51: Chapter 51 Thousand Machines Micro-carving Platform

"Lens curvature deviation 0.003! Ye Duan, has your hand been damaged by fire? Start over!"

"Bullshit! That is a natural deformation caused by the tension of the material itself! Your crappy Formation can't suppress the repulsive force of this top-grade Void Gazer crystal at all! Shen Weilan, can you stop designing your rune circuits to look like a tangled mess?"

Inside the Earth Fire Abyss, the sounds of arguing, metal clashing, and the humming of Formations intertwined into a frenzied symphony.

Over the past three months, these three had barely stepped out of the cave. This place was no longer a gloomy purgatory, but had been transformed into a precision workshop filled with strange Magic Treasure components.

Zhang Mingxuan stood at the central control console, looking coldly at the two Golden Core Stage masters spitting at each other like street hags.

"Both of you, shut up."

"Senior Brother Ye is right, Void Gazer crystals do have stress rebound. But Senior Brother Shen's Formation isn't wrong either, it's just..." Zhang Mingxuan drew a red line on the light screen with his finger, "we are using macroscopic Formation logic to constrain microscopic stress. This is like trying to bind smoke with iron chains."

"Then what should we do?" Ye Duan threw down the semi-finished lens in his hand and sat on the ground with a thud, his face covered in black ash, his eyes completely bloodshot. "This is already the most stable transparent spiritual material the Wanfa Sect can find. If this doesn't work, do we have to steal and melt down the Sect's mountain-stabilizing Heavenly River Fixed-Bottom Divine Treasure?"

"There is no need to change Materials. Change the approach."

Zhang Mingxuan walked over to the Artifact Refining furnace that was still emitting steam.

"Since we can't suppress it, we won't. We will reserve breathing holes inside the crystal." He used spiritual power to construct a model full of honeycomb-like micropores in the air. "Let the excess stress flow out through these holes. Just like Da Yu controlling the floods, blocking is not as good as diverting."

Ye Duan and Shen Weilan looked at each other and simultaneously fell into deep thought.

"A honeycomb structure... this will sacrifice part of the refractive index, but the stability will increase tenfold." Shen Weilan rapidly performed calculations in the air. "If combined with my multi-focusing array, we might be able to make up for it."

"I can't make a mold with this kind of structure," Ye Duan frowned. "Those holes are thinner than a strand of hair, and they have to be formed in a molten state..."

"I will guide the heat," Zhang Mingxuan interrupted him. "You just focus on outputting spiritual power to maintain the liquid state of the material; leave the rest to me."

Another seven days and seven nights passed.

When the final cooling rune was struck into the furnace, accompanied by a crisp hum, a translucent crystal only the size of a palm but presenting a strange compound-eye structure throughout slowly floated up. It was no longer a single lens, but an array composed of tens of thousands of micro-lenses.

"Formation units, embed."

Shen Weilan formed hand seals, and thousands of rune light spots smaller than grains of rice flew into the interior of the crystal like a meteor shower, precisely landing into every honeycomb hole.

"Core hub, calibrate."

A beam of Divine Sense shot out from Zhang Mingxuan's brow, connecting to the crystal's master control node.

Hum—

At that moment, the scene inside the entire cave underwent an earth-shaking change within his Sea of Consciousness.

He looked at his own palm.

There was no skin, no flesh. He saw countless closely arranged cells, saw the spiritual liquid flowing between the cells like a golden river, and even saw the faint but resilient spirals of life within the cell nuclei.

The visual distance was pulled closer by a hundred thousand times.

This was the Divine Sense Microscopic Array prototype.

"It's a success..."

Shen Weilan slumped on the ground, looking at the strange Magic Treasure floating in the air, his eyes as glazed as if he were looking at his own child. He never thought that one day a Formation could truly allow a person to possess a god-like perspective.

Ye Duan was even more excited, his whole body trembling. He reached out shakily, wanting to touch it but not daring to: "This is the divine eye that can see microscopic dust? Quick! Let me see what that damned star tear gold actually looks like inside!"

Zhang Mingxuan temporarily transferred control to Ye Duan.

After a few breaths, this rugged man let out an exclamation that was almost a groan.

"So that's how it is... so that's how it is! Those patterns aren't cracks; they are natural riverbeds for the flow of Spiritual Qi! I've actually been trying to level the riverbeds all this time... I'm an idiot! A total idiot!"

Ye Duan laughed wildly while holding a piece of Ore, and as he laughed, tears began to flow. For a madman obsessed with Artifact Refining, this was like a blind man regaining his sight and seeing the colors of the world for the first time.

"Master... Master Zhang."

Ye Duan turned around, and this time he didn't use his name, but sincerely used a respectful title. He knelt on the ground with a thud, his eyes frighteningly fanatical. "I don't care who this thing belongs to, but from now on, as long as it's something you want to build, even if I have to drain this Earth Fire Abyss dry, I will build it for you! Just as long as you let me use this thing to look!"

This was the conquering power of technology. No oaths or Restrictions were needed; as long as you held the key to truth, these people would surround you like moths to a flame.

"Get up." Zhang Mingxuan's tone was flat, but he also felt a secret sense of relief. "This is only the beginning. With these eyes, we can start the real engineering."

