Chapter 348: Heat + Pressure + Coal equals…
[Bleh.]
[Welcome back my volcanic valkyrian friend,] Hurricroak greeted,[how was your possession experience?]
[Acting is exhausting,] Nepherage grumbled, [how the heck did you two do this without feeling bone tired?]
[To be fair, all I had to do was electrocute a brother. You and Frosttusk decided to go with the whole therapy session.]
[Fair…]
[I…also…have…higher…endurance…stats…than…you…]
[Also fair.]
[I don’t know, something about tailoring a personalized experience to unlock one’s hidden potential while imparting our own arcane wisdom sounds fun,] Arachnidame added.
[While I’d rather not agree with the control freak, she’s right. I sincerely hope my guy puts up a decent fight,] Lacerage added.
[Wait, aren’t you two busy managing the children and business back home?]
[Oh we are, the kids are just busy learning how to break a man’s bones with minimum force and bruising.]
[…Dafuq?]
[Don’t look at me, I was just teaching them how to turn scarves into whips.]
[Again, Dafuq?]
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“Fourth Uncle.”
“Mmehh…”
“Fourth Uncle…”
“Five more minutes…”
“…EY YO, THEY’RE GONNA TURN XIAO BAO INTO ROAST PORK!’
“I’LL KILL EM!”
“Oink?”
Zhen Liu backed up with his hands up as soon as his Uncle Zhen Xi shot awake into a sitting up position.
The latter looked about him with a manic look on his face, wondering who would dare to turn his baby piggie into bacon…despite the fact that the aforementioned piggie was about as big as a mini-van and had a hide strong enough to break pickaxes.
Multiversal constant: One man’s dangerous monstrosity, is another man’s fluffy, cuddly baby.
It took a minute for Zhen Xi to realize that not only was Xiao Bao okay, but the Bejeweled Boar was staring at him with concern in it’s eyes.
Zhen Xi felt slightly embarrassed as he realized that he may have overreacted to nothing.
‘Wait…wasn’t I in some kind of weird mead hall?’
Zhen Xi took a deep breath to resettle his thoughts and began to look around again in a more controlled manner, in order to figure out where he was and what happened to him.
The last thing he remembered was walking back to his cart to rest after finishing up his errands and then…a whole lot of fuzziness.
He remembered that it involved…pigs…a volcano…a giant woman? That last one didn’t sound right to him.
With all that said though, while he couldn’t remember exactly what happened to him, he did feel like he just underwent some weird, life-changing experience.
‘Was it all a dream?,’ he wondered as he scratched his chin.
“Fourth Uncle, are you okay?,” Zhen Liu asked with concern.
“Y-yeah, I’m…fine, Xiao Liu,”Zhen Xi said as he waved off the question. If he was more perceptive of his person, he would have noticed the sparks that seemed to jump off his hands when he shook them
“Do you know what happened to me? Do you know why I was laying here on the ground? Wait shit, is it still the same day?”
“Yeah, it’s still the same night,” Zhen Liu answered, “as for why or what happened to you, I’m not entirely sure. I was just heading back to my own tent when I heard a loud thud. I went over to investigate and there you were, laying on the ground.”
“Really?”
“Yeah….did you need help getting back to your tent? Maybe a drink of water?”
“No, no. I’m…good…I’m just gonna go to sleep properly now.”
“Uh…okay.”
Zhen Xi swore that there must have been more to the story as to why he passed out but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure it out.
As he and Zhen Liu parted ways, the latter had a weird look on his face as he stared at his uncle’s retreating back.
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‘Alright, so…what happened this time?’
[Pardon, milord?]
‘After Frosttusk possessed grandpa, he suddenly became a lot younger looking and now he’s possessed by some kind pseudo-ancient chaos serpent.]
[My…bad…]
‘After Hurricroak possessed Zhen Hai, he can now use lightning aether and occasionally swears in fluent Spanish.’
[I regret absolutely nothing about that.]
[Wait, is contaminating our target part of the rubric?]
=No.=
‘Pathos, no.’
‘So…what happened this time?’
[Oh, that what’s you mean milord. Well, unfortunately I couldn’t get Zhen Xi to breakthrough because he hadn’t reached peak Aether Master yet, he was only at the Third Ring.]
