The sparks flying through the air joined together in a dazzling ribbon of light. The spectators could barely follow the action, seeing only a blur of white flashing madly around a black speck.
Every flash was accompanied by a sharp metallic crack and a burst of sparks.
“What speed. What flawless defense.”
In the Huaqing rest area, An Changqing’s gaze was more focused than ever. As a master of swordsmanship, he could see the danger hidden within the exchange more clearly than anyone else.
“Every one of Yan Feiyan’s strikes is aimed at a different vital point—the wrist, the ankle, the neck, the heart. Her attacks flow together so seamlessly that they hardly look human. But Chen Guan’s defense is even more absurd. He’s like a mountain. No matter how fiercely the wind and rain beat against him, he doesn’t move an inch.”
Shan Heng’s heart pounded as he listened. He asked himself honestly: if he were facing that silent sword, pouring down like mercury, he probably wouldn’t last ten seconds before being stabbed full of holes.
As expected of an academy of geniuses. It truly was a gathering of monsters.
And Chen Guan hadn’t even moved his feet.
“He… He seems to be adapting.”
Shan Heng adjusted his glasses and voiced his discovery in a whisper so soft it was almost inaudible.
He could see it clearly. At the beginning, there had been the tiniest pauses in Chen Guan’s parries. But as Yan Feiyan’s attacks grew more violent, his defense had become increasingly smooth and seamless, as though he were borrowing his opponent’s sword to hone his own skills.
The furious assault stopped without warning.
Yan Feiyan’s figure appeared ten meters away. She stared intently at Chen Guan, whose breathing hadn’t changed in the slightest.
Her Silent Sword relied on speed and continuity to overwhelm her opponent. What it feared most was this kind of unreasonable absolute defense.
Once her rhythm was interrupted, her strength would be rapidly exhausted by the high-speed movements.
“You’re strong.”
Yan Feiyan spoke, her voice cool and detached.
Chen Guan looked at her and calmly offered his assessment. “You’re not bad either.”
To outsiders, it sounded like nothing more than a polite compliment. But to Yan Feiyan, it was no different from a condescending judgment.
She took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the frustration roiling inside her. Her eyes sharpened once more.
“Again.”
Before the words had even faded, she was already moving.
This time, she abandoned all the dazzling afterimages, concentrating every ounce of her speed and strength into one final strike.
Man and sword became one, transforming into a streak of white lightning that tore through the air and shot straight toward Chen Guan’s heart.
It was a sword of absolute commitment, one that discarded every variation and every retreat.
Facing this attack, which embodied all of Yan Feiyan’s essence, energy, and spirit, Chen Guan finally moved.
He shifted his body slightly to the side, allowing the white streak of lightning to skim past his ribs.
In that split second, the sickle in his hand swept around with the momentum. Its long handle caught precisely beneath Yan Feiyan’s sword-wielding wrist, then gently levered upward.
An irresistible spiral of deft force traveled from her wrist. The longsword she had been gripping with all her strength was pried from her fingers by sheer leverage, flying uncontrollably through the air.
Clang!
The sword traced an arc overhead before crashing onto the distant floor with a crisp, mournful ring.
The entire arena seemed to have been drained of sound.
Everyone saw Yan Feiyan frozen in the posture of a forward thrust, her hand now empty.
And the blade of Chen Guan’s enormous sickle had already come to rest silently against her neck.
From the instant he drew his weapon to the instant her sword hit the ground, the entire process had taken less than a second.
It had happened so quickly that even the referee failed to react.
Yan Feiyan stood rigid, the bone-chilling cold of the blade against her neck spreading through her entire body. She could clearly feel gooseflesh rise across her skin.
She had lost.
She had lost so cleanly and so completely that she hadn’t even been able to see exactly how her opponent had done it.
“The winner is Chen Guan of Huaqing Academy.”
The referee’s voice shattered the silence, striking Yan Feiyan’s mind like a thunderclap.
Without looking at her, he turned and walked toward the longsword lying on the ground, still giving off its mournful ring. He bent down to pick it up, then returned to Yan Feiyan and held it out to her by the hilt.
“Your sword is very fast.”
Yan Feiyan’s body trembled violently. She slowly raised her head, her lips parting and closing, but she couldn’t utter a single word.
The sword she had been proud of, the confidence that had been fused into her very bones, had been shattered into dust by that casual upward flick.
This hadn’t been a battle between equals.
She took the sword, turned around in a daze, and walked off the arena step by step. The sharpness she had carried when she entered was nowhere to be seen.
[Is that it? I prepared all these sunflower seeds for nothing.]
