Chapter 206: Interrogating Huo Yuhao! Is This Your Justice?
At this moment, Huo Yuhao's body completely blocked the way in front of Ma Xiaotao.
He braced himself, fully expecting the destructive power contained within Liu Yuan's fist to obliterate him. Yet, in that breathless instant, the grayish-brown energy sphere dissipated on its own less than thirty centimeters from his chest.
Liu Yuan withdrew the lethal energy, but his momentum did not halt completely.
His figure blurred, swaying slightly as his right hand formed a vice-like claw. He clamped down directly onto Yuhao's shoulder, using the boy's own weight and inertia to fling him toward a jagged outcropping of ice.
Yuhao struck the hard, frozen rock with a heavy, sickening thud, sliding down the slick surface to collapse onto the snow-covered ground.
Liu Yuan stood exactly where he had been, looking down from above with an impassive gaze.
"You want to protect this Evil Soul Master?" Liu Yuan spoke, his voice entirely flat, carrying no anger, only a chilling indifference.
Ju Zi and Ke Ke, who had been hiding in the distance to avoid the shockwaves, finally arrived at the shattered edge of the battlefield.
They stared at the unconscious red-haired woman shielded behind Yuhao, and then at Du Busi, who stood silently beside Liu Yuan. The old man radiated a terrifying soul power pressure that made the very air feel heavy and suffocating. The two girls exchanged glances, their faces painted with utter confusion and bewilderment.
Ke Ke simply could not process Yuhao's actions. She took two cautious steps forward, making sure to keep a wide berth from Xiaotao's prone form. "Yuhao, what are you doing? That woman is an Evil Soul Master! She almost slaughtered those four Soul Masters just a moment ago!"
Ju Zi's brows knit together tightly. She looked from Xiaotao on the ground to Liu Yuan standing tall above them, a strong sense of doubt rising within her chest. She had originally assumed Liu Yuan was the designated executor of this purge operation, a righteous strike against corruption. Now, Yuhao's desperate interference tangled the situation into an beyond understanding knot.
Yuhao could not afford to answer their frantic questions right now.
He pushed himself up from the freezing ground, his limbs trembling slightly. He brushed the clumps of snow from his uniform and fixed his gaze firmly on the young man standing before him.
"She isn't an Evil Soul Master. She is Ma Xiaotao." Yuhao panted, forcing his voice to remain steady despite the burning ache in his back. "Don't you recognize her?"
Hearing the name, Liu Yuan remained completely unmoved. His expression was carved from ice. "I recognize her. So what? It is a fact that she is Ma Xiaotao."
He took a slow, deliberate step forward. "But it is also a fact that she is currently completely out of control. Her soul attributes lean entirely toward evil, and she nearly caused the death of every living thing in this area just now. Right now, in this exact moment, she is an Evil Soul Master."
Yuhao found himself momentarily speechless, his mouth opening and closing without sound, but he still refused to back down. "This was an accident! She became like this because of a mutation during a mission, because something went wrong with her cultivation. It wasn't her intention. She is a victim!"
Liu Yuan looked at the desperate boy and suddenly smiled.
It was a faint, fleeting curve of the lips, but it caused the ambient temperature to drop a few degrees further, chilling the marrow of everyone present.
"Something went wrong with her cultivation?" Liu Yuan repeated the words slowly, rolling them over his tongue before shaking his head. "Huo Yuhao, you truly are a master of double standards."
He took another step forward, his boots crunching against the scorched, frozen earth left behind by the previous devastating clash.
"When someone from your precious Shrek Academy becomes an Evil Soul Master, it is merely that something went wrong with their cultivation. They are suddenly a victim, a genius who needs to be protected and saved."
Liu Yuan's eyes narrowed, the purple-gold light within them glinting dangerously. "Fine. Let us entertain your delusion. Even if something went wrong with her cultivation, let me ask you this: is she an Evil Soul Master right now? Does she not reek of fresh blood and dark malice?"
He leaned in slightly, his presence towering over the younger boy. "Has she killed anyone during the time she has been an Evil Soul Master? If she has, can the innocent blood staining her hands simply be washed away just because something went wrong with her cultivation?"
Yuhao clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles turned white. His lips trembled, but no words came out. He was entirely unable to refute the cold, hard logic crashing down upon him.
Liu Yuan continued. His voice was not loud, yet every single syllable stabbed into Yuhao's heart like a heavy, rusted blade.
"Do you people from Shrek Academy not always style yourselves as the absolute guardian deities of the Douluo Continent? Do you not always love to preach about exterminating Evil Soul Masters for the sake of the common people?"
A dry, mocking scoff escaped Liu Yuan's lips. "What? Now that the monster standing in front of you happens to wear the uniform of Shrek, the standards are suddenly different?"
"If we followed Shrek's usual, uncompromising style, shouldn't an Evil Soul Master of her rank and destructive capability be exterminated immediately, without question?"
