NOVPUBWe were locked in a silent duel of minds, reading each other with every breath and subtle shift in stance. Every glance carried weight.
But with fireballs streaking through the air, their heat warping space and their roar swallowing thought, that mental chess match began to tilt in my favor.
He had already lost.
There was no escape now. Even if I died, I would burst my cultivation and become a sacrifice to strengthen the array. Either way, he wasn't leaving.
He held my gaze calmly, and in that instant, I understood. Neither of us was panicking. There was no point in taunts or bravado. No words would shake us. Not now.
I'd read stories of enemies understanding each other mid-fight, but rarely had I felt it like this. Even without tapping into my Eight Mind Phantoms Technique, it was like I could hear his thoughts.
We were both prepared to die.
No thoughts of retreat or what life might look like without limbs, Qi, or victory plagued our minds. Those thoughts had no place here. They only made you hesitate. And hesitation meant death.
He slipped from the fireball's path like it was choreographed. His body twisted midair with expert timing, avoiding the blast entirely. The explosion struck the ground behind him, sending sparks and dust upward in a roaring plume. But he was already gone.
The auto-attack was too slow for someone like him. Fast, alert, seasoned. He moved like he'd memorized the array's rhythm after one glance as if he knew exactly when the fireballs stopped tracking and became pure trajectory.
Then, the array rumbled.
A deep, resonant growl filled the barrier like a beast awakening. Crimson light pulsed across its surface, and in the next instant, fire bloomed.
Dozens. No, hundreds of fireballs ignited along the array's ceiling.
Molten spheres of burning Qi spiraled to life and dropped like a thunderstorm from hell, raining down with the relentless pace of a machine gun with the devil's finger on the trigger. The air split with each blast, the roar becoming one continuous scream of heat and power.
The sky wasn't just burning.
It was raining fire.
But the cultivator didn't flinch.
He tilted his head back, staring into the inferno above with sharp, steady eyes. He didn't blink. Didn't brace.
He read it.
In that split second, time itself seemed to stretch around him. His eyes moved with eerie precision, tracking and calculating, line by line, fireball by fireball.
He wasn't reacting.
He was decoding it.
Every flicker of flame, every shifting arc of descent, was absorbed and mapped. His face never changed. No fear. No awe. Just razor-edged focus.
He wasn't looking at chaos.
He was reading fate mid-fall, like the fire was writing it for him in the sky and he was already flipping to the last page.
His lips pressed together as he took in a breath. Then let it out.
He didn't get a second one.
The sky cracked open, and fire rained down like molten meteors.
But even as they came from every direction, he moved through them like water through cracks. His body twisted, ducked, pivoted. Every motion was sharp, clean, and practiced. He flowed between falling fireballs with impossible grace, each movement guided by both instinct and calculation.
The battlefield lit up in bursts of flame, the ground erupting in molten splashes. But the guy was always just ahead of destruction.
By the width of a breath, he avoided death. Threads of heat kissed the edges of his robe. Shockwaves chased his heels.
And I just stood there, watching, waiting for one of the fireballs to hit.
But none fucking did.
After a while… he stopped looking up.
His eyes shifted to me. Calm, steady, unblinking. Fire still raged above, but he no longer tracked it. He moved on Qi sense alone now, weaving through the hellstorm like it was background noise. It didn't feel real. It was like the fire no longer mattered.
Explosions continued all around him, but he slid through the gaps like smoke, reading only the rhythm of energy in the air.
And now, his focus was entirely on me.
At that moment, I understood: he wasn't dodging anymore.
He was closing in.
Holy shit.
He already adapted.
This was like picking a fight with some random guy in an alley and realizing too late it was Mike Tyson.
Even as more fireballs joined the onslaught, he danced through them like they were falling snow. The temperature climbed, warping the air into waves and even I, the array's conjurer, felt the sting clawing at my lungs. The ground cracked from the pressure, the world sweltering in flame.
He didn't even sweat.
But no matter how good he was, we both knew the truth; this wouldn't last. The longer the array fired, the worse it would get for him.
Then he kept moving, getting closer with each step.
Like a serpent through a furnace, he blitzed through the barrage and lunged toward me.
Fuck.
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Last resort it is.
I shut my eyes tight and hoped that when I opened them, my skull wouldn't be decorating the edge of the array.
For just a breath, an image flashed in my mind.
Wu Yan, tugging at my sleeve, asking if we'd make it out alive. For the first time, I could see her face. Even though I couldn't make out what it looked like, it felt familiar.
Fu Yating, warning me not to curse in front of her.
I opened my eyes.
Still alive.
Good enough.
I activated Eight Mind Phantoms and tried to hold him telekinetically. No effect.
Didn't expect it to work. He was too experienced, too fast, too strong. But I didn't need to hold him.
I'd already mapped him and marked him.
And with that, I sent out a mental bullet, a compact sphere of raw psychological trauma. No noise, no light, just a crushing echo of pain.
He stopped mid-step.
Just for a second.
Confused, eyes narrowing. It hadn't stopped him, but it hit. A delay. A flicker of hesitation.
"Fuck," he muttered. Hoarse, rasping, like someone who hadn't spoken in years.
The first truthful word I'd heard from him.
That split second stretched into a full one as he gathered his bearings.
And a full second?
That's a goddamn eternity in a fight like this.
The fireballs finally slammed into him with a deafening roar, the ground trembling beneath our feet.
