jdhmnovel Chapter 426 The Realm of Fusion
Chapter 426 The Realm of Fusion
Ye Shuli's palms, which were holding the crystal fragments, were sweating profusely.
Moonlight pierced through the cracks at the top of the ruins, cutting out checkerboard-like patterns of light on the scattered bronze fragments.
She counted the number of rotations of the gears at the back of Jiang Ye's neck, and by the thirty-seventh breath, the dark red crystals had indeed rearranged into the topological structure of the Klein bottle.
“I need a lab.” She crushed the crystal in her palm, the fragments emitting a dark red fluorescence between her fingers.
Jiang Ye wiped the moss off the tip of his nose with his sleeve and took out half a spirit stone carved into a counting rod from his Qiankun bag: "Same as always, I'll be in charge of stabilizing the energy field." The bloodstain on the back of his neck glowed faintly with the frequency of his speech, and the clicking sound of the gears turning was a quarter beat slower than usual.
The two cleared a three-zhang square area in the northwest corner of the ruins.
Ye Shuli used her broken sword to carve the basis functions of the Fourier transform on the rammed earth surface, while Jiang Ye buried twelve Soul-Suppressing Nails along the circumference.
When the last nail was embedded in the cracked bronze plate, the entire protective array suddenly collapsed into the shape of a Möbius strip—this was the third time Jiang Ye's bloodline talent had gone out of control.
"Don't get distracted." Ye Shuli pulled the glass bead hanging from her hair and pressed it against the indentation of the gear on the back of Jiang Ye's neck.
The Klein Blue energy flowing inside the bead immediately resonated with the bloodstain, forcibly correcting the arrangement angle of the Soul-Suppressing Nails.
The experimental table was modified from half of a bronze tripod.
Ye Shuli spread out the collected rune rubbings, and the dark red patterns continued to undergo non-Euclidean geometric transformations under the moonlight.
She tried to use her spiritual power to make a copy, but the ink evaporated into a rainbow of colors the moment it touched the paper; she then tried to copy it with Jiang Ye's wolf-hair brush, but the brush tip ignited a bluish-white flame as soon as it touched the first talisman.
"Try this." Jiang Ye cut his index finger and dripped the blood onto the edge of the bronze cauldron.
Blood imbued with the power of stars flowed along the Taotie pattern on the body of the cauldron, forming a miniature Kuiper Belt model at the mouth of the cauldron.
The rune rubbings suddenly stopped changing and froze at a certain moment that contained icosahedral symmetry.
Ye Shuli's pupils suddenly contracted.
She grabbed a charcoal pencil and started doing calculations on scrap paper, quickly piling up a small mountain of discarded paper balls at Jiang Ye's feet.
When the seventh deduction reached the calculation of Hamiltonian, she suddenly threw down her charcoal pencil and rushed to the experimental table, the silver ribbon in her hair sweeping away three spirit bottles.
“Recite the contents of the eleventh volume of the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art for me.” She arranged the three Soul-Suppressing Nails into an equilateral triangle, with the tips pointing towards the bronze stove where Jiang Ye was warming wine.
Jiang Ye took a sip of plum wine, the liquid dripping down his chin onto the seal pattern on his collarbone: "The finer the cut, the less is lost; cut again and again..." His recitation gradually synchronized with the vibration frequency of the bronze cauldron, and the rune fragments suspended inside the cauldron began to project a three-dimensional structure like a holographic image.
Ye Shuli suddenly snatched the wine pot and splashed it onto the lab table.
The wine froze into a matrix of ice crystals the instant it touched the runes, each lattice refracting Kharosthi characters she had seen in the Dunhuang murals.
The texts that should have existed in the third century AD are now perfectly overlapping with the topological nodes in the runes.
“This is the encryption method of ancient elementalists!” Her fingertips trembled as she traced the solidified strokes within the ice crystals. “They deconstructed the elemental fusion formula into sacrificial inscriptions…” Before she could finish speaking, the experimental table suddenly burst forth with a blinding light.
The gears on the back of Jiang Ye's neck emitted a sharp whistling sound, and the Soul-Suppressing Nails on the outer edge of the protective array snapped off at the root.
The two were knocked to the ground by the blast wave.
Half a foot of Ye Shuli's skirt hem was scorched, and the jade hairpin Jiang Ye used to tie his hair was broken into three pieces.
The rune hologram suspended in the air is now extending infinitely in the form of the Penrose staircase, with each turning point flashing with elemental imprints of different attributes.
