Chapter 10: The Willing Crowns
The Suotou quarry was a massive, jagged scar carved into the earth ten miles outside the city walls. For decades, the Blacksmith Association had used its deepest, most inaccessible ravines as a dumping ground.
Mame stood at the bottom of the gorge, surrounded by literal mountains of blackened, oxidized Heavy Silver slag. To the rest of the world, it was an industrial graveyard. To him, it was the birthplace of a god.
He unclasped his black cloak, folding it neatly on a relatively clean boulder. If he was going to use Thousand Refinement to forge this slag into gravity-plating, he couldn't do it as a suppressed Rank 19 Spirit Scholar. He needed his full, unbridled power.
Mame closed his eyes and allowed the "Cosmic Origin Core" in his Dantian to expand.
The air in the ravine instantly grew heavy. The gravel beneath his boots began to vibrate, then levitate, caught in the localized anti-gravity field of his sheer spiritual density. He didn't summon a spirit to stand behind him—he didn't need to. He was the spirit.
From the earth beneath his feet, three rings rose in a slow, rhythmic pulse.
Purple. Dark Purple. Pitch Black.
To any Spirit Master of this era, the sight would be enough to induce a heart attack. The theoretical limits set by Grandmaster Yu Xiaogang dictated that a first ring could only be yellow (hundred years), and a black ring (ten thousand years) was suicide for anyone below Rank 50.
But Mame wasn't just breaking the rules; he was operating on an entirely different operating system. He looked down at the three rings swirling around him, the ambient light of the ravine warping around their immense pressure.
In this era, humans believed that spirit rings were born of violence, hatred, and death. They thought you had to slaughter a beast and forcefully rip its soul from its corpse. They didn't know the truth that wouldn't be discovered for another ten millennia: the concept of the Spirit Soul.
When a beast offered itself willingly, without a shred of resentment, the spiritual shockwave that usually destroyed a cultivator's mind was negated. Because Mame possessed the bloodline of a King Beast and the backing of Da Ming and Er Ming, he hadn't hunted a single one of his rings.
They had bowed to him.
The First Ring: The Void Specter Sloth The deep purple ring nearest his feet pulsed with an eerie, quiet stillness. It came from a creature well over a thousand years old, and perhaps the only one of its kind in the entire Star Dou Forest.
The Void Specter Sloth wasn't a fighter. It was an anomaly of space and dimension—a creature so profoundly lazy that it had evolved the ability to slip between the folds of reality just so other predators would stop waking it up. When Er Ming had brought Mame to it, the Sloth had looked at Mame's bottomless, singularity-like soul and saw the ultimate, quiet place to sleep forever. It had willingly dissolved its physical body to move into Mame's Dantian.
It was the source of his Void Instinct and his Dimensional Blink. It allowed Mame to completely erase his presence, hiding his multiversal power level behind a veil of absolute nothingness.
The Second Ring: The Golden Sun Ape The second ring, a violently dark purple that bordered on black, radiated a scorching, holy heat. It was just shy of ten thousand years old.
The Golden Sun Ape was a tyrant of the forest canopy, a beast of immense physical strength and a naturally occurring holy-fire attribute. It had challenged Er Ming for territory and been utterly crushed. But when it saw Mame—a human who possessed the blood of a Saiyan and the aura of a King Beast—it hadn't felt fear. It had felt religious reverence.
The Golden Sun Ape had offered its soul as a tribute to its new King. It was the foundation of Mame's Sun-Ape Bankai and his DBZ-style physical multipliers. It provided the golden, radiant energy that allowed his muscles to handle the immense strain of his Zenkai boosts, acting as the "Super Saiyan" catalyst of his soul.
The Third Ring: The Starfall Asura Ape Mame's eyes drifted to the final ring—the pitch-black halo of a ten-thousand-year beast. It hummed with a sound like a dying star, crackling with raw, destructive kinetic energy.
Finding this beast had been a stroke of pure, multiversal luck. The Starfall Asura Ape was a twelve-thousand-year-old mutation. Instead of absorbing natural soul power from the earth, it absorbed ambient cosmic radiation from the night sky, condensing it into raw, explosive energy in its chest.
In DBZ terms, it was a beast that naturally generated Ki.
