Volume 2: Shenzhou Academy & The Battle of Venice
Chapter 133
Fusing the Spirit Seed, Metamorphosis of the Fire Element
Night descended, cloaking the sprawling metropolis of the Magic Capital beneath a heavy veil of shadows. An early summer downpour, thick with the briny tang of oceanic winds, swept through the whispering pine groves flanking the northern slopes of Shenzhou Archmage Academy. Yet even the torrential chill could not temper the stifling, oppressive tension simmering quietly in the air.
A pitch-black, specialized vehicle reinforced with mana-plated, bulletproof armor drifted sharply around a granite-paved curve, screeching to an abrupt halt directly before the wrought-iron gates of the Golden Eagle Villa. The heavy passenger door swung open, and Lin Feng strode swiftly down onto the manicured lawn. Beneath his thick black trench coat, both arms clamped tightly around a square alloy container. The exterior was bound in three thick layers of thermal-insulating felt and sealed with fluctuating azure containment runes that pulsed erratically like dying embers.
Even though thoroughly insulated behind a three-inch slab of Profound Ice glass, violent waves of scalding heat continuously seeped through the casing. The air skirting the edges of the alloy box warped and shimmered like a desert mirage, billowing faint wisps of vapor that reeked of pungent sulfur.
Sealed within was the very treasure that had driven the high society and aristocratic clans of the Magic Capital into a frenzy at the Jinghai Auction House: a top-tier Fire Spirit Seed known as the Scarlet Flowing Flame!
Close on his heels, Ye Qingwan stepped out from the transport. Her long hair, loosely bound at the nape of her neck, swayed with each brisk step, her limpid eyes filled with solemn vigilance. She cast a sharp glance toward the suffocating darkness of the hillside forest, her slender fingers already resting unobtrusively against the emerald jade bangle encircling her wrist.
“Zhao Jingshan and the Zhao Clan retinue were so livid they crushed their crystal goblets to powder in the auction hall,” Ye Qingwan murmured as she drew alongside Lin Feng, keeping her voice strictly between them. “They’ve long grown accustomed to throwing their weight around, relying on their clan’s stranglehold over the Magic Capital’s mineral and ore trade to seize whatever caught their fancy. Tonight, you slapped thirty-eight million gold coins onto the table under the banner of Shenzhou Archmage Academy, crushing them in full view of the public. Their face has been ground into the dirt. Xie Zhaoyuan has already doubled back toward the student dorms to divert attention, but along the route from the auction house to here, I detected at least three separate mental pulses from Wind reconnaissance mages tailing our transport.”
Lin Feng paused before the stone steps of the villa, the corner of his lips pulling into a chilling, razor-thin smirk.
“Those hounds only dare lurk along the academy’s outer fringes. The Golden Eagle Villa was bestowed upon me directly by the Chancellor; the campus defense wards still cover the perimeter. Unless they are eager to invoke the wrath of the board of directors, they won’t dare breach the front gates tonight.”
He tilted his gaze toward the third floor of the villa, his expression placid yet brimming with cold, unyielding resolve.
“However, tomorrow will be a different story. Once word spreads further, bounty hunters and hyenas drooling over a Spirit Seed won’t give a damn about academy regulations. That is why I must assimilate this flame tonight. Transforming it into my own raw power is the only true defense.”
Ye Qingwan gave a resolute nod. She offered no futile words advising him to rest or await reinforcements; she understood Lin Feng’s character all too well. This young man had never once staked his survival on the passive protection of others.
“Rest easy and enter your seclusion in the underground chamber,” she said, taking a step forward. The jade-green silk ribbon trailing from her wrist fluttered faintly as a pristine, life-imbued surge of Wood mana unfurled from her slender frame. “I will seal the entire perimeter of the villa. Within ten strides of this ground, not even the tremor of a single blade of grass will escape my divine sense.”
“I leave it to you.”
Lin Feng nodded, his implicit trust sealed with a light pat on her shoulder.
The moment his boots crossed the threshold of the heavy ironwood double doors, the shadows pooling beneath his feet rippled like agitated water. A colossal silhouette rose silently from the polished marble floor, exuding an icy, baleful aura that caused the ambient temperature in the foyer to plummet.
