Chapter 120: Ultimate Sublimation! Instantly Destroying Dai Yueheng and Ling Luochen
Acrid smoke rolled across the tournament stage, thickening with every explosive clash of spirit power. The concussive booms hammered through the arena like a relentless war drum, vibrating against the ribs of the tens of thousands of spectators watching in breathless silence.
At the epicenter of the chaos, Liu Yuan moved with mechanical precision. He deflected Dai Yueheng's bone-crushing hooks with calculated shifts of his shoulders, simultaneously weaving through the biting frost of Ling Luochen's Extreme Ice Chains. Through it all, the dual irises within his eyes rotated at a chillingly steady, unhurried frequency.
His gaze swept the fractured battlefield. Behind those calm eyes, his mind processed the chaos with the cold efficiency of a high-tier spirit tool array.
To his left, the temperature was high enough to warp the air. Ma Xiaotao's Evil Fire had reduced nearly half the arena to a bubbling, dark red wasteland of scorched earth. Long Aotian stood his ground within the inferno. Even with the tyrannical physical foundation of his Body Martial Soul, his senior brother's skin was blistering, his movements growing sluggish. Under the absolute suppression of that dark crimson flame, Long Aotian's defeat was a mathematical certainty.
Across the stage, the situation was equally grim. Vina, Chen Lu, and the rest of the Heavenly Soul vanguard were completely bogged down. Huo Yuhao's four-man formation operated with sickening coordination, forming an impenetrable net that choked out any chance of reinforcement.
Liu Yuan drew a slow breath, tasting the ash and frost in the air.
'Shrek's tactical division is flawless,' he analyzed coldly.
By carving the battlefield into isolated pockets, they had dragged the Heavenly Soul Imperial Academy into a suffocating quagmire. It was a slow, agonizing execution. If the scales were not tipped immediately, their loss was guaranteed.
There was only one variable left on the board capable of shattering this deadlock.
Liu Yuan exhaled. The breath plumed white in the freezing air generated by Ling Luochen's magic, carrying away the last traces of his restraint. Deep within his eyes, the swirling purple-gold light contracted into two pinpoint stars of absolute focus.
"It seems I have to stop holding back."
His voice did not boom over the explosions, yet it cut through the noise with a heavy, suffocating gravity.
"I originally intended to save this for Ma Xiaotao," Liu Yuan continued, his tone flat, devoid of arrogance but heavy with simple truth. "I did not expect the two of you to force my hand this early."
He did not bother to lower his voice. The words reached Dai Yueheng and Ling Luochen with crystal clarity.
Ling Luochen's icy facade cracked. Her delicate brows pinched together, and her knuckles turned white as she gripped her ice staff tighter. The frost swirling around her faltered for a fraction of a second. They had him cornered. They were suppressing him with the combined might of a top-tier assault system and control system Spirit Master. Yet, he was claiming this was merely a warm-up? The absolute lack of panic in his posture sent a cold prickle of warning down her spine.
Dai Yueheng, however, scoffed.
He gathered blinding energy in his maw, spitting out a devastating White Tiger Light Wave. The beam gouged a trench through the floorboards. Liu Yuan sidestepped, the hem of his uniform singeing from the near miss.
Seeing the evasion, a sneer twisted Dai Yueheng's rugged features. "Still putting on an act? Pathetic."
He cracked his thick neck, the sound like snapping branches. "You are nothing but a Rank 49 Spirit Master, Liu Yuan. The gap in our spirit power is an impossible chasm! You think you can take both of us? Heh. If you actually manage to knock us off this stage today, I will strip myself of the Dai surname!"
A deafening tiger roar ripped from Dai Yueheng's throat. Muscles bulging beneath his clothes, he launched himself forward like a beast descending a mountain. His massive claws, wreathed in razor-sharp Gengjin Qi, slashed through the air, leaving faint white trails in their wake as they aimed directly for Liu Yuan's chest.
