The "dueling ground" was a rain-slicked stretch of road before the roadside shrine, with a handful of bored villagers and the four green-robed disciples forming a loose circle. Mist clung to the rice paddies on either side, and the air tasted of wet earth and coming trouble.
Jin took his stance at one end, sword held in a classic Verdant Dragon opening form. His spiritual energy, the orthodox qi of the Mortal Foundation Middle Stage, rolled off him in visible waves—a pale green aura that made the nearby grass tremble. He looked every inch the young master, confident and cruel.
Ling Xiao stood at the other end. He had no stance. He held his walking stick not like a weapon, but like… a walking stick. He wore no aura. To the disciples' spiritual senses, he felt like a void, a patch of empty air where a cultivator's energy signature should be. It was unnerving.
"First move to the challenger!" announced one of Jin's lackeys, grinning. "Don't kill him too quick, brother Jin. Father wants him functional."
Jin's smile returned. "Don't worry. I'll just… educate him."
He moved. It wasn't the blinding speed of the Star-Seer scouts, but to Ling Xiao's senses, it was a predictable flow of ordered motion. Jin's form was textbook: a lunging thrust aimed at Ling Xiao's right shoulder, meant to disable, not kill. The green energy around the blade sharpened, whistling through the damp air.
Ling Xiao didn't have the physical reflexes to dodge a trained cultivator's strike. But he didn't need to.
He used Chaos Sensing.
He felt the world not as solid objects, but as interlocking patterns of energy and potential. He felt the thrust not just as a sword moving, but as a ripple of ordered force pushing through the chaotic tapestry of the environment. And he felt the environment's resistance—the humid air's drag, the slight unevenness of the road beneath Jin's back foot, a tiny eddy of wind from the east.
He didn't move his body. He shifted his weight, a subtle lean to the left, and raised his walking stick not to block, but to intersect the thrust at a precise, glancing angle.
Clack!
The sword tip skimmed off the hardened oak, throwing a shower of sparks. The deflection was minimal, but it was enough. The perfect, ordered line of Jin's thrust warped. The disciple stumbled forward a half-step, overbalanced, his expression switching from smug to surprised.
The villagers murmured.
"Lucky parry," Jin scoffed, regaining his stance. But his eyes narrowed. "Let's see how you handle this! Verdant Serpent's Coil!"
He stamped his foot. Green qi shot through the ground, making the muddy road writhe. Tendrils of earth and grass, infused with his energy, shot up to entangle Ling Xiao's legs—a low-level binding technique.
Ling Xiao looked down. He saw the pattern of the energy spreading through the soil—a branching, invasive root system of order. But the soil itself was chaos—a mix of clay, silt, decaying matter, air pockets, worms. The ordered energy was trying to force it all into one purpose: bind.
Ling Xiao exhaled, focusing his will. He didn't have orthodox qi to counter. So he did what Shí had taught him. He redirected.
He pushed a thread of his own chaotic awareness into the soil, not fighting Jin's energy, but complicating its command. He showed the earth a different possibility. Instead of coiling around his ankles, the energized tendrils found a cluster of hard river stones three inches to his left and coiled tightly around those instead, snapping them with a crunch.
Jin stared as the technique spent itself on meaningless rocks. "What… how are you doing that?"
Ling Xiao didn't answer. He was learning. Orthodox techniques were like precise recipes. His chaos was like convincing the ingredients to behave differently. It was incredibly efficient—he used minimal energy—but it required perfect understanding of the existing patterns. He couldn't just blast. He had to persuade.
"Enough tricks!" Jin's face flushed with anger and humiliation. He raised his sword high. "Dragon's Descending Fang!"
This was no disabling move. A crescent of concentrated green energy shot from the blade, screaming as it cut through the air toward Ling Xiao. It was wide, fast, and designed to cleave. A killing technique.
Li Ming shouted a warning.
Ling Xiao's senses exploded with information. He couldn't redirect this. The energy was too dense, too focused. He couldn't dodge. Its arc was too wide.
He had only one option left. One he'd been avoiding.
Energy Absorption.
But not from within himself. From around him.
He dropped his walking stick and raised both hands. He opened his senses to the chaotic energy suffusing the environment—the latent heat in the wet air, the static from the recent storm, the slow, grinding pressure of the earth deep below, the frantic life-force of the insects in the grass. It was a cacophony of wild, unstructured power.
