Chapter 164: Merge
He stood up, turning his attention to Mirela and Tasha as he pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward the massive sixty-foot bird corpse.
"Mirela, Tasha," Klaus ordered smoothly. "I want every single one of those blue feathers plucked out and gathered into a big bowl. Every single one. After that, butcher the meat... phoenix meat is high-grade protein, we’re eating well tonight."
Tasha blinked, stunned by the casual request to strip a mythical beast like a chicken. "Pluck... pluck the feathers?"
"You wanted to prove your worth, didn’t you, Tasha?" Klaus smirked, raising a silver eyebrow. "Get to work. We’re getting back on the road while you pluck."
"Yes, Master Klaus!" Tasha nodded fervently, her determination flaring back up.
Ten minutes later, the carriage was back in motion.
Up front, the bone-plated mountain bear was churning through the snowpack at a rapid clip, dragging the heavy oak vehicle across the valley floor.
Inside the main cabin, the atmosphere was busy and thick with the smell of fresh ice-magic and raw meat.
Mirela and Tasha were sitting on wooden stools near the rear of the cabin, working with mechanical efficiency.
Between them sat a massive, iron-bound wooden tub.
They were using sharp hunting knives to pluck every single luminescent blue feather from the severed wings Klaus had dragged inside.
The feathers chimed softly as they hit the bottom of the tub, filling the container with a glowing sapphire-blue mountain of Tier 4 materials.
Simultaneously, Mirela was carving thick marbled steaks of high-grade phoenix meat, stacking them into the stasis-preserved supply crates.
"These feathers are so warm..." Tasha noted in awe, holding a long glowing blue feather in her hand. "The mana radiating from them is intoxicating."
"Master knows what he’s doing," Mirela smiled proudly, plucking three more feathers with expert speed. "Whatever he’s planning to do with them, it’s going to be incredible."
A few minutes later, at the front of the carriage, Klaus opened the heavy iron door of the control cabin.
He didn’t walk in empty-handed.
He was carrying a massive overflowing wooden bowl filled to the brim with hundreds of the plucked glowing blue Ice Phoenix feathers.
He set the heavy bowl down on the iron floorboards beside the captain’s chair, closing the door firmly behind him.
He raised his right hand, placing a layer of white Soul Mana over the door to soundproof the room entirely.
"Haah... This is good..."
Klaus sat down in the plush leather chair, resting his elbows on his knees, staring down at the glowing mountain of Tier 4 feathers between his boots.
He reached down, running his calloused fingers through the soft, chiming blue plumage.
The ambient mana bleeding off the feathers was dense, making the air in the small room feel charged with static electricity.
"Alright," Klaus muttered to himself with his glowing silver eyes narrowing in deep contemplation. "First of all... how the hell do I milk these for enough mana to break through?"
His mind ran through various alchemical scenarios.
Should he boil them in a giant pot of water? Would boiling them destroy the delicate spiritual structure of the mana, or would it extract the liquid essence? Should he grind them down with a mortar and pestle into a fine, concentrated blue powder, mixing it into a potion brew?
"Boiling seems too slow," Klaus analyzed softly. "And grinding them manually might leak half the ambient mana into the air before I can consume it..."
As he deliberated over the best alchemical method, Klaus casually raised his left hand, tapping his fingers against his spiritual interface to open his System tabs.
A series of glowing blue windows materialized before his eyes.
He glanced at the System Spin tab... his Gacha wheel.
Klaus wanted to save his Gacha tickets until he reached a major civilization or town.
He hated the thought of spinning the wheel while traveling on the road; if he rolled a pile of useless trash or a weird volatile item mid-journey, it would just sour his mood and distract him from driving.
He was about to dismiss the interface when his silver eyes caught sight of another tab sitting right beside the Gacha wheel.
A tab he hadn’t actively explored since his time in Rivera City.
[MERGE]
Klaus froze.
His eyes locked onto the glowing word as the memories of his function flashed instantly through his mind.
The Merge feature.
It was a core function of his Gacha System... an item fusion skill designed specifically to take multiple lower-tier items, herbs, or raw materials of the same category, fuse them together at optimal concentration, and aggressively upgrade them into a single potent higher-tier consumable.
He didn’t need a mortar and pestle, He didn’t need a boiling pot and didn’t need an alchemist’s license or hours of delicate brewing either.
The system could fuse the feathers directly into an ultra-concentrated mana pill or a mana feather?
A triumphant grin slowly spread across Klaus’s handsome face. His silver eyes flashed with pure excitement.
’Fuck yeah!’ Klaus yelled triumphantly in his head.
Without hesitating for a single microsecond, Klaus reached out his hand and tapped the Merge tab!
VWOOM!
The standard Gacha interface vanished, replaced by the dark metallic silver altar of the Merge system.
On the iron dashboard in front of him, two wide glowing hexagonal slots of light materialized.
’Did this thing change or what? Well whatever, it doesn’t matter at all...’
They hovered side by side, pulsating with a soft golden energy that illuminated his sharp, handsome features.
Klaus looked at the wide slots, then looked down at the mountain of Tier 4 feathers in the bowl.
"Alright," Klaus muttered to himself with his deep voice carrying a calm edge. "Let’s see how much we can condense."
He didn’t take a handful.
He reached down with both of his large hands, gathering the entire pile of hundreds of feathers, minus two pristine blue feathers he deliberately set aside on the leather armrest.
He split the massive pile into two huge, equal stacks, dumping one stack into the left glowing slot and the second stack into the right glowing slot.
The two wide slots of light violently flared, absorbing the luminescent feathers until the wooden bowl sat entirely empty.
