The plaza before Wavewatch Pavilion, where banners had blotted out the sun and voices had rolled like surf, had emptied out completely.
The vast entry-ceremony grounds were bare enough to feel desolate now. Only a handful of Mohist Gate stewards remained behind the registration tables, thick roster scrolls spread open in front of them, pages turned at idle intervals.
Into this stillness, two figures came tearing down the far end of the main street in a manner that could not be called dignified.
The one in front was Gu Chengming of the Wenjian Sect. His robes were in order, but sweat beaded faintly at his temple and his stride had long since passed anything that could be described as brisk walking.
The one behind was swallowed in a grey hooded cloak so oversized it bordered on comical, the brim pulled low enough to hide the entire face along with that far too conspicuous white hair. Only a sliver of chin showed.
The hem flapped wildly with every step, giving the impression of a mushroom being blown along by the wind.
Which was to say: the most talked-about Third Realm cultivator of the current age, and the body-refinement technique he had manifested less than four hours ago.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, are we late?" came Hundred Bones Resonance's voice from under the cloak, full-throated and utterly unwinded.
"Hundred Emperor. Don't use that name for now."
"Oh." Hundred Bones Resonance managed obedience for half a breath. "Then, Gu Chengming, are we late?"
The two of them skidded to a halt at the registration table.
The Mohist Gate steward behind it looked up, swept an expressionless glance over the panting Gu Chengming, then over the figure behind him.
"Wenjian Sect?"
"Yes." Gu Chengming cupped his hands. "Gu Chengming, disciple of Huiyuan Gate, team leader. Urgent business held me up and I missed the entry ceremony. I've come to register late."
The steward leafed through the roster, made a check beside Gu Chengming's name, then jerked his chin toward Hundred Bones Resonance. "And this one?"
Gu Chengming had his answer ready. "An attending disciple of the Wenjian Sect. She wasn't on the formal list for certain reasons. I'd ask that she be added."
He handed over an identity jade token prepared in advance, a spare slot he had scrambled to obtain from Elder Han Che before leaving. The Wenjian Sect had not filled its quota of competing disciples this time, so slipping one more person in was no trouble at all.
The steward took the token, ran a routine check on its spiritual power imprint, confirmed it was in order, and nodded.
"Both of you pour spiritual power into these tokens. The Secret Realm entrance is in the teleportation formation behind you." He paused, then added, "The disciples of the various sects were sent in by groups an hour ago. Once inside, you'll be dropped at random into the region matching your realm. Find your own sect members from there."
Gu Chengming accepted two brand-new jade tokens and passed one to Hundred Bones Resonance.
A hand emerged from under the hood to take it. She turned it over twice, studying it, then leaned close to Gu Chengming's ear and lowered her voice. "What is this thing for?"
"You'll find out once we're inside."
The steward cleared his throat beside them, evidently feeling obliged to discharge one last duty.
"A moment, if you would. Allow me to run through the rules of this Secret Realm tournament once more."
Gu Chengming was about to say that wouldn't be necessary, they were in a hurry, but the steward had already started, speaking fast, clearly reciting a script he had rattled off a thousand times.
"Within the Secret Realm, the true bodies of all cultivators are shielded by the realm's source formation. Only spirit soul and projection are cast inside. Even grievous injury or death results in nothing worse than expulsion from the realm, with no harm to the body in the waking world."
The steward flipped a page in his memorandum and read on.
"Therefore no methods are forbidden within the Secret Realm. All of you may fight with everything you have and hold nothing back."
Gu Chengming nodded. That rule followed the same logic as the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror, essentially a safe sandbox where you could cut loose. What came next, however, gradually drew his brows together.
"The Secret Realm is vast, and strictly divided by cultivation realm. Third Realm cultivators are dropped into Third Realm territory, Fourth Realm elders into Fourth Realm high-danger territory, and so on down the line. Crossing the boundaries is not permitted."
"Scattered through the outer rim and the folded spaces are a great number of historical projections. Each is a renowned great cultivator or peerless prodigy of ages past, reproduced from the memories held in the realm's spirit veins, each carrying the signature art that made their name in life, endlessly re-enacting it between heaven and earth."