As the green crescent of death descended, Ling Xiao inhaled through every pore, through his burning mark.
He pulled the ambient chaos into the path of the technique.
It wasn't a shield. It was a stormfront.
Where the ordered, sharpened edge of Jin's technique met the gathered chaos, reality stuttered.
The green crescent didn't explode. It… unraveled. Its perfect form degraded into a spray of harmless green mist that dissipated with a sound like sighing grass. The chaotic energy, now agitated and seeking release, swirled around Ling Xiao for a moment—a visible, violet-tinted haze that crackled with tiny lightnings—before sinking into his skin.
The pain was immediate and fiery. His meridians screamed as they processed the wild energy. He gasped, veins standing out on his neck and forehead, his mark blazing like a violet star. But he held his ground.
The road fell silent.
Jin stood frozen, his sword still raised, his face a mask of utter disbelief. "That's… that's not cultivation," he whispered, then his voice rose to a shout. "That's demonic deviation! You absorb wild energy! You have no core! No orthodox methods!"
He was right. To their eyes, Ling Xiao hadn't countered a technique with a stronger technique. He had dissolved it with something… unclean. Something that broke the rules.
The disciples behind Jin drew their swords, their fear palpable. The villagers backed away, making warding signs with their fingers.
"Seize him!" Jin screeched, his pride shattered into terror. "He's not a prodigy! He's a demon! A chaos demon!"
The four disciples surged forward, no longer bound by duel protocol.
Ling Xiao, still trembling from the painful absorption, knew they couldn't fight four at once. He grabbed his walking stick and turned to Li Ming. "Run!"
They ran. Not down the road, but into the mist-shrouded rice paddies, leaping over the low berms, sending up sprays of muddy water. Shouts and the sounds of pursuit followed.
"Split up!" Li Ming hissed. "Meet at the old lightning tree! Three miles north!"
Ling Xiao nodded, veering left. He used his Chaos Sensing to find the path of least resistance through the soggy, chaotic terrain. He could hear Jin's voice raging behind him, organizing the hunt.
They regrouped an hour later beneath the skeletal branches of a giant tree blackened by some ancient strike. Both were panting, covered in mud.
"They'll put a bounty on us," Li Ming said grimly, wiping his face. " 'Demonic practitioners.' That's a death sentence anywhere the sects have influence."
"I'm sorry," Ling Xiao said, the weight of his exposure heavy on him. "I didn't mean to…"
"You won," Li Ming cut him off. "You won fair, by their stupid rules. They just didn't like how. That's their problem." He managed a fierce grin. "But it's now our problem too. The Verdant Dragon Sect is small, but they're connected. Word will spread."
Ling Xiao felt the Memory Crystal pulse a warning at the back of his mind. Exposure leads to convergence. Your unique signature is now a beacon.
He thought of the Star-Seer's Alliance, of their symbol etched into the planet's dying heart. A local sect's fear was one thing. Drawing the attention of the real hunters again…
"We need to go somewhere they won't follow," Ling Xiao said.
Li Ming's grin faded. "There's only one place like that. The Ashen Wastes. Past the Fire-Gourd Mountains. It's a dead zone—no spirit veins, no resources, just bad earth and worse weather. Not even bandits go there."
A place of minimal order. A place where chaos might be the only rule.
Ling Xiao nodded. "Then that's where we go."
They moved under the cover of gathering clouds, which Ling Xiao sensed presaged another storm. They were ten miles away, heading for the barren hills, when Ling Xiao felt a new, familiar vibration through the earth—the synchronized footsteps of a mounted group moving with purpose.
He stopped, placing a hand on the ground. He didn't need the Stone to see this pattern.
"They're not just letting us go," he said softly. "They sent a hunting party. Fast ones. On spirit-horses."
Li Ming cursed. "How many?"
Ling Xiao closed his eyes, reading the tremor. "Six. And one of them… feels stronger. Much stronger. Not Jin. An elder."
He opened his eyes, meeting Li Ming's worried gaze. The Verdant Dragon Sect wasn't just putting out a bounty.
They were coming to erase their embarrassment personally.
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END OF CHAPTER 9