Chapter 117: The Mythic Forging
He looked back at Isolde. The static reached her chest. She was almost gone.
Levi didn’t even hesitate.
He reached up, grabbed the heavy Diamond chain, and violently ripped it off his neck.
The system instantly registered the unequip.
A heavy, sickening feeling washed over his avatar. He felt physically lighter, but much weaker. His health bar shrank. His mana pool contracted. The comforting layer of invisible armor that the 50% damage reduction provided completely vanished. He felt naked.
Levi didn’t care. He walked right up to the holographic anvil.
He took the Diamond-tier [Heart of the Chained] and slammed it directly into the center Catalyst slot of the Boundless Fusion interface.
The system paused. The UI hitched.
A new prompt overwrote the old one.
[System Override: Sacrificing a Diamond-tier item as a catalyst for a Platinum-tier fusion will trigger a rarity override.]
[Resulting item will ascend to Mythic-Tier.]
[No Gold fee required for Divine Sacrifices.]
[Proceed?]
"Give it to me," Levi snarled.
He smashed the accept button.
**
Levi ripped the Diamond-tier necklace off his chest.
The system instantly registered the unequip command. The heavy, sickening feeling of massive stat loss washed over his avatar in a fraction of a second. It didn’t just feel like taking off a piece of jewelry. It felt like someone had literally scooped out a piece of his virtual soul.
His health bar instantly shrank, dropping from 26,180 straight down to 24,180. His mana pool contracted from 5,160 to 4,160.
But the worst part was the loss of the passive ability. The invisible, comforting layer of the 50% Damage Reduction completely vanished. Without it, the freezing ambient temperature of the Midnight Spire’s apex actually bit through his Obsidian Carapace armor. The VR engine made him shiver. He felt totally naked.
Levi didn’t care. He tossed the empty Diamond chain aside and sprinted back across the black ice.
"Isolde!" Levi shouted, sliding the last few feet and dropping to his knees right beside her.
She was almost entirely gone.
Her avatar was ninety-five percent translucent. Her legs and torso had already dissolved into floating blocks of green hexadecimal code. Only her face and her shoulders remained somewhat solid, and even those were aggressively flickering like a bad video stream.
He reached out to grab her hand. His armored fingers passed straight through her palm. There was absolutely no physical collision left. The server had completely revoked her physical rendering tag. To the game engine, she was just a corrupted visual glitch waiting to be wiped from the cache.
Isolde’s gray eyes rolled toward him. They were impossibly dim.
"Levi," she whispered. The audio was so fractured it barely registered in his helmet’s speakers. "Deletion sequence... finalizing."
"I told you to shut up," Levi gritted his teeth. "I’ve got the cores. Just hang on for ten seconds."
Levi slammed both of his hands flat against the freezing black ice. He didn’t have a crafting bench. He didn’t care. He forcefully triggered a thought-command, dragging the [Boundless Fusion] interface right out of his system menu and projecting it directly into the open air.
The holographic anvil materialized with a heavy, metallic clunk. The three glowing golden fusion slots hovered right over Isolde’s fading chest.
Levi opened his spatial inventory. He grabbed the three [Platinum Cores of the Night] he had just ripped from the boss’s loot pile. The pitch-black orbs pulsed with a faint, trapped starlight.
He shoved all three cores directly into the primary material slots.
The system chimed. The anvil read the Platinum-tier items and threw up the standard high-tier warning prompt right in his face.
[Warning: Forging a Mythic-tier item from Platinum materials requires a Divine-tier Catalyst and a currency fee of 100,000 Gold Coins.]
Levi stared at the red text. He didn’t have a single gold coin left to his name. He was completely broke. If the system demanded currency, it was over.
He grabbed the [Heart of the Chained] from his inventory. The Diamond-tier necklace glowed with a heavy, prismatic light. It was the single most powerful defensive item he owned. It was the only thing that had kept him alive against the Night King.
Without hesitation, Levi slammed the Diamond necklace straight into the bottom Catalyst slot of the fusion interface.
The system paused.
The UI literally hitched. The glowing golden slots flickered red, then blue, then bright white. The game engine was struggling to process the math. A player sacrificing a fully functional Diamond-tier item just to use it as a crafting material wasn’t something the standard algorithms handled smoothly.
