Chapter 67: Two Down

The metallic reek of fresh blood and scorched earth burned in the back of my throat, but the taste of copper on my own tongue was far more bitter.

Circulating spiritual qi through freshly opened meridians in the midst of a life-and-death clash was an entirely different beast than meditating upon a peaceful peak.

Even though the Cloud Flowing Origin Scripture was boundless in its purity and depth, my newly condensed spiritual sea was only hours old.

Every time I drew upon the spinning whirlpool in my lower dantian, the flow felt like icy mountain spring water rushing through stone gullies that had not yet been polished smooth.

A seasoned expert at the Second Layer of Qi Condensation would have moved like drifting mist, but to me, every transition carried a microscopic drag.

"With your Indomitable Asura Dao Heart, cleansed marrow, and the foundational battle scriptures of our peak, defeating a practitioner at the Peak of the Qi Condensation Realm is only a matter of practice," Master’s calm, teasing voice echoed in the quietest recesses of my sea of consciousness.

A matter of practice.

I gripped the hilt of the Autumn Water Frost Sword until my knuckles turned porcelain-white. Master’s faith was an unshakeable mountain at my back, and I refused to let his teachings be humiliated by two mediocre border scavengers.

If my control was unrefined, I would temper it in the fire of their blades, if my meridians were stiff, I would bathe them in the blood of our enemies.

"Die, wretched girl!"

The scarred brute, Commander Hu, roared with fury, his heavy twin-headed battleaxe cleaving down from the sky.

He was no longer holding back a shred of his Fourth Layer Qi Condensation cultivation. The twin steel crescents of his axe blazed with a murky, muddy-yellow earth-attribute spiritual aura that seemed to carry the crushing weight of a small boulder. The sheer spiritual pressure alone cracked the shale beneath my boots before the iron even descended.

At the exact same instant, the pale commander on my left flicked his iron-spined whip.

CRACK!

The serpent-like weapon uncoiled with terrifying speed, imbued with the crackling, cerulean arcs of Fifth Layer lightning-attribute qi. The whip did not simply lash out, it split into three serpentine shadows that whipped through the air, hissing like venomous thunder-vipers as they coiled around my blind spots, completely sealing off my left and rear retreat paths.

Individually, I could have parried either strike with the orthodox forms Master had drilled into my flesh. But faced with their combined, interlocking assault, the disparity in raw spiritual volume bore down upon me like an iron millstone.

I shifted my footing, executing the foundational defensive step of the Cloud-Ascending Movement Art.

CLANG!

My frost blade met the descending battleaxe at a sharp upward angle, channeling a thread of water-attribute spiritual qi to redirect the crushing earth-force into the dirt. But even with the technique softening the blow, the murky spiritual energy shuddered through the blade, rattling through the bones of my wrists and jarring my collarbone with a dull, throbbing ache.

Before my breath could reset, the lightning whip struck.

SZZZT!

The iron spines grazed across my left shoulder and my waist.

The dark-green traveling tunic Master had bought for me tore apart, and three violent, scorched lacerations opened across my flesh.

The searing heat of the lightning scorched my skin, sending jagged arcs of numbing thunder-qi burrowing into my secondary meridians, threatening to paralyze the left side of my torso.

I bit my lower lip so hard that crimson drops trickled down my chin, using the sharp sting of pain to keep my sea of consciousness pristine and clear.

Do not flinch. Do not retreat.

The two commanders had clearly abandoned every shred of arrogance. The sight of their companion lying dead on the shale with her throat frozen solid had shattered their complacency.

They were fighting like cornered wolves, coordinating their strikes with the practiced malice of veteran border killers.

Wounds began to accumulate across my body. A glancing sweep of the axe sheared through the leather of my boot, leaving a shallow gouge along my calf; an erratic snap of the lightning whip tore away a lock of my raven hair and scorched my collarbone. Warm blood soaked through my dark clothes, sticking the fabric to my bruised skin.

Yet, beneath my sheer traveling veil, my obsidian eyes burned with an icy, terrifying stillness.

My Indomitable Asura Dao Heart beat with an eerie, steady rhythm. The pain did not terrify me, pain was an old, familiar companion that had walked beside me across three mortal kingdoms.

In fact, the stinging agony acted like a whetstone, stripping away the lingering rust of my mortal habits and forcing my divine sense to sharpen to a razor’s edge.

I was relying almost entirely on the Frost-Bending Willow Sword Scripture for offens, the exquisite sword manual Master had passed to me a few weeks ago.