The Abyssal Thunder Wolf emerged without a sound from the pool of shadows. Its massive frame resembled an armored war chariot, draped in an obsidian coat sleek as nocturnal silk and traced with dark sapphire lightning runes that crackled with latent electricity. Its ghostly-blue feral pupils blazed like twin arctic lanterns, locking intently onto the alloy case cradled in its master’s grip. The violent scent of incinerating heat provoked a primal snarl behind its bared fangs, but the moment Lin Feng reached out and rested his palm against the horned carapace spanning its shoulder, the Warrior-tier beast reined in its ferocity. It lowered its great head, letting slip a low, obedient rumble from deep within its chest.
“Black Wolf, guard the descent to the underground cultivation chamber. Anyone who steps foot down those stairs without my express consent—tear them limb from limb.”
The Abyssal Thunder Wolf let out a muffled growl that rumbled like subterranean thunder. Pivoting on paws wreathed in dark lightning, it padded silently toward the arched stairway leading down into the subterranean vault. It crouched before the threshold, its hulking, armored physique standing like an impenetrable, demonic monolith.
Out in the estate garden, Ye Qingwan began weaving her hand seals. Her porcelain fingers traced mesmerizing azure-green trajectories through the misty night air. Forty-nine Wood-element stars flared into life, forming a dazzling Intermediate Star Pattern.
“Verdant Wood Myriad Star Boundary: Concealing Aura Aegis!”
Snap... crackle...
Countless deep green vines bristling with needle-sharp thorns burst through the turf, weaving through every seam in the flagstones to envelop the wrought-iron perimeter fencing and the villa’s exterior walls. Miniature emerald leaves pulsed with a dim bioluminescence before melting seamlessly into the rainy night, establishing an invisible warding barrier that not only suppressed any leaking mana fluctuations from escaping into the open, but also forged a hyper-sensitive life-sensing web.
Seeing the Wood ward lock into place, Lin Feng wasted not another breath. He turned on his heel and descended into the earth.
The subterranean cultivation chamber of the Golden Eagle Villa was carved fifteen meters beneath the bedrock of the hill. All four walls, the floor, and the vaulted ceiling were forged from monolithic slabs of Profound Iron Rock—a rare arcane mineral capable of withstanding extreme physical impacts and absorbing temperatures exceeding thousands of degrees Celsius without fracturing. In the four corners of the chamber, black-bronze pillars etched with shock-dampening runes emitted a dim, murky gray sheen.
Lin Feng strode into the center of the chamber. Behind him, the half-meter-thick solid steel vault door swung shut with a resounding, heavy CLANG, the arcane deadbolts sliding home automatically to completely sever this underground sanctum from the outside world.
The subterranean hall plunged into an eerie, stifling quiet. The only audible sounds were Lin Feng’s steady heartbeat and the increasingly violent bubbling churn originating from inside the alloy container.
Lin Feng set the container upon a raised granite pedestal at the room’s epicenter, then lowered himself into a cross-legged meditative posture directly opposite.
He slowly shut his eyes, regulating the steady rhythm of his chest. This was far from his first brush with high-tier magical resources, but integrating a complete Spirit Seed was a venture on an entirely different plane of existence.
In the arcane world, a Spirit Seed was the pristine essence condensed by heaven and earth over centuries in locales where elemental lay lines raged with extreme density. Unlike the mundane flames manifested by an ordinary mage from their Star Dust, a Spirit Seed possessed a primordial, savage sentience. It carried an intrinsic power of destruction and fundamentally refused to bow to human subjugation.
When an ordinary Intermediate Mage sought to fuse with a Spirit Seed, they typically spent months making meticulous preparations: purchasing exorbitant meridian-protecting alchemical draughts such as Ice Heart Dew, retaining at least two advanced Water or Ice mages to continuously channel frigid mana to suppress thermal spikes, and, most crucially, donning high-grade Spiritual Magic Equipment to anchor their Sea of Consciousness. Even with such exhaustive safeguards, the failure rate and resulting backlash—ranging from charred meridians that left one a crippled invalid to catastrophic bodily detonation—still exceeded thirty percent.
Yet right now, Lin Feng possessed no protective elixirs. Nor did he have any ice archmages standing by to temper the blaze.
He had only himself—and an unshakeable confidence forged through a thousand brushes with death!
“Open!”
Lin Feng barked in a low growl, his finger lashing out to strike the arcane locking mechanism of the container.
Snap! Crack!
