The heavy, spirit-reinforced gate slammed shut behind Lin Feng with a final, resonant clang that echoed not in sound, but in the bones of those who watched.
Silence.
Not the peaceful quiet of Veiled Silence Peak, but the pressurized, anticipatory hush of a tomb. Lin Feng stood alone in the center of the scarred, marble-tiled arena, a solitary figure of pale grey against the dark stone. Above him, the massive pane of Heavenly Obsidian dome warped the world, framing the faces of a hundred spectators.
They were a tapestry of expressions.
High on the terraced seating, a group of female disciples from the Cerulean Cloud Clan leaned so far forward they seemed ready to topple over the railing. Their earlier giggles were gone, replaced by breathless, wide-eyed fascination. They weren't here for the beast. They were here for him—for the stark, flawless lines of his profile, the unnerving stillness that seemed to draw all the light in the arena toward him.
"By the heavens, he's not even nervous," one whispered, her voice hushed with awe.
Nearby, a minor elder with the stern demeanor of a drill instructor watched with crossed arms, his face a mask of professional assessment. But beside him, a woman of seemingly middle years stood apart. Her robes were a deep plum, marking a mid-level administrative rank. Her hands were clasped delicately before her, but her knuckles were white. Her gaze on Lin Feng was not one of mere curiosity; it was intense, proprietary, burning with a fervor that bordered on the devotional. She was not watching a disciple; she was witnessing a revelation she felt privileged to behold.
On a higher walkway, Mo Yun's brush flew across his scroll, sketching not the arena, but the crowd, annotating reactions, calculating social dynamics. Jian Nian remained a statue in the shadows, his scarred palms resting on the railing, his entire being focused on the figure below. And Shi Jian, the massive disciple, simply watched, his arms like crossed pillars of stone, his expression unreadable.
The Arena Master, from his control niche, gave a sharp, grudging signal.
A deep, mechanical groan answered from the far side of the arena. A secondary gate, thick with rust and older scars, began to grind open, revealing a yawning mouth of darkness.
For three full heartbeats, nothing emerged. Only the silence, growing heavier, thicker.
Then, it came.
A sensation first, not a sound. A high-frequency thrum that vibrated unpleasantly in the teeth, a dissonant buzzing that set the nerves on edge. It was the feeling of a bone saw heard from another room, felt through the floor.
A shadow detached itself from the absolute blackness of the gate. It did not walk or run. It unfolded.
The Umbra-Shriek Howler entered the world not with a roar, but with a terrible, silent grace.
It was the size of a young wolf, but its wingspan was grotesquely large, a tattered, living shroud that seemed to drink the light from the air around it. Its form was a matte, unsettling black, like a patch of solid shadow that refused to shift with the light. It wasn't the black of its fur, but a flat, depthless absence that made the eyes strain to focus on it.
Its face was a hairless, wrinkled mask of pale grey skin, stretched tight over a sharp skull. Its eyes were large, milky-white, and utterly blind. It turned its head, and those sightless orbs seemed to sweep over Lin Feng, seeing not with light, but with the pressure in the air, the minute currents of his breath.
It opened its mouth.
The needle-like teeth were a shocking white against the matte black color of its body. No sound emerged that the ears could register, but the arena floor trembled. A series of powerful, silent echolocation clicks hit Lin Feng's body like physical pressure waves, testing his form, mapping his density, searching for weakness.
From above, a disciple snorted, trying to mask his fear with bravado. "An Umbra-Shriek? That's it? It's just a fancy bat. Its sonic scream can give you a headache, that's all. This will be over quickly."
The minor elder in plum allowed herself a small, knowing smile. They saw a simple beast. She saw a perfect, brutal test. Without qi to reinforce his body, those sonic pulses would feel like hammers on his bones, and its bite could sever tendon from bone. Arrogance often broke on the simplest of obstacles.
Lin Feng did not shift into a combat stance. He didn't tense. He simply watched the creature unfold its light-eating wings. His head was tilted just slightly, as if listening to a distant, familiar song.
His dark eyes held no fear, no anticipation. Only a deep, bottomless curiosity.