Klaus leaned back against the leather headrest with his glowing silver eyes fixed on the interface prompts hovering before his face.
"Fuu... It’s been a while."
He knew exactly how risky this was.
In the mechanics of his System’s Merge feature, throwing hundreds of Tier 4 legendary materials into a single fusion attempt without a guaranteed 100% synergy was a high-stakes gamble.
If the Merge failed, the System wouldn’t return a single feather. Everything placed into the slots would be permanently erased, destroyed, and reduced to useless non-refundable spiritual ash.
’I hate this System...’
He was essentially betting a mountain of legendary materials that could buy an entire kingdom’s treasury on a single spin of a randomized percentage wheel.
"Fuck it," Klaus grunted with a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. "It’s just feathers."
Besides, he was no longer the broke, coughing invalid hiding in a cramped one-room apartment in Galen Town.
He had harvested elite souls, stolen an iron-bound carriage, claimed a mountain bear, and possessed a divine core.
If he lost all of these feathers to a bad percentage roll, it would be annoying, sure, but he could easily just waltz into the nearest major city, dump a fraction of his harvested loot, buy out the highest-grade mana resources from the grand merchant guilds, and force his way up the ranks anyway.
He wasn’t going to let fear dictate his growth.
Klaus raised his hand, his thumb hovering over the glowing golden [MERGE] tab.
"Let’s go," Klaus growled.
TAP!
The moment his thumb made contact with the screen, the entire control cabin violently shuddered.
VWOOOOOOOM!
The two wide stacks of feathers inside the light slots instantly dissolved, turning into two massive roaring rivers of blinding, sapphire-blue liquid light.
The streams shot upward into the air above the dashboard, spiraling around each other inside a central, spinning fusion sphere created by the System.
The ambient air pressure in the small room plummeted instantly as the raw Tier 4 elemental mana of hundreds of Ice Phoenix feathers was being violently compressed, stripped of its physical impurities, and forced into a single core.
Then, the dreaded Merge Bar materialized in the center of his vision.
It was a glowing, golden line that began to cycle through numbers at a sickening seizure-inducing speed.
[3.12%... 45.89%... 12.04%... 0.0001%... 58.77%... 19.34%...]
Klaus’s glowing silver eyes narrowed into sharp slits.
His jaw clenched hard with his back molars creaking as he watched the randomized percentage bar flicker wildly across his vision.
’Better do this right...’
The System’s rule could not be changed.
The Merge result had to hit 70.00% or higher to succeed. Anything below 70.00% meant instant and total destruction of all materials...
The numbers continued to flash erratically, bouncing like a chaotic slot machine.
[22.45%... 61.10%... 8.92%... 68.33%...]
"Come on..." Klaus growled under his breath with his hands gripping the leather armrests so hard the reinforced wood groaned under his divine strength.
The spinning fusion sphere above the dashboard began to crackle with erratic dark-red static... the warning sign of an imminent fusion failure.
The blue liquid light inside was threatening to destabilize and explode into ash.
The percentage bar slowed down, ticking upward with agonizing slowness.
[69.12%... 69.50%... 69.88%... 69.99%!]
Klaus’s heart literally skipped a thudding beat in his chest. His right eye twitched violently behind his silver hair.
"You’ve got to be fucking shitting me," Klaus cursed internally, grinding his teeth so hard he almost tasted iron. ’69.99%?! Are you serious?!’
He was a fraction of a decimal point away from losing hundreds of legendary feathers.
The red static expanded, completely enveloping the blue sphere, preparing to purge the slots.
And then, at the final second, just as Klaus was about to crash out and punch the dashboard in rage—
TCHING!
The percentage bar violently jerked upward one last time, snapping to a solid blinding gold.
[99.00%]
The dark-red static instantly shattered like cheap glass.
The two rivers of blue liquid light violently collapsed inward, compressing into a single blinding point of divine blue illumination that filled the entire control room.
A triumphant ringing jingle echoed directly in Klaus’s brain, followed by a series of glowing blue System notifications that flashed across his vision.
’It’s a new tab alright, did the Gacha System change or something...?’
[MERGE SUCCESSFUL!]
[Materials Consumed: [Ice Phoenix Feathers (Tier 4) x 480] ]
[Final Fusion Rate: 99.00%]
[Created: [Tier 5 Glacial Soul-Core Orb] ]
[Effect (Wizard Pathways): Upon absorption, forcefully expands and purges the host’s foundational mana pathways, granting an immediate two-tier surge in magic power.]
[Effect (Aura Pathways): Simultaneously floods the physical circulatory system, compressing raw bodily vitality into combat Aura. Immediately elevates the host’s physical Aura capacity to the level of an Early-Stage Aura Master.]
The blinding blue illumination instantly faded, collapsing into Klaus’s waiting right palm.
Sitting in his hand was an orb.
It was roughly the size of a billiard ball, forged from what looked like solid, translucent sapphire, thrumming with a hypnotic pulse of cold-water mana and golden combat Aura.
There was no smoke and zero energy leaking into the air... every single drop of power from four hundred and eighty Tier 4 legendary feathers had been compressed into a single swallowable core.
Klaus stared at the glowing blue orb in his palm with his breath hitching slightly in his throat.
"A Tier 5 Mythical item..." Klaus whispered with a stunned expression crossing his face before a massive smirk spread across his lips. "A two-tier jump in magic power... and an instant promotion to an Aura Master?"
He had expected a solid boost to his mana reserves, maybe enough to comfortably reach Tier 3 Apprentice status before hitting the capital.
He hadn’t expected a dual breakthrough that would simultaneously elevate his physical Aura pathways to the rank of an Aura Master.