[Brother Coffin didn’t just defeat her—he shattered her martial heart.]
[Poor Miss Yan Feiyan. She walked out of the beginner’s village and immediately ran into the Demon King.]
Chen Guan watched her dejected back as she left, then turned and walked back to the Huaqing rest area.
“Beautifully done.”
An Changqing came forward to greet him, amazement and contemplation in his eyes.
“That last move—you used the momentum of her charge, using the sickle’s long handle as a lever and creating a spiral fulcrum at the point where she was exerting force. You instantly neutralized the strength of her grip.”
An Changqing’s analysis was precise. He looked at Chen Guan and shook his head with a wry smile.
“Looks like your hand-to-hand skills are pretty strong too.”
As expected of someone without a single weakness. Even though An Changqing had known about Chen Guan’s strength for a long time, he still often felt defeated by him.
Perhaps what his father and Qin Wu had said before applied to him as well.
Meanwhile, in the Beishi Academy rest area, Bai Huanran watched Yan Feiyan return to a corner. For a moment, he had no idea how to comfort her.
He turned his head and stared through the densely packed crowd at Chen Guan, who had just taken his seat in the Huaqing rest area. The surging frustration nearly burned away the last of his reason.
The expressions of the contestants from the other academies changed as well.
If they had still been able to make excuses during the team competition—claiming it was merely a matter of teamwork and that Chen Guan had been a lucky freeloader—then this one-sided defeat, which had uprooted Yan Feiyan’s confidence completely, had torn their remaining fantasies to shreds.
Everyone from Huaqing was a monster who couldn’t be judged by common sense.
“Next match: Shengu Academy’s Shū Seihaku versus Zero Academy’s Marcus.”
The scarlet characters flashing across the big screen, along with the harsh electronic announcement, cut through the wave of discussion in the stands.
In the Shengu Academy rest area, Shū Seihaku smoothed out the tiny wrinkles on his collar and walked straight toward the center of the arena.
He was going to wipe away the humiliation of his previous defeat.
On the other side, Marcus of Zero Academy was a muscle-bound brute standing over two meters tall. Twisted scars covered his exposed arms. He looked less like a student and more like a member of the mafia. Like Shū Seihaku, he was a fourth-year student.
“At last, they’ve picked a target whose face I can actually see.”
Marcus pulled back his lips, revealing a row of pale teeth, and rolled his thick neck. The grinding of bone made everyone’s teeth ache.
Shū Seihaku didn’t even bother to look back at the crude provocation.
In his eyes, these idiots who went around needling people had driven their own needles into their brains. Every last one of them had a pointy head.
s + Rent Collection Wealth】 At the start, he inherited a rundown house in the urban village from his grandfather. The house had no tenants, but the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a self-proclaimed empress from the Tianxuan Continent arrived as his first tenant. Ye Chuan soon discovered that with every new tenant moving in, not only did he receive massive daily payments, but he also obtained unique items related to their backgrounds. 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Tiger Strength Pill—dramatically enhances physical power!】 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Deer Blood Pill—significantly boosts vitality!】 …… From that day on, all sorts of bizarre tenants began appearing in the house: the empress from Tianxuan Continent, an apocalyptic sorceress from the Magic Realm, a mysterious scientific girl who fell through a spacetime rift… Every single day, he received strange, powerful items and endless money. Then one day, he suddenly realized—he had become invincible. Enough, enough! Stop giving me more!
nto another world, I bought a slave for the first time, never expecting the silver wolf girl to be so cute... Lin Feng: I know it's cold, but you don't have to sneak into my bed! Yuna: Just sharing body warmth, if you dare do anything naughty, I'll definitely...
uld barely embark on the path to immortality. Just as he was on the verge of death, his golden finger awakened. No matter whether it was poison, drained blood and vital energy, diminished lifespan, or any other physical debuff caused by paying a price—once midnight passed, everything would be refreshed. From then on, whenever someone asked what kind of person Chu Ran was, the answer was simple: Forbidden arts that other cultivators dared not learn? Chu Ran would learn them. Prices that even demonic cultivators dared not pay? Chu Ran would pay them. Lifespan that even righteous cultivators dared not burn? Chu Ran would burn it. All the blood essence in his body? Take it. Want both his hands and feet? He would cut them off and send them to you. You say he’s finished? He wasn’t built to sit idle. You think he’s gone mad? No—he was simply waiting for midnight. From that day onward, Chu Ran would respect neither Heaven nor Earth, bow to neither gods nor ghosts. He had only one wish: For midnight to arrive a little sooner.
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