The Umbra-Shriek Howler did not charge. It did not snarl. It simply flowed into the air, a spill of living darkness. Its movements were silent, unnervingly precise, a predator that had executed this same maneuver ten thousand times. It identified the threat. It calculated the range. It began its immutable strategy: maintain distance, disorient, destroy.
Its blind, milky-white eyes fixed on the still figure. Its chest cavity swelled, a grotesque inflation of flesh and bone gathering power.
Then, it unleashed.
Not a roar. A weapon.
A visible cone of distorted air, shimmering like heat haze, rocketed across the arena. It tore a shallow furrow in the marble tiles, sending a spray of stone chips dusting the air in its wake. The sound that accompanied it was not heard—it was felt. A concussive, brain-scrambling wave of pure force meant to liquefy resolve, shatter eardrums, and turn bones to jelly.
It struck Lin Feng dead-center.
The impact was violent. The marble at his feet spider-webbed, cracking under the transferred force. The air around him shimmered, warped by the brutal sonic payload. The tails of his pale grey robes fluttered and snapped violently behind him, whipped by the concussive wind.
The spectators above flinched as one, a collective, subconscious recoil. One of the Cerulean Cloud disciples gasped, her hands flying to her own ears in sympathetic pain. The Arena Master's single good eye narrowed, waiting for the inevitable collapse.
Lin Feng took the hit.
And did nothing.
The beast's piercing shriek—a sound meant to cripple a Body Tempering cultivator and disorient those even at the Meridian Opening stage washed over him. It passed through him. It found nothing to hold onto.
His body absorbed the vibration, the null-frequency, as if it were a sigh. The violent force that cracked stone dissipated against his skin, his bones, his very cells, like a wave breaking harmlessly against a cliff face of impossible density.
He didn't stagger. He didn't flinch. He didn't even blink away the dust.
He merely… blinked.
A single, slow, deliberate lowering and raising of his eyelids. A flicker of something—not alarm, not pain, but pure, undiluted clinical curiosity—passed behind his dark, bored eyes for a nanosecond. It was the look of a scholar observing a mildly interesting result in a controlled experiment.
His head tilted a fraction of an inch, as if adjusting to a new frequency.
Then, it was gone.
His expression settled back into its state of profound, utter boredom. The silence left in the wake of the shriek was louder than the attack itself.
A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile of triumph, but of confirmation. A private, darkly amusing truth had just been verified.
The beast's primary weapon was useless.
'...Interesting,' Lin Feng thought, the observation cool and detached, a single note in a vast mental ledger. 'A concussive sonic attack. It should be vibrating my bones, scrambling my thoughts. But it's not. It's just... noise. My body... absorbed it? No, it's more like it simply failed to exist the moment it touched me. This is new.'
The curiosity was noted and filed away. It was a data point, nothing more.
The Umbra-Shriek, its blind mind unable to process the lack of result, shrieked again. Another visible cone of distorted air slammed into him, cracking the stone at his feet into a finer web.
Same result.
Lin Feng didn't even blink the second time. His expression remained one of profound, almost insulting boredom.
The Execution began. Not with fury, but with clinical dissection.
Lin Feng watched, his dark eyes lazily tracking its frantic, silent flight path. It was a predictable, panicked loop: shriek, bank left, gain altitude, dive, shriek again. A pattern of desperation.
He didn't summon energy. He didn't adopt a flashy stance. He simply timed it. His body was a coiled spring of patient potential.
On the beast's next diving approach, as it drew a breath to unleash another useless cry, Lin Feng moved.
It was not a blur of motion, but a study in perfect, efficient economy. He took two swift, precise steps to his right, positioning himself directly in the creature's blind spot. Then, he performed a short, powerful jump—not superhuman, just perfectly calculated—meeting the creature's trajectory at the exact intersection point.
His hand shot out with the efficient grace of a striking hawk. Not to grab its body, but to snag the very leading edge of its leathery wing at the exact apex of its dive.
He didn't try to overpower it in the air.