A new, massive prompt violently overwrote the old warning.
[System Override: Sacrificing a Diamond-tier item as a catalyst for a Platinum-tier fusion will trigger a rarity override.]
[Resulting item will ascend to Mythic-Tier.]
[No Gold fee required for Divine Sacrifices.]
[Proceed?]
Levi let out a harsh, breathless laugh. "Give it to me."
He smashed the floating accept button with his fist.
The Boundless Fusion anvil didn’t just glow. It violently erupted.
A pillar of absolute, blinding white light shot straight up from the interface, piercing through the dark, shattered sky above the Midnight Continent. The light was so intense the VR engine actually dimmed Levi’s visor to prevent real-world eye strain.
Then came the sound.
It didn’t sound like a hammer hitting metal. It sounded like the sky itself was cracking. A deafening, screeching noise echoed across the platform as the Starfall server actively struggled to render the birth of a Mythic item. Frame rates dropped. The black ice beneath Levi’s boots stuttered and glitched, turning into untextured gray blocks for a split second before snapping back.
The three Platinum cores and the Diamond necklace melted into a singularity of pure, concentrated gravity. The white light aggressively compressed, shrinking down until it formed a tiny, pitch-black sphere floating just above the anvil.
The sphere cracked open.
The light faded instantly. The heavy mechanical sound died away.
Floating gently down into Levi’s open palms were two identical, perfectly smooth rings. They didn’t look like they were made of metal. They looked like they were forged from solid midnight and dotted with tiny, shifting constellations of starlight.
The system chimed with a notification that wasn’t gold. It was a deep, pulsing crimson.
[Item Forged.]
Levi quickly tapped the rings to pull up their stat block.
[Rings of the Abyssal Tether]
[Rarity: Mythic]
[Description: When worn by two entities, their souls are permanently tethered. Grants a flat +25,000 HP and +5,000 Mana to the shared pool. All Base HP, Mana, and passive health regeneration are perfectly merged across a 50/50 split. If one dies, both die. Soul-Bound.]
Levi didn’t bother reading the rest of the flavor text. The math was all he needed to see. A shared health pool and merged passive regeneration. It was exactly what Isolde needed to survive.
He dismissed the UI and scrambled forward.
Isolde’s face was almost completely gone. Her gray eyes were just empty, static-filled voids. The server was literally seconds away from permanently dumping her code.
Levi grabbed her left hand.
It felt like grabbing cold mist. His armored fingers sank right through her digital skin. He couldn’t get a grip. The physics engine wasn’t allowing him to interact with her.
"Come on," Levi gritted his teeth, forcing his hand to align perfectly with hers. "Don’t you dare delete on me."
He took one of the Mythic rings and pressed it against her translucent ring finger.
The moment the Mythic item made contact with her corrupted Anomaly code, the ring violently sparked. The starlight trapped inside the band flared to life. The item’s high-tier code forced the game engine to recognize the collision.
The ring slid onto her finger.
Levi didn’t wait to see if it worked. He instantly grabbed the second ring and shoved it onto his own armored finger.
**
The exact microsecond the second Mythic ring slid onto Levi’s finger, the system interface went completely insane.
A harsh, blaring siren echoed directly inside his NerveDive helmet. It sounded like a submarine crash alarm. Massive, aggressive red error boxes flooded his entire field of vision, completely blocking out the dark sky and the black ice of the platform.
[System Warning: ILLEGAL ENTITY MERGE DETECTED.]
[Player Code cannot merge with Anomaly Code.]
[Attempting to Sever Connection.]
[Initiating Firewall Deletion Protocols.]
"Oh, no you don’t," Levi snarled, glaring at the red text. "You’re not taking her."
The server actively tried to fight the rings. Levi could physically feel the VR engine trying to pull his hand away from Isolde’s. The haptic feedback in his gloves vibrated violently, simulating the feeling of two magnets repelling each other.
But the Mythic items didn’t care about the server’s basic firewall.
The [Rings of the Abyssal Tether] pulsed with a blinding, deep crimson light. The starlight inside the bands began to spin rapidly. The incredibly dense, high-tier code of the Mythic item slammed directly into the game’s security protocols and completely brute-forced its way through.