"Participants may observe these projections' techniques and sword intent from the outer rim to aid their own cultivation. However"
He glanced at Gu Chengming.
"if you trust in your own strength, you may also challenge a historical projection directly. The victor may draw out the essence of the dao arts condensed within it and receive a generous sum of points."
"Points are the sole measure in this tournament. Every participant's current total will be displayed above their head. Defeating another participant lets you strip away the greater part of their points outright."
Gu Chengming's expression grew rather peculiar.
"Furthermore, extraction formation nodes are scattered at random throughout the realm. They allow you to make your points and insights manifest and carry them out safely. Should greed get the better of you and you go wandering the wilds with a fortune in points, one ambush by a stronger cultivator and every point is gone. All that effort, wasted."
The steward shut his memorandum and delivered one final line in flat officialese. "Those are the rules in full. May fortune favor you both in battle."
Loot, fight, extract. Again?
Tianque Secret Realm ran on this model, and now the Grand Tournament's Secret Realm ran on it too. Did the secret realm designer of this game only know one trick?
Gu Chengming glanced at Hundred Bones Resonance beside him. Under the cloak, the girl was turning the jade token over and over in her hands, both eyes peering curiously through the gap beneath the brim, entirely unaware of what sort of place she was about to be thrown into. He started to say something, some version of stay close to me once we're inside, then thought better of it. Given her temperament, saying it and not saying it would amount to much the same thing.
Complaints aside, the rules were what they were. He poured spiritual power into the token, and beside him Hundred Bones Resonance copied the motion exactly.
Both tokens lit with a deep blue glow, and the teleportation formation beneath their feet activated.
The light flared white-hot. Vision drowned in it.
In the last instant Hundred Bones Resonance seized the hem of Gu Chengming's robe with a grip strong enough to nearly tear the outer layer off him.
The transit was brief. She landed worse than he did, staggering two steps before she caught her balance, the hood slipping back off her head with the impact to reveal that white hair, glaringly bright in the sunlight.
No. There was no sunlight.
Gu Chengming registered the problem the moment he opened his eyes.
The sky overhead was a heavy, brooding dark red. No sun, no moon, no clouds. Only a layer of spiritual pressure so thick it seemed nearly congealed, hanging low like a curtain of lead, smothering the whole land in a stifling gloom.
The ground underfoot was ashen black, its surface crossed and recrossed with gullies.
Those gullies were not the work of weathering. Every cut was too clean, and the lingering resonance of sword intent still clung to their edges.
Gu Chengming found himself looking down at the nearest of them. Behind him, Hundred Bones Resonance had noticed the wrongness too.
He raised his head, gaze passing over the gullies and out across the terrain ahead.
The wasteland ran to the horizon, wrecked from end to end. Several beast carcasses of a size that made his scalp prickle lay scattered within sight, each frozen in its final living posture. Some crouched to pounce, some with heads thrown back mid-roar. Every last one of them had been beheaded. The severed surfaces were mirror-flat, without the slightest ragged edge, the clean work of a single killing stroke.
And far beyond those carcasses, a stone stele broken off at the middle stood alone at the wasteland's end.
The formation patterns and archaic characters on the stele glimmered faintly under the dark red sky. Gu Chengming narrowed his eyes and picked them out one by one.
The Fallen Immortal Abyss.
Hold on. Weren't Third Realm disciples supposed to be ratting around in the outer rim?
Why had he been shipped straight into the core zone?
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula, gravely: This is no ground for a Third Realm cultivator to tread. I fear the teleportation formation has erred.]
Gu Chengming's thoughts ran the same way. Whether the formation had malfunctioned on its own or the man in the moon-white brocade robe had tampered with the Secret Realm, the urgent thing now was getting out of this Fourth Realm territory.
In Third Realm territory he could walk sideways and nobody could stop him. But the spiritual pressure here, the tier of the historical projections, even the Fourth Realm cultivators he might run into, none of it was anything he could meet head-on right now.
