The spear’s tip tore through the open sky, dense thunder-plasma crackling and snapping.
Like the wrath of the heavens given form, the sheer spectacle of it was enough to make ordinary people avert their eyes.
Shen Yi watched it in silence, eyes flickering with sharp focus.
With the golden eagle divine ability bolstering his sight, the entire spear’s speed slowed to a fraction — and yet even so, his pupils contracted slightly.
This was the Mixed Origin technique he’d wanted so badly to witness.
What played out before him now was already beyond every technique he’d ever seen.
Whether Twin-Harmony True Intent or anything else, they were all straightforward applications of qi, condensing it into a physical form.
But this — the man had genuinely, through a mortal body, set heaven’s lightning itself in motion.
Where did the lightning come from? Qi transmuted into it?
His blue-green robe billowed, and beneath it the crimson dragon-tiger pattern across his skin rose slowly to the surface.
Shen Yi shook the lingering lightning arcs off his body with a surge of dense demon qi, and when the spear closed to within three inches, threw the Unfettered Wind-Riding Art into full force.
A translocation art at Perfection — a hundred zhang of distance in a single breath.
And yet against that spear, there was nowhere to go.
Shen Yi barely managed to angle himself clear of the vital points. Dark hair lifted in the wind, and a savage glint flashed through his eyes.
He dropped any thought of continuing to evade.
Three demon kings roared in unison within his body, their overwhelming force pouring entirely into his right arm.
“What kind of brute—?!”
Under Perfected Master Changqing’s watching eyes, Shen Yi didn’t change expression, and drove a fist straight at the thunder-spear.
Crack!
Thunder-plasma that could reduce flesh and bone to cinders in an instant splashed off the edge of his knuckles. Red light blazed across the skin — his path infant fighting back with everything it had — but beyond the path infant, the skin and flesh themselves were formidable beyond comprehension.
The spear, more than a zhang in length, dissolved inch by inch beneath his fist.
Until the last arc of lightning scattered and was gone.
Shen Yi’s momentum was spent. His breathing came slightly faster. He looked up.
The flesh of his right palm was scorched black, revealing the translucent hand of his path infant beneath, wrapped in a faint peacock-bright red glow, slowly mending the damage.
“…”
Perfected Master Changqing had failed to seize the opening of that moment, and stood staring at the young man like he was looking at something that shouldn’t exist.
That killing move, against an entry-level Mixed Origin cultivator, could reasonably have ended him on the spot.
Unless he had some profound technique to draw on, it should only have been barely manageable at best.
But to knock it apart with a punch this crude — this was simply outside anything Changqing had encountered before.
“Hah.”
Shen Yi recovered his composure quickly, his gaze carrying a faint trace of something strange. In this life-or-death clash, this so-called Perfected Master’s presence and cultivation level had far exceeded his expectations — and yet everything the man did seemed somehow difficult to follow.
In some ways less sharp than himself, who hadn’t even been on the path of cultivation for a full year.
Either turning his head to look away, or standing there in a daze.
Strength flooded back into his limbs, and Shen Yi’s figure vanished from where he stood.
At the sight, Perfected Master Changqing stumbled back two steps in a mild panic, a thunder-blade appearing in each palm — but instead of moving, he stayed rooted in place, looking frantically in every direction around him.
Thwish—
Shen Yi dropped out of the air behind him, Deep Abyss in hand coming down in a slash across his spine, the blade raking skin apart on its way through!
The motion was as practiced and clinical as gutting livestock — separating the path infant clean from the body in a single stroke.
On an ordinary cultivator, this strike would have cut him in two.
“AAGH!!”
Perfected Master Changqing let out a wail of agony. The solid path infant burst free of its husk, thunder-plasma surging across its entire form, lighting Shen Yi’s face in alternating white and shadow.
The twin blades in its hands lost all composure, hacking wildly in every direction.
Fury tangled with terror.
The thunder-plasma erupted in violent surges, scorching every nearby mountain range to blackened wasteland.