"You think empty bluffs will save you? Get on the ground!"
The strike carried enough kinetic force to shatter a boulder into dust. This time, Liu Yuan did not step back. His feet remained planted.
When the lethal Gengjin claws were less than a meter from his chest, the air around Liu Yuan abruptly froze. Beneath his feet, a deep, pitch-black fourth spirit ring flared to life, trembling with terrifying intensity.
"Fourth Spirit Ability." Liu Yuan's voice was a dead calm. "Ultimate Sublimation."
The black ring expanded, swallowing the ambient light. In that fraction of a second, Liu Yuan's presence mutated. Deep within his Sea of Consciousness, the vast Life Origin accumulated by the Gold of Life ignited like a dying star. It converted instantly into a torrential flood of mental force, surging through his meridians and feeding back into every single cell of his body.
On his forehead, a vertical slit parted. The Life Double Pupil snapped open.
A sacred, ancient aura erupted from his form, piercing straight through the arena's protective barriers and soaring into the heavens.
As a control-system Spirit Master, Ling Luochen's sensory perception was razor-sharp. The moment that third eye opened, the blood drained from her face. The boy standing yards away was gone. In his place stood the phantom of a primordial behemoth, slowly opening its jaws after eons of slumber.
Panic seized her throat. "Yueheng, pull back! Something is wrong!" she screamed, her usual icy composure shattering completely.
It was too late. Dai Yueheng's forward momentum was absolute. He heard the warning, but the ingrained arrogance of the White Tiger Duke's bloodline refused to let him flinch before a lower-ranked opponent.
'It is an illusion! A cheap trick!'
"Die!" Dai Yueheng roared, funneling every drop of his boiling spirit power into his right arm. The fierce White Tiger Qi compressed around his fist, forming a blinding sphere of destructive energy as he drove it ruthlessly toward Liu Yuan's face.
Liu Yuan's expression remained carved from stone. He pulled his right arm back and delivered a simple, unadorned punch to meet the incoming strike.
"Qilin Precious Technique—Collapse."
Fueled by the monstrous amplification of Ultimate Sublimation, the inherently tyrannical Qilin Precious Technique mutated. A dark purple phantom materialized over Liu Yuan's fist, crackling with raw power. It was no longer just physical force; his mental energy had materialized into a physical layer of absolute defense and pure destruction.
BOOM!
Fist met claw. The collision birthed a shockwave that ripped the floor tiles from their moorings, accompanied by a deafening crack of thunder.
But this time, the script was flipped.
Dai Yueheng expected the satisfying crunch of bone. Instead, the moment his steel-rending claws struck that purple-wreathed fist, it felt as though he had driven his arm full-speed into the side of a ten-thousand-foot mountain.
A terrifying kinetic rebound exploded outward. Fused with the high-frequency mental vibrations of the Double Pupils, the force effortlessly shredded Dai Yueheng's White Tiger Barrier like wet paper. The destructive energy surged up his arm, snapping bones and tearing muscle fibers.
"Gah—!"
Blood sprayed from Dai Yueheng's mouth in a crimson mist. The impact lifted his burly frame entirely off the ground, sending him hurtling backward like a kite with a snapped string. He crashed into the reinforced stone of the arena, tumbling and bouncing violently. He gouged a deep trench into the floor, skidding for a full twenty meters before his broken body finally ground to a halt.
Coughing violently, Dai Yueheng struggled to lift his heavy head. The haughty, untouchable pride that always danced in his eyes had been violently replaced by raw, unadulterated terror. He stared through blurred vision at the boy standing at the epicenter of the crater.
Liu Yuan hadn't moved a single inch. Purple-gold flames licked the air around him, distorting the space.
"This... how..." Dai Yueheng wheezed, blood bubbling past his lips. "How could your spirit power... spike so high?"
Liu Yuan offered no villainous monologue. He offered no answers. He didn't even give the Shrek elite time to draw his next breath.
