Thud!
Thud!
Thud!
The jarring, meaty impacts echoed across the sky as the two figures clashed in mid-air. The spectators could only watch in disbelief. They were seeing a delicate-looking female cultivator trading blows with a mountain of a man.
And she was winning, seven moves to his three.
Yes, the woman held a clear seventy percent of the advantage, while Liu Xinlou barely managed thirty.
"Is she holding back, or is her physical body just that monstrous?" someone whispered, their voice full of awe. "A spellcaster going toe to toe with a dedicated body cultivator, at a lower cultivation level, and she is dominating him?"
At that moment, everyone stared at Su Min as if she were a ghost. Their minds were screaming, what the hell?!
Even Tian Yinzi was speechless, his face twitching.
"Grand Elder… your image… your image!" he muttered under his breath.
He watched helplessly as Su Min, growing more enthusiastic with every passing second, uprooted a centuries-old willow tree from the secret realm and started whacking Liu Xinlou with it.
"Lin Daiyu uprooting a willow tree? Grand Elder, you're the representative of Eastern Mulberry Province!"
It was a bizarre sight. Grand Elder, the respected representative of their province, was swinging a hundred-meter-long tree like a club.
"I surrender!!!"
Faced with the humiliating spectacle of Su Min brandishing the giant willow, Liu Xinlou finally raised his hand in defeat. What kind of fight was this?! She had not cast a single spell the entire time. She had just used him as a living punching bag, and the worst part was, he could not even fight back properly.
As the saying went, even a worm will turn. If he could not beat her, he could at least deny her the satisfaction. So the moment Su Min swung the tree for another hit, he vanished from the arena, teleporting away before anyone could react. He did not even wait for the referee's call.
"Tch."
The crowd's lips twitched in unison. They had to admit, if this had been the previous round, Su Min's reckless approach might have backfired. But Liu Xinlou had exhausted all his trump cards in his last fight, leaving him utterly defenseless. Against Su Min's unrestrained brutality, they could only laugh wryly.
Sighing as her opponent fled, Su Min clicked her tongue in disappointment. If someone wanted to run, she could not exactly force them to stay. Still, the bout had given her a clear measure of her physical prowess. It was slightly inferior to her spellcasting, but the gap was negligible. The real limitation was the lack of dedicated killing moves. Unless she resorted to her specialized pills, which she was saving for true life-or-death situations, her close combat had its limits.
"Grand Elder," Tian Yinzi said, wiping his forehead as she floated back. "Perhaps… you could refrain from such methods next time?" His expression was pained.
"What is wrong with it?" Su Min asked, raising an eyebrow. "I got a good sparring partner. Do you want to volunteer for the next one?"
Tian Yinzi's neck shrank into his shoulders instinctively. Him? Fight her? She would pulp him into mist with one slap.
"Grand Elder Xie… where are you when we need you?" he silently prayed. Normally, Xie Yingying was the one who sparred with Su Min. Their bouts were always evenly matched, at least when they were not fighting to the death. But with Xie Yingying absent, no one could rein in Su Min's wilder impulses.
"Enough," Su Min said, shaking her head. "Let us focus on the matches."
She turned her attention back to the arena. Over the next period, the battles progressed swiftly. Compared to the month-long slog of the first round, the second round concluded in just a week. The third round wrapped up even faster, in under three days.
This time, Su Min faced another late-stage Divine Transformation cultivator, whom she dispatched without any theatrics. A quick Vermilion Bird Possession explosion, followed by a few sharp feather projectiles, was enough to send her opponent packing.
Now, the tournament had reached its final round. This event was fundamentally about resource allocation, not pure competition. Only four rounds would determine the distribution of the precious Sealing Crystals, with the final victors claiming the largest shares.
But when the lottery wheel stopped this time, the Eastern Sea Immortal Sect's seating area erupted in chaos.
"Why her?!"
"Uh…"
The crowd fell into a stunned silence. The wheel's display was unmistakable.