Flames erupted in a violent burst, engulfing his figure in a surge of heat and light. A thick cloud of dust and smoke mushroomed upward, swallowing the battlefield in a haze of scorched earth and boiling air. The shockwave ripped past us, carrying the stench of burning stone and flesh.
For a moment, nothing was visible through the haze, just the echo of the blast and the hungry flicker of flames licking at the dust’s edge.
Who the fuck even was this guy?
The array was still firing.
That meant he was still breathing.
I could feel him, barely. A lingering presence beneath the storm of fire. I had stumbled into a duel with a top-tier Foundation Establishment cultivator seemingly out of nowhere.
My best guess? He’d been hiding deep in the region and got smoked out by those Molten Sky Island teams trying to clear the beast populations.
Lucky me.
But as long as he exhaled, the array would continue raining death. Literally, this array tracked CO₂ emissions. That’s why I’d been holding my breath since the first exchange.
Cheap trick? Maybe. But effective.
Fire Qi was so dense in this region that the array barely touched my reserves. And while the design wasn’t completely original, the CO₂ target-locking was my twist. It was surprisingly simple to layer on top of existing heat-sensitive array logic.
Of course, my actual specialty was thunder arrays. This was just a clever improvisation in the right place, at the right time.
The barrage lasted five full minutes.
Then, without warning, the array turned on me. Fireballs launched at my position.
Shit. He’s figured it out.
I closed the array with a single thought, cutting off the feed of fire Qi.
The battlefield fell silent, the dust beginning to settle in slow spirals as the smoke lost its fury. Embers floated in the air, dimming as the flames receded to glowing cracks in the earth.
I stood still.
No movement. No desperate gasp. No final lunge.
As the smoke peeled back its final veil, the crater revealed itself.
At its center lay a corpse, charred, broken, and very much dead. It barely resembled a man anymore. Flesh melted into bone. Limbs twisted and half-fused to the scorched stone below. It looked more like a shattered statue than a fallen warrior.
Whatever he had been, it was gone.
But I didn’t move just yet.
Could be a fakeout. Could be a preservation technique. Nothing visible, nothing I could sense. But any life-preserving technique that left a “traceable” signature after death would be a bad one.
I stepped closer, cautious.
Falling Moon Claw.
I swept my arm sideways, and blades of wind whipped from my fingers, slicing the remains into scattered chunks of smoldering meat and bone.
Then, without hesitation, I cast a tight furnace array and reduced what was left to ash.
Nothing left to come back.
Nothing left to mourn.
Finally, I let out the breath I had held since this fight began. It felt cathartic.
Whoever this nameless guy was, his fighting talent was real.
And it was strange how someone like that had ended up here. A shame, honestly. With a bit more knowledge, maybe better luck, he wouldn't have died here.
If I'd had the strength, I might've spared him. Just to see what was going on inside that mind while we fought. I couldn't tell how high his cultivation potential ran, but his combat instincts were elite. The only reason he lost was due to lack of knowledge.
Given time? He'd have adapted. Found a countermeasure. Become one of those dangerous opponents that haunt your future. But today, he picked the wrong battlefield… and the wrong guy to fight.
I stared at the scorched patch of earth where his body had been.
It was a hard thing to admit, but I'd probably learned more in that single battle than in weeks of indoor training.
That mental strike I used. Leveraging just a locked gaze to activate the Eight Mind Phantoms Technique?
That wasn't even the plan.
Originally, I'd intended to let him hit me… and use the contact to activate the technique directly. But honestly, I probably wouldn't have survived that first blow. He was too smart to fall for it. Would've adjusted mid-strike, changed angles, crushed my throat or something worse.
So instead, I'd made my final move before the game even started.
We were both playing chess. Pre-playing each move. Trying to see the enemy's thoughts in advance. Ultimately, I won because I had a trump card. A Sky Grade Technique he didn't see coming.
"We need to get that wound checked," Fu Yating said, eyeing the sunken-in section of my chest. Every time I breathed in, there was a stinging pain, and with every breath out, my chest puffed up like a turkey.
Off to the side, Wu Yan stood silent, statue-still. Just the cold expression of her porcelain mask and her head locked toward my position even though she couldn't see me without eyes.
I turned and rushed to Speedy, who had crashed against a tree. I dropped beside him, checking his condition.
He was breathing. Thank the heavens.
Minor scratches along his neck, nothing too serious. But then I saw it.
A crack in his shell.
Shit.
With Speedy's absurd defense, I hadn't thought many Foundation Establishment cultivators could hurt him at all. But here we were.
I let out a sigh and winced. My ribs shifted, scraping something soft inside. A kidney, maybe? Definitely something important.
I placed a hand on my chest and carefully moved my Qi. Using the soft-hard modulation from Dancing Jade Armor, I locked the bones in place and swallowed a high-grade healing pill I'd bought in the Alchemist Town.
The pain dulled. The bones held.
I offered a pill to Speedy. He extended his head and swallowed it gently. Some of the surface wounds began healing… but the shell crack remained untouched.
That would take time.
I checked on the egg next, making sure everything was intact. The jade cocoon pulsed softly, undisturbed.
A long breath escaped me, lost to the wind.
My gaze drifted to the horizon, with dawn spilling over distant mountain peaks.
Then, without another word, we set off again.
Boots pressing into the scorched earth.
Wind at our backs.
The road ahead as uncertain as ever.
