No sooner had her father's corpse been consumed than Su Min'er pushed a second body into the flames.
This was her grandfather, Su Ling!
The Soul-Attracting Sandal Flame devoured him, burning fiercer still. Within the cyan blaze, a streak of bright blue began to emerge.
Next, she slid a third corpse into the fire, that of her great-grandfather, Su Lin!
Half the Soul-Attracting Flame had now turned blue. Only one final corpse remained, the most special of all.
But that body could not be burned. She would have to find another way.
Turning, Su Min'er suddenly dropped to her knees before Jing Qian, knocking her head against the floor with each word she cried:
"Brother, forgive me! Please lend me the corpses of your ancestors, so that I may kindle the Blue Flame!"
Jing Qian's eyes flashed. With Worldly Insight open, he had already guessed what she intended.
With a wave of his hand, threads of silk shot forth, prying open the three bronze coffins. The corpses of the Jing clan ancestors were lifted gently out and laid beside the Life Furnace.
It was what any descendant of the Jing family would have done.
Without hesitation, Su Min'er placed those bodies into the Soul-Attracting Flame as well.
With their aid, the furnace was forced upward, transformed into a Seventh-Rank Blue Life Furnace.
At last, her purpose was achieved. Su Min'er exhaled in relief.
Only one corpse remained, the most extraordinary of all: Su Ming, the founding ancestor of the Su clan, a Longevity-stage master who had established Jiangzhu Island three centuries earlier.
Unlike the others, his body had never decayed. His skin remained smooth as jade, seated upright as if still alive.
Su Min'er knelt by his right side and began chanting a strange incantation toward the furnace.
At once, a blue flame surged forth from the Fate Fire, latching onto Su Ming's body.
The corpse, long dead, suddenly inhaled a breath, as though life had returned to it.
She continued chanting without pause, blue flames streaming forth one after another, and Su Ming's body stirred with growing vitality.
Fate Fire was precious beyond measure. Yet here it was being spent as though worthless, as Su Min'er recklessly forced the furnace to its limits.
The blue blaze fed by six great cultivators' remains slowly dimmed back to cyan, its strength drained.
In exchange, Su Ming's body radiated an ever-denser aura of living presence.
The flame weakened further, dwindling to a fragile white ember, every last drop of its strength siphoned into Su Ming's corpse.
Jing Qian, watching through Worldly Insight, saw not just ritual but a masterpiece of cultivation laid bare, an ultimate demonstration of arcane technique that left him awestruck.
Before his eyes, lines of strange information shimmered into view across Su Ming's form:
Spiritual Construct: Martial General – Left Registrar of Fate (Su)
Suppression Requirement: Ghostly Pattern & Su Clan Bloodline
Lifespan Burden: 100 years per day
Jing Qian was witnessing the birth of a Spiritual Construct!
This was the third such creation he had ever seen, following the Flood Dragon and the Subduing Dragon constructs. But unlike those, this Martial General – Left Registrar of Fate had been forged over a hundred years of Su family lineage, generation after generation, from nothing to something.
Yet compared to the earlier two, this one was still incomplete. Its lifespan drain was catastrophic, and suppression would cost a hundred years of life per single day. Even Jing Qian, with all his strength, would last no more than two days before being drained to death.
Fortunately, such absurd consumption came only at the birth of a construct, when its essence was still unstable.
With further burning of Fate Fire, the burden rapidly diminished.
From one hundred years a day, it dropped to a handful each time the fire flared.
By the time the furnace collapsed into a feeble white flame, the burden had shrunk to three months of lifespan per day.
In this stage, the very first forging was always the easiest, the most efficient moment to temper and reduce its drain.
Su Min'er was ruthless, pushing the furnace to its absolute limit.
But even then, losing three months per day was unbearable.
Ninety times the natural rate of loss, no cultivator beneath the Longevity realm could endure such consumption for long.
Drawing a deep breath, Su Min'er turned toward Jing Qian, ready to plead.
But before she could speak, he cut her off, his voice steady as if their thoughts were one:
"Little Su, do whatever you must. I'll support you."
Reassured, Su Min'er abandoned all hesitation. She chanted yet another incantation.
At once, the final white flame guttered out.
The Life Furnace of Jiangzhu Island, which had burned for three centuries, was extinguished and ruined by the last scions of the Jing and Su clans.