Shen Yi raised an eyebrow and stepped clear.
In his eyes right now, Perfected Master Changqing was no longer a martial powerhouse — just a wounded beast driven to blind, instinctive release.
Sure enough, when slash after slash produced no result whatsoever.
Perfected Master Changqing, consumed by fury and fear alike, spent his reserves without restraint, his entire form transmuting into a vicious thunder-dragon that went hurtling into the blue-green figure below!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Mountains split apart. A thousand ancient trees crashed and fell.
Every technique he threw out was a different Mixed Origin method.
Which said a great deal about Xuanguang Cave’s accumulated depth.
Whether any of it had any effect was irrelevant — every strike was at full power.
Shen Yi focused on slipping past the sharp points of each attack, fingers tightening on the hilt, his expression growing progressively more indifferent, waiting quietly for the moment the man’s strength ran dry.
The same move, used too many times, would eventually show its flaws.
When Perfected Master Changqing came surging in as a thunder-dragon for the several-dozenth time, Shen Yi finally stopped purely evading. He swept three zhang — exactly three — to the right, and watched the thunder-plasma scatter.
The instant Perfected Master Changqing’s true form broke through the dispersing energy—
Shen Yi was already hanging in the air at his back, and the demon power from three demon kings detonated off the blade as he drove it viciously into the flower-petal that was the heart of Changqing’s path infant!
Perfected Master Changqing slapped instinctively at his own waist.
Only when his hand found nothing there did he look down in horror at his own body, now sliced into two sections on the ground below.
At the same moment, the blade trailing its thick haze and red light, backed by the force of three demon kings, had already driven itself into the thunder-plasma and come down hard against the white flower at its center.
Crack!
Hard as the white flower was, it split apart beneath the edge.
Perfected Master Changqing’s eyes went blank without conscious thought. His mouth opened, and nothing came out.
Within those twin eyes of condensed thunder-plasma, something unmistakably human surfaced.
Terror!
On pure instinct he transmuted into a thunder-dragon once more and shot upward toward the sky — not noticing that his once-brilliant white body was growing dim.
Shen Yi watched the direction he was fleeing, and slowly slid Deep Abyss back into its sheath.
The next instant, the blinding thunder-light was swatted apart by a golden palm. The thunder-plasma path infant rapidly shrank, and was seized in the golden dharma form’s fist without ceremony — like holding a chick.
The Arhat Golden Body descended to the ground before Shen Yi.
Coming down alongside it were the white dragon’s remains, neatly disassembled — claws here, hide there, the flesh and blood torn into regular-sized chunks.
Perfected Master Changqing struggled with everything he had.
But beneath that golden palm, no matter how fiercely his lightning blazed, it accomplished nothing whatsoever.
“Let me go! Hiding behind a senior is no kind of skill! Let me—”
He beat furiously at the golden fingers, screaming toward Shen Yi in a frenzy.
The golden form glanced at him with flat indifference, applied a fraction of pressure, and nearly crushed the path infant to pieces on the spot.
My Master’s already shattered his heart. Still making noise.
Lady Qinghua respectfully held the path infant out. “Master, please dispose of it as you see fit.”
The gentle voice in his ear made Perfected Master Changqing’s struggling go completely still. He stared up at the young man ahead in absolute horror.
My Master?
This wasn’t an elder protecting him. This was his personal servant guardian?
To have a Spirit-Transformation cultivator serving as a slave and attendant — what kind of terrifying background was that?
Was he from somewhere outside the immortal sects?!
“Changqing is willing to serve my Master! Spare my life! Worthless slave Changqing will guard my Master’s cultivation with his life!”
The tiny path infant slammed its forehead frantically against the golden palm.
When it looked at Shen Yi again, what it met were a pair of uncanny slitted pupils.
A wolf’s howl detonated in its ears.
Perfected Master Changqing felt its soul begin to drift, as though some invisible hand were tearing it apart by force — and consciousness left it swiftly.
(End of Chapter 244)