Chapter 236: How
"The Phantom of Sword River... how is this possible?"
The words tumbled out of someone’s mouth before they could stop them, carried by a disbelief too large to stay silent.
"How can a Golden Core cultivator forge a connection with the Sword River? That realm of sword dao is not supposed to exist below the immortal threshold—"
"Could it be... his mortal sword heart has already ascended? That it has transformed — broken through into an immortal sword dao entirely on its own?"
The voices overlapped and tangled, spilling out across the courtyard in a cascade of stunned murmuring that no one seemed able to fully contain. The mockery that had filled this same space only moments ago had evaporated completely, burned away without a trace. In its place stood something rawer — awe, tightly wound around the edges of genuine fear. Eyes that had been cold and contemptuous now fixed on Lin Huang’s figure with expressions stripped of all pretense, hard and serious and unable to look away.
Lin Huang’s cultivation was Golden Core. That fact had not changed. By every conventional measure, by every rung of the ladder these disciples had spent their lives climbing, he should have been beneath their notice.
But the pressure bearing down on their souls was not conventional. It was not measured in cultivation realms or years of refinement. It was the pressure of something vast and ancient pressing against the inside of the world, straining to get through — and it was coming from him. His sword dao alone, untethered from his cultivation base, was something that could tear through them like parchment.
None of them spoke that part aloud. They didn’t need to.
"Master..."
The word came out barely above a breath.
In the distance, half-hidden behind the edge of the courtyard wall, Zhao Yunfei stood with both hands pressed over her mouth, her wide eyes locked on Lin Huang’s figure. The excitement pushing against her chest was almost too much to hold. She was trying to contain it — barely succeeding — her entire body trembling with the effort of staying still.
She could hardly believe this was the same person. The same Lin Huang she had known in the Phoenix and Dragon Dojo — quiet to the point of invisibility, enduring everything without complaint, weeping silently through exhaustion and training until his body gave out, then getting up and doing it again. That Lin Huang had stood in the background of every room he had ever entered.
This Lin Huang filled the entire courtyard without taking a single step.
His voice, when it came, was stripped of everything except the word itself.
"Scram."
One word. Flat, unhurried, carrying no performance behind it whatsoever — which somehow made it land heavier than a shout ever could have.
It didn’t reach the ears so much as it bypassed them entirely, sinking straight through skin and bone to land somewhere deeper, somewhere that cultivators spent lifetimes building walls to protect. The souls of every disciple present shook as if struck — a vibration that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the dao pressure woven into those two syllables.
The courage that had carried these outer sect disciples through the gate of this courtyard — the borrowed bravado, the comfortable arrogance of numbers and rank — crumbled. Not gradually. All at once, like a structure whose single load-bearing pillar had just been knocked out.
Not one of them moved.
Not one of them spoke.
Not one of them, if they were being entirely honest with themselves, dared to breathe too loudly.
A suffocating silence fell over the courtyard like a physical weight, settling into every corner, pressing down on every pair of shoulders.
Then it shattered.
"Arrogant!"
The voice cracked through the silence like something thrown against a wall. Loud, furious, jagged at the edges with the particular rage of someone whose pride had just been publicly reduced to nothing in front of people who had always watched him be untouchable.
"Do you even know who you are talking to?"
Chen Hu stepped forward, and the sight of him was almost startling — face flushed a deep, violent red, the color of a man running on rage fumes alone. His fists were clenched so tightly at his sides that the knuckles had gone white, and the veins pushing against his forehead looked like fault lines on the verge of splitting open. He was a volcano with nowhere left to go but up.
"Do you know who I am?"
The words rang out across the silent courtyard.
Nobody moved to answer him.
"Just a lowly Golden Core cultivator, and you dare to act this arrogant in front of me?" Chen Hu’s voice had climbed past rage into something uglier, something that had abandoned all pretense of dignity. "Do you really think that casting the Phantom of Sword River makes you something? Let me beat some sense into that thick skull of yours — because if I don’t, one day you’ll walk out those gates and drag the reputation of my Ancient Sentinental Sect through the mud!"