The three concentric rings of Profound Ice containment runes fractured instantly, bursting into showers of blue motes. The alloy lid blasted open, and the heat-resistant glass pane within shuddered before splintering into spiderwebs!
BOOM!
A monstrous shockwave of incinerating heat, like a volcanic caldera detonating at point-blank range, roared into the chamber! The entire subterranean hall—spanning well over a hundred square meters—transformed in an instant into a churning, blood-red sea of fire. Dazzling, molten-gold radiance illuminated every dark crevice, banishing the shadows entirely. The oxygen within the chamber was incinerated within half a breath; the plummeting atmospheric pressure provoked shrill, screaming gales that howled like wailing specters.
The ambient temperature skyrocketed out of control: five hundred degrees... eight hundred degrees... surging past one thousand degrees Celsius! The Profound Iron Rock slabs paving the floor began to glow dull crimson, while the edges of the granite pedestal bearing the direct brunt of the flame fractured and melted, sloughing off in thick, viscous droplets of lava that sizzled furiously against the stone.
At the center of the pedestal, the Spirit Seed revealed its true form.
It was a sphere of liquid fire, dense and viscous like liquefied blood jade, roughly the size of a clenched fist. Whirling around it were rippling ribbons of brilliant golden flame spinning at dizzying velocity. Deep within the sphere’s core, the fire had coalesced into the visage of a ferocious flame serpent, baring fangs in unrestrained fury. Sensing its fetters shattered and feeling the proximity of living flesh, the Scarlet Flowing Flame unleashed its most untamed, destructive predatory instincts!
SKREEEEEE!
An ear-splitting shriek tore through the air, piercing the eardrums. In the span of a heartbeat, the flame morphed into a miniature fire dragon stretching over ten meters in length. Opening its crimson maw brimming with churning lava, it surged forward with the momentum to incinerate all existence, plunging straight toward Lin Feng’s chest!
The scorching gale slammed squarely into his face, scorching his flesh. His eyelashes and the fringes of his hair curled into brittle ash in an instant. His outer robes ignited into furious flames, yet Lin Feng yielded not an inch. His hands locked into an arcane convergence seal as he roared at the top of his lungs:
“Fire Nebula—Channel the Blaze to the Origin!”
ROAR!
Deep within Lin Feng’s Sea of Consciousness, the radiant crimson Fire Nebula, housing forty-nine star particles revolving like a miniature celestial galaxy, surged with torrential mana. Lin Feng tore open every meridian across his entire body, actively welcoming that frenzied fire dragon to plunge straight into his flesh!
Using a mortal body as the vessel, and his meridians as the conduit to swallow a divine Spirit Seed of heaven and earth!
The moment the Scarlet Flowing Flame breached his meridians through the acupoints at his chest, Lin Feng’s entire body seized violently as if struck by a bolt of divine lightning.
Heat! An agony that threatened to rip his very soul apart detonated from the deepest marrow of his bones!
That raging torrent of fire was no different from tens of thousands of white-hot needles skewering through every fiber of muscle and carving through his meridians. The blood in his veins boiled violently, venting plumes of crimson steam through his pores. Lin Feng’s skin fractured into countless jagged fissures, resembling an arid wasteland parched by a millennium of drought. Fresh blood seeped out only to be flash-fried by the apocalyptic heat into charred, blackened crusts before it could even trickle down his torso.
“Urgh... aagh...”
Lin Feng clenched his teeth until crimson leaked from between his gums, a feral growl trapped behind his throat. Blue veins bulged and throbbed violently across his forehead and temples. The savage will of the wild Spirit Seed went rampant, thrashing relentlessly against the walls of his meridians, seeking to tear his body apart from the inside out to break free.
It sought to incinerate this arrogant mortal into dust!
Within his Sea of Consciousness, Lin Feng’s Fire Nebula was being invaded by this alien, molten-gold blaze. Forty-nine brilliant crimson star particles trembled uncontrollably beneath the crushing pressure of the Spirit Seed, Lin Feng’s innate origin mana evaporating at an alarming rate.
The insidious “Mana Incineration” trait of the Scarlet Flowing Flame was rearing its vicious head! This flame did not merely consume flesh and blood; it used the very mana residing within a mage’s Star Nebula as its primary fuel. The more aggressively one mobilized mana to suppress it, the more fiercely the inferno burned, like pouring high-grade oil onto a raging pyre!
Lethal peril!