"Shall we continue?" Jiang Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and dug out a perfectly intact spirit energy bottle from the ruins.
Ye Shuli stared at her charred cuff, where the remaining ice crystals were reforming into the symbol of Maxwell's demon: "I need a more precise frame of reference." She tore off the restraining ring at her waist, and twenty-eight jade beads rolled onto the edge of the bronze cauldron, automatically arranging themselves into a projection of a four-dimensional hypercube.
When the sound of the clapper at midnight came from down the mountain, the experimental platform had already changed to seven different encryption algorithms.
Ye Shuli finally discovered the pattern—whenever Jiang Ye's blood droplets fell in a specific location, the runes would reveal the hidden Langlanz Theory structure.
This field, which modern mathematics has not yet fully conquered, is presented on the surface of bronze artifacts in such a barbaric way.
“The periodic table is folded here.” She drove the last three Soul-Suppressing Nails into the Karman vortex street diagram that Jiang Ye had drawn with blood. “Look at this…” Her blood-stained fingertips touched a Klein bottle-shaped node, where the condensed ice crystals revealed the atomic structure of hydrogen, helium, and lithium.
Jiang Ye suddenly pressed down on the gear that was twitching violently at the back of his neck.
The moonlight outside the protective array twisted into a Fibonacci spiral, and a buzzing sound similar to an electron transition came from the depths of the ruins.
Ye Shuli grabbed his wrist and pressed it against the edge of the lab table. Their blood mingled on the bronze surface, forming a strange Foucault pendulum pattern.
When the moonlight shifted its angle for the twelfth time, Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed all the scrap paper and threw it into the bronze furnace.
The burning ash forms a nontrivial zero-point distribution as described by the Riemann Hypothesis in the updrafts, and each of those leaping sparks corresponds to an isotope on the periodic table.
“We’ve been tricked.” She sneered and kicked over the bronze cauldron. The runes inside, which had not yet solidified, drew a perfect Bayesian network in the air. “These runes are not records at all…” She suddenly fell silent halfway through her sentence because dark golden liquid was seeping from the bloodstain on the back of Jiang Ye’s neck. The drops of liquid were precisely filling in the last missing topological loop.
The dull thud of the bronze cauldron overturning echoed for a long time in the ruins.
Ye Shuli stared at the dark golden liquid seeping from the back of Jiang Ye's neck, which was condensing into a complete Klein ring on the bronze surface.
She suddenly grabbed a wolf-hair brush from the lab table, dipped it in the blood plasma from the two of them, and drew Maxwell's equations on her palm.
“Retreat to the Gen position.” She tore open her charred sleeve, revealing elemental burn marks on her forearm. “If I lose control…”
Jiang Ye used his teeth to bite open the new Soul-Suppressing Nail packaging, the nail, gleaming with a bluish light, spinning in his fingers, leaving afterimages: "Three years ago, you blew up the weapon-refining room on Danxia Peak, and I didn't die." The gear at the back of his neck suddenly accelerated its rotation, and dark golden liquid spread out in a Fibonacci spiral pattern at their feet.
Ye Shuli pressed her palm, covered with equations, against the center of the Klein ring.
The solidified moonlight outside the protective array suddenly began to collapse, and seven elemental chains hung down from the cracks in the dome of the ruins.
Crimson fire and azure water collided at her wrist, and the resulting energy wave overturned three spirit bottles.
"Kan and Li complement each other!" Jiang Ye flung out the Soul-Suppressing Nail to pin down the hem of her fluttering skirt, but he himself was slammed into a broken pillar by the recoil.
He wiped the blood from his nose, pulled a bronze abacus engraved with star maps from his storage bag, and shouted, "Three lines for Qian, six lines for Kun—place the bet!"
The sound of the beads colliding and the sound of the gears turning created a peculiar resonance.
Ye Shuli's left iris suddenly turned Klein blue, and the floating rune fragments, like iron filings attracted by a magnet, began to construct an icosahedral barrier around her.
Dark red lines pierced through her skin, leaving a Möbius strip of Kharosthi script on her collarbone.
“Just… one last…” she managed to squeeze out broken syllables, and her right little finger suddenly turned to ash.
A deafening explosion, as if tearing space apart, came from outside the protective array. Twelve streams of elemental turbulence rushed towards the barrier like ferocious beasts unleashed from a floodgate.
Jiang Ye suddenly ripped open his shirt, and the sealing patterns on his collarbone seeped out the power of stars.
