Destiny in Cinders

Huo Qing ended the call with Metalhand and returned to the house with a troubled look. ”Uncle didn’t scold me and only asked me to keep doing what I’m doing. He said that if I manage to make money by the time he returns, he’ll make me a manager here and go to the city to start a new shop. How did he even come up with something like that? Is he going to leave this place just like that?”

Huo Qing didn’t quite feel secure about the whole thing. It wasn’t a big deal for him to run the recycling house. However, he still didn’t feel too confident about his abilities. But as Metalhand had expected, Huo Qing did seem to mature somewhat from his experiences to the point that he no longer thought it was an impossible task for him. All he wanted was to live up to his uncle’s expectations, but that was a matter for another day.

The focus at the moment was their meal. Madam Huai had cooked a table full of dishes, such as delicious salted meatball soup, chicken oat congee, chili-sauce-grilled turkey sausages, butter bread and meat-and-pickle dumplings. Though most of them used partially processed ingredients, they were delicious nonetheless. An Jing could tell that Madam Huai didn’t even go all out as the pantry of the recycling house was a little too limited. While Skysource had no lack for food, it did lack fresh ingredients.

”An Jing, here,” Huo Qing said as he awkwardly stuffed a few merit bills at him. He was the owner of the property in name, but An Jing was the one who had fronted the whole transaction. Even though they were in a partnership and didn’t need to split every hair, Huo Qing didn’t quite feel good about letting An Jing pay for everything and tried to give all his savings, a whole 618 merits and 3217.55 credits to him. Naturally, the smaller denominations were not possible to transfer to a chipless person, so he had no choice but to use physical merit bills to pay a rounded figure.

An Jing was touched, but he refused it. ”It’s not a huge sum. There’s no need to be that hasty about it. You have to widen your horizons. We’re about to embark on serious business, so let’s not squabble about small sums like that. Let’s eat for now and not talk about all that.”

With all those tasks finished, An Jing didn’t have anything left to do in Skysource. As Huo Qing still felt too uncomfortable about An Jing paying all the money, An Jing got ammunition and more lightning beads from him instead. He also got a large stockpile of canned and dried food as emergency rations which he would store at Hilltwixt.

He also wanted to return the spirit vest that he would no longer be using. Though Huo Qing refused and said that An Jing needed it more than he did, he froze when An Jing took out the scale hide that he took after defeating the deathtame fiend. Such complete and high-grade fiend materials were incredibly precious, even before they were forged into a proper artifact. An Jing truly didn’t need the spirit vest anymore.

”That item is absolutely supreme!” Huo Qing said. ”An Jing, you can trade this for a chip or even citizenship in Deepnight City!”

”I can get something like that easily if I truly wanted it,” An Jing confidently said, not bothering to hide it from his trusted friend even though it sounded incredulous. ”But I don’t want to stand out. In fact, if I can get this forged into proper spirit armor somehow, it’d be far more useful to me than a chip or citizenship.”

”It’s too bad that I don’t have connections like that.” Fiend materials were so precious that they had to be processed by the right people. This was far out of Huo Qing’s paygrade. ”We have to wait for Uncle Metalhand to return first. He knows lots of eccentric and amazing people who’ll definitely be able to get that processed for you. Fortunately, he’s back, but he went to the city to deal with some things. It might take him five days or so.”

Metalhand seems to be involved in more troublesome matters than I thought. An Jing furrowed his brow and said, ”I guess we’ll have to wait for him then.”

Though Metalhand had proven himself trustworthy, An Jing still didn’t let his guard down fully around him unlike with Huo Qing. While Madam Huai did praise his character, they hadn’t had the chance to properly cooperate before, nor did he have an emotional attachment to him like Huo Qing. Either way, there was no harm in waiting for him.

By the time matters in Skysource were concluded, two of the three days they could spend there had been expended. During the final day, Yvelbane finished inspecting a part of the Soul Domination Mantra.

”At the very least, this part doesn’t involve summoning any ghostly spirits. But you can definitely use it to control spirits of the dead,” Yvelbane said as it manifested a diagram in An Jing’s mind during the explanation. ”The Nether Soul Nourishment Formation uses the nurturing qi of lesser yang to nourish the soul. The formation can be used by the living and the dead to stimulate focus and grow the will. It’s one of the pure and good arts within the Soul Domination Mantra.

”If that friend of yours is able to comprehend even a tenth of this formation’s profundity, he’d be able to pass the dao exam easily. It’ll also benefit him greatly too. He has a good bodily constitution, but a rather feeble soul. If he doesn’t nourish it, he’d end up quite weak. But with this art, his power and potential will grow quite a lot, which will end up benefitting us.”

Most of the content of the Soul Domination Mantra concerned ritual formations. One of the most impressive ones was called Silent Call Divine Descent. Even the more basic rituals of the mantra required an idol that had been offered incense for more than fifty years, a hundred livestock sacrifices and an offering of a spirit item matched to the kind of nether ghostly spirit being summoned.

Once those conditions were satisfied, the spirits could be directed to possess something. One could even give them new life by letting the spirits make a divine corpus their host. The power of the being that manifested in the divine corpus depended on the number of sacrifices, strength of the terrestrial veins where the ritual was conducted and the quality of spirit items used.

Clearly, Lu Jin had used rituals like these to rear the subfiend of a heavenly fiend. In fact, the ritual formation itself seemed quite orthodox. According to Yvelbane, it could be categorized under the righteous nether path.

Even though the Silent Call Divine Descent ritual seemed bloody and savage, it was a method humans of the past used to summon paragon spirits such as those of their ancestors. The divine corpus was made from various profound qi to begin with, which could gather and disperse just as easily. It allowed paragon spirits to use their abilities to an astonishing degree, potentially outputting even more power than they managed to while they were still among the living. It was a classic nether legacy that only achieved full completion upon one’s death.

While a divine corpus allowed a paragon spirit to incarnate into the corporeal world, it would scatter after some time. People could simply perform another ritual to summon another paragon spirit that matched what they needed at any given moment. That was the reason why many countries conducted sacrificial rites during times of war.

Though the method seemed rather antiquated by modern standards, it had always been considered a righteous method. Yet, for some reason, heavenly fiends managed to usurp it and made it into an unorthodox, evil method that could be used to summon them with fiend embryos.

”This is a good formation art indeed!” An Jing immediately knew how valuable something like this was. ”With an art like this, I only need to find a suitable spirit corpus to be able to form a fake cult in Skysource! It won’t be an evil cult either, but rather, a righteous and orthodox cult that protects its believers!”