“A heart? What do you want a heart for?”
Fu Feng looked up at Lu Yan, a flash of clear astonishment instantly crossing his eyes.
“Is there something wrong with your heart?” he asked next. “Our Molten Heart Tower and the Artifact Sect headquarters both have doctors who specialize in regulating the body and repairing meridians, and they are quite skilled. If it’s an injury that can be stabilized with medicine or secret arts, there’s absolutely no need to go as far as a heart transplant. It’s far too risky.”
Lu Yan shook his head gently, a layer of heavy, unyielding gloom weighing down his eyes. “It’s not me,” he said in a low voice.
He fell silent for a brief moment. During his time at the Molten Heart Tower, Fu Feng had always been generous and accommodating toward him. His monthly salary was paid on time and in full, never docked, and even though he was usually idle and his classes were relaxed, Fu Feng never interfered.
All in all, Fu Feng treated him well, and the man was not bad by nature—he was someone worth trusting. After a brief moment of thought, Lu Yan decided to tell him the truth; there was no need to keep hiding it.
He slowed his pace of speaking, lowering his voice until it was very quiet, carrying a trace of hard-to-detect weariness and solemnity.
“I have a friend... Her heart had a major issue a long time ago. Her source was damaged and nearly gone, and she has been relying on a special secret art to barely replace her heart's function and keep her alive.”
Pausing, Lu Yan’s fingertips tightened slightly, his voice sounding somewhat choked up.
“But that secret art has a time limit and won’t last much longer. Once the limit is up, she won’t be able to hold on at all. I really have no other choice but to try and find something that can completely replace her heart and prolong her life.”
He took a step forward, his gaze locked tightly onto Fu Feng, carrying a desperate, all-or-nothing sincerity.
Inside the Molten Heart Tower, the furnace fires never went out. Heatwaves surged, and the dry, scorching air blew fine iron filings against his face. Combined with the extreme tension and anxiety in his heart, a thin layer of sweat soon broke out on Lu Yan’s forehead.
Fu Feng’s Adam’s apple bobbed slightly.
A heart... made of metal? The moment this thought entered his mind, his first reaction could be summed up in just two words:
Crazy. Absolutely crazy.
He had spent his entire life deeply immersed in artifact forging, refining spiritual materials, and crafting mechanical creations. He was highly proficient in material properties, spiritual rune operations, and artifact structures. However, when it came to the human body’s five elements, meridian qi circulation, the systemic hierarchy of organs, and visceral mechanics, he was completely ignorant.
But he could still figure it out with some common sense. For any flesh-and-blood creature, the physical organs were formed from warm vitality, and the chest cavity was the most core, most fragile source of a human body.
Shoving a cold, hard metal creation into a living human body went against all common sense, no matter how one looked at it. It would definitely cause massive problems.
Yet, despite the inherent danger his intuition warned him of, an extremely bold idea suddenly popped into his head.
What if he didn't make it a stiff, lifeless piece of ordinary metal?
What if he forged this artificial heart into a custom, living magic artifact that could pulse with spiritual energy, integrate with the body's meridians, and regulate the entire body's vital energy?
Wouldn't that bypass those inexplicable physical rejections, stabilizing the heart's meridians and prolonging life?
His desire to explore, which had been dormant for many days and worn down by the daily, mechanical repetition of standard forging, roared back to life at this very moment.
The exhaustion from days of non-stop forging and the weariness piled in his eyes were completely washed away by this sudden, novel concept. A fanatical and bright light gradually kindled in Fu Feng’s eyes, filled with the unique obsession and curiosity of an refiner.
“A heart... an artificial replacement for the heart’s meridians...”
He murmured in a low voice, then snatched the drawing from Lu Yan’s hands without a second word. Grabbing a charcoal pencil from the edge of the table, his fingertips quickly flew across the paper, rapidly sketching and modifying while muttering calculations to himself.
“The human heart is divided into four chambers, governing the circulation of vital energy and blood, as well as the pumping of spiritual energy. The material absolutely cannot be stiff and rigid; it must have extremely strong ductility, able to contract and expand with breathing and spiritual energy to match the body’s rhythm...”
