Who the hell is this guy? Shen Tian asked himself, feeling the spiritual pressure crush the air in his lungs until every breath became stabbing agony.
Before him, the illusion of the refined Lin Clan envoy had crumbled completely, leaving in its place an aberration clad in ragged funerary garments and an armor of yellowish bone plates. The energy emanating from this creature belonged to the suffocating oppression of an expert in the Golden Core Realm, far beyond any mortal frontier.
The false envoy attacked before he could assimilate the revelation or find answers. With a languid, disdainful movement of his free hand, he tore through the space in front of his chest. Five massive claws of pure gray, putrid energy shot toward Shen Tian, deforming the air in their path and leaving a trail that smelled of cemetery earth and burnt ozone.
WHOOSH!
The speed of the attack far exceeded anything a Qi Condensation cultivator’s eyes could naturally register. Dodging using the brute force of his legs was a geometric impossibility; the unnatural gravity of the enemy’s aura kept him anchored to the black ground of the gorge, as if he had lead shackles tied to his ankles.
Shen Tian released the hilt of the Immortal Dagger, letting it fall to the stone, and raised both hands to chest height. In an instant, his fingers became an imperceptible blur.
FWOOSH! FWOOSH! FWOOSH!
His phalanges intertwined, separated, and crossed again at dizzying speed, executing an intricate sequence of thirteen positions in less than a heartbeat. They were hand seals. During his long, tortuous meditation sessions in the sea of consciousness, Xue Huang had instilled this ancient and extinct discipline through relentless repetition.
The modern cultivators of the frontier sects channeled and expelled their Qi like wild beasts pushing water through a pressurized pipe. Hand seals, by contrast, allowed spiritual energy to be structured at a micrometric level. It was the supreme art of weaving power into manageable threads, each finger position a key that opened and closed specific channels in the meridians, creating formations directly in the air.
"Inverted Lotus Seal!" Shen Tian roared through clenched teeth.
A complex geometric matrix of faint light, composed of dozens of interconnected hexagons, bloomed before him just in the microsecond when the necrotic claws impacted.
CRASH!
Shen Tian knew that attempting to stop a Golden Core attack head-on would have disintegrated him on the spot. Instead, the hand seal structured the Qi to act as a slippery energy ramp, redirecting the overwhelming kinetic force of the attack to the sides.
Even so, the pure shockwave shattered the luminous matrix in an explosion of energy crystals.
SHATTER!
Shen Tian was sent flying through the air like a weightless ragdoll. He tore through the undergrowth violently and crashed on his back against the thick trunk of an iron pine twenty meters away.
CRUNCH!
The black wood creaked and splintered behind him from the force of the impact. Shen Tian coughed convulsively, feeling the warm, thick metallic taste of blood flooding his palate. His internal organs trembled, but his brown eyes, cold and calculating, held their lock on the cadaverous figure. Turning to flee using the Flickering Shadow Steps would have meant instant death. Turning his back on a monster of that caliber was tactical suicide dictated by panic.
"His Qi circulation is ancient, immensely heavy, but it moves like mud at the bottom of a stagnant swamp," dictated the Blood Empress’s voice, resonating in the vastness of his mind, scanning the enemy’s fluctuations with the precision of a war deity. "That bone armor is an extension of his own mummified body. It has microscopic fissures and blind spots at the shoulder and knee joints. Use the Penetrating Needle Seal! Steal his space to breathe and cut off his area spells!"
Shen Tian launched himself forward, using the shattered tree trunk as a launch platform before the enemy could raise his hand for a second attack. He summoned the Immortal Dagger from the ground using an invisible thread of his Qi Control Technique, making it fly directly into his grip, and charged head-on against the funerary entity.
WHOOSH!
As he cut the distance, his left hand danced before his chest, forming one-handed hand seals in a continuous, uninterrupted cycle. Index and middle fingers extended like swords, thumbs intertwined, ring fingers folded toward the palms. Each tiny positional change manipulated the energy of the environment and his own Level 8 Qi Condensation core.
SHING! SHING! SHING!
He fired incessant bursts of hyper-compressed Qi needles. These stingers sought with surgical precision the fissures in the false envoy’s armor. At the same time, his fingers wove the Latent Detonation Seal, leaving microscopic explosive traps suspended in the air where the monster would have to move.
Simultaneously, with his right hand, he wielded the Blood Era dagger, still with rust remnants on its surface but with the black edge revealed. Shen Tian traced deadly arcs and venomous thrusts, guided by the mental memory forged in the one hundred and thirty-five years of horror and survival in the Blood Demon Valley.
CLANG! SLASH! CLANG!
The asymmetric combination of hand seals on the left and assassin swordsmanship on the right was a spectacle of absolute martial perfection. His fluid, efficient movements, economical to the last thread of Qi, defied the logical understanding of what a cultivator of his level should be capable of executing.
In a spectacular exchange, Shen Tian dodged a swipe that would have decapitated a steel ox and slid the dagger’s blade across the enemy’s neck. The ancient metal clashed against the plates, tearing out a torrent of orange sparks and managing to detach a tiny fragment of bone scale.
CLANG! SPARK!
A perfect blow. The technical culmination of an impeccable assassin.
The false envoy watched him with languid, profoundly bored amusement.
