CHAPTER 784: THE BLACKSMITH OF SOULS!

"The dumbest suicide attempt I’ve ever seen."

Her voice didn’t rise.

Just flat and factual, like she was noting the weather.

He didn’t stop.

She exhaled, watching the slow ritual, hands folded behind her back.

"If that soul destabilizes, it won’t just kill you. Every lower world in range gets swallowed with you. Small universes collapse like lungs under pressure..."

Wang Xiao’s hands didn’t shake.

Focused.

Still rearranging the dead.

The fragments of Yang Yuhuan’s soul flared against his palm, bent, warped, then held down, while the sword traced through the air, obsidian and soundless, severing divine essence with the care of a surgeon and the ruthlessness of a butcher.

He wasn’t repairing her.

That was what Xue Hanqin assumed, what she’d expected when he first knelt there, aligning the pieces.

But she stepped closer, her breath halting.

Because what he was shaping... wasn’t her.

The fragments weren’t fitting back into their old mold.

He reshaped them...

Forced them, cut away pieces and replaced them with emptiness, with essence stolen from other fragments. He fused the soul into a new geometry entirely, foreign, and alien, even to the lord of Reincarnation.

"You’re... forging a new life?"

She almost choked on the words.

Her hand raised to her lips, fingers curling tight.

Rearranging soul like chains across the skeleton of a dead memory.

No one could do this, not a necromancer, not a priest, not even her.

"You can’t just swap souls like poker chips," Xue Hanqin finally sighed, patience snapping, fingers curling into her hair. "You need the exact soul. Otherwise..." she bit down, furious, "... it won’t be the same person. The body might look right, but the self is gone!".

"Just... just show me the soul you want, I’ll drag it here myself," she muttered, teeth grinding. The words came out like a curse, as if even offering to help was poison on her tongue.

But she couldn’t look away.

That sword in his hand wasn’t being used as a weapon anymore.

It was a hammer.

A scalpel.

A forge.

Not resurrection, not even repair.

This was creation.

A heresy against the very idea of identity.

The dark blade sang once, sharp and high, a ringing that echoed at the marrow of the world. Its edge glowed, dark light sliding across it like oil on steel.

If it were only a soul-shattering stunt, collapsing a few lower worlds by accident, she wouldn’t have cared.

She’d seen destruction before. She’d caused it. But this...

This was worse.

He wasn’t just playing with a soul. He was tethering it.

She saw it clearly, threads stretching out, one end buried in the broken soul he was molding, the other sinking into him, as if he were splicing the essence of another life into his own.

A bridge!

The first part she could almost accept. That fragment had once been his anyway, devoured and made part of him.

Reconnecting it wasn’t impossible.

But the next step...

Her throat went dry.

A Transcendent wasn’t just some overpowered brute. They commanded because their very soul had been rewritten into the element they ruled. Fire, water, void, thunder, whatever it was, their authority flowed from divinity, siphoned endlessly from the matter of the universe itself.

... And universes, by design, could only bear so many.

Too many Transcendents, and the whole structure cracked.

Wang Xiao’s way was worse.

When he tapped into his absolute form, he didn’t just draw divinity. He rewrote his soul into dark matter itself, made himself the divine authority of the unknowable, the invisible mass beneath existence.

Xue Hanqin had always drawn hers differently. Her power wasn’t earned in the same brutal way. She pulled from the "Reincarnation Gate" in the Netherworld, her bloodline and that cursed ancestral artifact feeding her strength. She didn’t have to hollow herself out like him.

She had resources, backing, a path paved.

But she still knew the rules. She knew how it was supposed to work.

And that was why her eyes widened, why her throat tightened, when Wang Xiao dragged the new soul into his orbit... and forced it into the same rewrite.

The bridge he’d forged shimmered, the string of light turning black, bleeding into the bright soul he’d cobbled together.

The newborn soul flickered, then dimmed, then darkened, until it too had transcended into... dark matter.

Her breath turned cold.

This wasn’t even creation anymore.

He had transcended the soul itself... turned it into an extension of his own being.

But why rearrange it before?

Whose figure had he even carved into that broken essence?

And for what purpose?

Just as she let out a thin, shaky sigh of relief, thinking the insanity was done... the bubbles came.

Tiny, mindless things, carved from his dark matter, his spies and watchers. They popped into existence one by one, like air blisters rising from deep black water.

Dozens, hundreds... Each carrying the blank, intent of their maker.

And then, without hesitation, they swarmed the floating orb.

Shplop! Shplop! Shplop!

Each bubble latched on, melted into it, vanished.

The young soul quivered, rippled,

and then began to assimilate.

Not just glowing now, but shaping, sculpting, knitting itself together. A body, crude and fetal at first, was starting to form.

Plop...

The matter, like dark goo, shifted eerily before forming a basic skeleton structure. Only 152cm tall, it looked small, the black bones glowing faintly, almost alive. What Wang Xiao was doing was something unfathomable even to Xue Hanqin.

Rather than just giving this new entity a body, he was permanently converting her Transcendent soul into one made of dark matter itself, giving her a form that could not decay. It wasn’t resurrection, it was the birth of an undying consciousness out of dark matter.

But maintaining such a body required constant divinity. Left alone, the new soul would exhaust itself to nothing just to hold shape. That was why the bridge linking Wang Xiao and the girl pulsed, feeding her his divinity until she could draw her own.

"It’s unreal..." Xue Hanqin whispered. Her vast experience let her see what was happening, but even she couldn’t deny the awe. Her gaze locked as the first organ appeared, a glowing obsidian heart forming at the anchor point of the bridge. Muscles wound around the skeleton, veins of luminous energy weaving like ropes to keep it all in place.

Then, skin began sliding over...

At first it was messy, uneven, like a drunk sculptor slapping clay onto a wire frame. But the form corrected itself quickly, smoothing, proportioning, filling in.

The figure took shape, small, slim, with a delicate frame.

Her chest rose slightly as if she was breathing for the first time, faint tremors showing beneath the pale skin as the body developed. Her waist was thin, tightening neatly into her hips, giving her an hourglass outline despite her small height. Long legs, fair and slender, extended down, the lines clean and youthful.

Upward, her shoulders were narrow, arms slim, hands delicate with fingers that twitched faintly as if testing life.

Her neck was graceful, leading up to a soft, oval face. Pale lips, faintly tinted rose, pressed together as if she was about to speak. Her nose was small and delicate, fitting her youthful look.

Then her eyes opened, bright crimson, glowing faintly like burning rubies that made her beauty look both fragile and dangerous. They contrasted against her pale skin, sharp and captivating, with long lashes framing them.

Silver-grey hair spilled down her shoulders, strands smooth, falling freely across her chest and back. It framed her face perfectly, making the glow of her eyes stand out even more.

She was wrapped in bandage-like cloth that hugged her tightly, covering her torso and hips but also outlining her shape. The outfit wasn’t flashy, but on her small body it highlighted her girlish form, the slim waist, the soft chest, the pale skin of her long thighs peeking out below.

From head to toe, she looked like something caught between fragile and unbreakable, small in size, but carved from power itself.

And then, in the final stroke, more of those broad white bandage strips shimmered into being, sliding across her face.

They wrapped around her rubby eyes, covering them completely.