Should this stalemate persist, in less than ten breaths, the entire Fire Nebula he had painstakingly cultivated would be consumed down to the dregs. He would be reduced to a crippled husk devoid of a single drop of mana—or worse, his Sea of Consciousness would detonate, blasting his brain to ash!
His meridians swelled to the brink of rupture. Every breath Lin Feng expelled was laden with black smoke and drifting embers.
Yet perched on the precipice of obliteration, the young man’s gaze remained terrifyingly cold. Amidst the howling storm of physical agony, his willpower stood as unyielding as a millennium-old reef weathering the fury of an abyssal sea.
“You wish to burn me alive? A mindless spark born from volcanic fissures dares dream of devouring the soul of Lin Feng?!”
Lin Feng roared within the depths of his mind. His hand, though trembling violently from the agony, pressed with absolute conviction against the center of his chest.
There, the rough-hewn, slate-black jade pendant pressed against his scorching flesh suddenly flared with an eerie, primordial heat.
The Primordial Dragon Pendant!
As if roused by the presumption of this mundane earthly flame, the ancient pendant passed down from the primordial chaos suddenly erupted with an abyssal gray-black radiance, deep and boundless as the infinite void of the cosmos.
HUMMMM... RUMBLE...
A profound resonance vibrated from the very depths of Lin Feng’s soul. It was no physical sound carried by vibrations of air, but a primeval roar spanning eons of history, piercing through space and time itself!
The Roar of the Sovereign Dragon!
Within Lin Feng’s Sea of Consciousness, where the Fire Nebula was being ravaged by the crimson-gold deluge of the Scarlet Flowing Flame, the celestial void suddenly tore open into a colossal rift. Pouring forth from that pitch-black abyss was a swirling tide of dark energy carrying the absolute, sovereign majesty of a supreme ruler, condensing into the astral silhouette of a titanic Primordial Dragon that blotted out the celestial firmament!
The dragon’s body was as ink-black as eternal night. Each colossal dragon scale gleamed with a frigid metallic luster, and its deep golden sovereign eyes looked down with majestic, indifferent detachment upon the puny flame serpent writhing below.
Before the phantasmal manifestation of the Primordial Dragon, the once-unruly, rampaging Scarlet Flowing Flame froze in absolute petrification.
It trembled!
It was a visceral trembling originating from the deepest instincts of all creation in the presence of the supreme ruler of existence! The flame’s wild, feral sentience was like an untamed beast that had stumbled into the presence of an ancient god; its ferocious murderousness vanished in an instant, leaving behind only sheer, marrow-deep terror.
ROOOAAAR!
The silhouette of the Great Dragon parted its jaws, exhaling a sweeping gale of slate-gray dragon breath. Every trace of malice, viciousness, and rebellion harbored within the Scarlet Flowing Flame was pulverized into harmless fragments beneath that ancient draconic force. Its violent impurities were stripped away down to nothingness, preserving only the purest, most pristine elemental fire essence born of heaven and earth.
The once-ferocious serpent of fire was reduced to a docile, shimmering stream of molten crimson-gold, hovering meekly in the Sea of Consciousness like an obedient child prostrating before its master.
“Now is the moment!”
Seizing this once-in-a-lifetime window, Lin Feng marshaled his spiritual focus with absolute authority. His will manifested like titanic, invisible hands, enveloping that purified stream of molten fire and steering it directly into the heart of his Fire Nebula!
BOOM!
The instant the origin core of the Scarlet Flowing Flame dissolved into the Star Nebula, an earth-shattering metamorphosis unfolded within Lin Feng’s Sea of Consciousness!
The forty-nine Fire stars, which had previously shone with an ordinary bright vermilion hue, hungrily absorbed the radiant golden tide. Like parched sponges welcoming sweet nectar after a drought, each star particle devoured the essence greedily, swelling in volume and blazing with blinding brilliance!
The coloration of the entire Fire Nebula underwent a magnificent transmutation. From its mundane scarlet, it was cloaked in a regal, incandescent crimson-gold hue, resplendent and divine. The cascading ribbons of mana circling this miniature celestial galaxy crackled with crisp, percussive detonations, like thunder cloaked in fire.
Across Lin Feng’s physical frame, the bleeding fissures lining his flesh began to mend at a pace visible to the naked eye. The charred, blackened scabs sloughed away, revealing pristine, smooth skin beneath that pulsed with extraordinary resilience. Every muscle cell, every singular meridian path, having undergone the trial and baptism of that pure elemental blaze, widened to more than double their original breadth, tempered like refined steel forged in dragon fire.