He scanned the surroundings fast, hunting for any passage that might lead to a lower region. In every direction the wasteland offered the same ashen black ground and the same crisscrossing gullies. Not a trace of a formation transit point anywhere.
Crimson gale winds came howling in from the distance, thick with choking dust. Visibility was terrible. Forget finding a route, even fixing a direction was difficult. Gu Chengming was frowning, about to send up a flying sword and search from altitude, when something caught at the edge of his vision.
Far ahead, at the wasteland's end, perhaps a hundred zhang out, the empty air began to twist without warning.
The ash-black sand storming through the sky froze along the edge of that distortion, and in the same instant the crimson gale stopped howling.
Then a figure resolved out of the twisted air.
A humanoid phantom, its back to them.
It wore a ruined sword robe of tremendous age. The star chart once embroidered across it had faded almost entirely, leaving only a few points of light still barely legible, like the last stars guttering out in a night sky.
Around the phantom orbited several hundred flying swords.
No. They couldn't be called flying swords.
They were more like the wreckage of flying swords, every one snapped or warped. Yet even so, the sword intent radiating off those hundreds of broken blades as they turned slowly through the air stacked and compounded into a pressure so terrible it made Gu Chengming's scalp crawl.
A historical projection.
Gu Chengming was already running the odds on escape. It had its back to them, it apparently hadn't yet
Even as he thought it, the phantom's head shifted, like dead wood swaying carelessly in the wind.
An instant later, the orbits of all several hundred broken swords changed at once, and killing intent bared itself.
Every route of Retreat was sealed shut the moment that killing intent unfolded.
A hundred zhang ahead. A hundred zhang behind. A hundred zhang to either side.
A killing net centered on the Sword Immortal's phantom, with him and Hundred Bones Resonance as the bullseye, closed soundlessly in less than a breath.
Only one thought remained in Gu Chengming's head.
Seriously? Cornered by a boss at the spawn point again?
The white-haired girl stood half a step behind him, hood long since fallen back. She rolled her wrist, and her knuckles cracked crisply.
"The first battle after This Emperor takes form ought to be against an opponent of exactly this caliber."
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, leave your back to me and rest easy!"
Gu Chengming looked at that profile, so earnest it verged on absurd, and for a moment genuinely couldn't tell whether what rose in him was gratitude or a headache.
The Sword Immortal's phantom had turned fully around. Its hollow eye sockets burned with dark blue sword flame, and all several hundred broken swords trembled at once, giving off a low droning hum.
The instant the phantom raised its hand, Gu Chengming moved.
Ten flying swords burst out of him and wove themselves in the space of a heartbeat into an airtight Ten Perfections Sword Formation.
At the same time, the Harmonious Joy Sect's Sword Domain unfurled without reservation.
That peculiar law belonging solely to the red dust sword dao spread forward like an invisible veil of water, trying to blunt the enemy's will to fight, to slow that Fourth Realm phantom's murderous resolve by even half a beat.
But then a vast, deathly stillness detonated out of the phantom's body. Ashen light diffused from it and congealed in midair into a Sword Domain the color of bleached bone and the texture of rotted wood.
For any living thing that stepped inside, the circulation of spiritual power turned thick and sluggish, like being dropped into a bog of decay. Worse still, the intangible emotion-shaping law within Gu Chengming's Harmonious Joy Sect Sword Domain was visibly corroding and peeling away under that death aura.
This Fourth Realm phantom had awakened a Sword Domain of its own.
Where the two domains slammed together, the ten flying swords shuddered violently along the seam, formation patterns flickering in and out, barely holding their rotation.
Gu Chengming cursed inwardly. He had always known he could kill across realms into the Fourth, but exactly how far up that ladder he could climb was something he had never actually field-tested.
This phantom would rank near the very top even among real Fourth Realm cultivators, and while his Ten Perfections Sword Formation was exquisite, against this thing it fell short.
He worked the formation through a grinding exchange, hunting for a single opening in an offense that seemed to have none.
Then he saw Hundred Bones Resonance. The white-haired girl had her eyes fixed hard on the phantom ahead, coiled and ready.
And then, as if by some unspoken understanding, the moment Gu Chengming's assault slackened, Hundred Bones Resonance took up the slack.
