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.
ts me of treason?" "Correct. The host must return to the capital and gradually build up influence." "Wait—I have half a million soldiers, and you want me to go back to the capital to 'build influence'?" "Host, you are currently the Northern Garrison General, loyal to the Great Xia Dynasty." "Of course I am loyal to Great Xia! Absolutely loyal!" "But you keep referring to yourself as 'We'..." "Never mind the details! Summon all the regional commanders and military officers! We suspect treacherous officials are manipulating the court! They shall march with Us to the capital and purge the corrupt!" "......"
e bizarre and supernatural had descended. The previous emperor was a thoroughgoing tyrant; no longer satisfied with human women, he had set his sights on a stunningly beautiful supernatural entity. He met his end in his bedchamber, drained of all his vital essence. As the legitimate eldest son and crown prince, Wang Hao was thus hastily enthroned, becoming the young emperor of the Great Zhou Dynasty. No sooner had he awakened the "Imperial Sign-In Intelligence System" than he was assassinated by a Son of Destiny—a classic villain's opening. The Great Zhou, ravaged by the former emperor's excesses, was in national decline. The great families within its borders harbored their own treacherous schemes, martial sects began to defy the imperial court's decrees, and border armies, their pay and provisions in arrears, grumbled incessantly against the central government. Fortunately, the central capital was still held secure by the half-million Imperial Guards and fifty thousand Imperial Forest Army who obeyed the court's orders, along with the royal family's hidden reserves of power, barely managing to suppress the realm. As the Great Zhou's finances worsened and supernatural activities grew ever more frequent, the court sat atop a volcano. Ambitious plotters everywhere dreamed of overthrowing the dynasty, and even some reclusive ancient powers emerged, attempting to sway the tides of the world. At the first grand court assembly, the civil and military officials nearly came to blows, fighting tooth and nail over the allocation of fifty million taels of silver from the summer tax revenues. The spectacle opened Wang Hao's eyes—the Great Zhou's bureaucracy was not only corrupt but also martially proficient, a cabinet of all-rounders. Some officials even had the audacity to suggest the emperor release funds from the imperial privy purse to address the emergency. Wang Hao suddenly felt weary. Let it all burn.
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