In that moment, the foundation of the island's stability was utterly destroyed.
The entire land began to crumble.
And yet Su Min'er cared nothing for the island's ruin. She simply lifted the three logs of Violet-Eye Soul-Calming Sandalwood, placing them reverently into Su Ming's arms.
Afterward, she began to chant a new incantation.
Jing Qian could clearly see the Soul-Calming Sandalwood glowing with violet light, its essence intertwining with the strange aura shrouding Su Ming's corpse, only to be devoured by it.
Each wisp of light consumed by the Spiritual Construct injected a fresh surge of vitality into it, while at the same time steadily reducing that terrifying lifespan burden.
To fully forge this Construct, the entire Life Furnace had been sacrificed.
Outside the ancestral mountain's seal, the three great cultivators of Tsushima Island immediately sensed the shift within.
For a moment, all three froze, then the blue lantern flared with furious intensity.
For the first time, the Blue Lantern manifested a humanoid form: a grotesque, malformed child with a head three times the size of a normal man's.
The child stepped up to Jiu Jianwan, his cold, pitiless eyes locking on the man's face. His words, one by one, fell like iron:
"You let them inside?"
There was no emotion in the voice at all. Jiu Jianwan might as well have been nothing more than a corpse already.
"I did not!"
"I stood guard here the whole time; no one could have gotten through!"
"Island Lord, you can't kill me!"
"I cultivated the Shuten-dōji Pattern, my place is etched into the Hyakki Yagyō Scroll!"
"Island Lord! Island Lord! Blue Lantern! Aaaahhh!"
The big-headed child seized Jiu Jianwan's throat with one hand. A strange power flooded into him.
The man's mighty Dragon-Elephant body twisted, shrinking under crushing force, until he was compressed into a shrunken, desiccated corpse barely a meter tall.
His hands rose uncontrollably above his head, as if holding something aloft.
Then the Blue Lantern produced a ninth-rank white-bronze lamp bowl and clamped it down over Jiu Jianwan's hands.
And thus a bizarre lantern, with a human being as its stand, was lit.
Beside them, Yozang trembled like a leaf, too terrified to utter a sound.
Fortunately for him, the Blue Lantern's wrath fell solely upon Jiu Jianwan and did not spread further.
The monstrous child once more revealed the Blue Lantern Pattern, using his own lamp flame to ignite the Shuten Lantern.
At once, a tangible, towering image of Shuten-dōji manifested its strength, eclipsing all other phantoms, and began battering the ancestral seal.
Its power exceeded even Jiu Jianwan's own.
This was the infamous Heaven-Lighting Lantern Technique, the very core of the Blue Lantern's battle arts: a grotesque sorcery that refined living beings into lantern-stands, channeling his Longevity-stage lampfire into terrifying ghostly avatars.
As one of the oldest Longevity cultivators in all of Hunzhou, the Blue Lantern was a true undying monster. No one knew how much lifespan he had hoarded over a millennium of cultivation.
In that time, countless lives had been extinguished to fuel his lanterns. Most of those soul-lamps now rested on Tsushima Island, woven into its great protective formation.
Were it not so, he could have lit a few more lanterns here and now and already smashed through the seal!
Even so, the seal was wavering, on the brink of collapse. Before long, the Blue Lantern would drag everyone inside out and make them into lanterns.
All he cared about now was that they not destroy the Life Furnace's supporting material.
If that happened, Jiangzhu Island would be ruined beyond repair.
After everything he had invested, if it were wasted here, even grinding his enemies' bones to dust would not ease his hatred.
Meanwhile, at the foot of the ancestral mountain, in the tomb chamber below, Jing Qian and Su Min'er remained oblivious.
Both were wholly focused on watching the transformation of the Martial General – Left Registrar of Fate.
Su Min'er could only act on instinct, perceiving nothing concrete.
But Jing Qian, through Worldly Insight, beheld the entire forging of the spirit-officer in detail.
He marveled at the Su clan's secret methods, layer upon layer, seamless in their intricacy; his heart stirred with admiration.
For Su Min'er, so young, to master the entire process so completely left him full of respect.
She was clearly a prodigy of rarest genius, her cultivation heritage far deeper than he had imagined.