Liu Yuan closed the final distance, walking right up to Yuhao and looking down at him with absolute disdain.
"Is protecting her now an act of practicing Shrek's vaunted justice? Or is Shrek's justice merely this kind of selective, hypocritical mercy based entirely on who the person happens to be?"
He did not let the boy breathe, delivering the final, crushing blow. "Then let me also ask you this. On what basis do you decide that other Evil Soul Masters did not also have something go wrong with their cultivation? And on what basis do you decide that the countless Evil Soul Masters your academy has slaughtered over the millennia were not victims just like the Ma Xiaotao lying before your eyes?"
Liu Yuan's questions were like heavy siege hammers, striking Yuhao's mental defenses one after another, shattering them into dust.
Yuhao stared at the young man, his mind descending into a state of absolute chaos.
The education he had received since stepping through those prestigious gates was Shrek Academy's absolute definition of justice and responsibility. He truly, deeply believed Xiaotao was innocent, a tragic victim of fate's cruelty. But the razor-sharp logic Liu Yuan threw at him tore that self-righteous compassion to bloody shreds.
If the standards for judgment shifted simply because of a person's background or uniform, was that so-called justice still justice at all?
"I..." Yuhao felt his throat go completely dry, as if he had swallowed a handful of sand.
He did not know how to answer.
Because deep down, in the darkest corner of his heart, he realized Liu Yuan was entirely right. If it happened within the walls of Shrek, it was called a tragedy requiring salvation. If it happened to anyone else in the world, it was called a heresy demanding execution.
This sudden, violent collapse of his worldview left him temporarily paralyzed, unable to utter a single syllable.
Seeing Yuhao's pale, speechless state, Liu Yuan did not bother to continue his mockery.
He had no time to waste playing philosophical games in the snow.
"Since you have nothing to say, then move aside."
Liu Yuan raised his hand once more. The grayish-brown energy of the Destruction Beast Soul Spirit rapidly gathered at his fingertip, humming with lethal intent.
His will was absolute: Ma Xiaotao was a hidden danger, a ticking time bomb. Since Yuhao could not provide a reasonable, practical solution, he would eliminate that danger permanently.
Yuhao looked at that condensing ball of annihilation. The confusion swirling in his eyes vanished in an instant, replaced by a desperate, burning resolve.
He could not let Liu Yuan act.
He knew Liu Yuan was an extremely rational person, rational to the point of being entirely cold-blooded. If he did not stop him right here, right now, Xiaotao would surely die today.
"I can't let you kill her."
Yuhao's Sea of Consciousness completely boiled over at this moment, churning like a tempest.
He did not use any conventional Soul Skills, nor did he mobilize his physical soul power for a direct, physical confrontation.
Instead, he directly activated the absolute origin power of his Spirit Eye Martial Soul.
A near-solidified wave of mental shock erupted from his glowing eyes.
This was the absolute strongest mental attack he could currently mobilize, concentrating every last drop of his spiritual force into a single point. It was aimed directly at Liu Yuan's Sea of Consciousness, attempting to forcibly sever the connection and interrupt the lethal attack.
This was a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble.
He knew Liu Yuan's mental force was formidable, but this was his final, unyielding line of defense as a Soul Master.
The invisible mental shock tore through the freezing air, arriving directly in front of Liu Yuan's face in a fraction of a second.
However.
The violent, devastating explosion expected from the collision of two immense mental forces did not occur.
Liu Yuan stood exactly where he was. His posture did not shift. His body did not even sway.
Facing a mental attack powerful enough to momentarily daze a Soul Saint-level expert, only a flash of brilliant purple-gold light flickered deep within Liu Yuan's double pupils.
He did not mobilize any Soul Spirits to intercept it, nor did he use any special, complex mental defense techniques.
He simply took his massive, overwhelming total amount of mental force—which had been continuously nourished and strengthened by the Destruction Beast Soul Spirit—and placed it directly in the path of the shock like an impenetrable fortress wall.
The sound of the collision was extremely faint, almost imperceptible.
That was the sound of mental force shattering like fragile glass.
The moment Yuhao's full-power, desperate mental shock touched Liu Yuan's absolute mental defense, it was like a tiny, trickling stream crashing into a solid steel dam. Without causing a single ripple, without leaving a single mark, it was directly and violently bounced back.
The terrifying backlash flowed directly back into Yuhao's Sea of Consciousness like a tidal wave of shattered blades.
Because the difference in their total mental force and purity was far too vast, the result of this instantaneous backlash was utterly devastating.
Yuhao's glowing eyes grew dim in an instant, the light snuffed out like a crushed candle. His body fell backward, collapsing into the snow like a puppet whose strings had been abruptly severed.
In the final, fleeting moment before he lost consciousness entirely, the last thing he saw were Liu Yuan's purple-gold eyes—eyes that were completely devoid of any emotion, and calm to the absolute extreme.
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