Chapter 215: Until We Meet Again
Lu Ruyi panted heavily.
The aurora light that had spiralled around her earlier—vibrant, layered, otherworldly—had begun to flicker. Not catastrophically. But the variance was there, the colours shifting between their natural hues rather than holding their coherent steady glow. Her spiritual energy was cycling faster than it was recovering, the sustained output of fighting at this level pressing against a limit she could feel approaching from the inside.
Her breathing had changed. Still controlled—she was too disciplined for it to be otherwise—but the intervals were slightly shorter.
Su Tianhao noticed without showing that he noticed.
He could feel his own reserves, which is to say he could feel them being effortlessly sustained. The Devouring Dragon Tactic worked in silence—ambient spiritual energy from the surrounding forest drawn inward with each breath in quantities Lu Ruyi couldn't detect, replenishing what the fight consumed as quickly as it was spent. He had been doing it since the third exchange. Mentally, eventually, the sustained concentration of combat would find its ceiling—but physically, he could continue for hours without the particular fatigue that came from genuine depletion.
Lu Ruyi didn't have that reservoir.
She had been giving everything the fight asked of her, and everything the fight asked had been considerable. Against any other opponent her age, it would have ended already. Against Su Tianhao, it had simply continued—and continued—and continued—until the gap between what she was spending and what she had left had become something she could no longer ignore.
She pressed forward for the final exchange—a sequence of three, each one carrying genuine commitment, each one answered.
Then she stopped.
She lowered her blade two inches. Not a surrender. A pause—deliberate and acknowledged.
Her chest rose and fell with more effort than it had an hour ago. The aurora around her had settled into a dim, steady shimmer—beautiful still, but quieter, like a fire that had found its sustainable level after burning hot. Her crystalline blue eyes had returned from their aurora hue to their natural colour, clear and direct and entirely undefeated.
The defiance in them hadn't moved an inch.
Su Tianhao studied her—the slight labour in her breathing, the shimmer that flickered rather than blazed, the discipline she was spending to look like she had more left than she did. He didn't say anything about any of it. He didn't need to.
Their eyes met across the clearing.
Golden. Crystalline blue.
A beat of silence that was its own kind of exchange.
Then—almost simultaneously—
"How about we decide this with one final move."
The words arrived in unison. Both of them stopped. Both of them looked at the other.
Then, without a word, they nodded.
---
Lu Ruyi wiped the sweat from her face with the back of her hand—a gesture entirely unguarded, entirely unperformed. Her long black hair had come loose during the fight, falling in dark strands across her face and down her back. Her robes clung closer than they had at the start of the morning, the exertion of the last hour having its own particular honesty. Her lips held a vindictive smile that had nothing performative about it. Her eyes burned with battle spirit that exhaustion had only sharpened.
Su Tianhao looked at her for a moment longer than he intended.
"Now you're the one staring," Lu Ruyi said, with a cheeky precision that suggested she had been waiting for exactly the right moment to use it.
She exhaled deeply.
"I'm not denying it," Su Tianhao said, his expression entirely composed. "You look beautiful, Ruyi."
The words arrived the way he delivered most things—casually, without ceremony, as though he were noting the weather.
"You—"
Her face flushed, immediate and total, and she was clearly embarrassed by it. She recovered quickly, but the recovery was visible.
'How does someone this perceptive remain this oblivious,' she thought with mounting frustration. 'Who does that?'
"What?" Su Tianhao raised an eyebrow.
"Nothing." Her lips twitched. She shook it off and let her gaze sharpen. "Prepare yourself. Don't hold back." A pause, and then something more direct: "I want to see the technique you used against Torin."
'She means Severing Shadow.'
Su Tianhao considered this.
The Severing Shadow multiplied his full output fivefold—his base of 220,000 reaching 1,100,000 in a single motion. Combined with Dragon God Enchantment, that figure scaled to something that could genuinely threaten 4th Level Martial Core experts. But the Enchantment was spent, and a third activation would cost more than the fight was worth. Without it, the Severing Shadow still produced 1,100,000 pounds in a single flash—and with the Heavenly Surge Rune's twofold amplification feeding into that baseline, the ceiling was higher still.
Lu Ruyi had a trump card. He was certain of it. He simply didn't know its shape.
It didn't matter. The mathematics, even conservatively, favoured him.
He said nothing. He let Dark Nether return to its sheath.
Crimson-gold energy coiled around him—compressed, contained, drawn tight against his presence rather than projected outward. His golden eyes quieted into something ancient and very still. A predator not stalking but waiting, which is its own particular kind of threat.
Across from him, Lu Ruyi's spiritual energy flared like a beacon igniting.
Aurora light spiralled outward from her in slow, ascending rings—beautiful and layered and cold, the kind of beauty that carries consequence. Her eyes shifted, crystalline blue bleeding into a mesmerising aurora hue that seemed lit from somewhere behind the iris rather than by it. Her aura compressed and then expanded again with controlled force, and the air around her trembled with the weight of her Sword Will manifesting before she had taken a single step.