At last, when the Construct had consumed the final piece of Soul-Calming Sandalwood, its information solidified:
Spiritual Construct: Martial General – Left Registrar of Fate (Su)
Suppression Requirement: Ghostly Pattern, Su Clan Bloodline
Lifespan Burden: Seven days per day
A Spiritual Construct that consumed a lifespan at seven times the normal rate. Su Min'er, a newly initiated cultivator, had fully refined it.
Only then did she finally let out a long breath of relief.
She bowed deeply to Jing Qian and said:
"Brother, I thank you for your aid. Without it, all the Su clan's centuries of effort would have been wasted.
Now that the enemy is at our gates, I ask that you leave as soon as possible. Should I survive, I will repay this debt with my very life."
Jing Qian asked in return:
"Outside, there are Longevity-stage cultivators. Do you really think you can withstand them?"
Su Min'er gave a faint smile and replied:
"I never expected to win.
All I know is that my clan has endured bitterly for so many years, burning through untold Fate Fires, just to forge a true Spiritual Construct and change the fate of our line.
If I don't gamble my life now, once the enemy breaks the seal, everything will be over.
At that point, even if I manage to survive, life would be meaningless.
As for those outside, if I drive the Construct, I should be able to resist for a few days."
Jing Qian nodded slightly and said:
"Little Su, if you trust me, then just hold on for five days.
Since you're staking your life on this, then I'll gamble once too!
Take care!"
With that, he turned and left without looking back.
He strode out of the burial chamber, stepped into the dimensional void, and sped straight toward the open sea.
Inside the tomb, Su Min'er watched his retreating, words she had wanted to say caught in her throat.
If she failed to endure the five days, it wouldn't be because she doubted him
but because she feared her lifespan was too short to survive the coming battle.
She turned toward the Martial General – Left Registrar of Fate, pressing her left hand against its chest.
This was her ancestor, Su Ming, now completely transformed from a decayed corpse into a noble Spiritual Construct.
It was the culmination of countless generations of Su clan children, who had sacrificed themselves for this very purpose.
Even at the cost of seizing more Fate Fire than their share and encroaching upon the Jing clan's rights.
And in the end, it fell not to the elders, but to her, the youngest, lowest-ranked, newly initiated cultivator, to wield it.
Though the clan's secret lore dictated that anyone with Su blood could control the Construct, once in her hands, how could she possibly have enough Life Essence to command it?
Lacking sufficient power, the only thing left with which to drive the Construct was her very lifespan.
Su Min'er only hoped that her remaining century of life would be enough to last five days, enough to honor her brother's request.
Without further hesitation, she drew her jade blade and cut open her wrist, letting blood drip onto the Construct's chest.
The metallic stench of blood reached the Construct's nostrils, and suddenly, its eyes snapped open.
Su Ming's brows were sharp, his features strikingly handsome.
But in those eyes, there was no trace of humanity, only cold indifference.
And the first thing the Construct did upon awakening was seize Su Min'er's left arm and bite down.
Crunch. Crack.
Her flesh and blood splattered, tendons and bone tearing apart.
Yet Su Min'er endured it all, neither flinching nor crying out.
Once the Construct had devoured enough of her flesh, it seemed at last to have found its missing piece and truly came alive.
It released her mangled arm and asked:
"What day is this? And who are you?"
"Ancestor Ming, it has been two hundred and twenty-five years since your passing.
I am your fifth-generation granddaughter, Su Min'er."
Hearing her answer, the Construct spoke again:
"This Left Registrar may be ordinary in quality, but at least it has finally been forged.
Min'er, your labors are great. You have completed the Spiritual Construct Forging. Your path of cultivation will now open to entirely new realms.
Wait here a few days, and kin from the main family will come to take you away from Hunzhou, to a true land of cultivation.
My consciousness can remain for only a quarter of an hour. If you have questions, you still have time to ask."
This so-called "Spiritual Construct Forging" was a foundational method reserved only for the core heirs of truly great sects.
By embedding a complete Construct into the sea of consciousness of a low-ranked cultivator, it replaced a Fate Pattern, granting a terrifying foundation for cultivation and immense benefits for the future.
Such a profound method was beyond the comprehension of backwater military provinces like Hunzhou.
For Su Min'er to succeed in completing it, her personal value skyrocketed.
But hearing her ancestor's words, she showed no excitement at all.
Instead, she replied quietly:
"Ancestor Ming, our Jiangzhu Island faces catastrophe. Whether I can even survive the coming days is uncertain. I fear I will only disappoint you."
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