Boom!
Fist met sword qi and the shockwave blew outward. Hundred Bones Resonance was rocked back two steps, then came right back in with another punch.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Punch after punch, every one taken head-on, a style so brutishly direct it left openings by the dozen.
Watching from behind, Gu Chengming winced. In any normal sparring match, any peak Third Realm sword cultivator could have exploited at least thirty of those openings to cut her down.
The problem was that for Hundred Bones Resonance they weren't openings at all, because she could eat the hits.
When the phantom's sword qi sliced across her forearm, her shoulder, her ribs, the sound it made was not flesh tearing. It was a bright metallic ring.
Gu Chengming noticed the detail but had no time to chase it down, because her insane frontal charge was genuinely carrying an enormous share of the pressure for him. The phantom had to divert part of its offense to deal with this bulldozing white-haired lunatic, and the recoil hammering back through the Ten Perfections Sword Formation eased by a clear twenty percent.
As the two Sword Domains ground against each other, every few breaths produced an extremely brief stall. In the instant the Withered Bone Sword Domain's corrosive force and the Harmonious Joy Sect Sword Domain's soothing law canceled out, a gap of less than half a breath opened in the phantom's defenses.
"Hundred Emperor!" Gu Chengming shouted. "Next exchange, I hold, you strike!"
Hundred Bones Resonance heard him, and the girl's eyes blazed.
Gu Chengming hurled himself backward, and in that same instant poured every scrap of his spiritual sense into the Ten Perfections Sword Formation.
The ten flying swords reconfigured at speed. What had been a spread plane linked head to tail within a single breath and became a three-dimensional cage traced with revolving yin-yang patterns. With a hard snap, it clamped the Sword Immortal's phantom and its Withered Bone Sword Domain together inside.
The phantom raged. All several hundred broken swords shot outward at once, hammering the cage walls.
The patterns cracked. The spirit light guttered.
It wouldn't hold long. One breath at most. It was enough.
The flagstone under Hundred Bones Resonance's feet shattered, fractures racing outward from her for several zhang.
The next instant she vanished from where she stood, became a white afterimage, and drove straight into the failing cage of swords.
Then the fists came down like rain.
The void gave off a heavy, muffled roar, not the sound of spiritual power exploding but of space itself resonating under an appalling impact. Crimson-gold blood energy surged across her knuckles, so dense it was nearly solid, and where her fists passed, the very air compressed into a visible shockwave.
That power. Gu Chengming knew it far too well.
"Hundred Emperor, Aid Me."
The supreme strike that cost him every ounce of strength in his body to throw. The trump-card-tier active effect of a CG in his system, and Hundred Bones Resonance was using it as a basic attack.
Bam bam bam bam bam bam!
Every punch landed with exactly the same force as the first. No windup, no pause, no sign of decay. Each one carried with it the blood-energy dharma image of an ancient Sovereign, fist-shadows layering upon fist-shadows like a cloudburst, the terrible pulses of blood energy rattling the half-shattered sword cage until it drifted apart at the seams.
Watching from the rear, Gu Chengming felt his scalp go numb.
Damn it, so the Endless War God really was a buff?
So I've been holding the Hundred Emperor back this whole time?
Hundred Emperor, you aren't actually a heavenly emperor, are you?
It wasn't as though the phantom failed to fight back. Quite the opposite. After that one breath of confinement it had already torn free, and its hundreds of broken swords lashed back savagely while Hundred Bones Resonance stayed glued to it. The razor sword qi of a Fourth Realm Sword Immortal came down on her one stroke after another.
Any Third Realm cultivator would have been shredded on the spot by a single one of them.
But when those strokes hit Hundred Bones Resonance, the sound they made was ting, ting, ting ting.
Through the shock, something clicked in Gu Chengming's mind, and every clue linked up at once.
Hundred Bones Resonance's panel had been locked by the system because she had left technique form behind and become a living person. But what the system had locked was his access to the technique, not the technique's own properties.
Her body was the complete manifestation of the Hundred Bones Resonance body-refinement technique.