The monster stopped his advance and stood in the middle of the clearing, lowering his gaze to the insignificant scratch on his neck. He simply remained there, receiving the impact of dozens of Qi needles and the detonations of the explosive traps as if he were standing under a light autumn drizzle. The explosions illuminated his cadaverous face, while the edges of his funerary garments stayed intact.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The difference of two great cultivation realms, separated by Foundation Establishment, was an insurmountable wall forged in the primordial laws of heaven and earth. Shen Tian was fighting with the tactical vision and impeccable technique of a war god, but the engine propelling his clone remained the fragile vessel of a mortal.
"Is this all a slippery mouse playing in the shadows can do?" the false envoy whispered, his voice of crushed stone vibrating in Shen Tian’s bones. "How disappointing. You bore me profoundly."
The man in funerary tunics raised his right foot and let it fall heavily against the basaltic rock floor.
BOOM!
The gesture carried the pure, unadulterated expression of Golden Core brute power.
A circular shockwave, composed of necrotic and dense Qi, swept the clearing in a radius of one hundred meters. The gray energy broke the invisible seal formations Shen Tian had carefully woven in the air, tearing them as if they were old cobwebs before a hurricane. The invisible wave of force struck the young man’s chest fully, arriving before he could raise his arms in guard.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Shen Tian felt three of his ribs yield instantly with a dull, wet crunch, piercing inward and grazing his lungs. The necrotic Qi brutally invaded his meridians, burning his internal energy channels with a cadaverous coldness that paralyzed his muscle fibers from the inside out.
The crushing impact threw him to his knees against the black stone.
THUD!
The straw hat flew into the darkness, revealing his pale face, covered in cold sweat and contorted by unbearable agony. Shen Tian opened his mouth trying to draw air, but instead vomited a dense mouthful of black, coagulated blood, poisoned by the energy of death.
He could barely hold himself up, hunched forward and resting the entire weight of his shattered body on the Immortal Dagger, whose blade was driven deep into the cracks of the ground. His peripheral vision began to darken, filling with black spots. The clone’s meridians were rapidly collapsing under the corrosive invasion. If this artificial body died in such a violent manner, assimilating that kind of putrid energy, the spiritual damage would rebound through the connection and shatter the sea of consciousness of his original body in the Jinyun Sect.
"It is useless," Xue Huang murmured in the mental space. The mockery, the arrogance, and the condescension had vanished from her voice, leaving only the coldness of a fatal diagnosis. "Your execution of the seals was masterful, Shen Tian. Even the prodigies of the great families of the continent’s center would struggle to make that monster bleed in close combat as you just did. An abyss of such grotesque power stands beyond every mortal technique. This artificial vessel will fall apart on the next attack."
Ten meters away, the false envoy began walking slowly toward him. Each of his steps resonated like the toll of a funeral bell. He raised his right hand, fingers extended toward the night sky, and began to condense a dense, spinning, unstable sphere of pure gray energy.
VWOOOM... VWOOOM...
An absolute execution blow. He was going to erase Shen Tian from existence, reduce his body to ashes, reclaim the map of the Sword Elder’s inheritance, and recover the dagger resting on the ground.
Time seemed to thicken in Shen Tian’s perception, slowing until the chaos of the wind and the creaking of the trees faded away. In that stretched stillness, the erratic, weak beats of his own heart thundered in his ears like distant drums in the middle of a storm.
"Your mind is steel, brat, but your flesh is irremediably weak," Xue Huang spoke again. This time, a lethal, undeniable urgency vibrated at the core of her millennial soul, shaking the mental space. "Let me use your body for an instant."
The pact had an emergency clause: in case of imminent death, Xue Huang could take control of the body with the host’s explicit consent. The risk was enormous. If the body could not withstand her power, both would die.
Shen Tian hesitated. Only for an absolute microsecond, but in the hyper-accelerated mind of a cultivator facing death, that sliver of time was more than enough to weigh the overwhelming burden of life and extinction.
Yielding motor and spiritual control to the Blood Empress was an insane risk, equivalent to swallowing poison to quench thirst. The immense residual power of her ancient soul and the destructive ferocity of her primordial martial arts were too much for the fragile Level 8 Qi Condensation. Her pure presence could burn and melt the clone’s meridians irreversibly with the simple act of inhabiting it. Worse still, once she took control of the reins of his body, nothing in heaven or on earth guaranteed she would decide to return command when the massacre ended.
But the giant necrotic sphere was already plummeting, whistling through the cold air, less than a second from annihilating his face and erasing his existence. His survival instinct, forged in decades of misery, sectarian conspiracies, and an insatiable hunger to live at the summit of this ruthless world, demanded he die on his feet with a blade in hand.
"Do it," Shen Tian whispered in a hoarse voice, shattered and soaked in blood.
The sphere of destructive energy was scant centimeters from impacting his forehead when Shen Tian’s posture changed abruptly and unnaturally.
All the agonizing tension in his shoulders, the pathetic trembling of his torn muscles, and the crushing weakness of his spine dissolved in a silent exhalation. The young man’s shattered body stopped leaning pathetically on the dagger. He straightened slowly, with a fluidity that ignored broken bones, relaxing into a posture of absolute elegance, haughty, disdainful, and supremely lethal.
The false envoy halted his advance, gripped by sudden caution. Something in Shen Tian’s energy signature had shifted. Something ancient, bearing the weight of centuries long buried.
When Shen Tian’s body raised its face to look directly at the approaching sphere of death, his cold, calculating brown eyes had extinguished completely, replaced by a golden glow, icy and of such unfathomable arrogance that it seemed to disdain the heavens themselves.