"I've never lost when using my strongest attack," she said. "Not once."
"That changes today," Su Tianhao answered, with the calm of someone stating a conclusion he had already reached rather than a prediction he was making.
His thumb pressed fractionally against Dark Nether's guard.
The blade shifted in its sheath—just a sliver of obsidian black visible in the gap—and the darkness in the clearing seemed to lean toward it.
Twenty metres of charged silence stretched between them.
Lu Ruyi's grip tightened. Her stance shifted, so slightly that anyone not already at the Realm of Perfect Edge wouldn't have registered it as the tell it was.
Su Tianhao registered it.
His weight settled onto his back foot.
Squish. Squish. Squish.
Both of them heard it at the same moment—footsteps, unhurried and approaching, the rhythmic snap of ironpine needles underfoot carrying clearly through the concentrated stillness of the clearing.
They didn't look at each other. They looked at the tree line.
"Someone's coming," Su Tianhao said. The irritation in his voice was entirely genuine.
The gathered aura—his compressed crimson-gold, her spiralling aurora—dissolved simultaneously, both of them releasing it without ceremony. Lu Ruyi's sword found its sheath in one fluid motion. Su Tianhao's hand fell away from Dark Nether's hilt.
"Damnit."
The word left his mouth before he chose to say it.
Lu Ruyi's smile arrived at once—warm and unhelpfully satisfied. She activated her movement technique, crossing the distance between them in seconds.
She stood before him—close enough that he could still catch the faintest trace of the fight's heat coming off her. Her crystalline blue eyes, returned to their natural colour, looked directly into his.
"We'll finish this," she said. Her voice had dropped into something quieter, the teasing edge set aside. "But next time—I want a proper stage. Millions watching."
"What are you—"
"The Three Great Sects Competition, rascal."
One tap on his nose—swift and entirely without dignity—and she turned sharply toward the tree line.
"Until we meet again."
She moved. One step, a branch, the momentum converted upward—and she was airborne, rising through the canopy in a single clean arc.
A massive shape dove in from above with startling speed—emerald feathers catching the morning light, ivory beak gleaming, wingspan throwing shade across the clearing in a single sweep. Qiongqi arrived like a falling comet and caught Lu Ruyi mid-arc without slowing. In the same motion, those great jade wings beat once—a sharp, powerful percussion that rustled every tree in a twenty-metre radius—and they were gone.
Su Tianhao blinked.
He tracked the diminishing speck of emerald against the brightening sky until it vanished into cloud.
Then he looked at the empty branch she had used. Then at the clearing. Then at the tree line where the footsteps were still approaching.
"Quite the exit," he said to no one in particular. His expression was composed.
His lips, however, had curved in a way he wasn't managing.
'Three Great Sects Competition. What is that exactly?'
The question had just settled into his mind when a pine needle snapped closer than the last—and he turned toward it with a slight frown.
A figure emerged from between the ironpines.
Su Lei.
The Outer Court uniform suited him in a way that managed to look both earned and inevitable—blue robes fitting cleanly to his frame, silver trim catching the morning light in a way that matched his distinctive silver hair almost exactly, as if someone had designed the uniform with him specifically in mind. His sword hung at his waist in a white scabbard, and his eyes lit up the moment they found Su Tianhao.
"Tianhao!" He raised a hand.
"Su Lei."
The name came out low and even—and the frown on Su Tianhao's face dissolved as he said it, replaced by something quieter and considerably warmer.
Su Lei quickened his pace and swept the clearing as he entered it—unhurried, thorough. His eyes moved across the scarred bark, the fresh craters, the deep gashes in the packed earth. They stopped on a particular ironpine: a nine-inch wound cut several inches deep into bark that had no business being cut at all, its edges still faintly luminous with residual energy, a thin curl of smoke rising from the deepest point.
A low whistle left him. "I thought I might find you here. But this—"
"Why are you here?" Su Tianhao asked, bypassing the question before it could form fully. He wasn't going to explain this clearing. He couldn't.
"I wanted to ask if you'd join me to redeem our Cloud Points." Su Lei's eyes moved back to him with easy curiosity. "I went to your cottage first—you weren't there."
"I see." He nodded once. According to Su Mei, his allocation had been pending the friendly competition results. With the rankings confirmed, there was nothing holding it.
"Alright," Su Tianhao said. "Let's go."
The two of them turned and walked back through the Ironpine Woods toward the Stonehaven Grove—side by side, unhurried, the morning light finding them through the canopy in long, warm intervals.
The clearing settled behind them.
In the ironpine trunk where Lu Ruyi's Night Cleaver had landed, the molten glow along the cut's edges had begun to fade—cooling slowly, returning the bark to something that resembled its ordinary self. The nine precise lines Su Tianhao's Ninefold Deathflash had carved into a separate trunk remained perfectly parallel, each one as clean as the last, geometry made from intent rather than measurement.
The clearing kept its silence.
Dark Nether—sheathed, still, riding at Su Tianhao's waist—gave one last, quiet hum as the light shifted through the canopy above.
Then that, too, went still.