Which meant her current state kept her, every single moment, inside the passive amplification of the Primordial Emperor Art CG's second stage, "Sovereign."
And "Hundred Emperor, Aid Me" wasn't an ultimate she had to charge up. It was simply the strength she already possessed.
Her basic attack was an ultimate. Her baseline was her peak.
Gu Chengming drew a slow breath through his teeth.
No wonder the system locked the panel.
If it hadn't, wouldn't that have handed him a human nuclear warhead and a fully-loaded cultivation technique at the same time?
Designer: This won't do. Far too unbalanced.
In light of Gu Chengming's standout performance last season, and in order to reduce his power level, we have temporarily revoked his access to Hundred Bones Resonance and split Hundred Bones Resonance off as a separate unit.
Huh? Why are there so many bugs after the split?
Damn it, who gave Hundred Bones Resonance numbers this high?
If a designer really existed, odds were he'd be thinking the same thing Gu Chengming was.
Because from the state of the fight, the phantom was not getting a chance to run.
Every punch trailed wind, every punch thundered, every punch a full-power blow of identical weight landing squarely on the phantom's torso.
Its star-chart robe tore apart and scattered in the fist-wind. The hundreds of broken swords orbiting it were blasted away and shattered one after another in the shockwaves.
More and more fissures opened across the phantom's body, spirit light leaking from the cracks like porcelain hammered once too often and finally reaching the point of collapse.
In midair Hundred Bones Resonance twisted her waist and hips, funneling the strength of her whole body into her right fist, and drove a punch wrapped in a sonic boom and imperial aura into the phantom's chest.
And then
The phantom disintegrated inside the storm of imperial fist-shadows, dissolving into a sky full of pure points of light.
The lights scattered outward from the center of its collapse like a sudden meteor shower.
Those motes carried the essence and insight of this ancient Sword Immortal's dao arts, drifting down in a slow rain. Some sank into Hundred Bones Resonance's jade token. Others crossed dozens of zhang to fly into Gu Chengming's.
Both tokens lit up bright at once.
Gu Chengming glanced down at the point total ticking upward on his token and raised an eyebrow.
The yield from killing a Fourth Realm historical projection really was nothing the Third Realm regions could match.
The raging gale gradually settled.
The dark red wasteland returned to its former deathly quiet, save for the countless fist craters and shattered stone now littering the ground, and a few broken sword fragments scattered here and there, every trace of sword intent gone out of them.
The motes of light had not yet fully faded. Fine glimmering flecks drifted down through windless air like a silent golden snow.
Gu Chengming stood where he was, looking at the white figure ahead of him.
Hundred Bones Resonance stood at the center of the wasteland, bare feet planted on flagstones she had smashed apart herself. She drew her right fist back slowly, fingers uncurling one at a time, the last of the crimson-gold blood energy still shimmering and guttering across her knuckles against the falling light.
At some point the hood had slipped off entirely.
Snow-white hair stirred faintly in the windless air, dust from the fight clinging to a few strands. The sleeves of her training clothes were still rolled to the elbow, and on the forearms they exposed were a few shallow bruises, the only marks Fourth Realm sword qi had managed to leave.
It was a striking figure from behind. Then she turned her head, her gaze crossing the drifting flecks of light to fix straight on Gu Chengming, and in the middle of that golden rain she broke into a brilliant grin.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu!"
She called out to him, her voice carrying a delight she probably hadn't noticed herself.
"Did you see that?"
Gu Chengming looked at the white-haired girl laughing without a shred of guard in the golden rain, and sighed to himself.
This is bad. Why does it feel like the Hundred Emperor's the one unlocking my CGs now?
…
Meanwhile.
At the center of Floating Isle City, deep inside the Mohist Gate's main hall, the four walls were inlaid with dense bronze plates of formation patterns, spirit light coursing endlessly along the grooves so that the whole space flickered light and dark.
Suspended dead center was a water mirror roughly two men wide, its surface split into dozens of panes of varying size. Each pane corresponded to a key spirit vein node inside the Secret Realm: verdant forests, deep gorges, a fire domain rolling with flame, a snowfield frozen for ten thousand li. These were the regions of the Grand Tournament's Secret Realm, divided by cultivation realm.
