ji Jue’s several attempts to argue, she asked, “Why do you think Master Kong came here this time?”
“Uh...” Ji Jue thought for a moment, then tentatively suggested, “She’s trying to assert dominance over you by making your student compete with hers after making full preparations?”
“Perhaps partly. But that alone doesn’t explain why, upon hearing I accepted a student, she would travel all the way from Tide City just to flaunt and show off. Personal pride isn’t the main motivator for a mature craftsman; remember that.”
Professor Ye said solemnly, “Alchemy is a precise and complex discipline. Most practitioners spend their lives studying minute details, so their emotional impulses are worn down over time. As a result, many craftsmen become creatures obsessed with every fraction of gain, while some lose sight of priorities entirely, turning into nothing more than marketing-minded merchants.
“Master Kong is that kind of person. She values honor over achievement and status over skill. For her, a deal she can’t profit from isn’t worth doing, and even a minor advantage may not be worth the effort.” Decisively, she added, “She came here for me.”
Ji Jue’s jaw dropped. “Huh?”
“But if that’s the case, she should have taken more action. I basically humiliated her in the face several times, yet she didn’t dare challenge me. Which means she was only confirming something: my condition, the state of the workshop, or perhaps seeking certain outcomes. She was trying to achieve something and aimed to eliminate my interference from the start.”
A faint vibration came from the phone on the table.
Caller: Wasteland Assembly - Chen Xingzhou
The call was answered, and a voice came through on the other end, but because of the interference built into the phone, no bystanders could make out a word. All they could catch was the slight change in Professor Ye’s expression, as if a sudden realization had struck her.
“I see. Understood. The remaining payment will be completed within two working days. Pleasure doing business with you.”
After hanging up, Professor Ye fell into thought, as if considering something.
“Perhaps... this is fate,” she murmured. Then she turned to Ji Jue and asked, “How far along are you in deconstructing and analyzing the Mouth of the Ancient Ones?”
“Huh?”
Caught off guard by the sudden shift in topic, Ji Jue froze. His first instinct was to say, “Pretty much figured it all out,” but after thinking carefully, it was more accurate to say, “About ninety percent figured out,” though even that sounded far-fetched.
“Pretty much... figured out half of it, probably...”
He hesitated, unwilling to admit that he was actually thoroughly confused and overwhelmed. It wasn’t just the sheer workload; the difficulty of the task far exceeded Ji Jue’s comprehension. All he could do was grope in the dark, guessing and eliminating possibilities repeatedly to verify each part’s function and effect.
He obediently handed over his notes. “I’ve almost figured out the deconstruction of the main body.”
In plain terms, he had figured out which parts actually mattered and which were just flashy but functionally useless. Professor Ye took the notes, put on her glasses, and switched to critique mode.
After about ten minutes of marking, she handed the notes back. Ji Jue was stunned by the many red crosses and corrections. There were so many mistakes!
Beyond disproving many of Ji Jue’s guesses, she had added countless aspects he hadn’t even thought of. From the perspective of a master, she could survey the entire alchemical work from a higher vantage.
More importantly, when she reached out and gripped the necklace of the Mouth of the Ancient Ones, the previously foggy, incomprehensible structures to Ji Jue suddenly projected into the air.
In an instant, they filled the entire living room, and even the room couldn’t contain all the intricate details. This was a structure condensed into a thumb-sized volume, yet once its internal structure unfolded, it formed a complex framework capable of covering most of the stadium.
But more often than not, the complexity served no real purpose. It felt like it existed purely to show off, with painstaking effort poured into bafflingly unnecessary details, sacrificing functionality and structure for the sake of aesthetics.
Ji Jue, accustomed to the modern alchemical principle of maximizing efficiency from the ground up, found it particularly jarring. “Do these alchemists just have nothing better to do all day?”
Professor Ye scoffed. “When presenting something to the emperor, ritual matters more than anything. Better to overdo it than appear disrespectful. Something as small as this could take a large workshop decades to complete. Back then, the workers and even the sacrificed beasts felt honored to participate in it.”
She dismissed the effort invested as irrelevant. Labor spent on meaningless things wasn’t real labor, it was vanity, a token to please authority and showcase one’s own toil.
After giving guidance on the structure of the Mouth of the Ancient Ones, and waiting for Ji Jue to finally correctly distinguish between functional and ornamental parts, Professor Ye slowly nodded. “Alright. Since you achieved this level in just a few days, I estimate it will take about a month. But it seems we may not have that much time now.”