The moment the last word left his mouth, his aura detonated outward.
It surged like a storm front breaking — vast, ruthless, and suffocating, pouring off his frame in violent waves that warped the air around him. The courtyard itself seemed to flinch. The pressure alone, just the raw condensed force of a Grand Ascension realm cultivator releasing his intent without restraint, was enough to make the ground groan faintly beneath their feet. Any normal Golden Core cultivator caught in the outer edge of that aura would have simply ceased to be a problem — erased from existence before the attack even arrived.
But Lin Huang was not a normal Golden Core cultivator.
He was someone whose dao had been quietly outgrowing the container the world had given it. Someone with grand dao providence running through him like a river that had not yet found its full banks. A name that would one day make realms turn their attention.
And so, before Chen Hu’s attack could close even a fraction of the distance between them, the Sword River Phantom hovering above Lin Huang’s figure moved.
The vast, shimmering expanse of the phantom condensed in a single, breathtaking instant — the entire river pulling itself inward, compressing, tightening, until it collapsed into one perfect white sword suspended in the air. Then it cleaved.
The motion was almost gentle in how clean it was. Like a thought made physical. Like a hot blade drawn through still water.
The sword split Chen Hu’s surging attack straight down the center without slowing, the force of the Grand Ascension realm cultivator’s strike peeling apart around it as though it had never existed, the divided energy scattering harmlessly to either side. The remnants flew past Lin Huang’s figure without touching so much as a single strand of his hair.
The courtyard went absolutely silent.
"You— how is this possible?"
Chen Hu’s voice came out wrong. Stripped of its earlier thunder, reduced to something raw and unsteady, the voice of a man whose framework for understanding the world had just developed a crack too large to ignore. He had used the majority of his strength. He was a Grand Ascension realm cultivator — a level so far above Golden Core that the gap between them should have been insurmountable, an ocean between a ship and a leaf. That alone should have been more than sufficient.
But before he could finish processing the thought — before the next word could form in his throat — something changed in the air around him.
A cold, piercing sensation gripped his heart without warning. Danger. Pure and absolute and completely without origin that his eyes could identify. His instincts, honed through years of cultivation, screamed at him to move.
He moved fast. Grand Ascension realm fast.
It wasn’t fast enough.
Puchi.
The sound was soft. Almost delicate.
For a fraction of a second, Chen Hu felt nothing but a sharp, searing heat — a line of burning drawn across his awareness so quickly his mind couldn’t locate it. Then something warm and wet sprayed across his face, hitting his skin in a fine, scattered mist.
He looked down.
Both of his arms lay on the ground.
The stumps where they had been attached flexed and contracted involuntarily, the muscles fighting on pure reflex to seal off the bleeding — the desperate, automatic response of a body that had survived long enough to know how to manage catastrophic damage. The blood soaked into the stone beneath him in dark, spreading pools.
For several long seconds, Chen Hu simply stared at them.
"Young Master Chen!"
The crowd fractured all at once. Voices collided in a wave of pure, undiluted panic, bodies surging forward and then stopping, unsure whether to approach or run. Chen Hu was not just any disciple — he was the outer sect elder’s most precious son, the singular point around which all of their futures and fortunes pivoted. If something happened to him under their watch, every single one of them would spend the remainder of their lives paying the price for it.
They stood frozen in that terrible in-between, paralyzed by competing terrors.
Meanwhile, Chen Hu slowly raised his gaze from the ground.
His face had undergone a complete transformation. The volcanic fury from moments ago had been overtaken by something more primal — the expression of a man whose entire world had just been restructured in a single, irreversible instant. His eyes locked onto Lin Huang, wide and blazing, pupils dilated, the humiliation and shock and rage all colliding together into something that shook visibly through his entire frame.
When he finally spoke, his voice had climbed back toward a roar — jagged and cracking at the edges, the sound of someone screaming into a wound.
"How dare you, piece of filth!"
The words hit the courtyard walls and echoed back into the silence.
Lin Huang looked at him.
His expression hadn’t changed once.