At that moment, most of the island's living forces had gathered along the coast to deal with the inexplicable disaster of a rising tsunami.
No one noticed the upheaval unfolding deep within the island.
And indeed, the sky-lamps were among the most dreadful things on the island.
Wherever a lamp stood, for several li around there would be no trace of human life.
For Jing Qian, it was as though he had walked into a self-serve banquet hall. Lamp after lamp was falling, and no one came to stop him.
Especially now, each lamp, one by one, came lining up at his feet.
So he simply set down the Tushita Furnace and focused entirely on refining his Sword Fang Pattern.
He had once believed that his Sword Fang, limited by materials and the furnace, would take a long, arduous accumulation to advance.
But unexpectedly, with just this single trip to Tsushima Island, he had struck it rich in one blow.
By the time he devoured his hundredth sword-blank, Sword Fang had finally, like Tidal Wave before it, advanced to the Blueblood tier!
Jing Qian raised his hand and summoned Sword Fang. The once-pale short blade now gleamed deep sapphire, crystalline like a gem.
Its sharpness had risen to new heights.
More importantly, Sword Fang was no longer a dead weight to be held in his hand.
With a thought, Jing Qian sent it flying.
It became a streak of sword-light, slicing through the air.
The keen cry of steel split the atmosphere, leaving a rift of raw mana that refused to close.
He guided it, circling his body. Within ten zhang, it followed his will like a limb. Beyond ten zhang, its response dulled, but even so, the breakthrough was immense.
From a mere toy blade, Sword Fang had leapt into a lethal flying sword. His combat power spiked once more.
With Sword Fang and Sumeru together, Jing Qian felt confident he could now slay even Dragon-Elephant realm cultivators on land.
The exhilaration of newfound strength only drove him to reap the sky-lamps faster, pushing Sword Fang toward the Violet Eye tier.
Every reforging brought a subtle rise in its killing edge, and Jing Qian was utterly intoxicated.
...
Meanwhile, Tsushima Island was finally recovering from the tsunami's devastation.
The island's sole port lay in ruins, dead and wounded beyond count; rebuilding would take immense effort.
The two Dragon-Elephant Patterns, Jorōgumo and Red Tongue, had exhausted themselves containing the waves. Even so, they dreaded the punishment awaiting them from their island lord.
As guardians, they knew even a natural disaster would not spare them from blame.
On their return, the two remained silent, each resigned to his fate.
Then Jorōgumo suddenly spoke:
"I remember… a sky-lamp should have been here. Where is it?"
Red Tongue glanced up and froze in horror.
He rushed forward, racing to the next node. The lamp there, too, was gone.
The hair on his back stood on end, terror flooding his chest.
"An intruder is on the island!"
It wasn't the invader he feared most, but how they would explain this to their lord.
The two Dragon-Elephants sped toward the Tsushima Shrine. But along the way, they found every lamp had vanished.
When they reached the shrine, their dread was complete.
The four guardian lamps that once stood at the shrine's corners were gone as well. And within the shrine lingered the aura of a stranger.
They could hardly imagine the fury their island lord would unleash.
Just then, a voice drifted from the south:
"Two Dao-friends, well met. Forgive the intrusion, I've troubled you with my arrival."
The two dashed outside and saw a squat figure, carrying a black jade furnace, strolling casually toward the shrine.
Behind him trailed a neat procession of sky-lamps, hopping step by step in eerie unison.
"Who are you?!"
Red Tongue roared.
Without waiting for an answer, the two Dragon-Elephants summoned their Patterns and charged at the intruder.
Jing Qian did not flinch. He raised the black furnace to his chest.
At the instant they closed in, he loosed the fire within.
A tongue of uncanny blue flame lashed out from the depths of the abyss, licking across both Dragon-Elephants at once.
It was the lampfire of Blue Blood Lantern, the true power of a Longevity cultivator.
"Aaaaah!"
The two shrieked in agony, as though flayed alive.
They knew this flame all too well, for it was their master's own.
But familiarity did not mean resistance. On the contrary, before this fire, they were utterly defenseless.
This was Blue Blood Lantern's ultimate subjugation technique.
He had never permitted his subordinates to learn methods of resisting his flames; he saw such things as betrayal.
And so, before Jing Qian's eyes, the two mighty Dragon-Elephant cultivators burned like torches, their souls and flesh consumed utterly by the blue blaze.
They fell without striking a single blow.
Within the Tushita Furnace, Jing Qian had now stored one hundred and forty-seven Longevity lampfires, granting him, if only for a time, the combat power of a Longevity master.
Such was the extraordinary might of a Golden Root Pattern.
More than its potency, though, was its origin. This fire came from Blue Blood Lantern himself.
On Tsushima Island, it represented supreme authority, an untouchable sacred force.
Jing Qian's face was grim as he stepped over the corpses to inspect them.
With a flick of silk, he drew out their treasures.
From Red Tongue: a red-bronze earring, another storage treasure, and a carved tongue of red jade, an eighth-rank Azure Wing-grade material.