Su Min vs. Xuan Mengyin
A wave of excitement immediately swept through the general audience. "Oh-ho! This will be fun. A catfight!"
"The last two top female cultivators, pitted against each other!"
"Go all out!"
While the spectators cheered gleefully, the atmosphere around Su Min's faction turned glacial.
Xuan Mengyin was the current sect master of the Mystic Sound Valley, a half-step Dao Comprehension expert. While others at her level were just starting their journey, she was a hair's breadth from a full breakthrough. A single epiphany could propel her into the true Dao Comprehension stage.
But her cultivation level was not the main problem. The Mystic Sound Valley was an all-female sect, renowned for two arts: Charm Magic and Illusion Magic. To make matters worse, Xuan Mengyin possessed a unique heavenly treasure—the Dreamweaver's Gale. Unlike combat-oriented divine objects, this one specialized in transformation and deception, synergizing perfectly with her charm and illusion techniques.
As the saying went, softness overcomes hardness. Against opponents weaker than her, victims often found themselves trapped in inescapable, blissful fantasies.
"Grand Elder…" Tian Yinzi leaned in, his voice nervous. "Can you… break her illusions?" This was the key to victory.
Su Min rubbed the bridge of her nose, her expression unreadable. "Hmph."
Illusions? She could handle those. When it came to fantasy realms, she was basically immune to surprises. But charm magic… that was another story.
She was not afraid, of course. No, never that.
She just… did not want to be remembered as the genius alchemist who got turned into a drooling idiot in front of everyone. If she fell victim to that kind of magic, the humiliation would be historic.
Her past life's memories had always served as her grounding rod, keeping her sober while others chased fleeting pleasures. Those memories reminded her of what she had lost, and what she could not afford to want. But charm magic did not care about rational thought. It went deeper, beneath the cultivated detachment, straight into the soft underbelly of desire—especially the desires you worked the hardest to ignore.
And that was what truly worried her.
She had never faced dedicated charm magic before. What if it worked? What if she—heaven forbid—actually liked it? What if, while everyone watched, she let out some embarrassing sound and collapsed in a flustered haze?
What if, in that haze, she thought it was Xie Yingying?
Her thoughts began to spiral. "Maybe I should just trade blow for blow and overwhelm her with my pill reserves?" she wondered desperately.
The last Divine Transformation expert who fought Xuan Mengyin had surrendered before the match even began, his expression glazed and his thoughts clearly elsewhere. And that was a late-stage Divine Transformation veteran, a man with an ironclad will, to whom beauty was supposed to be fleeting smoke. Yet he had folded instantly. That spoke volumes about Xuan Mengyin's charm prowess.
The only silver lining was that both illusions and charm magic were single-target. Onlookers would see nothing of the internal struggle.
Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the arena, Xuan Mengyin was not exactly celebrating either.
"Why her…?" she groaned inwardly.
Her sect's charm magic was unisex, but against Su Min, she knew it would be useless. Despite being only at the early Divine Transformation stage, Su Min had three heavenly treasures, had defeated the legendary Yao Xian'er (someone Xuan Mengyin idolized), and possessed a flawless, unshakable Dao heart. In short, charm magic preyed on primal desires. But against someone like Su Min? It would be like tickling a stone boulder.
So while Su Min was having a quiet internal meltdown about possibly becoming another charm-victim statistic, Xuan Mengyin was staring at her as if she were an immovable stone tablet.
"It seems charm magic is out," Xuan Mengyin concluded, a little bitterly. "I will need another approach."
She began formulating a new battle plan. This would be a rare, hard-fought match. In gaming terms, she had "anti-male super effectiveness." Since male cultivators outnumbered females several times over, she usually held an overwhelming advantage. Today, she had drawn the worst possible matchup.
"Hahaha! Serves her right! No more bullying men with that tricky charm magic!" one of the male half-step experts laughed in relief.
"Exactly! Let us see her try being a 'seductive vixen' in front of Su Min. All she will get is a slap!"
"Heh."
