As of this moment, Zhen Liu was stuck in this weird state of conscious unawareness. He knew that something was happening to his body, he just didn't know what was happening to his body...except for one sensation.
'Why...does it feel like I'm eating a gallon of fire noodles?'
Aside from that, he didn't know what the heck was happening so he just decided to roll with it.
'The last time this happened, I woke up stronger, so...maybe what happened last time is happening again?'
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"And it looks different from last time," Jin Fang commented as she stared at the familiar aether marionette thing from last time currently fiddling with her boyfriend's formula...at least that's how it looked like.
When Zhen Liu started passing out, his body began releasing aether at a rapid pace, until it all condensed into a familiar marionette demon with a couple dozen arms phasing in and out of reality.
Before Zhen Liu could fall to the ground completely, the aether marionette produced a platform out of thin air and laid him on it. Once he was settled, the marionette produced a series of tools that Jin Fang had seen toymakers use for their crafts. Granted, these tools looked a lot more mysterious and otherworldly.
"That's...excessive."
"All...necessary....," Frosttusk responded. It was at this moment, Jin Fang realized that he wasn't dismissed like how Nepherage was last time.
"Wait a minute, shouldn't you be an accessory on him right now?"
"Not...for...this..."
The marionette used a free hand to lightly tap Zhen Liu's prone form, causing a dazzling array of runes and patterns that was clearly connected to him to form from his body, projecting it outward like a hologram. This array was none other than Zhen Liu's cultivation formula.
"It's so chaotic looking! Yet...so fascinating."
The aether marionette began to use the hand that called up the array and swirl it around, rotating the runes and patterns like a petals in a whirlwind, until settling in a pattern of chaos it seemed favorable.
Next, the marionette produced the red crystal ball that Zhen Liu had uncovered earlier, held it between two pinched fingers and began to gently swirl it as well.
Waves of red Iganti aether began to come off of it, forming into thin red strands of energy that then formed into patterns that made up an artistic rendering of what appeared to be a strange salamander. While she couldn't understand the true meanings of the patterns, she felt something profound while staring at it.
'The Way of...Salamandra..."
When the salamander was fully formed, the marionette reached up and grabbed it by it's "neck". Once it had a firm grasp, it shoved the salamander into the Zhen Liu's formula, diffusing it's form into patterns that merged with the rest. There was a bit of resistance, but the patterns and runes eventually settled down into a new equilibrium.
When everything settled down, the marionette used a small hammer and tapped the formula pattern once, knocking it into Zhen Liu with a small bump.
With it's job now finished, the marionette did a slow nod.
"It can talk?!"
The marionette turned towards Jin Fang, her sudden outburst catching it's attention.
The two began to stare at each other for a bit, before the marionette used one of it's hand to do the universal symbol for hushing.
With that statement made, the marionette proceeded to retract into Zhen Liu, taking the platform with it, and dropping Zhen Liu to the floor. Jin Fang quickly rushed over to catch his falling form.
"Xiao Liu!"
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"Ughhh...why does this stupid thing keep knocking me out?," Zhen Liu grumbled, "but it appears to have left me on the best pillow in the world with the best view in the world."
"You're awake!"
Jin Fang managed to catch Zhen Liu before he hit the ground, the problem was that she had nowhere to put him. So in truly altruistic fashion, she laid his head on her lap, as to prevent bugs from crawling into his ears and not because she liked playing with his hair...or so she says.
"So how are you feeling?"
"Well...I feel like I just chugged an entire bottle of chilli sauce for one thing. Wait...where's Frosttusk?"
"With me, milord."
"Over...here..."
Zhen Liu lifted his head from Jin Fang's lap to see where the voices were coming from. He was soon greeted by the sight of Frosttusk, and for some reason Nepherage, playing a game of Go. Evidently the sight of the two monstrous beings playing a game as a simple as Go was a bit weird to him.
"Where did they get the Go board...wait, back on topic, what happened to me?"
"Well..."
But before Jin Fang could give him an answer, his inner voice suddenly piped up with an announcement.
<[Will of the Salamander] has been integrated into the [Chaos Body Forge] formula. New abilities has been added to the user.>
"Wait, what?," Zhen Liu asked aloud as he suddenly felt a lot more awake from the surprise information. Jin Fang was about to ask what was the matter, but quickly connected the dots that he was probably talking to that weird marionette thing from earlier in his head.
'Wait...then why would it ask me not to mention it to him...,' Jin Fang thought to herself.
'What do you mean by abilities? Does that mean I can finally u-'
'DAMNIT!'
<[Will of the Salamander] has now made it possible for the user to absorb and convert Ignati aether into their own power, change user's aether expression and increase resistance to Ignati related sources of damage. For convenience's sake, the abilities will be condensed into easy to understand "skills" for easy perusal.>
A series of pings accompanied by lines of text began to go off in Zhen Liu's head.
{Skill: Iganti Absorption I has been unlocked.}
{Skill: Ignati Resistance I has been unlocked.}
{Skill: Aether Expression Mask: Ignati has been unlocked.}
As these skills sounded off in his head, Zhen Liu's mind began to wander.
'Again with the videogame lingo, are you actually like this or is this how you translate in my head?'
'Still unhelpful!'