He grasped Ye Shuli's carbonized right hand and pressed their overlapping palms hard into the Taotie pattern on the bronze cauldron: "If we're going to go crazy, we'll go crazy together!" Dark golden blood surged along the grooves on the cauldron, actually outlining the Bohr atomic model in the void.
The entangled chains of elements suddenly came to a standstill.
Ye Shuli's charred cuffs moved without wind, and the rune fragments that had burrowed into her body began to distribute along the non-trivial zero points of the Riemann Hypothesis.
Her blood-stained eyelashes trembled twice, and a silvery-white light, never before seen, shone deep within her pupils.
"I see..." She grabbed Jiang Ye's bleeding wrist and slammed him into the disintegrating icosahedral barrier. "The key to elemental folding is the complex conjugate!"
The moment their clasped hands pierced through the barrier, all the bronze artifacts in the ruins resonated simultaneously.
The moonlight shattered into hexagonal ice crystals in the collapsed space, each facet reflecting elemental imprints of different properties.
Suddenly, iridescent light grew from Ye Shuli's scorched hair, and Klein blue veins surged beneath her carbonized skin.
"Let go!" Jiang Ye suddenly shouted, and the gears at the back of his neck emitted a blue light like an electron leap.
He tore off the amulet around his neck and stuffed the jade pendant engraved with the Hetu diagram into Ye Shuli's palm. "Take this to the Zhen position..."
Before they finished speaking, the projection of the Penrose Stairs suddenly appeared on the bronze plate beneath their feet.
Ye Shuli grabbed Jiang Ye's belt and flipped in mid-air. The four-dimensional hypercube composed of twenty-eight jade beads barely blocked the incoming elemental turbulence.
She bit her tongue and spat blood onto the jade pendant, instantly activating the Hetu pattern into a rotating model of the Milky Way.
"We'll die together." She dragged Jiang Ye into the center of the energy vortex, and a supernova-like burst of light erupted from their intertwined hair.
The ruined dome exploded with a deafening roar, and moonlight cascaded down like a waterfall onto the suspended rune matrix.
When the seventh elemental chain collapsed, cultivators within a hundred miles saw a rainbow-colored pillar of light soar into the sky.
The sect elders who were watching from the shadows were horrified to find that all the spirit beasts they had raised were kneeling and bowing in the direction of the pillar of light.
At the center of the pillar of light, Ye Shuli slowly opened her eyes, which were filled with stardust.
Her tattered ruqun (a type of traditional Chinese dress) has been reconstructed by the power of elements into a flowing Klein blue robe, with the entire periodic table floating in the electric sparks dancing at her fingertips.
Jiang Ye knelt behind her, the gears on the back of his neck had evolved into a Dyson sphere structure protective shield, and dark golden blood wove a double helix energy bridge between the two of them.
"Success?" He wiped away the ice crystals that had formed on his eyelashes and discovered that a time-lapse image of the Big Bang was playing out in Ye Shuli's pupils.
Suddenly, the sound of clothes rustling through the air came from outside the ruins.
The twelve cultivators, dressed in the robes of their respective sects, crashed through the remnants of the barrier, but froze the moment they saw Ye Shuli.
The compass in the hand of the purple-robed elder at the front suddenly shattered, and the spirit stones embedded in it vaporized into mist.
Ye Shuli gently raised her hand, and the old man's natal sword at his waist suddenly decomposed into basic elements.
The Kharosthi mark on the side of her neck glowed slightly, and the suspended elemental particles immediately reformed into a ninth-order spirit sword that shimmered with rainbow light, with the emblems of all the sects present clearly engraved on the hilt.
"How much longer?" She chuckled softly at the void, her voice echoing like quantum entanglement.
The spiritual energy within a ten-mile radius suddenly materialized, condensing into countless elemental swords hanging above everyone's heads.
The first person to kneel down was Jiang Ye's uncle from his own family.
This usually arrogant Spirit Venerable expert was now trembling as he raised his family token above his head: "The Jiang family is willing to offer..."
His declaration of loyalty was crushed in his throat by the sudden, overwhelming pressure.
Ye Shuli casually fiddled with the newly formed elemental crystals in her hair. The clear sounds emitted by the collision of those crystals caused the meridians of three early-stage Spirit King cultivators to reverse.
When the last sect elder prostrated himself, Jiang Ye suddenly tugged at Ye Shuli's sleeve.
His blood-stained fingertips pointed to the eastern horizon—where a dark red star, defying the laws of the star chart, was falling steadily toward their location.