‘Right, I could feel that.’
[So I decided to lay the groundwork for his breakthrough.]
‘Okay…and what did that entail?’
[I helped him figure out part of his Conviction, cleared out some unusually dirty aether channels, gave him a few new arts and fixed his formula.]
‘Alright, so he won’t be breaking through until he figures out his new for-I’m sorry, what did you mean by “fix”?’
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‘What the hells? Why does my body feel so weird right now?,’ Zhen Xi asked himself as he stopped walking halfway to his part of the caravan.
Since he parted with ways with Zhen Liu, he started to notice that his body was getting hotter and hotter by the second and he had no idea why.
He had initially thought it was just the general atmosphere of the desert, but then he saw two of the main branchers walk by him in full coats and blankets. The heat wasn’t coming from outside, it was coming from him.
‘Why am I burning up so bad? I gotta use my aether to try and-wait…why does my aether feel weird too?’
The moment Zhen Xi tried to call up some aether in order to suppress the heat coming from his body, he noticed that it was a lot denser than normal.
Confused, and burning up still, Zhen Xi quickly found some place far from the camp, in case whatever was happening to him was explosive, and checked on his formula.
“What the fuck?!”
Which is when he discovered that not only did the amount of active aether channels going through his body had increased, but his formula had somehow inexplicably mutated as well. He was pretty sure those two were related, so he decided to focus more on the formula.
‘Wait, it didn’t mutate, it’s…more elaborate?! How?!’
Perhaps they were influenced in part by their father’s own semi-bestial formula, but the brothers themselves took up formulas that matched their beastly inclinations as well.
For example, Zhen Xi’s older brother, Zhen Lao, cultivated a formula known as [Tempest Peacock’s Dance], while his youngest brother, Zhen Yan, cultivated [Incinerating Lion’s Arrogance].
As for Zhen Xi himself, he cultivated a formula known as [Mountain Boar’s Rampage], an intermediate Ethereal formula with an emphasis on Terraqi aether and an emphasis on enhancing arts that made use of one’s head and/or forward momentum. However, this was no longer the case.
“[Diamond Boar’s Gravitas]? What the fuck kind of formula is this?! It feels like my old one, but…”
It took a moment for him to realize that his formula hadn’t necessarily become a brand new formula, but it was if additional components were added to the original formula, causing it to become just different enough to be worrying and bring it up to major Ethereal class.
“Wait, maybe if I go through the cultivation chant it can help deal with this fucking burning-GAH! MY HEAD!”
Before Zhen Xi could even think about cultivating, a sudden series of movements appeared in his head one after the other.
‘These are…aether arts?! Wait…this one art…maybe…’
Zhen Xi wasn’t sure what came over him, but he decided to follow the movements of one of the new arts appearing in his head, especially since it seems his body was automatically performing the requirements for it anyways.
‘Concentrate all of the Ignati aether in your body to your arms, coat it in Terraqi aether and apply gravity aether to that and…’
*Crack!*
“By the heavens!”
Evidently, the reason why Zhen Xi felt his body acting up the way that it was was because it was trying to perform an aether art without his direction somehow. But now that he managed to perform the necessary forms for it, the icky feelings were gone and now his body felt significantly lighter and stronger too.
Also his arms looked liked they were made of diamond.
‘This move was called…[Unbreakable Diamond Gauntlet]? A bit on the nose, but…’
Zhen Xi stared at his new fists and at the empty, sandy expanse before him.
Out of curiosity on how this art worked, Zhen Xi quickly took up a fighting stance and threw a single punch forward.
What followed was the sound of thunder as his fist broke through an invisible air barrier, accompanied by a small pit’s worth of sand spontaneously forming into glass through sheer air friction.
“Huh.”
As shocked as Zhen Xi looked when he threw the punch, people back at the caravan were equally surprised.
“What the fuck was that?! Was that an explosion?”
“I think that was either…a Three-Tailed Storm Eagle flying by or someone is getting into a fight to death some miles away from here.”
“Fight to the-mother fucker, that sounded like a cannon going off!”
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‘…’
‘Saving it for later, just…saving it for later.’