The other half-step Dao Comprehension experts shared the sentiment. Facing Xuan Mengyin was a nightmare. Losing to Su Min was just embarrassing, but losing to Xuan Mengyin? That was social suicide. Now that these two were paired together, the rest of them could relax. With only four rounds total, they would avoid both landmines.
"Oh, for f—"
Su Min swore silently and descended into the arena. Her mind was racing. Her inner world was chaos. Her spiritual sea churned with half-formed panic. So her instincts did what they always did when things got bad.
"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form…" she chanted quietly, the words coming without conscious command.
Golden Buddha light erupted from her body in radiant, pulsing waves.
A visible ripple of surprise passed through the crowd. Across from her, Xuan Mengyin landed lightly on the arena floor, then promptly froze mid-step, her eye twitching uncontrollably.
The Great Sun Tathāgata Sutra—a heaven-grade cultivation method that severed earthly desires—had activated all on its own.
Xuan Mengyin's lips moved, forming silent words. "You have got to be kidding me."
"Is Grandmaster Su becoming a Buddha? I almost forgot she practices the Great Thunder Temple's techniques!"
"That woman's face must be priceless right now."
"Hahahaha!"
The crowd burst into laughter. Su Min's ties to the Great Thunder Temple were well-known. After the Land and Water Dharma Assembly, secrecy was impossible. Moreover, public acknowledgment from figures like Liao Jie had cemented her status as their ally.
Xuan Mengyin exhaled sharply, watching the radiant, and now utterly charm-immune, Su Min. She had already decided. There would be no charm magic today. Even trying would get her turned into a laughingstock. She could already hear the nicknames forming. "The temptress who could not tempt." No, thank you.
She would fight clean. While this crippled more than half her strength, she was not helpless. As a half-step Dao Comprehension expert, she still had other means.
And Su Min, radiating divine light and chanting silently like a monk who had been cornered at a brothel, stood across from her with a look that seemed to scream, "Please do not awaken anything weird in me."
It was going to be a long, weird match.
"Begin!"
The barrier fell.
In a flash, Xuan Mengyin summoned a guqin. It was a rare earth-grade treasure and one of her sect's priceless heirlooms. While swords and sabers were commonplace, crafting a musical instrument required esoteric knowledge. Few cultivators understood the arcane harmonies needed to forge such a treasure. This guqin was the lifework of a past elder, who had aimed for heaven-grade but had to settle for earth-grade.
Yet it was more than enough.
With the first, resonant pluck of its strings, Su Min's surroundings warped. The empty arena vanished, replaced by a landscape of towering, oppressive mountain ranges. But these were not ordinary peaks. Even a mountain like Mount Everest would be insignificant to a Divine Transformation expert. Yet now, Su Min found herself genuinely, physically trapped.
"These are not mere illusions," she realized, her expression darkening. "My spiritual sense is at least equal to hers. This is a formation. So she is also a formation master. This is troublesome."
This woman was far more formidable than she had anticipated.
Meanwhile, outside the arena, the spectators gasped.
"What kind of illusion is this? Why can we see it too?!"
They watched as the entire battlefield transformed into a dense mountain forest. Illusions were supposed to affect only the target. The fact that everyone could see it meant one thing.
This was not an illusion. It was a large-scale, tangible formation.
"She has been hiding her skills! She is a formation master all along!"
"Combining formations with illusions, blurring the line between reality and fantasy. This is mental torture!"
Even the other half-step Dao Comprehension experts paled. Had they faced her, they would have been played to death. As the crowd murmured in shock, Su Min inside the formation was forced into a desperate, harried retreat, constantly assailed by inescapable, shifting terrain.
===
LOL, Su Min... Are you that scared??? Anyway, only our beloved Yingying that can reign her wild side
"林黛玉倒拔垂杨柳" → "Lin Daiyu Uproots the Willow Tree" (A playful twist on the Dream of the Red Chamber character)
"色即是空,空即是色" → "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" (Heart Sutra quote)