Dou Artifact Skill? Triple Detonation! Please Read On! Please Vote!

"Th-this..."

Mr. Yao and Xiao Yi Xian stared at the massive sword embedded a full meter into the ground, their hearts leaping!

A Dou Artifact with an active skill?!

The Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword had shed its disguise amid that instant burst of explosions. Before Mr. Yao stood a mechanical greatsword that utterly overturned his understanding, striking his vision with a powerful shock!

The Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword in Jiang Lin's hand was 1.8 meters long, over twenty centimeters wide, and tremendously heavy. Jiang Lin could only barely swing it at present. One of the reasons he had forged it was to temper his body.

The Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword looked markedly different from the traditional greatswords of the Dou Qi Continent. Traditional greatswords were mostly forged as a single piece, while Jiang Lin's Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword used an interlocking modular design. This single-edged greatsword was broadly divided into four parts: the unsharpened blade, the Purple Fire sword body, the Flame Burst sword back, and the hilt. The blade was cast from sharp, tough Azure Gold and gleamed with a faint azure hue beneath the sunlight. The sword body was forged from Purple Fire Stone, a second-tier fire-element metal with excellent fire Dou Qi conduction efficiency. It also bore three evenly spaced, highly conspicuous red crystal slots.

The back of the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword was not solid. Instead, it featured a design resembling honeycomb ventilation vents and was dark red overall. The hilt, meanwhile, was quite ordinary.

The white cloth wrapped around the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword for disguise caught fire and burned away under the high heat. Lava-like fiery red patterns appeared across the visibly color-varied blade, gradually dimming. Of the Dou Techniques Mr. Yao had prepared for Jiang Lin, Flame Fist and Explosive Step had both been successfully integrated into the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword in Jiang Lin's hand.

Both the blade and the sword back of the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword were thicker than the sword body. In other words, the faces of this greatsword were concave. Mr. Yao understood at a glance that this thing was not suited for defense. Its sword face and sword back were both very fragile, yet Jiang Lin had still designed it this way because he had endowed this greatsword with unparalleled frontal killing power.

What Jiang Lin had just demonstrated to Mr. Yao—Triple Detonation, the Flame Sword's armor-slaying strike—carried such speed and force that even a Nine-star Dou Shi standing before it would be either dead or crippled if they took it head-on!

"Well? What do you think? Isn't it amazing?" Jiang Lin looked at the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword as its lava patterns slowly faded from the ground. The three red crystals on its body had also gradually dimmed.

"I named it the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword. This greatsword has a very special mechanism: while swinging and slashing, it can activate the three fire-element Magic Cores in its body up to three times, allowing it to achieve effects such as Armor Shatter, Swift Slash, and Heavy Slash in different situations."

"Armor Shatter... How does that work?" Mr. Yao crouched down, his palm trembling slightly as he stroked the still-warm Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword. Its strange yet cool design made him feel as though he were dreaming.

Mr. Yao could understand the effects of Swift Slash and Heavy Slash. Detonating a Magic Core would instantly accelerate the blade and increase its force. But he did not quite understand Armor Shatter.

"Hmm... That's a little hard to explain." Jiang Lin thought for a moment, then laboriously pulled the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword from the earth. He ran back into the house and retrieved a first-tier fire-element Magic Core worth five hundred gold coins, installing it into one of the red slots on the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword under the somewhat astonished gazes of Mr. Yao and Xiao Yi Xian.

"You just demonstrated it for us, and three Magic Cores worth at least five hundred gold coins each were scrapped???" Xiao Yi Xian's eyes widened as she stared blankly at Jiang Lin.

Jiang Lin scratched his head sheepishly. "Well... I had to let you hear the bang."

Though he said that, Jiang Lin had no intention of stopping. After replacing the fire-element Magic Core, he raised the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword and gently set it upon a discarded ore chunk the size of a car tire in the courtyard.

Though this ore was waste material, it was as hard as ordinary iron swords and blades.

"Armor Shatter means that when your blade is intercepted and the two sides enter a brief deadlock, at that moment..."

Bang!

Lava patterns reappeared on the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword. Fire flashed, and the ore beneath its blade instantly split apart!

Under the shocked gazes of Mr. Yao and the others, Jiang Lin pulled the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword from the dust and rubble.

Some principles were far too troublesome to explain to people with no foundational concepts. The Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword was a mechanical greatsword with a structure resembling an impact hammer inside. The instant its blade was obstructed, it could unleash a concentrated burst of force. If the opposing weapon's material strength was even slightly lacking, it would be cleaved apart by the mechanical greatsword.

"Three Magic Cores, three detonations. You can simply understand it as multiple opportunities to attack."

"But Xian'er Boss was right about one thing. Fighting with this is a bit expensive." While Mr. Yao and Xiao Yi Xian remained stunned for a long while, unable to recover their senses, Jiang Lin somehow found a scrap of rag and began wrapping the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword in cloth again, bit by bit.

This greatsword possessed a rather eye-catching mechanical structure. Jiang Lin did not want to draw too much attention, so he wrapped it in cloth strips.

"...The expense is secondary. As long as it is worth the cost, the returns will be astonishing!" After a long silence, Mr. Yao watched Jiang Lin wrap the sword in cloth beneath the lingering light of the setting sun and sighed softly.

A Dou Artifact with an active skill like this could save one's life at a crucial moment!

After analyzing the materials of the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword, Mr. Yao believed that if a Da Dou Shi wielded this sword, then in a battle against an opponent of the same level who was unfamiliar with this mechanical greatsword's characteristics, that opponent could easily be slain in an instant during their very first exchange!

"Still, don't reveal something like this for now. I can tell that the purpose of forging this greatsword was to give yourself a suitable weapon for body tempering."

"Of course. Don't worry, Mr. Yao. I gained a great deal from this period of secluded cultivation. I can appropriately forge a few Yellow-grade low-tier Dou Artifacts now and exchange them for other resources." Jiang Lin nodded to Mr. Yao. After several incomparably precious moments of enlightenment... Hmm, why did that sound a little strange? In any case, Jiang Lin felt that his Artifact Forger knowledge had reached a level that was "temporarily sufficient." At this point, he could spend more time on production.

He also felt that he was close to the fourth stage of Dou Qi, and he had begun to notice that his cultivation speed seemed just a little fast. In this remote region, beginning cultivation at six or seven and advancing to a Dou Zhe at eleven would make one one of the Jia Ma Empire's rare young prodigies.

Jiang Lin found that he advanced by roughly one stage every two or three months on average. There were nine stages of Dou Qi in total, which meant that if his cultivation speed did not slow down, he would certainly break through to become a Dou Zhe within two years. By then, Jiang Lin would only be twelve years old and would have practiced Dou Qi for two years. (Xiao Yan's early cultivation speed only qualified him as a prodigy in a remote region. What made him strong was how his later cultivation speed rose crazily like he had cheats enabled.)