Five Mohist Gate Elders sat around the mirror, each with a post to keep.
The one at their head was the Grand Elder, surnamed Liu, given name Chongji, the Mohist Gate's highest-ranking officer stationed in Floating Isle City. His cultivation sat in the middle of the Fifth Realm and his combat strength was nothing remarkable, but his mastery of formations and artifice ran extraordinarily deep. Thirty percent of the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror's core formation had come from his hand.
At the moment Liu Chongji held a cup of tea that had gone stone cold, his gaze drifting slowly from pane to pane.
The Secret Realm had been open barely an hour and everything was running normally.
The sects' disciples had all been inserted by batch. In the Third Realm regions there were scattered flashes of spirit light from clashes, none of them large, mostly young people freshly landed and probing one another's depth. The Fourth Realm regions were far quieter. Those elders obviously weren't going to expose their strength this early.
Liu Chongji set down the cup. As chief engineer of this tournament's Secret Realm formation, seeing his own work run smoothly gave him a certain quiet satisfaction.
The satisfaction did not last long.
HMMMM.
The pane at the lower right of the mirror erupted with a searing crimson glare, bright enough to wash the entire mirror surface blood-red.
At the same time, the archaic formation script labeling the region flashed violently beneath it.
The Fallen Immortal Abyss.
Liu Chongji's hand stopped in midair. Inside the Secret Realm, an alert like that generally meant somebody, or something, was making a great deal of noise in that region.
"What's happened?"
Liu Chongji's voice wasn't loud, but the weight in it snapped everyone present to attention.
"Reporting to the Grand Elder. The historical projection in the Fallen Immortal Abyss has been destroyed!"
Liu Chongji frowned. "Destroyed? Which one?"
"The Withered Bone Sword Immortal of Cinnabar Sword Mountain."
Steward Zhao swallowed, as though double-checking that he hadn't misread the figures. "Designation Grade-A zero-three-seven, the Fourth Realm ultimate projection 'Withered Bone Sword Immortal.' It was annihilated outright some dozens of breaths ago."
The Withered Bone Sword Immortal was no ordinary figure.
In ancient times the cultivation world had passed through an era later generations called the Age of Great Contention. Prodigies rose in that age like weeds, the great powers warred without pause, and it stood as the most brilliant chapter in cultivation history.
Even measured against that era, the Withered Bone Sword Immortal counted as a genius.
The man had come out of the Wenjian Sect, gifted beyond measure but obsessive in temperament. An ordinary sword cultivator could pour his entire life into the path and still count himself a once-in-an-age talent for glimpsing the threshold of a Sword Domain at the Fifth Realm.
This man had commanded a complete Sword Domain at the Fourth.
A complete Sword Domain at the Fourth Realm was vanishingly rare across the whole of cultivation history. Even in that age crowded with prodigies, the Withered Bone Sword Immortal absolutely belonged to the small handful standing at the summit.
By rights, this was a phantom that ought to have been brought down in the tournament's late stages by the combined effort of several sects' elders.
Liu Chongji was puzzled, but he spoke up quickly enough. "Let's see what happened."
"Yes sir!"
The mirror flickered a few times, and the pane showing the Fallen Immortal Abyss, which had gone dim, lit up again with the timestamp rolled back a dozen or so minutes.
All five Mohist Gate Elders leaned in as one.
In the image, the dark red wasteland lay as dead and desolate as ever.
The Withered Bone Sword Immortal's projection stood with its back to the viewpoint, draped in its ruined star-chart robe, several hundred broken swords rotating slowly around it. Even through the mirror, some fraction of that suffocating, leaden sword intent came through.
Liu Chongji glanced at the regional map in the corner of the frame. Two small points of light had just appeared at the entrance to the Fallen Immortal Abyss.
"Only two people went in?" one of the other Mohist Gate Elders murmured.
In the image, the Withered Bone Sword Immortal's projection seemed to sense the intruders. It turned slowly, and the orbits of its hundreds of broken swords shifted direction in a single instant, converging into a spearpoint aimed at the edge of the frame.