He drew faster and faster, his train of thought becoming clearer and clearer. His hands were covered in fine iron filings and a thin layer of sweat; fearing he would dirty the precious drawing, he casually wiped them clean on his trouser leg, completely unbothered by his messy appearance.
As his pencil hit the paper, lines of spiritual material names emerged one by one: Melting Fire Gold, Spirit-Infused Iron, Huayang Jade...
After writing a few lines, Fu Feng’s pencil suddenly paused.
He stared at the outline of the heart that was beginning to take shape on the drawing, falling into deep concentration and stopping his writing.
Lu Yan stood quietly behind him, even holding his breath slightly, not daring to make a sound to disturb him, for fear of interrupting his train of thought.
After a long silence, Fu Feng finally turned his head slowly. With an incredibly serious expression, he looked at the tense Lu Yan and spoke with absolute certainty:
“For this, we must find a doctor who is highly proficient in the physical body and meridians to cooperate. Both are indispensable.”
At this moment, while Lu Yan remained calm on the surface, his mind went completely blank, and he was almost driven to laughter by sheer exasperation.
He had spent the entire night devising a plan and took a risk to come here. Fu Feng had modified the drawing, listed the materials, and calculated the structure, busying himself for so long, only to come up with this single, deeply considered conclusion—they needed to find a doctor?
He of course knew they needed to find a doctor!
Anyone could figure it out without thinking. Opening up a chest to swap a heart—if you didn't find a doctor, did you expect to do it yourself? Wasn't that just practically begging for death?
Lu Yan suppressed the speechlessness in his heart and asked helplessly, “Then where do we find a reliable doctor?”
He knew very few doctors. The only one who could be considered skilled was Yao Wu. But Yao Wu was a complete rogue practitioner.
He didn’t understand meridians and the five elements, nor did he understand visceral mechanics or how to balance the excess and deficiency of vital energy. His only skill lay in refining pills and channeling the vitality of plants, crudely pumping life force into the human body.
His method of saving people was crude and simple to the extreme: if they survived, it was because they were lucky and the medical treatment worked; if they didn't, it was because the medicine wasn't strong enough and the life force hadn't been pumped in sufficiently, so he would just keep forcing it in.
His main philosophy was quantity over quality—and they wanted him to hold a scalpel and perform a heart transplant?
The more Lu Yan thought about it, the more his head ached. The road ahead seemed to be completely blocked once again.
But he never expected that Fu Feng’s efficiency and initiative would far exceed his imagination.
The moment he finished speaking, Fu Feng stood up abruptly. With a heavy pat from his broad, thick hand, he forced Lu Yan back down onto his stool. The force was so immense that Lu Yan’s shoulder went numb and achy.
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Rubbing his aching shoulder, Lu Yan looked down at the dense list of rare materials on the paper, a deep sense of helplessness washing over him.
Of the few types he had heard of, even a tiny piece of any of them was worth tens of thousands of spirit stones—the prices were outrageously high. With his current meager savings, he probably couldn't even afford a fraction of a single material.
The path of a mechanical heart transplant had barely taken its first step before being blocked by the massive mountain of astronomical material costs.
Lu Yan couldn't help but complain in his mind.
In his previous life, at least there was health insurance to fall back on, allowing him to drag his body along and slowly undergo treatment. In this damn cultivation world, who knew if anyone had ever thought of opening an insurance company...
Just as he was immersed in thoughts of how to quickly make some money, the sound of an argument interrupted him.
Fu Feng had left quickly, but he returned even faster.
In Lu Yan's field of vision, on Fu Feng’s broad shoulder, he was actually carrying an elderly man with white hair and a beard, who possessed an ethereal, transcendent air.
The old man’s limbs struggled non-stop, his face filled with helplessness and grievance as he shouted repeatedly, “Young Sect Master! Put me down quickly! My legs are perfectly healthy, and I can walk on my own! Why must you be so uncouth!”
Paying absolutely no heed to the old man’s protests, Fu Feng strode straight into the room. Seeing Lu Yan sitting there, his lips curled upward as he let out a light, casual whistle.
“There.”
He raised his hand to gesture to the old man on his shoulder, his tone relaxed and certain.
“I’ve brought the doctor for you.”
Rate on N.U.