A torrent of unprecedented vitality coursed through his four limbs and hundred meridians!
Within the nebula, all forty-nine star particles had completely molted. They were no longer mere embers of red light; they had transformed into forty-nine celestial rubies gilded in radiant gold, orbiting with peerless, flawless trajectories.
Complete, consummate fusion!
The Fire Spirit Seed—Scarlet Flowing Flame—was entirely subjugated!
Lin Feng clearly perceived every strand of mana humming through his veins. The destructive potency of his Fire magic had been elevated to an entirely new echelon:
A massive 2.5-fold leap in base damage!
Not only that, but nestled deep within the core of every star particle, a miniature glyph of a molten-gold flame flickered with arcane brilliance—the indelible imprint of its innate mutant trait: “Mana Incineration!”
From this moment forth, any Fire spell unleashed by Lin Feng—whether a humble Primary-tier Fire Burst or the Intermediate-tier Fiery Burst: Raging Dragon Force—would cling to an enemy’s flesh like maggots on rotting bone the instant it landed. It would continuously consume and siphon the mana residing within an opponent’s Star Dust or Star Nebula to feed its own combustion, draining their reserves dry until they withered in exhaustion and perished!
An auxiliary trait that was ruthlessly vicious and overwhelmingly tyrannical in mortal combat!
Phew...
Lin Feng exhaled a long breath of turbid air. The breath he released carried crackling specks of golden embers, drifting through the subterranean air for several moments before dissipating into nothingness.
His eyes snapped open.
Within the young man’s deep, pitch-black pupils, two brilliant golden flames flared like miniature twin suns, exuding a searing pressure that warped the empty air half a meter before his face.
Lin Feng raised his right hand before his chest and lightly flicked his slender fingers.
Snap!
Without tracing a single Star Orbit, relying solely on an instantaneous thought to commune with his mana, an exquisite lotus of molten-gold flame bloomed upon the tip of his index finger!
The flame lotus was merely the size of a teacup, its petals weaving together with ethereal, fluid grace. Nestled at the heart of the stamen was a droplet of refined essence fire, as dark crimson and viscous as fresh blood. Yet the apocalyptic heat radiating from this delicate blossom was vastly more terrifying than the uncontrolled sea of fire from earlier!
Sizzle... hiss...
The air around his fingertips charred with high-pitched screeches. Beneath Lin Feng’s boots, the Profound Iron Rock—reputed to withstand extreme thermal stress—abruptly groaned with brittle cracking sounds. A half-meter radius circling beneath his feet was instantly liquified by the sheer ambient temperature of the lotus, collapsing into a bubbling pool of churning molten lava!
“Such destructive power...” The corners of Lin Feng’s lips curled into a smile of profound satisfaction. “If I unleash Fiery Burst: Raging Dragon Force powered by this Scarlet Flowing Flame, even an opponent clad in peak Intermediate Magic Armor or wielding an Earth-element Shield Magic Tool would be smelted into slag in a single strike!”
He clenched his fist, and the fire lotus vanished smoothly into his palm as the blistering heat in the underground chamber rapidly abated.
Yet before the smile on Lin Feng’s lips could fully spread, his brow furrowed.
The Primordial Dragon Pendant resting against his chest, having fallen quiet, suddenly pulsed with a minute, subtle warning vibration. At the same moment, the razor-sharp perception granted by his formidable spiritual force detected an anomalous signal transmitting from the ground above.
Snap...
The faint, almost imperceptible snapping of an enchanted vine.
A corner in the northwestern sector of Ye Qingwan’s Verdant Wood Myriad Star Boundary out in the garden had just been severed by something razor-sharp!
Immediately following came three chilling, sinister pulses of murderous intent—resembling venomous vipers slithering through the darkness—gliding silently through the curtain of rain, closing in on the rear wall of the Golden Eagle Villa.
Lin Feng rose to his full height, his gaze instantly hardening into bone-chilling frost.
“They arrived faster than I anticipated. It seems someone truly couldn’t wait until dawn to snatch this Spirit Seed...”
Flicking his wrist, faint arcs of dark crimson-gold fire coiled silently between his knuckles as he strode toward the heavy iron vault door of the underground sanctum.