"The Three Thousand Burning Flame from the world of Battle Through the Heavens. Genuinely unexpected."
"But for where I am right now, this is a perfect fit."
Ye Xuan nodded. Even if he hadn't fished up something with overwhelming destructive power, the Three Thousand Burning Flame was ideal for his current situation.
Setting aside the raw destructive potential of the Heavenly Flame itself, the fact that it would grant him the Three Thousand Star Constitution alone was significant. Not only could he absorb stellar energy to strengthen himself, he could use it to heal his body. As long as his soul wasn't extinguished, his physical body could recover by drawing on the power of the stars. In essence, an undying body.
Having this constitution would close the gap in his physical durability entirely. The Three Thousand Star Constitution would allow him to simply disregard a large portion of incoming damage. At the very least, he would no longer need to worry in the future about someone injuring him badly enough to prevent him from drawing on his combat strength.
"Mentally, I'm far calmer than I was during the first pull."
"Not because gaining power improved my state of mind, but because I already know the system will give me a quota every month. There's no urgency."
He didn't want to feel elated or deflated based purely on what quality of item he happened to pull. Two pulls in, and both had been highly valuable items within their respective worlds. His luck seemed to be holding up reasonably well.
Ye Xuan let out a quiet laugh and said to the system, "System, merge the Three Thousand Burning Flame."
The moment those words were spoken, a roiling mass of flame burst into existence in the space around him. The fire was a deep, concentrated purple, as though it contained destructive force without limit. The lawn beneath Ye Xuan carbonised in an instant under the extreme heat, crumbling into ash.
The merging began.
The fire of the Three Thousand Burning Flame broke apart into thousands of fine threads that pierced through Ye Xuan's skin. In an instant, his body felt as though it had been run through by millions of burning steel needles. Cracks spread across the surface of his skin like a spider's web, and dark violet fire seeped out through every fissure.
*CRACK!*
His bones snapped with a sharp, clear sound, as if being smashed apart inch by inch by a great hammer. Ye Xuan could feel every change happening to his body. Destruction and reconstruction cycled without pause. His meridians widened, his bones were tempered, his flesh was remade, and even his heart and skin underwent rapid transformation in the baptism of fire.
Except.
"This kind of pain... it's genuinely too much for me!!!"
Ye Xuan, who had never experienced anything close to this, clenched his teeth until his jaw ached. The relentless, escalating agony pushed him briefly to a point where even dying seemed like it might be a relief. But he forced that thought down into the deepest part of himself.
"When you feel like you can't go on, remember, this is exactly when cultivation matters most."
Words from somewhere he couldn't name surfaced in his mind. With everything he had, he forced himself to hold through the pain and assume a meditation posture.
◆━⊰✿✧✿⊱━◆
Somewhere along the way the sky had grown dark. Stars outside of Blue Star cast their gentle light downward, and strand after strand of starlight descended, flowing into Ye Xuan's body.
Suddenly a flash of divine clarity broke through his mind. The long sword at his side drew itself from its scabbard without being touched, and every fragment of his understanding converged at the tip of the blade, compressing into a single point of extreme light.
"Cut!"
*SLASH!*
With a rough, hoarse shout, a burst of sword light tore upward into the sky. It started no wider than a thread, and then in an instant it swelled into a golden pillar of light that drove straight through heaven and earth.
*BOOM!*
Under the impact of the explosion, the clouds above split in two, as though the sky and earth themselves had been cleaved apart by the sword.
As the light faded, Ye Xuan knelt on one knee, the Wangquan sword plunged deep into the ground. His new skin gleamed faintly like polished jade, carrying a soft trace of starlight. Every movement he made threw off fine sparks of stellar fire.
"Haah..."
Ye Xuan let out a long exhale and stood. The stellar energy of the Three Thousand Burning Flame had restored his body completely.
"The merging process for a Heavenly Flame is genuinely agonising."
"But the results are far beyond what I imagined."
A smile found its way to his face. The most critical gain was the increase in his ceiling. But the greatest achievement he had made was the comprehension of the Wangquan Sword Intent. And within that Sword Intent, the character of the Three Thousand Burning Flame had taken root. It was not only tremendously destructive. It could also continuously regenerate.
The one remaining flaw was that the technique would still consume the user's lifespan.
"But that's fine. Sword Intent is a derivative of the sword itself. The fact that the Wangquan Sword Intent demands a cost in years of life isn't a problem with the sword. It's a problem with me."