Book 4: Near Blood - 108: Mysterious System
She yelled loudly, “You won’t succeed, not now and not ever!”
Su Chen replied calmly while wearing the same smile, saying, “Actually, I’ve already succeeded.”
What?
Everyone present was stunned.
Su Chen pulled out a vial of medicine and pointed at the Ferocious Race individual whose intestines had turned into water. “This is the same medicine that I used on him previously. Watch closely.”
He tilted his head back and gulped down the medicine.
Everyone watched on in shock but quickly realized that Su Chen was totally fine.
That medicine really had no effect on him.
“How is this possible?”
“How could this be?”
“This is impossible!”
The group of Ferocious Race individuals began to clamor loudly.
Reina stared intently at Su Chen. “There must be some restrictions to its usage. You won’t be able to wipe us out that easily!”
“You’re not wrong,” Su Chen acknowledged as he nodded. “The biggest issue with this kind of medicine is that its propagation ability is too weak, and a lot of poison is needed before its effect manifests, and the rate at which it kills also limits its ability to spread...... In any case, there are still many issues that need to be resolved. But no matter how you put it, a prototypical poison that can be used to wipe out the Ferocious Race does exist. The next steps are to keep improving it, and I believe that one day it will be as effective as I envision it to be.”
“Please, I beg you, don’t do anymore research......” Reina whimpered helplessly.
Ever since Su Chen had captured her, Reina was willing to face death fearlessly.
However, in this moment, she was truly afraid.
She was afraid of what Su Chen had invented and that he would really succeed.
All of the Ferocious Race soldiers present stared at Su Chen in terror, as if they were staring at the devil incarnate.
Su Chen then calmly said, “It’s impossible for you to stop my research, but I have a certain bad habit, which is that I have a wide range of interests. If there’s something that can capture some of my attention, that would be enough to get me to temporarily put down my other research.”
Reina immediately understood.
She knelt on the ground before Su Chen. “Bone Diviner Reina of the Gongga Divine Shrine greets the mighty human prophet. No matter what you desire to know, I will tell you everything I know.”
“Does that include your knowledge on bone divining?”
Reina trembled before finally replying, “Yes, that’s correct.”
Su Chen laughed. “See, didn’t I tell you that you would be begging to tell me?”
Su Chen actually did stop experimenting with his Ferocious Race poison.
Actually, creating a medicine that could wipe out the Ferocious Race was kind of a pipe dream anyways.
On the surface, it seemed like Su Chen had successfully created a medicine that could wipe out the Ferocious Race, but just as he said, infecting large groups of individuals would be difficult.
Most amateurs would think that creating a medicine that only affected the Ferocious Race individuals was the difficult part and that increasing the medicine’s range was a relatively easy problem, but that was completely wrong.
Creating a medicine that only affected the Ferocious Race wasn’t actually that hard, but the issues that Su Chen had mentioned were much more of a problem. In some sense, they weren’t any easier to resolve than the issues he had encountered when trying to create his bloodline-less cultivation system.
The intricate principles behind concocting medicines couldn’t easily be understood by people who were unfamiliar with the field.
Reina and the other Ferocious Race individuals didn’t understand medicine, so Su Chen’s display had scared them quite badly. In reality however, even if they did let him continue his research, he wouldn’t be able to wipe out the entire Ferocious Race. It would be possible, though, for him to wipe out quite a few Ferocious Race individuals within a small localized area.
Su Chen’s ultimate goal was not to exterminate the Ferocious Race but rather to break through the bloodline limits, so using this medicine to scare Reina a bit and then achieve his goals was good enough.
Indeed, Reina was quite cooperative with Su Chen afterwards, answering all of his questions obediently.
To better understand the role of bone diviners, it is important to mention the Ferocious Race’s command structure.
As a race that emphasized strength, the Ferocious Race were innately barbaric warriors. They were used to fighting in terms of pure physical strength.
However, relying on the strength of these martial artists alone would not be enough to hold onto all their territory.
The Origin Energy Temple was basically the reason why the Ferocious Race had developed the ability to use magic.
However, the productive capability of the Origin Energy Temple was too low and it couldn’t make enough Origin Qi Scholars, so they needed another way to supplement their forces.
Long before the creation of the Origin Energy Temple, the Ferocious Race possessed their own system of magic — their Divine Shrine.
The Divine Shrine had existed for a long time, and its origins were unknown. All people knew was that it was around by the time the Ferocious Race was present.
In the Ferocious Race’s system, the Divine Shrine was like the brain of the Ferocious Race. It was responsible for creating Ancestors, performing life-saving procedures, providing enlightenment, transmitting Origin Energy, and developing the self.
These procedures corresponded respectively to magic, medicine, knowledge, totems, and tempering.
Bone divining was a combination class formed from the mastery of magic, medicine, and tempering.
Apparently, for the Ferocious Race to raise a single bone diviner, it required carefully selecting a candidate from many Ferocious Race individuals until a suitable target was found, at which point they would be carefully groomed. Afterwards, they would undergo a long period of special training and ingest some special medicines to activate their hidden talent, before finally obtaining the ability to divine truth from the bones from their ancestors.
After becoming a bone diviner, they would apparently gain supernatural abilities and be able to find clues from seemingly nowhere.
Su Chen was very curious about the mysterious nature of this technique.
The path he was walking involved understanding the truths of the world that he lived in and resolving any mysteries along the way. Everything had a law by which it operated, even things which seemed like smoke and mirrors. There was always some truth or scientific principle of actual substance to be learned.
However, these mysterious, profound, and seemingly supernatural phenomena were hard to explain using scientific principles, which was why they were all labeled as “magic.”
The Ferocious Race were of the “learn by experience” school of thought. They rarely focused on the underlying theories and relied more on fate. As such, they hadn’t made many contributions to the research of this system, but they did learn how to use it quite well.
Su Chen finally had an opportunity to study this kind of magic, and he dived right into researching it with his endless curiosity towards the unknown.
Magic tended to focus on illogical sequences and constant changes.
Su Chen was having a hard time figuring out how to approach the problem.
However, he had a resolute personality, so the more he felt the difficulty, the more determined he was to fully understand it.
He believed that everything had a principle that it operated by, and that these mysterious magics were only mysterious because their principles were well concealed and had yet to be discovered.
If it weren’t for the fact that he was worried about Shi Kaihuang’s safety, he might have stayed in this cave and researched much longer.
The next day, the rain stopped.
Su Chen brought his hostages with him and embarked for his next destination.
At this point, they had left the border and he could finally use the Cloud-Piercing Shuttle.
Su Chen used the Burning Sun Shuttle. The reason he had chosen this combat shuttle was because its interior was much larger than the Silver Moon Shuttle and could seat thirty people. However, Su Chen still had too many captives, so he had done a succession of fatal experiments the day before to use up the excess. They only embarked after the extra Ferocious Race soldiers had been taken care of.
This only further strengthened these Ferocious Race individuals’ fear of Su Chen. In their eyes, he really was a demon.