But its body had been failing. The Asura Ape couldn't contain the sheer density of the "Power Level" it was generating. It was literally tearing itself apart from the inside out, essentially dying from its own uncontrolled Kaioken.
When Mame found it in the deep core of the forest, it was in agony. Mame hadn't killed it; he had placed his hand on its chest and showed it his own "Cosmic Origin Core." He showed the beast that his Saiyan/Hybrid body was the only vessel strong enough to contain its power.
The Starfall Asura Ape had roared in gratitude and sacrificed itself, merging its nuclear-reactor heart with Mame's own.
This pitch-black ring was the crown jewel of Mame's arsenal. It finalized the DBZ integration. It gave him the ability to compress energy into the razor-sharp Destructo-Disc and fire the devastating Beast Cero. It was the engine that powered his Singularity.
"Three willing sacrifices," Mame whispered, the black ring flaring with purple-white electricity. "Three pieces of a puzzle this world doesn't even know it's trying to solve."
He cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing sharply off the canyon walls. His skin began to darken, the Iron-Will Armor coating his forearms in a metallic, obsidian sheen.
He didn't have a blacksmith's hammer. He didn't need one.
Mame stepped up to a massive, jagged boulder of Heavy Silver slag that weighed easily five tons. He sank into a low, martial arts stance, his tail snapping behind him for balance.
"Let's see how much pressure it takes to purify this garbage," Mame grinned, his eyes flashing silver.
He threw a punch.
He didn't hit the metal physically. Instead, he channeled the raw, explosive kinetic force of his third ring—the Starfall Asura Ape—and the spatial folding of his first ring.
BOOM.
A concentrated shockwave of pure soul power slammed into the Heavy Silver. The air in the ravine shattered. The deafening crack of displaced oxygen mirrored the sound of a thunderbolt striking the earth. The massive chunk of impure metal screamed as it was compressed from five tons of jagged slag down to a single, dense, perfectly smooth, three-foot cube of shimmering, pure Heavy Silver.
Mame lowered his fist, staring at the perfectly refined, gravity-conducting block. Smoke rose from his blackened knuckles.
"One down," Mame said, looking at the thousands of tons of slag still waiting in the ravine. "Thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go."
The Phantom of Suotou went to work.
Chapter 10: The Willing Crowns (Continued)
For three days and three nights, the Suotou quarry did not sleep.
Down in the deepest, most inaccessible ravine, Mame worked. He didn't use a hammer, a forge, or a bellows. He used the explosive, nuclear-level kinetic force of his third ring—the Starfall Asura Ape—and the spatial folding of his first ring.
Every time his blackened, Haki-infused fist struck a five-ton boulder of Heavy Silver slag, a deafening BOOM echoed through the canyon. It wasn't just a sound; it was a physical shockwave. He was literally punching the impurities out of the metal, compressing tons of jagged, oxidized garbage into perfectly smooth, three-foot cubes of peerless, gravity-conducting plating.
BOOM. A shockwave ripped through the air, shattering the loose rocks on the canyon walls.
BOOM.
The ambient soul power in the ravine violently expanded and contracted, creating a localized atmospheric anomaly. The sky above the quarry seemed to warp, the clouds pushing away in a perfect ring.
Naturally, this did not go unnoticed.
Ten miles away, in Suotou City, the higher-level Spirit Masters felt it. It started as a faint tremor in their teacups, but by the second day, it felt like a rhythmic, distant heartbeat vibrating in their very marrow. The local Spirit Hall branch sent out a scouting party of seasoned Spirit Ancestors and a Spirit King to investigate the strange, terrifying energy spikes. Several elite mercenary groups and curious nobles followed suit, hoping an ancient artifact or a high-tier Spirit Beast was being born in the quarry.
But they couldn't get close.
As the Spirit Masters approached the lip of the gorge, the sheer density of the ambient air became suffocating. The weaker cultivators—those below Rank 30—began to hyperventilate, forced to drop to their knees a full mile away from the epicenter.
The Spirit King and his elite guards pushed forward, gritting their teeth against the crushing pressure. They reached the jagged ridges overlooking the deep ravines.
BOOM.
Mame threw another punch down below.
