Silence reigned in the secret chamber.
Su Chen sat cross-legged on the bed, his entire body like a lifeless stone statue, without a trace of breath.
All his awareness had long since sunk into the deepest reaches of his consciousness, into that empty space.
After five full days of uninterrupted "passive reception," the Stone Platform had become utterly different from what it had been before.
Above the Stone Platform, a fist-sized ball of light had gathered.
It was made up of countless pale particles, swirling like billions of fireflies and radiating a bone-chilling cold that seemed to come from the depths of the soul.
This was the source energy data of the "Bone Spirit Cold Flame," which he had spent countless hours painstakingly stripping away, bit by bit, from that distant "Lighthouse."
There was enough now.
Su Chen's consciousness hovered before the Stone Platform as he suppressed the last traces of agitation in his heart.
He knew all too well just how insane, how heaven-defying, his next step would be.
This wasn't purification, nor was it duplication.
This was... creation!
He would use the remnants of a first-tier Beast Flame as a "vessel," forcibly injecting into it the "soul" of a wonder of heaven and earth!
"Construct the model!"
At his silent command, the ball of light made up of countless particles abruptly contracted.
The Stone Platform blazed with light, beginning to analyze, calculate, and reorganize the source data at an unimaginable speed.
Countless arcane runes raced across its surface, forming a colossal, ever-spinning vortex of light.
Every last pale speck was sucked inside. Then, at the center of the vortex, an extremely indistinct outline began to slowly take shape.
It was the phantom of a flame.
A flame no bigger than a fingernail, its entire form a strange, pallid white.
It had no temperature and no substance, as though it might disperse into nothingness at any moment.
Yet the instant it took shape, the entire space of consciousness abruptly stilled.
A lofty, overbearing majesty that seemed to rule all creation burst forth from that tiny phantom!
Even as a rudimentary model made purely of data, it still possessed a status that transcended all flames...
Su Chen's soul trembled faintly.
But he didn't stop.
Once the bowstring was loosed, there was no turning back.
Carefully, he retrieved a prepared material from his storage space.
It was a bottle of "Rock Fire Seed" that had been purified to the utmost degree.
Its energy was gentle and pure. It was the highest-quality Beast Flame Su Chen possessed, and the only "sacrifice" he had prepared for this mad experiment.
An orange-red flame appeared quietly atop the Stone Platform, giving off a gentle glow.
It was like an innocent commoner, cluelessly gazing up at the pale wraith above, radiating the air of an emperor.
"Inject!"
Su Chen issued the command again, his voice tinged with a tremor he hadn't even noticed himself.
What he intended to do was force the soul of an emperor into the body of a commoner!
The pale flame model floating overhead moved.
Like an iceberg crashing down from the heavens, it bore down upon the orange-red "Rock Fire Seed" below with an irresistible pressure!
There was no earth-shaking boom.
No clash of energy.
The moment the two touched, the pale model flowed into the orange-red flame like quicksilver, silently merging with it.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl.
Su Chen held his breath, concentrating all his awareness on the newly fused flame.
Had he succeeded?
The flame remained fist-sized, floating quietly in midair.
But its color began to change in a strange way.
Its once-pure orange-red rapidly faded before his eyes.
In its place came a pallid white.
A sickly pallid white mottled with orange-red spots!
An utterly different aura began to emanate from within the flame.
No longer gentle. No longer pure.
Instead, it was a violent, twisted... chaos, a blend of Scorching Heat and Extreme Cold!
"Something's wrong!"
Su Chen's heart lurched.
The mutated flame atop the Stone Platform began to shudder violently!
It was no longer stable, no longer quiet.
It was like a living creature injected with two deadly poisons, enduring unimaginable agony and torment!
The flame's shape began to twist wildly.
At one moment, it swelled into a colossal pallid orb, radiating a chilling cold that could freeze the soul.
At the next, it abruptly contracted and burst into countless blazing orange-red sparks, releasing a frenzied aura of destruction.
Ice and fire!
Two utterly opposing source forces were waging the most primitive, bloodiest war inside that tiny flame!
They repelled and devoured each other, neither willing to yield!
The entire space of consciousness began to shake violently from the microscopic battle!
The Stone Platform hummed, and the surrounding void warped!
"Hold steady!"
Su Chen tried to intervene by force, using his mental power to suppress the frenzied energy.