The manual was profound beyond measure, perfectly attuned to the deep-sea cold iron of the blade and the water and metal spiritual roots resting within my soul. Whenever I swung the sword, a pale blue crystalline mist erupted from the fuller, coating the edge in razor-sharp frost-qi.

Swish!

Pivoting on the ball of my uninjured foot, I slashed horizontally, sending a crescent arc of icy sword-light shrieking toward Commander Hu’s neck. The brute roared, raising his heavy axe shaft to block, but the cold mist seeped through the iron, frosting his knuckles and causing his heavy weapon to slow by a fraction of a breath.

I managed to carve a shallow, bloodless furrow across his armored bicep, but before my follow-up thrust could pierce his heart, the lightning whip lashed toward my eyes, forcing me to leap back into the smoky dust.

While trading blows across the rocky valley floor, my peripheral vision took in the wider battlefield, and a cold weight pressed down upon my chest.

The lethal traps we had prepared under Master’s guidance were no longer claiming lives.

The surviving imperial soldiers had finally identified the kill-zones. Guided by the iron whistles of their surviving squad captains, the infantry columns were carefully circumnavigating the concealed trenches and steering clear of the narrow defiles where gravitational rock deadfalls hung suspended above.

Still, looking across the entrance of Wolf Fang Gorge, the results were staggering.

The canyon floor was an open-air graveyard.

Shattered war wagons, dead horn-beasts, and hundreds of crushed imperial corpses lay buried beneath thousands of tons of fallen limestone and impaled upon poisoned wooden stakes.

Between the sudden night raid that had erased their eastern detachment and the catastrophic ambush of the morning traps, Governor Yan’s terrifying eight-hundred-and-fifty-man extermination vanguard had been decimated.

Barely three hundred imperial soldiers remained standing.

Yet, three hundred heavily armored mortal infantry and disciplined Body Strengthening elites were still a terrifying, insurmountable mountain for a ragtag band of starving refugees.

High atop the cliff ledges, the ninety rebel fighters were raining down volleys of iron-tipped arrows, their recurve bows twanging relentlessly against the morning wind. But mortal arrows could not halt the advance forever.

Dozens of imperial shock troops, veteran warriors at the middle and late stages of the Body Strengthening Realm, clad in heavy scale-mail, kwere already scaling the steep cliffside paths with terrifying agility.

Brandishing curved iron sabers and climbing hooks, they were rapidly clawing their way past the barricades, pulling lesser infantry up behind them.

Clang! Shing! Ahhh!

Distant screams of agonizing mortal combat echoed from the high precipices.

The direct, bloody melee between the imperial shock troops and the rebel defenders had begun.

A sharp, suffocating spike of anxiety pierced my chest. The rebel militia were brave, but they were mostly green hunters and desperate peasants, if those fifty Body Strengthening brutes broke through their front lines, the women, elders, and chained children hiding in the caverns behind them would be butchered without mercy.

I have to end this now!

The fiery, vengeful impulse of my Asura Dao Heart surged violently, screaming at me to ignite the entirety of my spiritual essence, abandon all defense, and trade blow for blow to decapitate the two commanders in a single suicidal burst.

My grip tightened, my boots tensing to launch a desperate, reckless charge—

No.

A sudden, chilling clarity clamped down upon my boiling blood, as if Master’s gentle, warm hand had lightly tapped my forehead once more.

Do not let impulse blind your sword. Adapt to the shifting tide.

If I threw myself forward on blind emotion, I would only be impaled by the lightning whip and crushed by the battleaxe before my sword reached their throats. Trading my life would not save the refugees, it would only leave Master alone on the high crags, disappointed by a foolish disciple who failed to absorb his simplest lessons.

Trust Sister Bai.

Bai Ling was a commander of exceptional intellect and iron will. She had held this resistance together for two years in the face of impossible odds, she knew how to bleed the enemy for every inch of stone. My duty was not to micromanage the cliffs. My duty was here, in the dust, pinning down the two greatest threats to our survival.

I exhaled a long breath of frosty mist, anchoring my heels back into the gravel.

Clang! Screeech!

The battle dragged on, brutal, exhausting, and merciless.

Yet, as the exchanges crossed the fiftieth breath, something extraordinary began to shift within my flesh.

The awkward, jagged friction in my meridians was steadily grinding away. The more I parried the earth-shattering axe and ducked beneath the crackling arcs of the thunder whip, the more natural the circulation of my spiritual qi became.

The liquid essence in my dantian responded to my thoughts with frightening fluidity, coating my muscles in a protective membrane of icy energy that blunted the impact of their blows.