He used its own immense momentum against it. He pulled down and torqued his body in a brutal, professional arc, adding his weight to its velocity. It was a savage Judo-style sacrifice throw, applied to a creature of flight.
He guided the creature's unstoppable dive directly into the unyielding marble floor.
The impact was not a thud. It was a wet, brutal crunch of bone and cartilage meeting absolute solidity. The sound echoed dully in the silenced arena.
The beast lay stunned, its wing bent at a grotesque, impossible angle, its silent shrieks now pathetic, choked gurgles.
Lin Feng landed in a crouch beside it, his balance perfect, his pale robes settling around him without a sound.
The clinical dissection was not finished.
His expression did not change. No rage, no satisfaction. Only the same bored focus.
His right fist hammered down. Once. A piston strike to the base of its skull. A sickening crack. The beast jolted. Twice. The same point. The same force. Bone yielded completely. Thrice. A final, definitive impact. The creature's form shuddered and fell still, the unsettling, matte-black darkness faded, revealing nothing but soggy, matted fur.
The fight was over.
Lin Feng straightened up from his crouch. He casually brushed a single, imaginary speck of dust from his pristine sleeve. His eyes fell upon the broken creature for a half-second, his face a canvas devoid of triumph, disgust, or pity. It was a task. It had been completed.
'Predictable. A linear attack pattern. The sonic focus creates a critical blind spot in its physical awareness. Inefficient.'
He turned his bored, impassive gaze back toward the Arena Master's control booth, waiting for what came next. The silence in the wake of the sudden, shocking violence was absolute, a vacuum waiting to be filled.
Then, the spell broke.
A collective, shuddering exhale swept through the spectators above. It was followed by a wave of murmurs, rising from a hushed whisper to a disbelieving buzz.
"Ha! A Body Tempering beast!" a brash disciple from the Rustless Blade Clan scoffed, trying to mask his unease with bravado. He crossed his arms, his demeanor arrogant. "Any one of us could have handled that thing. This proves nothing. He just has a flair for the dramatic."
His companion, however, elbowed him sharply. "Without a weapon? Without any qi? Did you see the way he moved? That wasn't flair. That was... calculation."
On the elevated walkway, Mo Yun's brush flew across his scroll, his movements sharp and precise. "A flawless translation of momentum," he murmured, his voice low and intense. "To use the beast's own strength as the killing blow... the elegance of it. A masterstroke of applied force." He was not just watching; he was dissecting, his mind cataloging every nuance of the execution.
Jian Nian, the mute disciple, remained a statue in the shadows. But his hands, resting on the railing, had tightened. His sharp eyes were wide, blazing with a silent, desperate intensity. He saw a language of motion he ached to speak.
Shi Jian, the massive disciple, gave a single, slow, deliberate nod from his vantage point. It was a gesture of deep, professional respect from one who understood pure, unadulterated power.
Near the control niche, a cluster of minor elders conferred, their voices a low hum of authority.
"Preposterous physicality for one who hasn't formally established his meridians," one muttered, stroking his beard. "Elder Lan would not choose a disciple without reason. This... this is a glimpse of it."
Another, a woman with sharp features and a stern gaze, nodded. "The Silent Blade seeks a certain... quality. Not brute force, but precision. A will that mirrors her own. He moves like a blade being sharpened."
The elder in the plum robes watched, her hands still clasped tightly. She did not join their analysis. Her smile was small, private, and utterly fervent. "You all speak of technique and reason," she said, her voice barely a whisper meant only for herself. "But you miss it. You see the action, but not the essence. That was not a fight. It was a statement."
In his control niche, the Arena Master stared, his single eye wide. The scowl was gone, replaced by a look of pure, unvarnished shock. He looked from the corpse to the unnervingly calm disciple, then down at his ledger. He had seen thousands of matches. None had ended like this. With a grunt that was half concession, half awe, he slammed his fist on a crystal control node.
"Fine," he growled to the attendant next to him, his voice carrying a new, grudging respect. "The pup wants a real challenge. Prepare the Meridian Opening-level beast. Let's see how he handles fangs that can actually pierce his skin."
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