"Exhilarating! To cross hands with a master of your caliber today—the journey was worth it. Yin Zhiping, I have marked your name. Again!"
Yin Zhiping's ambush had cost the Golden Wheel Dharma King a small loss, nothing more—to a man like him, it barely registered.
Yin Zhiping privately suspected that even if that Vast Heaven Palm had landed square on the Dharma King's chest, nothing much would have come of it.
The Dragon-Elephant Prajna Skill was exactly that tyrannical.
The Dharma King's wheel flew from his hand—and in mid-air, three smaller wheels split off from it, orbiting the great one.
Four golden wheels, laden with the Dharma King's colossal strength, came scything at Yin Zhiping.
The shriek of split air reached him first. Yin Zhiping understood: the Dharma King meant to break technique with brute force.
Beyond its defensive sheath, the most storied feature of the Dragon-Elephant Prajna Skill was this: each layer gained was said to add the strength of one dragon and one elephant.
Even by the conservative guess—that the Dharma King had only reached the eighth layer—that was the strength of eight dragons and eight elephants.
Dragons were too misty a currency; Yin Zhiping had no feel for them. But elephants—he'd seen elephants, in his past life.
He had no interest whatsoever in testing on his own body whether the divine skill's exchange rate was honest.
So, as the four wheels came on in full fury, Yin Zhiping chose to sidestep the edge.
The Golden Goose Art rose through him, and he lifted straight up into the air.
The Dharma King wasn't done. He steered the wheels by remote will, bending their arcs upward after the climbing figure.
"A man in mid-air has nothing to push against! Yin Zhiping, you have made the worst choice of all!"
The Dharma King's victory felt banked already; there was even a twinge of regret that so worthy an opponent was about to spill his blood five steps.
"Hahaha! Don't fret for this humble Taoist—worry about yourself."
Was Yin Zhiping a fool?
Certainly not!
Did he not know a man in mid-air was a living target?
It was precisely because his Golden Goose Art was trained to its limit—because he could walk on empty air—that he'd had the confidence to leave the ground at all.
Aloft, Yin Zhiping turned and shifted through the empty sky, sword flicking, and struck the three lesser wheels aside.
The great wheel arrived last, its timing and angle viciously chosen—the exact instant Yin Zhiping had turned and not yet recovered his blade.
Too late to parry with the sword. Yin Zhiping didn't panic; all of it sat inside his prediction. His body wrenched violently higher, and his left palm came down in the Frost-Treading Ice-Breaking Palm.
Struck from above, the great wheel's flight path snapped downward, and it clattered to the ground.
Riding the rebound of that blow, Yin Zhiping glided forward—sword extended, point set dead on the Golden Wheel Dharma King.
Three lesser wheels not yet recalled; the great wheel in the dirt.
The Dharma King stood empty-handed. If ever there was a moment to press the advantage, this was it.
The Quanzhen Inner Art surged at full draw; true essence stormed through Yin Zhiping's body. Still short of closing range, he swung three strokes in succession.
True essence leapt off the blade as three edges of sword-light, streaking at the Dharma King from above, from the left, from the right.
The Dharma King abandoned any thought of recalling the wheels to shield himself. Both hands closed into fists, and the eighth-layer Dragon-Elephant Prajna Skill roared to its absolute limit.
Innate astral qi surfaced across his skin; an elephant's trumpet swelled out of his body; his two fists carried the dragon's cry. He did not retreat—he advanced, straight into the storm, to meet it face to face.
His left fist shattered one edge of sword-light; his right smashed the second; the third arrived too fast to answer—and against that high, brazen trumpeting, it broke on the surface of his Innate astral qi without so much as parting his robes.
All it left was a shiver of ripples across the sheath of protective qi, a brief dimming, no more.
The instant the light broke, the Dharma King dared not dally—Yin Zhiping was already on him, sword driving in. No named form, no flourish. One plain, unadorned, straight-line thrust.
Only the formless true essence riding the point told the Dharma King how dangerous this one was.
Break the surface at a single point: Yin Zhiping knew the man's defense was strong past reason, and ordinary techniques would likely amount to scratching armor. So he had chosen this. Succeed once, and he could succeed a hundred times.
The Dharma King couldn't read Yin Zhiping's plan—but neither would he stand there and let himself be carved.
The dragon-cry rose again. Both fists came out together.
One fist for the sword. One fist straight at Yin Zhiping's heart.
The Dharma King had turned vicious—this was trade-wound-for-wound fighting.
His art gave him the advantage in that market, and he knew it. Yin Zhiping's edge lay in the sword's reach and sharpness—so the Dharma King would simply drag him down onto level ground by main force.
If that fist landed true, the Dharma King was confident: Yin Zhiping dead, or half his life gone.
And even if Yin Zhiping blocked it—meeting it head-on, off-balance and hurried, he'd take some wound regardless.
Then both sides would be wounded, the wheels would come home to his hand, and the board would reset to the opening position.
Yin Zhiping hadn't expected the Dharma King to pull a move like that at the brink.
Truth be told, he did not dare eat that fist head-on. And there was no time left to answer it with the Quanzhen Palm Technique.
What saved him was an old discipline: always hold three-tenths in reserve. The long sword turned mid-thrust—stab became slash.
The cost was most of the blow's power. To break the Dharma King's protective qi he had packed all his true essence into the point; the edge itself carried little kill in it.
Sword met fist; the point never broke the qi-sheath, and the fists took no wound. The fists were likewise turned aside by the blade, and struck empty air.
Two lances of fist-force shot skyward, flew far, and dissolved in the height.
One touch, and apart. Yin Zhiping spun through the air and came down light and steady.
The Dharma King fell back several steps, used the space to summon his four wheels home—the three lesser folding back into the great one—and raised the whole before his chest, exactly as he had stood before the first blow was struck.
Yin Zhiping and the Golden Wheel Dharma King: dead even. Several exchanges gone, and neither could do a thing to the other.
Yin Zhiping felt a quiet gratitude. He truly had been a frog at the bottom of a well—believing cultivation realm was everything.
Every exchange with the Dharma King ran razor-thin. One mistake in any of them, and body and Tao would have ended together.
Thank heaven Ouyang Feng had taught him so much. Without those days, there was no telling how today would have read.
The exchanges had come too fast, too dense. Both Yin Zhiping and the Dharma King stole the pause to settle their breath by fractions.
Over on Guo Jing's side—in the end, Innate and Acquired were different substances. The five were spending their lives just to hold him in place, and even how long they could manage that depended on Guo Jing's mood.
Case in point: by the time Guo Jing finished one full run of the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, the five had been beaten into honorary members of the Beggars' Sect—one written application away from Huang Rong stamping the seal and holding the welcome ceremony.
Seeing them still grinding stubbornly on, Guo Jing decided to switch to the arts of the Nine Yin Manual—opening with the Adamant-Crushing Divine Claw.
Paired with the Spiral Nine Shadows, Guo Jing split one into nine.
Nine figures alone were enough to suffocate the five men—no way on earth to tell which was flesh.
The Adamant-Crushing Divine Claw broke whatever it touched; ten moves later, all five were face-down on the ground.
Had the Mongol soldiers not read the wind and thrown bodies at Guo Jing to drag their men back, five heads would already have parted from five necks.
But that was fine too. It freed Guo Jing's hands for the rest of the army.
And with them, Guo Jing proceeded to demonstrate to the watching world exactly what an Innate-realm powerhouse was worth on an open battlefield.