Mystic Rank Martial Skill

“So.”

Lin Xiaoxiao looked at Su Yu, a mischievous smile curling at the corner of her mouth.

“You’ll have to fight for the only spot left.”

“Which is, second place.”

Su Yu watched her proud, almost haughty expression.

He didn’t argue.

Just nodded along cooperatively.

“Alright.”

Seeing Su Yu so obediently acknowledge that she was better than him,

Lin Xiaoxiao’s vanity was thoroughly satisfied.

She gave a smug little hum, picked up the teacup beside her, stood up, circled around the wide rosewood round table, pulled out the chair next to Su Yu, and plopped herself down without any pretense.

The distance between them instantly closed.

That faint, elusive fragrance once again lingered around Su Yu’s nose.

To assert her authority as the “Big Sister,” and also to cover up the subtle flutter she felt from being so close,

Lin Xiaoxiao tilted her head.

Suddenly reached out.

With complete naturalness, she pinched Su Yu’s arm, which was right there within reach.

“Don’t worry.”

“When we get on the actual combat stage, Big Sister will take it easy on…”

The last word—“you”—got stuck in Lin Xiaoxiao’s throat.

Her voice cut off abruptly.

The entire person, as if frozen mid-motion,

stiffened in place.

Silence filled the private room like a corpse.

Lin Xiaoxiao’s eyes went wide.

She stared blankly at her own hand, still pinching Su Yu’s arm.

Her mind went blank for a split second.

The feeling.

An utterly unbelievable sensation!

Through the thin layer of cotton short sleeves,

what she was gripping didn’t feel like a human muscle at all.

It felt like a piece of refined steel—one that had been hammered a thousand times, compressed to its limit.

Hard.

Dense.

And when she tried to press down with a little more force,

an elusive yet overwhelmingly powerful rebound rose from the surface of that muscle,

pushing her fingers back just slightly.

How was this possible?!

Lin Xiaoxiao’s heart skipped a beat.

Her breathing quickened instantly.

Who was she?

She was a mid-level warrior with a blood-energy value of 406!

Her perception of physical strength was razor-sharp.

Even with just a gentle pinch,

she could clearly sense the terrifying explosive power hidden beneath that seemingly lean frame.

This was absolutely not the level of physical toughness you’d expect from a blood-energy value of 10.4!

Even those external-practice martial artists in the Great Xia Kingdom, who specialized in refining their bodies, wouldn’t have muscles this firm and iron-like at a blood-energy value of just 10!

“This muscle…” Lin Xiaoxiao screamed inside her head.

“So solid!”

“And… so nice to touch!”

A strange electric sensation shot from her fingertips through her entire body.

The tips of Lin Xiaoxiao’s ears turned bright red in an instant.

But then, an absurd suspicion began to sprout wildly in her mind like weeds.

“This hidden sense of power under his skin…”

“Could it be… just as strong as mine?”

“Could it be…”

Her pupils narrowed slightly.

“Could his actual blood-energy value already be over four hundred?!”

No sooner had the thought appeared than Lin Xiaoxiao mercilessly crushed it in her mind.

“Impossible!”

“Absolutely impossible!”

She shook her head internally, trying to convince herself with logic.

Who was she?

The most elite heiress in Jiangcheng!

She knew better than anyone how she’d gotten that blood-energy value of 406.

From the moment she was in her mother’s womb, her mother drank only top-grade exotic beast bone soup.

After birth—

a monthly medicinal bath of rare herbs to wash her marrow.

At age three, she began cultivating the family’s secret body-forging techniques.

Every day, she ate the finest flesh of high-level exotic beasts and drank nutrient fluids rich in spiritual energy.

Countless precious resources that most people couldn’t even dream of—

combined with her own decent martial talent and over a decade of painstaking training—

had hard-forged this groundbreaking blood-energy value of 406 by age eighteen.

This was a miracle built on a mountain of gold and a sea of silver!

But what about Su Yu?

An orphan.

Living in a leaky rented room in the old city.

Scrimping and budgeting even for synthetic meat in the cafeteria.