But the moment his mental power drew near, that chaotic force tore it to shreds!
This had already gone beyond what he could control!
The flame struggled ever more violently.
Its color flickered wildly between pallid white and orange-red. With every flash, Su Chen felt a needle-like stab of pain in his soul.
He had underestimated the overbearing nature of the Heavenly Flame.
And he had underestimated the gulf between the two flames' essential natures.
It wasn't an emperor and a commoner.
It was a god and an ant!
A god's power, even as no more than a data-fied remnant, was not something any mortal vessel of flesh and blood could bear!
At last.
After who knew how many cycles of swelling and contracting,
the struggling flame reached a critical point.
All its distortions and struggles abruptly stopped.
It didn't explode with a bang as Su Chen had expected.
Instead...
It suddenly collapsed inward!
In that one-millionth of a moment, all the light, all the heat, all the cold, all the frenzy were compressed into a speck smaller than a needlepoint.
Then.
Pfft.
A faint sound.
The speck vanished completely.
It turned into a wisp of barely visible smoke and dissipated into the void.
He had failed.
A complete, utter failure.
But it wasn't over.
The instant the flame vanished, an invisible, devastating mental shock wave surged from the Stone Platform like a breaking dam, violently rebounding upon him!
It was the final backlash produced when the two sources of energy annihilated each other!
Pfft!
In the real world, Su Chen's body jerked forward as he sat on the bed, as if struck by a heavy blow.
A mouthful of blood burst uncontrollably from his lips, splattering across the floor before him like a dazzling blood blossom.
His face turned ashen in an instant.
It felt as though tens of thousands of steel needles were churning inside his head. The searing pain made his vision blacken in waves, nearly knocking him unconscious on the spot.
The space of consciousness was in even worse disarray.
The Stone Platform's light had grown dimmer than ever, as if it had exhausted all its energy.
The surrounding void still trembled faintly, taking a long time to settle.
Clutching his aching head, Su Chen's consciousness knelt in midair, gasping for breath.
Disappointment, lingering fear, and countless other emotions swept over him like a tide.
For the first time, he had felt the true terror of a Heavenly Flame so directly.
Even if it was only data-fied aura, even if it carried only one ten-thousandth of its power,
its backlash had still been enough to gravely injure him, a transmigrator whose mental power far surpassed that of ordinary people.
If he had pushed any further just now, trying to force a fusion with his own soul...
The consequences would have been unthinkable.
After a long while,
the pain that had seemed to tear his soul apart finally began to fade.
Suppressing the pain in both body and mind, Su Chen stood up again.
The feverish ambition had vanished from his face. All that remained was the pallid stillness of someone who had narrowly escaped death.
He didn't leave at once.
Instead, he turned his gaze toward the dimmed Stone Platform.
Failure wasn't frightening.
What was frightening was not knowing why he had failed.
"Review."
The thought came weakly.
The dim Stone Platform brightened faintly.
Lines of data made up of runes slowly appeared across its surface, recording every detail of the failed experiment.
From the construction of the model to the injection of energy, then the rejection and the conflict, all the way to the final annihilation.
Every detail had been recorded with precision.
Su Chen stared intently at the streams of data, not letting a single detail escape him.
He saw that the energy structure of the "Rock Fire Seed" had begun to collapse from within the very first moment it touched the "Bone Spirit Cold Flame" model.
He saw that the fusion rate between the two energies had never exceeded one-thousandth.
He saw...
His approach had been wrong from the very beginning.
What he had tried to do was "overwrite"—to use a higher being's soul to forcibly replace a lower being's vessel.
That was a method only a god could use.
And he was merely a mortal.
A mortal... who had dared to steal the authority of the gods.
"I was wrong... all of it was wrong..."
Su Chen murmured to himself.
His gaze moved across the countless lines of data, finally stopping at a short stretch of code.
That code represented the most basic, and most fundamental, of the Bone Spirit Cold Flame's countless traits.
"Energy trait: Extreme Cold."
He stared at that line of code. Deep within his once-dim consciousness, a faint glimmer suddenly rekindled.
The light grew brighter and brighter.
A completely new idea, even more insane yet far more feasible, sprang violently to life in his mind.
He couldn't replicate the whole sun.
That belonged to the domain of the gods.
But...
Perhaps he didn't need to replicate the sun itself.
Instead, he could find a way to borrow a ray of light from that distant sun... a ray that belonged to it!
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