"Qilin Precious Technique—Flash."
A sharp hiss cut the air. Liu Yuan vanished.
Before Dai Yueheng could even blink, a shadow fell over him. Liu Yuan materialized directly at his side. With cold, mechanical precision, Liu Yuan clamped a hand onto Dai Yueheng's ruined shoulder, pinning him flat against the rubble.
Panic seized Dai Yueheng's heart. He desperately tried to force his spirit power up his throat to unleash a point-blank White Tiger Light Wave, but Liu Yuan shifted his stance, planting a heavy boot squarely onto Dai Yueheng's shoulder. The weight felt like a falling meteor, crushing him against the floorboards.
Looking down at the defeated tiger, Liu Yuan's eyes narrowed. Two pinpoints of blood-red light rapidly condensed within his dual irises.
"First Spirit Ability. Spirit Ray."
The crimson beams fired at point-blank range. Stripped of his White Tiger Vajra Transformation, Dai Yueheng's physical defenses were practically nonexistent. The twin lasers punched cleanly through his chest. Liu Yuan's control was surgical; the beams bypassed the heart completely, instead targeting and shredding the primary spirit power circulation nodes around his sternum.
An agonizing, wretched wail tore from Dai Yueheng's throat. His massive body convulsed violently against the floor. His oppressive spirit power leaked from his shattered nodes, dissipating into the air like a receding tide. In an instant, the proud core disciple of Shrek Academy was reduced to a crippled, twitching mess.
Witnessing the brutal, systematic dismantling of her teammate, Ling Luochen stood frozen in the rear, the blood completely draining from her face.
"Yueheng!"
Abandoning all thoughts of offense, she swung her ice staff with frantic desperation. She tried to channel her extreme ice spirit power across the stage, hoping to freeze Dai Yueheng's bleeding wounds before he bled out.
But to Liu Yuan, her panicked movements were agonizingly slow.
The moment Dai Yueheng went limp, Liu Yuan pivoted on his heel. Propelled by the massive speed enhancement of Ultimate Sublimation, the stone beneath his boot shattered. He blurred into a dark purple afterimage, crossing the distance in a fraction of a heartbeat to materialize directly in front of Ling Luochen.
Her pupils dilated in sheer terror. Driven purely by survival instinct, she threw her staff up, instantly condensing a thick, layered ice shield between them.
Liu Yuan had no concept of mercy for Shrek's hypocrites. Twisting his waist, he generated a terrifying torque, driving a brutal horizontal elbow strike straight into the frozen barrier.
CRACK!
The reinforced ice shield exploded into a cloud of glittering powder upon impact. Unimpeded, Liu Yuan's elbow, wreathed in crackling dark purple lightning, sank deep into Ling Luochen's abdomen.
The impact drove the air from her lungs so violently she couldn't even scream. The proud ice-attribute Spirit King of Shrek Academy folded over his arm, lifted off her feet by the sheer kinetic trauma. She was launched backward, her body drawing a long, helpless arc through the air before crashing heavily into the safety zone below the stage. She bounced once, rolled, and lay completely still, unconscious before she even hit the ground.
From the moment Liu Yuan activated his fourth Spirit Ring to the instant Dai Yueheng was crippled and Ling Luochen was blasted out of the arena, barely three seconds had passed.
The entire sequence was a blur of absolute, overwhelming violence.
A deathly, suffocating silence descended upon the stadium. Tens of thousands of people forgot how to breathe.
High above, the sixteen Rank 7 aerial recording spirit tools captured every brutal frame, broadcasting the slaughter with crystal clarity to screens across the entire continent.
In the VIP stands, Elder Xuan's hands froze around his wine gourd, his eyes bulging. Deep within Shrek Academy, the ancient entities residing in the Sea God Pavilion fell dead silent. And across the world, countless Spirit Masters watching the broadcast felt their minds go entirely blank, paralyzed by the sheer, unadulterated shock of what they had just witnessed.
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