Chapter 1599. Chaos Unfold
Rolling his eyes, the blacksmith waved his hand, using to snuff out the volcanic flames rising from the shafts below the street. The source of heat was instantly gone, however-
Despite the source of the heat being gone, it was already too late.
“Whoops...” Seth muttered, seeing the chaos unfold.
The superheated massive cauldron could no longer withstand the inner pressure. It didn't just crack; it violently detonated like a bomb. With a deafening roar that shook the cobblestones of the Central Plaza, the house-sized bronze vessel ruptured like a burst pimple. A shockwave of superheated air, metal shrapnel, and geysers of bubbling, white-hot alchemical slurry erupted outward.
Panicked cultivators deployed hasty spiritual shields, while weaker tourists and refugees were thrown off their feet, screaming as bronze fragments and boiling slurry rained down like a localized meteor shower. Seth and Mina simply watched calmly; Fin had already made her move.
A person-sized chunk of steaming bronze plating—spinning like a circular saw and glowing white with boiling heat—came hurtling straight toward the blacksmith's face. Not that it would have done anything to him, even without armor; he was used to handling such materials, but the moment the deadly projectile entered a one-meter zone around the party, the glowing metal flattened against the invisible boundary and was violently deflected. it dug deep into the cobblestone of the plaza, finally coming to a halt.
Without even a chant, the trio and their golem servant were covered in a transparent barrier bubble, shielding them from the molten barrage. But that wasn't all. Showing an incredible level of skill and fine control, the fairy brute had sneakily deployed tiny, almost imperceptible shields all over the plaza, saving normal people from the worst hits.
Next to him, Mina was frowning as a spray of boiling medicinal soup splashed harmlessly against Fin's barrier. Her eyes fixed on the panicked alchemists fleeing their own stage.
"Well," she said, looking down at the flattened metal at Seth's feet. "I guess that's it for the alchemy performances today," she lamented with a sigh.
Seth slowly nodded. Originally, they had come to watch the flash-refining of pills, for entertainment and because Seth, as an -craftsman, could glean anything from their technique. Master Mountain had given him some basic books about the artificing and pill making of the continents a long time ago.
He, personally, didn't gain much from those. Alison was able to glean alchemical formulas, and Rún had been able to reverse-engineer the artificer techniques of the Cloud Continent, thanks to those books, Nam, and the intel they gathered.
However, nobody in Minas Mar got behind how this pill-making with a pill furnace was supposed to work. Safe to say, watching a furnace explode did nothing to help him understand. Seth nodded, a little disappointed, as the chaos around them began to clear, city enforcers finally arriving to contain the fires.
"Let's not dwell on it! Let's keep going!" Fin said enthusiastically, trying to distract them and raise the mood. She was in a good mood, since she was able to help people, but more so because she had succeeded in her incredibly complex spell.
Seth looked around; he had not forgotten the system notification that had popped up just a moment before the cauldron blew up. Something about a mind-controlling fume, however; with the current chaos, there was no point in trying to find the source.
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Still, he brought it up with the girls using the .
~I got that one, too,- Fin said, but agreed that there was no point in trying to find the source now.
~It's definitely suspicious. Let's keep it in mind and continue for now,- Mina suggested. She had not gotten a whiff of the weird smoke, although she would have probably resisted it like them.
“Yes, let's go on,” Seth agreed out loud. They weren't here to play heroes. They were on a honeymoon. Today, they had come for the show, but that was not the only thing to do in the commercial district. As a big trade hub of the cloud continent, even if things were a little chaotic because of their actions, there was a lot to find and buy.
Especially pills, herbs, and samples for Alison,l since the city was characterized by their alchemy guilds and pill business. Konan had mostly offered products fit for low-level players. Although these would help raise the next generation of players, they wanted some higher-class stuff for mid- to high-level players.
Although they had gotten a whole bunch of medicines and even good pills with permanent effects from that magical shop in Spring City, one could never have too much variety. The more knowledge Alison had to draw from, the better her products would become... and she would become an even stronger wizard.
Variety was the name of the game. They had also heard that there might be some manuals available in Doushi. Since it was a town full of alchemists, the auctions here were known to sell compendia and research notes of alchemists, which would help Alison even more than reverse engineering finished pills.
They had asked master mountain, but even as a disciple of the sect leader, he was unable to simply hand the secrets of their sect to them; this was why they were on their own when stealing the copyrights and patents of the Cloud Continent.
Leaving the smoking ruins of the Alchemist Guild's pride behind, the trio navigated the wide commercial avenues of the district. The detonation of the central cauldron had thrown the open-air market into a frenzy, but the street leading away from it was heavily warded and remained unaffected.
Apparently they had some experience with exploding cauldrons. Apparently, explosions happened even if people didn't lack their cooling agents. Just walking down these streets, they found merchandise that dwarfed anything offered in Konan.
They strolled past the open storefronts of Weapon Forges, where, behind humming, iridescent defensive arrays, heavy broadswords, slender spears, and intricate metal fans floated lazily on cushions of spiritual energy.
The weapons glowed with various elemental hues—fiery crimson, stormy blue, and toxic green. Seth’s took in the sights, passively collecting blueprints of rare and uncommon weapons and adding them to his catalog.
Despite the average rating being uncommon with a couple of rare items, shop signs loudly proclaimed these to be 'Heaven-Sunderers' and 'Soul-Piercers,' but the blacksmith was not impressed. The most heaven-sundering and soul-piercing about these items were their price tags. Merchants were frantically rewriting the spirit-stone costs on wooden placards every hour, capitalizing on the mood in the city.
Seth seriously considered whether he should bank on this too and lighten his burden a little. Especially since Legion was filled with heaps of weapons he had plundered from the ruins of the Silk River Sect. There had been so much stuff it did not fit in his inventory, even when he packed it in crates and boxes to stack them. Any of the weapons in his possession could keep up with the displayed armaments
A few paces further, a pungent aroma filled their noses. The street they passed was lined with stalls of raw material. However, the sight was a little sad, as they all seemed to suffer a chronic lack of supplies to fill the wooden crates that filled their pitch; most were completely empty, their bottom boards covered only by dust.
At the few stalls that still had inventory, alchemists and rogue cultivators were gathering in undignified huddles. They were aggressively bidding against each other for small bundles of withered spirit herbs or a handful of low-grade beast cores, their voices rising into angry shouts while the stressed merchants sweated through their robes.
"This could have been an interesting place," the blacksmith muttered, a little sad. He remembered his journey with Fin, when they visited markets, and he was able to register all kinds of new materials just by looking around.
“Welp, I guess Doushi depended a little more on the Southern Blade Sect than we expected,” Mina murmured, awkward and a little embarrassed. When planning the journey, the girls had not expected Minas Mar's actions to have this much of an impact.