Even if in the past three days he had stumbled upon some insane luck—

found a thousand-year-old lingzhi mushroom or accidentally swallowed the inner core of a high-level beast—

pushing his blood-energy from 0.8 to 10.4 would already be the limit of that luck.

Tempering the body takes time to mature.

No stroke of fortune could raise a person’s physical strength to the level of a mid-level warrior in just three days.

That defied the basic common sense of martial arts.

“An illusion,” she told herself.

“It must be an illusion.”

“Maybe he did odd jobs, carried bricks, hauled cement—built up a bunch of stiff muscles.”

“Yeah, that must be it.”

“Kids from poor families grow up early, right? Makes sense that his muscles are firm.”

Forcing down the shock and that strange stirring inside her,

Lin Xiaoxiao pulled her hand back as if she’d been electrocuted.

She cleared her throat,

trying to mask her fluster.

Took a big gulp of tea.

Su Yu, sitting across from her,

had said nothing the whole time.

He just quietly watched Lin Xiaoxiao’s ever-changing face—

from shock, to doubt, to self-denial.

A barely perceptible flicker of amusement passed through Su Yu’s eyes.

Four hundred blood-energy?

Su Yu mentally rolled his eyes.

This girl’s imagination was still way too conservative.

If she knew that beneath the blood-energy lock inside his body lay an entire warrior-grade blood-energy pool exceeding 1,000 points,

he wondered if this proud heiress would just jump right out of her chair in fright.

But Su Yu didn’t intend to explain.

The perfect disguise of his Energy-Hiding Art made it impossible for even someone of Lin Xiaoxiao’s level to detect his true state with just a pinch of his arm—unless he actively unleashed it.

“Ahem.”

Lin Xiaoxiao set down her tea and forcefully pulled the conversation back on track.

“So…”

“Where was I?”

“Oh right, that one last spot.”

She took a deep breath, her expression suddenly growing serious.

She looked at Su Yu.

With unprecedented gravity in her voice.

“Su Yu.”

“If you want to grab this last spot,”

“you only have one real competitor.”

“Zhao Ze.”

Upon hearing that name,

not a single trace of emotion flickered in Su Yu’s eyes.

He didn’t even pause in picking up his food.

“I know there’s bad blood between you and Zhao Ze,” Lin Xiaoxiao said, thinking Su Yu was just putting on a brave face. “At this morning’s blood-energy test, he scored 10.3.”

“Just 0.1 lower than you.”

“But Su Yu, don’t underestimate him just because of that 0.1 gap!”

Lin Xiaoxiao leaned forward slightly, tone dead serious.

“Blood-energy value is only the foundation.”

“What really decides a battle’s outcome is martial technique!”

“And Zhao Ze has an extremely terrifying trump card.”

Lin Xiaoxiao lowered her voice, as if afraid the walls might have ears.

“He has mastered a Profound Rank lower-tier martial technique.”

“The Shattering Rock Palm!”

A Profound Rank martial technique—the mere mention of those three words seemed to make the atmosphere in the private room grow heavier.

In the Great Xia Kingdom, ordinary high school students could only access the Yellow Rank lower-tier Five Elements Fist.

Even the top students at elite high schools were lucky to learn a Yellow Rank mid-tier martial art at most.

As for Profound Rank techniques...

Their starting price was half a million!

These were advanced arts only accessible in top-tier martial arts universities or elite military units!

Their power was immense, and mastering them was as difficult as reaching for the heavens!

The meridians’ energy pathways were incredibly complex, requiring extreme control over one’s qi and blood.

Even if an ordinary person got their hands on the manual, they might practice for years and still fail to grasp even the basics.

“To get him into the Kyoto Martial Arts University, the Zhao family spared no expense—they specially bought this Shattering Rock Palm, which has lower cultivation difficulty but decent power.”

Lin Xiaoxiao, using the intelligence network of her family, revealed all the information she had gathered without holding anything back from Su Yu.

“Besides, Zhao Ze has been soaking in medicinal baths since childhood, so his meridians are much wider than an average person’s.”

“He managed to force his way through and master this Profound Rank lower-tier martial technique...”