From Jorōgumo: a spider-silk handkerchief, and a bundle of woven spider-thread.
That too was a storage treasure and an eighth-rank material.
Jing Qian picked up the silk cocoon, turning it over in his hand. Confirming that it could be used to refine his Soul-Weaver Pattern, he felt the gain was great.
Then he activated his Sumeru Pattern. The earring and handkerchief instantly crumbled into gray smoke, merging into the Void Realm. The entire domain doubled in size, expanding from coffin-sized to outhouse-sized, a massive leap forward!
He casually pocketed the other two materials, then carried the Tushita Furnace to the Tsushima Shrine.
At this point, the sky-lamp network that had blanketed the shrine was all but destroyed.
The shrine was the heart of Fate Island; its seals were even stronger than the ancestral mountain of Jiangzhu Island.
In the past, Jing Qian would never have been able to breach it.
But now everything was different.
He directed the Tushita Furnace, pouring out the gathered lampfires, flooding them over the shrine.
This was, simply, spear against shield.
The surface structures of the shrine, under the tide of lampfire, disintegrated into ash in an instant.
Then, a bloody-red radiance surged from the ground, firmly resisting the flames.
This was the final, strongest seal protecting Tsushima Island's foundation.
But Jing Qian was not daunted. In his furnace burned over a hundred lampfires.
Each lampfire carried the power of a Blueblood Pattern!
The flames continued to blaze within the Tushita Furnace. Jing Qian had no means to suppress them, nor to store them forever; they would eventually burn out.
But until then, he wielded the might of Longevity itself.
Wealth unspent only goes to waste.
And so, he targeted the toughest, most crucial object on the island, and poured his fire into it.
He planted the Tushita Furnace at the shrine gates, letting it belch flames upon the seal, requiring no more of his attention.
Behind him bounced a train of hopping sky-lamps.
Jing Qian wasted no time. He turned back to his "guests." Swallow fire, burn bronze, forge blanks, chew swords, reforge an assembly line in motion.
Every hour, he could reforge Sword Fang nearly twenty times.
With over two hundred lamps remaining, within a day, the entire net would be harvested.
He worked feverishly, hoping his effort would not go unnoticed by Blue Blood Lantern.
...
Meanwhile, Jiangzhu Island, battlefield of a Longevity war, had been shattered to pieces; half the island had already sunk beneath the waves.
It was the third day of battle between Marshal Zuo Siming and Blue Blood Lantern.
Both sides were flagging, yet the ferocity of combat had not diminished.
Clad in armor and brimming with fighting spirit, Zuo Siming struck with a spear that carried the might of thunder, cleaving iron as if paper.
Su Ming's lingering consciousness had faded away. Now the Spiritual Construct fought purely by martial instinct, yet displayed a mastery bordering on the Dao.
His spear moved like a dragon, precise, ruthless, simple yet flawless, cutting through the swarm of ghosts without a single wasted motion.
But the construct's strength drew only from Su Min'er's dwindling lifespan.
Thus, his power waned, and he began to fall behind.
Opposite him, Blue Blood Lantern's force blazed like a great river, his lampfires and ghosts pressing the construct down.
Yet compared to the calm Zuo Siming, Blue Blood Lantern grew ever more agitated.
It was understandable. Imagine watching surveillance footage of a stray cat breaking into your home and setting your gas tank ablaze, wouldn't you drop everything and rush back?
That was Blue Blood Lantern's plight.
The lamp network had been his life's masterpiece, the foundation of his cultivation.
When the first lamp was snuffed, he had sensed something amiss.
As the harvest spread, he nearly lost his composure entirely.
Each lamp costs staggering resources: at minimum, a ninth-rank white-bronze vessel, a Fate cultivator, and a Blueblood Pattern.
Each was worth no less than a seventh-rank artifact.
It had taken him a thousand years to accumulate three hundred lamps more than half his life's fortune.
And now, they were vanishing at terrifying speed.
If he knew that Jing Qian was smashing them crudely, stripping the bronze to chew into Sword Fang reforges, he might very well have broken down on the spot.
He longed to abandon the fight, race back to the island, and flay the intruder alive, burn his soul upon the lampfire.
But the Spiritual Construct before him was too precious to abandon.
He was certain: give it another day, and the wielder's lifespan would be exhausted.
Then he would claim this priceless construct, enough to cover all the costs of seizing Jiangzhu Island.
So he endured.
Yet as his lamps fell in droves, his killing intent only soared higher.
He unleashed his true trump card.
A Longevity Art, fueled by his own lifespan: The Technique of Lamp Shadows.
His lifespan flared away, kindling a strange blue fire upon his lantern.
The fire leapt to his ghost army, transforming them into a hundred blazing specters, surging at Zuo Siming.
This was the true terror of a Longevity cultivator burning lifespan itself to fight.
Under this blessing, the hundred ghosts rose to the Blueblood tier, and their power multiplied.