He pulled the long-prepared [Artificial Spirit Root] blueprint from his robe and slapped it onto the workbench.

"Master Ye, Master Shen, rest for half a day. Then... we will begin to carve a breathing labyrinth in this microscopic world."

Shen Weilan leaned in and took just one look at the blueprint before his pupils shrank violently: "This... what is this?"

"A Spiritual Root."

Seeing the shocked expressions of the two men, the corners of Zhang Mingxuan's mouth curled into a cold arc.

"A Spiritual Root... is this something that can be made?" Ye Duan swallowed hard and spoke cautiously.

"Not only can it be made, if the plan is optimized to the limit, it can even be mass-produced."

...

Zhang Mingxuan stood before the newly assembled microscopic array, looking at the crystal material serving as the substrate through a field of vision magnified a hundred thousand times.

He took a deep breath, slowing the circulation of spiritual power in his body to the minimum and forcibly suppressing his heartbeat to five beats per minute; his entire being became as still as a hibernating turtle. He tried to use his right hand, which was a hundred times steadier than that of a top surgeon, to control a wisp of True Fire a thousand times thinner than a hair to touch the crystal surface.

But in that microscopic world, even the slightest pulse beat, even an unconscious twitch between muscle fibers, was like a magnitude ten earthquake.

Sizzle—

The line of fire deviated from its intended path, burning an ugly canyon into the perfectly flat crystal surface.

"It won't work."

Zhang Mingxuan dispersed the True Fire and shook his head helplessly.

"What's wrong? Isn't the Formation running fine?" Shen Weilan leaned over, looking at the obvious flaw on the crystal with a face full of confusion.

"The eyes see clearly, but the hand cannot keep up." Zhang Mingxuan raised his right hand, his tone carrying a hint of disdain for his mortal Physical Body. "For carving of this precision, even if my body has reached the Golden Core Stage, there are still ineradicable physiological tremors. Our hands are too crude."

"Then what should we do? Do we need to find some Nascent Soul old monster who has practiced the 'Body Fixing Technique' to do the work?" Ye Duan asked gruffly from the side, fiddling with a scrap of material in his hand.

"No. Since the hand isn't steady, then we won't use hands."

Zhang Mingxuan turned around, his gaze sweeping over the pile of scattered blueprints. In his Sea of Consciousness, he issued a new command to DeepEye: deduce a set of mechanical transmission structures driven by Divine Sense.

A moment later, he picked up a rune pen and sketched a new model in the void.

"Master Ye, I want you to forge a set of handle-less blades. Only the blade tips, no handles required; the material must be able to carry extremely high-intensity Divine Sense attachment."

"Fellow Daoist Shen, I need a Divine Sense transmission Formation. I want to transform my Divine Sense commands into physical displacement through a Formation, and this displacement needs to have a reduction ratio. For example, if my Divine Sense moves one inch, the blade tip controlled by the Formation only moves one micron."

Shen Weilan's eyes instantly lit up: "Divine Sense micro-reduction transmission... this is equivalent to adding a gearbox between Divine Sense and matter! Brilliant! This way, even if your hand shakes like a sieve, what is transmitted to the blade tip will only be a light breeze!"

"That's roughly the idea." Zhang Mingxuan nodded, not bothering to explain gearboxes or transmission ratios, only saying faintly, "I thought of it during a flash of insight while deducing... my Mind-Cultivation Technique just now."

For the next month, the Earth Fire Abyss fell into a busy state once again.

Ye Duan used his treasured Heavenly River Silver Sand, known as the lightest and most spiritually conductive metal in the world. He tempered it in the core of the earth fire for a full forty-nine days, finally creating thirty-six silver particles that were almost invisible to the naked eye, like dust. Those were the blades.

Meanwhile, Shen Weilan engraved a full nine layers of superimposed rune arrays on the workbench, each layer designed to perform precision filtering and reduction of the Divine Sense commands.

Finally, a strange-looking machine appeared before the three of them.

It looked like a complex Bagua plate floating in mid-air, with those thirty-six silver particles drifting on its surface, surrounded by countless fine threads of spiritual power.

[Equipment naming: thousand-machine micro-carving table.]

[Divine Sense access test... connection stable.]

[Operational latency: 0.001 seconds. Displacement precision: Nanometer level.]

"Let's try it."

Zhang Mingxuan sat cross-legged and closed his eyes. This time, he didn't move his hands, but instead injected his vast Golden Core Stage Divine Sense into the machine.

Hum.

The Bagua plate vibrated slightly, emitting a crisp hum.

On the projection screen of the microscopic array, everyone clearly saw—

They saw those silver particles come to life like spirits, arranging themselves into a specific Formation under the control of Zhang Mingxuan's Divine Sense.

"Carve."

With a thought from Zhang Mingxuan, the leading silver particle instantly sank, carrying a wisp of Pill Fire compressed to the limit, and lightly stroked the crystal surface.

An absolutely straight groove, with edges as smooth as a mirror and a width of only a few dozen atoms, appeared silently.

No tremors, no deviations.

This was the coldness and precision of a machine.

"Perfect..." Ye Duan held his breath, not even daring to breathe loudly for fear of blowing away those particles. "This is simply a miracle."