Rogue Villain-Chapter 336: Impure

After the Sun God Token took root in Ackster’s smelting furnace, it helped subdue the blue sun while siphoning its flames to strengthen itself. But the blue sun hadn’t become noticeably weaker. It was just suppressed and dormant.

However, when the flames inherent to Smelting Furnace enveloped the blue sun, it woke right back up and roared with surges of blue fire that tried to fend off the encroaching orange fire.

But Ackster was no longer the same as he had been when the blue sun nestled into his Smelting Furnace. He had grown a lot stronger, and so had his Smelting Furnace. Most importantly, he had Ichor now, which could support Limit Breaker and Smelting Furnace.

Slowly but surely, Ackster’s Smelting Furnace ate away at the blue sun, refining its fire into its own. The Sun God Token was relegated to being an idle spectator.

If the Sun God Token interfered or tried to take even more of the Smelting Furnace’s food, the Smelting Furnace would point its hungry flames at the Token next. The current symbiosis worked perfectly fine. The Sun God Token didn’t need to be consumed, and the Smelting Furnace didn’t need to consume the Sun God Token.

It would be just as good for the Sun God Token if the Smelting Furnace ate the blue sun and became stronger and hotter since it could just leech, reflect, resonate, and amplify the Smelting Furnace’s heat. That way, they would both work to make each other hotter.

Ackster’s gaze intensified, and sweat started dripping down the brows of everyone who stayed in the hall with him. The heat of his Smelting Furnace started reaching the point where he could no longer contain it. He was unaffected, but his surroundings weren’t.

However, it wasn’t as bad as when the blue sun first came into being.

Trana made the blue sun as a guaranteed way to kill Ackster. But that was before he achieved what had to have been Ex-rank Pyro Resistance, which Iron Body then devoured to evolve into Diamond Body. He was incomparable to his past self.

That was why, although Smelting Furnace needed Limit Breaker and Ichor, it didn’t take too much time to completely refine the blue sun’s fire into the Smelting Furnace. Unfortunately, it didn’t count as another source since, in the end, it was just mana.

The quality of Ackster’s Smelting Furnace’s fire rose another step, and the broken trident became a pinch softer as it drowned in the dark purplish blue flames that rose and spread to cover the entire Furnace.

The miasma had mostly escaped into the demon core, but parts of it had also sought refuge in the corners of the Furnace. Ackster began with refining away and purging any stray patches of miasma before turning his gaze to the demon core.

This was it. This was Ackster’s chance to strengthen his Ichor.

Ackster concentrated the flames of his Smelting Furnace below the demon core. He started heating and softening the core. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but his instincts told him not to rush it.

Ackster’s instincts also told him to add his mana, vitality, Will, and Ichor into the Smelting Furnace.

Gradually, as the demon core softened, Ackster added strands of each of his sources to the demon core. He wrapped them around the core and started melting them together, weaving more and more of his own sources into the demon core. But the process wasn’t smooth. His Ichor and the demon core rejected each other.

Ichor, the power of gods, and miasma, the power of demons, were on opposing sides of a spectrum of sources and attributes. Those attributes didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the personality of the ones using the source. But Ichor and miasma were deeply incompatible.

However, there were four reasons why Ackster could do it. He had his three ordinary sources to act as buffers. Ackster’s Ichor was created from the combination of all his skills, his thoughts, his memories, and everything that was him, including his soul and experience.

Ackster’s Ichor was born out of Ackster’s wish to live and save the world. But it also contained his obsession with life, willingness to do anything, and paranoia. It contained the brightness of his intentions and the shadows they created. Ackster’s Ichor wasn’t pure the same way the Ichor of a god born with it would be. It was Ichor formed by a mortal in the mortal world after undergoing a mortal life.

The third reason why it should work was Ackster’s Demon Sword and the miasma his body had already grown accustomed to. His body, the vessel of his Ichor, could already handle miasma. He couldn’t control it or store it anywhere other than the Smelting Furnace as he was now. But miasma wasn’t a source that his body opposed.

And as part of his body and self, Ackster’s Ichor was more receptive to miasma than it would have been otherwise.

The fourth and final reason for Ackster’s success was thanks to Makkel.

Although Mbelg was still dead, they had already confirmed his continued existence. It was both contradictory and natural. A person didn’t stop existing just because they died. They stopped existing when no one remembered them, not even themselves.

Mbelg still existed, and technically, his soul did, too. It was still injured to the point where Mbelg was dead, which meant it still lacked a crucial part.

For Ackster to completely eradicate Mbelg’s existence, he needed to destroy and get rid of every last shred of Mbelg and his demon core. The only way he could do that perfectly was to consume all of the demon core and refine it, purging the traces of Mbelg from it.

The luckiest outcome for Ackster in this situation was for him to completely make the demon core part of him. If Mbelg had had even a shred of luck to fight against that, Ackster might not have succeeded. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

But with no opposing universal force, the miasma and Ichor’s clashes didn’t escalate. Instead of misfiring like bad explosives, the esoteric energy of both sources clashed a couple of times here and there.

It looked and felt dangerous. But thanks to Ackster’s impure Ichor, there was the possibility of the two sources not clashing. And thanks to the skewed luck in the situation, that situation happened more often than not.

A pure and higher-grade Ichor wouldn’t have been able to do the same. But, at the same time, a better Ichor wouldn’t have needed to absorb and fuse with miasma to become stronger.