The viewpoint swung to follow, and at last brought the two intruders into view.
A man and a woman.
The man wore the formal Wenjian Sect uniform. His face looked vaguely familiar; Liu Chongji had the nagging sense he'd seen it somewhere.
The woman wore no protective robes, not even a decent set of combat clothes. Just a rumpled white training outfit, bare feet, white hair flying loose. She looked as though someone had hauled her straight out of bed and dropped her onto a battlefield.
The Withered Bone Sword Immortal opened with a terrifying cataract of several hundred broken swords, pouring down over the two of them from horizon to horizon.
An indiscriminate area attack of that magnitude would grind not just a Third Realm cultivator but an ordinary Fourth Realm one into paste on the spot, unless they brought out a natal treasure and defended with everything they had.
Then Gu Chengming summoned ten flying swords and unfurled a Sword Domain alongside them.
"A Sword Domain? At the Third Realm?" Steward Zhao blurted, eyes bulging.
Before anyone could take that in, the white-haired girl charged.
The sword cataract crashed down, and the anticipated spray of blood and torn flesh never came. Most of it was stopped by Gu Chengming's Sword Domain, and the few strokes that slipped through and struck the girl's pale arms produced a bright, ringing ting ting, like metal on stone. They didn't leave so much as a white mark.
"What body-refinement technique is that?" Steward Zhao's fingers had begun to tremble. "A mortal body taking the source sword qi of a Fourth Realm Sword Immortal head-on?"
In the mirror, the girl had already closed to point-blank range with the Withered Bone Sword Immortal.
The Mohist Gate Elders stared, trying to catch whatever supreme art she was about to unleash.
Then the girl threw a punch.
No true qi taking shape. No heavenly phenomena. Just an utterly ordinary straight punch. Set, load, extend. Clean and economical, with the unadorned quality of a street brawl.
Boom!
The punch landed flush on the Withered Bone Sword Immortal's chest. The projection was driven backward several zhang without its feet leaving the ground, a clear dent pressed into the star-chart robe.
The phantom shuddered, and the girl gave it no time at all to wind up a response.
Second punch. Third punch. Fourth punch.
Liu Chongji felt his understanding of the world coming apart.
By every rule of the cultivation world, a killing technique of that magnitude demanded an enormous reservoir of spiritual power, a long charging period, and left a considerable recovery window afterward.
In the image, the fight was already reaching its end.
The girl's body halted hard in midair. She drove from the waist, carried her entire upper body into it, and gathered every trace of the Primordial Imperial Aura into her right fist.
At the crest of that fist, crimson-gold light compressed to its limit, like a miniature sun on the verge of bursting.
One punch, thrown!
BOOM.
The light faded.
On the dark red wasteland, the Withered Bone Sword Immortal's phantom had vanished without a trace. Not a single thread of it remained.
In its place was the vast ring-shaped crater the girl's final fist-wind had plowed into the ground.
The entire hall fell into dead silence. The men who had been guessing whether she came from the Taiyi Sword Sect or the Myriad Dharma Sect now had only one absurd thought left in their heads.
Just which sect had been hiding a monster like this, saving her to flip the entire table at this tournament?
And even as they thought it, in the image the girl's lips moved. The water mirror carried no sound, so no one present knew what she said.
But judging by the shape of her mouth, it was probably
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, I won!"
Liu Chongji eased back into his chair and discovered that at some point he had risen to his feet, and that his grip had pressed a hairline crack into the rim of the teacup. Beside him, Steward Zhao's mouth hung open and stayed that way.
And what on earth was going on with this "heavenly emperor" business?
Then she looked toward the viewpoint, as though she could see straight through the image to everyone in the hall.
"In this life, I will not let the tragedy repeat itself."
"If anyone dares stand in our way again, I will cut a path through the Nine Heavens and the Ten Earths to kill them!"
It was the sort of line that was frankly juvenile, the sort that from anyone else would only make you wonder whether the child had lost her mind.
But having just watched that fight, the men of the Mohist Gate felt something rather different rise in them.
Somehow, their backs had gone cold.
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