Zuo Siming, his battle-wisdom keen, fought as he fell back, drawing the ghosts deeper into the island.
But at the crucial moment, Blue Blood Lantern turned and fled.
Abandoning the ghost army, he bolted for home.
Deprived of his control, the ghosts froze, their power dissipating.
Zuo Siming wasted no time. His spear pierced them one by one, scattering the phantoms.
Thus, the battle ended abruptly, inconclusively.
The Marshal stood silent, lowering his spear. His armor peeled back, revealing Su Min'er upon his shoulder.
The girl had lost one hundred and three years of her lifespan; fewer than thirty remained.
Her face looked unchanged, but her once-black hair had turned white.
After forging the construct, losing her arm, and enduring the battle, she was utterly spent. She collapsed against the Spiritual Construct, slipping into sleep.
Her last hazy thought was:
"At least I lasted the days I promised him. I did not break my word."
Blue Blood Lantern's retreat had been sudden.
But what choice had he?
If he didn't turn back now, his ancestral temple would be dug up and burned to ash.
...
Tsushima Shrine Has Vanished
The Tsushima Shrine had completely disappeared.
All that remained was a hundred-meter-deep pit where it once stood.
The walls of the pit glistened like glazed crystal, scorched by fire, and from its depths a pure and potent aura of flame rose upward.
Jing Qian had already descended into the pit and was carefully studying two priceless treasures.
The pit led into a secret chamber. Empty and bare, it contained only a single massive red candle, burning eternally.
Suspended above the candle flame hovered a jade-green seal.
Neither candle nor seal emitted any aura, yet in Jing Qian's Worldly Insight, they revealed different information.
First, the candle:
Life Furnace: Flood-Dragon Life Candle
Rank: Blue Blood Furnace
Foundation: Flood-Dragon Fat
Remaining Lifespan: Four Years
Then, the seal:
Spiritual Construct: Tsushima Divine Seal
Subjugation Requirements: Pattern of Gods and Ghosts, Pattern of Beasts
Lifespan Burden: Two Hours per Day
Jing Qian had already burned through more than half the Longevity Lampfires he had plundered.
With their power bolstering him, he had pierced the seal of Tsushima Island and reached this Life Furnace far faster than Blue Blood Lantern had managed in his assault on Jiangzhu Island.
He had, in effect, cleared this seventh-rank Fate Island like a game straight to the final boss.
Now he was attempting to claim its two greatest spoils.
Both the Life Furnace and the Spiritual Construct were among the rarest, most exalted treasures in all of Hunzhou.
In almost every case, they belonged exclusively to Longevity-stage cultivators.
Had Jing Qian not found this gap when Blue Blood Lantern left, and possessed the perfect counter in the form of the Tushita Furnace, he could never have broken in.
Yet somehow, by sheer fortune, he had done it. Truly, heaven's luck was upon him.
But after studying both treasures for some time, he still could not claim them.
The Flood-Dragon Life Candle was Tsushima Island's Life Furnace, rooted in the land's veins, deeply linked to the island's spiritual energy. No matter what methods or spells he tried, it would not budge.
Worse, with the Fatefire blazing upon it, his mortal body could not endure direct contact.
The Tsushima Divine Seal was fused into that Fatefire itself; neither flesh nor mana could touch it. It, too, was untouchable.
Here, Jing Qian confronted his own inadequacy.
Though his cultivation was outstanding, and his Life Patterns superior to most, his foundation was still shallow.
He had relied too much on talent and fortune to force his way forward.
But when faced with high-level knowledge beyond his grasp, he faltered.
He simply didn't know the proper method to claim such treasures.
So he resorted to the only method he could.
He once again brought out the Tushita Furnace and set it to drawing in the Fatefire from the Flood-Dragon Life Candle.
His living treasure-furnace would devour any flame he fed it.
The Life Candle was of Blue Blood rank, not low, but the dragon fat within it was nearly depleted.
That was the real reason Blue Blood Lantern had been so desperate to seize Jiangzhu Island.
To Jing Qian, though, Fatefire was priceless.
As he coaxed it out, the first stream of Fatefire drifted from the candle into the Tushita Furnace.
The black jade furnace, once light as a feather, suddenly became heavy as a mountain. With a resounding thud, it crashed onto the ground.
Jing Qian blinked in surprise.
So this was the true weight of Fatefire condensed earth-energy, crushingly dense.
Its presence transformed the very nature of the Tushita Furnace.
Now his treasure was no different from a genuine Life Furnace.
The difference was that, unlike a true Fate Island, the Tushita Furnace had no land veins to feed it. Once it held Fatefire, it became almost impossible to move.
But Jing Qian didn't care. He left the furnace where it fell and continued to draw more fire into it.
If he could seize both the Life Furnace and the Spiritual Construct, it would be a blow that pierced straight to Blue Blood Lantern's heart.
Even that arrogant Longevity master would have to consider abandoning the front lines and rushing back.
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