Up on the ridge, the Spirit King gasped, clutching his chest. The kinetic shockwave didn't just rattle his eardrums; it resonated violently with his own heartbeat. With every thumping impact that echoed from the gorge, the Spirit Masters felt a corresponding explosion of pain in their chests. Their blood vessels bulged, and their Martial Souls flickered erratically, threatening to forcefully disperse.
"What... what is down there?" one of the Spirit Ancestors choked out, blood dripping from his nose. "It feels like a Titan Giant Ape is beating a war drum!"
"We have to pull back," the Spirit King wheezed, his face pale with primal terror. "One more strike, and my heart is going to burst."
Down in the ravine, Mame paused.
His fist hovered an inch above a freshly purified cube of Heavy Silver. He didn't need to look up. His Void Instinct had already mapped the thermal signatures and terrified auras of the Spirit Masters clustering on the ridge a mile above him. They were like bright, trembling candles in his mind.
"Annoying," Mame muttered, his tail swishing irritably behind him. He didn't have time to play with the local authorities, nor did he want to reveal his face or his multiversal forging methods to the public.
It was time to clear the area.
Mame stood up straight, letting the pitch-black ring of the Starfall Asura Ape fade back into his Dantian. He closed his eyes and tapped into the deep, oppressive gravity of his soul.
Conqueror's Pressure.
He didn't throw a punch. He simply released a massive, directed wave of his spiritual density up toward the ridge.
It hit the investigating Spirit Masters like a physical tidal wave of pure, unfiltered malice. The sky seemed to darken for a fraction of a second. The weaker mercenaries instantly passed out, their eyes rolling to the back of their heads as they collapsed into the dirt. The Spirit King let out a strangled cry, his legs giving out entirely as his mind was overwhelmed by the sensation of being buried alive at the bottom of the ocean.
The message was clear, burned directly into their survival instincts: Leave, or die.
The conscious ones didn't hesitate. They dragged their unconscious comrades and fled back toward Suotou City as fast as their trembling legs could carry them, convinced that a hundred-thousand-year beast had claimed the quarry as its new domain.
Satisfied that the rats had scattered, Mame quickly went to work.
He channeled his soul power into the dead Douluo's spatial ring. With a series of silver flashes, the hundreds of perfectly refined, hyper-dense cubes of Heavy Silver vanished into the expanding void of the ring. He had processed enough to build the core foundation of his Gravity Chamber, leaving only a fraction of the raw, useless slag behind.
He couldn't leave evidence of his Thousand Refinement technique. If the Blacksmith Association saw how the remaining slag was fractured, they might realize it had been struck by bare fists rather than hammers.
Mame raised his right hand, his third ring flashing briefly. A small, condensed sphere of white-and-purple energy gathered in his palm.
Beast Cero.
He casually tossed the energy sphere into the center of his workspace. Then, he tapped into his first ring.
Dimensional Blink.
Space folded, and Mame vanished just as the Cero detonated.
The explosion vaporized the remaining slag, melted the stone floor into smooth, glassy obsidian, and completely collapsed the walls of the ravine, burying his footprints and any trace of his multiversal forging beneath thousands of tons of mundane rock.
The Sleeping Boar
A split second later, Mame reappeared in the middle of Room 402 at The Sleeping Boar inn, miles away in the bustling heart of Suotou City.
The room was exactly as he had left it. The faint sounds of street vendors haggling drifted up through the window.
Mame let out a long, exhausted breath. He allowed his Cosmic Origin Core to decompress slightly, falling back down to the harmless, suppressed aura of a Rank 19 Spirit Scholar. The sudden shift in pressure made his muscles ache, but his Saiyan biology immediately began to adapt, his Zenkai Overdrive humming quietly as it repaired the micro-tears in his muscle fibers.
He stripped off his dusty clothes, tossed them aside, and fell back onto the soft mattress.
He had the raw materials. He had the power. Now, he just had to wait for the continent-wide contracts to be finalized.
Mame stared up at the wooden ceiling, his hands behind his head. The heist was already in motion, and no one in this era had the multiversal vocabulary to even understand what they had lost.
"Eight days left," Mame whispered, closing his eyes to get some well-deserved sleep.