"So, I think I learned another move!" Back in his bedroom, Bai Jing clapped his hands lightly. Spatial portals appeared in front of him, behind him, to either side, and above his head!
Five spatial portals and five surging streams of water meant five times the speed!
This was hardly any slower than being underwater!
By eight in the morning, Bai Jing's field radius had increased from 1.9 meters to 2.5 meters!
Bai Jing was loaded now, so he could ignore the digits after the decimal point!
"Right, with my current gravitational strength, can I process Adamantium?" Bai Jing remembered the Adamantium he had obtained earlier.
When Bullseye fought Daredevil, Daredevil threw him off a rooftop, leaving him half-paralyzed. He was later saved by the scientist Kenji Oyama from Japan, who injected him with Adamantium to restore his spine.
As for why the liquid Adamantium had not burned Bullseye to death, who knew?
The Adamantium was with Bai Jing. There were six pieces in total. Since they were shaped like vertebrae and Bai Jing had been unable to process them before, they had remained unused in a cabinet.
He got up and walked to the combination safe. He had destroyed it with gravity, then sealed it shut with gravity. Unless someone could also control gravity or electromagnetic force, it was absolutely impossible to open.
Manipulating the positions of the atoms, he opened the safe door and took out the six pieces of Adamantium.
Each was only around eight cubic centimeters in volume, with highly irregular shapes.
Closing his eyes, Bai Jing sensed the atomic arrangement of the Adamantium again. Every time he examined it, he felt that this arrangement was simply art!
Then he began drawing the atoms within it!
The moment he tried, he noticed the difference. Last time, even after using all his strength, he could not move them. This time, before he had even exerted much force, the atoms moved successfully!
"It really works!" Bai Jing was excitedly about to start processing it when another question suddenly came to mind.
Adamantium's exceptional properties were inseparable from its unique atomic arrangement. If he moved the Adamantium atoms around, would it really not affect its properties?
Besides, his Black Hole Metal was not bad either. Black Hole Metal increased a metal's hardness by gathering its metal atoms together. If it developed further and all the atoms could be packed tightly together, it would become Strong Interaction Material. By then, its hardness would not be inferior to Adamantium.
After all, the only things capable of defeating Strong Interaction Material were other Strong Interaction Materials, or methods that started from higher dimensions.
"But Strong Interaction Material is far too difficult to make. A piece the size of a playing card would consume ninety billion billion pieces of titanium metal of the same size. Where am I supposed to get that much?" Bai Jing felt that he should still test whether Adamantium could be modified!
Using gravity, he controlled the Adamantium atoms and moved them bit by bit, flattening and sharpening the metal that had originally been shaped like a spine.
Half an hour later, the former Adamantium vertebra had become a one-meter-long sword, thin as a cicada's wing!
"It seems like it didn't affect its performance?" Bai Jing tried bending the sword, only to discover that even when he used gravity to apply several tons of force, the sword, which was only 0.2 millimeters thick, did not bend in the slightest!
"Then what if I remove one atom?" Bai Jing set the sword aside and switched to another piece.
He could not bear to damage this sword. He had spent half an hour making it, after all!
Using gravity, he broke the chemical bond between two atoms and plucked out one atom. After that, he felt as if something had changed throughout the entire piece of Adamantium!
"Hm?" When Bai Jing moved its atoms again, he found that they could be shifted with ease. He manipulated gravity to knead and flatten the metal however he pleased. After a long while, he finally admitted that the metal had become an ordinary piece of steel.
"If I only move the atoms without breaking the chemical bonds, Adamantium remains Adamantium. But if I remove even one atom, it turns into ordinary steel?" Bai Jing did not understand why. He knew neither materials science nor physics.
"But in that case, I can actually change Adamantium into any shape I want!" Five shape-shifting materials with the greatest defensive power in the world were practically magical artifacts!
The only problem was that they could not recognize an owner.
Bai Jing controlled the remaining five pieces of Adamantium and turned them into a string of beads around his wrist. The entire process took another two and a half hours.
"My gravity is still too weak, but as long as I keep absorbing energy, one day I'll be able to turn it into whatever I want with a thought!" Bai Jing thought. Wasn't that why he had learned projection magic?
He closed the portals, shut his eyes, and sent his spirit out of his body!
With a thought, Bai Jing arrived beyond Earth.
This was the speed of thought. Bai Jing was not as absurdly powerful as Ancient One, capable of exceeding the speed of light, but traveling from Earth into space in a single thought was not difficult.
This was his first time taking a spiritual journey alone. Standing amid the stars and looking at Earth before him, countless thoughts surged through his mind.
I've learned projection magic. I can barely count as a beginner mage now!
"The greatest enemy of a mage is nihilism!" A voice sounded beside Bai Jing. "Once you have seen too many worlds and too many people, you will fall into nihilism, pondering the meaning of life and the meaning of society. But there is no meaning in thinking about such things!"
"Only by relaxing, remaining optimistic, cheerful, and curious can you go farther!"
Bai Jing turned his head and saw an Ancient One standing beside him, though she was far more illusory than Ancient One in spiritual form.
"This is merely a fragment of my thought!" Ancient One said with a smile. "The Three Sanctums form an array that guards the main universe and also watches against spirits and malicious thoughts approaching Earth!"
If they were enemies, they would either be driven away or eliminated.
If they were allies, then they could chat and offer encouragement.
"Oh!" Bai Jing nodded and looked into the distance. "Then can I go to Jupiter?"
Where should he go to absorb energy?
Within the Solar System, the most suitable choice was naturally the Sun, followed by Jupiter because it was large.
"You are still very weak. I do not recommend that you go!" Ancient One shook her head. "There are unknown secrets within celestial bodies. Even I do not dare venture into them lightly. I suggest you first visit the explored universes recorded in the books. They are relatively safe. Once you become stronger, you can explore the unknown!"
I'm weak?
I'm weak?
Bai Jing wanted to grab Ancient One by the collar and make her think again. Was he really weak?
But she was, after all, a religious ascetic and a frail woman. As a magnanimous man, he would not argue with her.
"Though spirits are difficult to injure, once injured, they are also extremely difficult to heal!" Ancient One continued. "At the very least, the Sanctums have no good methods!"
"Fine!" Bai Jing nodded. "Then is there a world that is entirely made of water?"
Ancient One smiled, then disappeared.
"Uh..." Bai Jing was speechless. She could have just told him! Now he had to go back and look through the books!
He looked in Jupiter's direction. Jupiter had never really had much of a presence in his mind, but after watching The Wandering Earth, he had specifically looked it up.
Jupiter's mass was eleven times that of Earth, but because its density was so low, its volume was 1,321 times that of Earth.
Another interesting point was that Jupiter's radius was one-tenth that of the Sun, while its mass was one-thousandth of the Sun's. Therefore, Jupiter's density was similar to the Sun's.
Thus, there was a theory that Jupiter was a star disguised as a planet, and it actually made quite a bit of sense.
The other seven planets in the Solar System were all solid, while Jupiter alone was gaseous. It was also huge, so absorbing and digesting it would certainly be faster, enough for Bai Jing to grow for a long time.
But Ancient One had actually said Jupiter was dangerous?
What danger could there be?
Hmph!
Bai Jing turned and returned to his body.
He was not chickening out. He merely felt that absorbing a gaseous planet was less efficient than a world made entirely of water, so he should look through the books to see whether there was such a world!
Tomorrow, the holiday would be over.
Before you continue