She clenched her fist, and the sprawling projections vanished. A soft, shattering sound came from her palm.
Startled, Ji Jue leapt from the sofa, not out of worry for damage to the Mouth of the Ancient Ones, but because in that instant, the spirit matter waves emanating from between Professor Ye’s fingers became complex and immense. They fluctuated at rates beyond microseconds, rising and falling without pattern, utterly incomprehensible.
As she spread her fingers again, minuscule fragments fell from the Mouth of the Ancient Ones, turning to dust, but Ji Jue’s ability reacted almost maniacally. It was nearly uncontrollable, as if it was starving to death.
Carefully taking the fragments and objects, Ji Jue pocketed the shards and immediately checked the internal structure of the Mouth of the Ancient Ones. To his astonishment, the originally maddeningly complex construction had completely vanished.
The spirit circuits connected to other fragments, along with all the meaningless decorative structures, had, in that brief instant, been effortlessly and utterly erased by Professor Ye.
The streamlined structure now followed the principles of modern alchemy. Its size was less than a tenth of the original, yet with all the redundant parts removed, its efficiency had increased severalfold.
Every rune and circuit revolved around the central emblem of the Supreme Benevolence, Vortex, preserving within it the gift of the vortex, a blessing known as Regeneration. Everything deemed irrelevant had simply disappeared.
Ji Jue thought he was hallucinating. “What... is this?”
Destruction was easy, while creation was hard. But to destroy the unnecessary while preserving and even streamlining the main structure? That level of difficulty was astronomical! If he had attempted the same task, he’d probably have needed the workshop’s ultra-microscopic equipment and months of painstaking effort, carefully eliminating each extraneous structure one by one, and even then, he could not have guaranteed perfect results.
How could this process be this fast?
It was like a precision demolition: blowing away everything above and below the eighth floor of a building, yet making sure that when the eighth floor landed, not a single leaf fell from the potted plants, and the utilities still ran perfectly.
Within this microscopic range, everything irrelevant had been destroyed or removed, leaving the essential structure untouched.
Ye Xian finally smiled, something she rarely did. “You could say it’s my signature technique. I can remove impurities, erase material properties, and dismantle structures. Based on my own experience, I use special techniques to freely deconstruct and reconstruct an object’s internal alchemical framework. This is what allowed me to pass the Scarlet rating of the Taiyi Ring. Its registered name is Dissociation Technique. Want to learn it?”
Ji Jue nodded furiously, his eyes shining like light bulbs.
With a world-shocking technique displayed right in front of him, if he didn’t wag his tail a little to show some flattery, he’d probably wake up at home that night and have to give himself a few hard slaps for pretending to be a tough guy. At this moment, even the slightest hesitation would be disrespectful to his own intelligence and his professor’s favor.
Thinking of all the scrap in the warehouse, with this skill, would he ever worry about missing out on the good stuff again? There’d be no need to exhaust himself making his spirituality overload, he could just show off as much as he wanted.
Going a step further, the next time he faced a P2W[2] heavily armed warrior like Young Master Lou, wouldn’t he be able to easily defeat him?
“Very well.” Ye Xian nodded, her expression turning serious. “I’ve been busy with another project recently and can’t spare the time. I need you to handle something for me.”
Go where? Kill whom? How many are there?
Seeing the golden exclamation mark rising above Professor Ye, Ji Jue could barely contain himself. If he didn’t press the Confirm button now, was he even human?
“More precisely, you’re going to a place to retrieve something for me,” she clarified. “The location is outside Cliff City. There’s a rift that will soon emerge in the world.”
The first part of her sentence froze Ji Jue’s smile; he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But by the second half of her sentence, he couldn’t even worry about crying anymore.
“The item you are to bring back is a matrix,” Ye Xian said slowly. “A matrix that can almost be said to be tailor-made for you. Its name is Pacifier.”
1. This refers to the community of gamers who enjoy the grand strategy historical or sci-fi strategy games produced by the Swedish game company Paradox Interactive. They are known for their love of fantastical historical reinterpretations, delight in creating memes around extreme villainy, and obsession with “cultivating immortality” through extremely long play sessions. Notable titles include the Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Victoria, and Crusader Kings series. ☜
2. Pay-to-win (P2W) is a gaming model where players gain significant competitive advantages, such as superior weapons, armor, or faster progression, by spending real-world money. The raw here actually writes “Fedra Warrior”, (Fedra referring to the Federation’s currency) but it sounded too weird in English, so I changed it to P2W to maintain a smooth and natural reading experience for you readers. ☜
