Chapter 68: Wasteland Legends
The three cultivators eyed each other, the radioactive wind blowing between them.
Arc had long overcome her need for sight once she had crossed the Fifth Coil. Her eyes had turned to metal inside their sockets, but she had gained a truer kind of sight. Her mind saw everything in a three-hundred sixty degree radius around herself. It could penetrate most objects, walls, illusions, and barriers. Her range spanned miles when not paying attention, and hundreds of kilometers when she focused on a single point.
Most importantly, Arc’s Truesight allowed her to analyze the subtle shifts in ambient qi with peerless accuracy.
Czar Zoa hid his core’s location by flooding his flesh with radiation and hiding his qi behind a Barrier. While Arc could easily see past the latter, she would need to observe his techniques to overcome the former.
The Yinyang Khan didn’t bother hiding anything. His monstrous furnace of a core burned deep within his massive chest. It poured out malice like a volcano vomited lava, its darkness obscuring the smaller core of his weaker split personality. Whereas Czar Zoa exuded the cold and sterile lifelessness of a nuclear winter, the Yinyang Khan oozed savage violence through every pore of his skin.
Of course a paranoid warlord would only trust himself with the cube, Arc thought as she assessed her chances. Dyad cultivators were dangerous enough when their cores were split into two separate users; she had never heard of one with both cores conjoined within themselves. That should at a minimum double his qi reserves in a pinch. All of the Path’s benefits, none of the disadvantages. Wonderful.
Both of Arc’s opponents were equally terrible, though the Yinyang Khan’s qi reserves surpassed both of his rivals since he hadn’t used his Authority yet. This would give him a slight edge in their first engagement.
“I must say, nuclear trash, that you have done something that I once thought impossible,” the Yinyang Khan threatened Czar Zoa, his mouth seething with unyielding rage. His entire body brimmed with anger. “You have managed to well and truly piss me off. This is quite the new feeling for me.”
“You speak these words as if they are meant to frighten me,” Czar Zoa replied calmly. The Nuclear Buddha had always been eerily calm, but it seemed his last clash with Arc had purged him of whatever human emotions he had left. “A fool like you, who would use the Nuke to enslave this flawed world instead of saving it, is unworthy of my respect.”