I began to see the rhythm of their martial techniques.

Commander Hu’s heavy axe possessed terrifying concussive force, but his transitions were ponderous, every time he brought the double blades down, his rear flank remained exposed for the span of half a heartbeat.

The pale commander with the whip was lightning-fast, but his focus was entirely fixed on keeping distance, whenever I stepped within five paces of his boots, his whip could not generate sufficient rotational momentum to deliver a lethal strike.

They were strong, but their martial foundations were saturated with crude flaws.

There.

The opening materialized like a stroke of heavenly revelation.

Commander Hu roared, leaping three feet into the air to bring his battleaxe down in an earth-shattering overhead cleave aimed to split my skull.

At the exact same instant, the whip-wielder lashed out horizontally from the left, aiming to sever my waist while my weapon was committed to the high block.

It was the exact same interlocking pincer attack they had used to wound me earlier. Only this time, I did not raise the Autumn Water Frost Sword to parry.

Cloud-Ascending Art: Phantom Drifting Mist!

Instead of bracing my weight, I released the spiritual qi holding my boots to the gravel, allowing the immense downdraft of the falling battleaxe to push my light frame backward like a dry autumn leaf caught in a gale.

BOOM!

The massive battleaxe struck empty earth, obliterating a five-foot crater into the limestone and throwing up a thick screen of blinding rock dust.

Through the dust, the lightning whip screamed toward my retreating shadow.

I didn’t dodge.

I twisted my torso in mid-air, allowing the electric lash to strike my left forearm.

SZZT!

Pain flared like liquid fire across my arm, the iron spines tearing into my flesh, but my left hand snapped shut like an iron vice, clamping tightly around the spined leather cord of the whip.

The pale commander’s eyes bulged in absolute, horrified shock. He had never imagined a cultivator would willingly sacrifice her own limb to seize a weapon.

"You crazy wench—!" he shrieked, frantically trying to channel a burst of lightning-qi down the cord to blow my hand apart.

He was too late.

Channeling all the spiritual qi within my lower dantian, I yanked the whip with the entirety of my peak Body Strengthening physical might.

The pale commander, caught entirely off-balance with his feet unplanted on the loose shale, was violently ripped from the ground, his slender frame flying uncontrollably through the air straight toward me.

Frost-Bending Willow Sword: Blooming Lotus of Severing Frost!

The Autumn Water Frost Sword sang with a clear, celestial chime.

Under my command, the five elemental currents within my meridians flared, feeding pure, refined metal and water spiritual qi into the blade.

A dazzling, six-petaled lotus of crystalline ice blossomed from the sword tip, rotating with razor-sharp sword-qi that froze the surrounding air into glittering snowflakes.

SHING!

I stepped forward, my sword gliding in a flawless, diagonal crescent.

The frost lotus detonated against his chest.

The high-grade spiritual sword-qi shredded his low-grade leather armor like wet paper, cleaving through his ribcage, his heart, and his spine in a single, devastating stroke.

A shower of crimson blood erupted into the morning light, only to instantly freeze into brilliant red ice crystals that rained down upon the gravel.

The pale commander’s eyes remained frozen in a wide, disbelieving stare as his bisected torso crashed heavily into the dirt, his severed organs glazed in a thick layer of blue frost, completely dead before his whip even slipped from my bloody fingers.

The clash of steel ceased across our corner of the valley.

Through the lingering veil of limestone dust, Commander Hu slowly pulled his heavy battleaxe from the crater.

His weathered, scarred face was drained of all color, his lips trembling violently as he stared at the two frozen halves of his brother-in-arms lying in the mud.

First Lan, now the whip-wielder.

Two seasoned middle-stage Qi Condensation commanders, dead at the hands of a wounded, veiled girl who had barely stepped into the realm hours ago.

A cold, paralyzing dread seized his spine. He looked at me as if looking at an ancient, blood-soaked demon walking the earth in human skin.

I stood five paces away amidst the falling snow of frozen blood.

My dark-green tunic was torn and soaked in crimson, my left arm was scorched and bleeding, and my breathing was heavy, misting into the cold air.

Yet, I did not cower. I did not lean on my weapon.

I slowly raised the Autumn Water Frost Sword, pointing the immaculate, bloodless blue blade directly between Commander Hu’s trembling eyes.

Beneath my sheer veil, a cold, dazzling smile curved my lips, and my voice echoed across the quiet rocks like the whisper of the executioner’s scythe:

"Two down," I spoke, my obsidian eyes locking onto his soul. "It is your turn next."