Chapter 212

The sword net tore through the phantom mountain. It reduced the apparition to countless drifting fragments with contemptuous ease—a blade through smoke.

The brown-haired elder hadn't expected Xia Si to find another gear. Alarm crossed his face, but this was a full-force exchange; both sides had committed everything to a single strike. With no room to pull back or redirect, he had no choice but to meet the razor-edged Wild Wind sword net head-on.

Swish. The phantom mountain dissolved. The wild wind died.

Two figures came to ground—one kneeling, one standing. Both were drenched in blood.

The difference was that Xia Si was smiling. The elder could no longer manage any expression at all. His face was a ruin of torn flesh and blood.

"What... sword technique is this?" he rasped, lurching a step forward to keep himself upright.

"Clear Wind Temple. Wild Wind Sword." A clean shing, and Xia Si sheathed her blade.

Behind her, the brown-haired elder pitched forward. A dark pool of blood spread slowly beneath him.

She glanced back at the body. "You were actually quite good."

…

"How is this possible?!" Across the field, Fu Chunxing of the Wanhua Sect—who had been posing as a member of the local Hongfei Sect—stumbled back step by step, his face carved with disbelief.

The Vice Sect Master of the Fushan Sect—a Major Three Harmonies Grandmaster, a Divine Officer Called One—had actually lost? Not only had the Fushan Sect, one of the Inner City's Three Sects, blown its cover; it had lost the fight outright.

They had overestimated the enemy as generously as possible before making their move. To deal with a single Divine Officer, they had fielded a Major Three Harmonies Grandmaster with combat power rivaling a High Divine Officer, and backed him with two regular Divine Officers in support. A lineup like that should have been unassailable.

Yet Liu Sheng—the Fushan Sect's Vice Sect Master, a man with High Divine Officer combat prowess—lay on the ground, fate unknown.

All because of a girl who had materialized from the Clear Wind Temple out of nowhere.

Clear Wind Temple... Clear Wind Temple. How could an unknown High Divine Officer surface from a place like that? She had reached this level without leaving a single trace or rumor. Did she simply drop from the sky?

Fu Chunxing had no time for deeper questions. He made his decision on the spot. The five-hundred-meter retreat they'd taken to escape the battle's aftershocks had handed them a generous head start. He used it.

Fu Chunxing and his surviving allies turned and ran.

…

A wave of fierce cheering rolled in from the Clear Wind Temple disciples.

Chen Sui swallowed hard. He watched Senior Sister Xia Si approach and felt his thoughts tangle. All he knew for certain was this: over a year ago, Temple Master Lin Hui had brought her without warning and declared her his direct disciple.

Xia Si had demonstrated terrifying physical gifts and martial aptitude from the start. Even so, she had remained within the believable range of a prodigy. Everything had seemed normal enough—until the exploration team entered the Mist Zone, where her precise, disciplined, ruthless combat instincts surfaced, and things slowly stopped seeming normal.

To be fair, the Clear Wind Temple had always been a little unusual. Before, they'd simply assumed that being the strongest and largest martial hall in the area meant a few secrets came with the territory.

But since Xia Si joined, that strangeness had compounded. Then came Mingxia. And the Clear Wind Sword Technique their inner circle practiced bore almost no resemblance to what ordinary disciples were taught—its power was freakishly explosive, its footwork absurdly swift.

And now Senior Sister Xia Si had stepped forward and, without tricks or shortcuts, cleanly beaten a Major Three Harmonies Grandmaster suspected of matching a High Divine Officer in combat.

As the cheering faded, the Clear Wind Temple disciples fell quiet. Each was turning over the same question in silence: had Xia Si hidden her strength all along—or had the Temple Master been concealing the Clear Wind Temple's true foundations from the very beginning?

No one had an answer.

"Whatever the case—she saved everyone." Chen Sui's voice was quiet. "Senior Sister Xia saved every last one of us. We owe her our lives."

Liu Xiao glanced at him, surprised, but said nothing. Her eyes tracked Xia Si as she approached.

"You—" Liu Xiao caught herself, a trace of shock surfacing in her expression. "You still have strength in reserve?"

Xia Si tilted her head slightly. "Burning yourself out completely, abandoning every last safeguard—that's the height of foolishness." She paused and exhaled slowly. "Still... it's been a long time since I've had a fight this satisfying. Back then, out there, those giant—"

She seemed to catch herself and stopped.

The unfinished sentence left Liu Xiao burning with curiosity. But it wasn't her place to ask.

"They came for me," Liu Xiao said. "Thank you. Without you, I would have died."

"Not necessarily. Unless he could have killed you instantly, he never had a real path to finishing you." Xia Si shook her head. "Shortly after the fight began, I sensed an expert of comparable level concealed at a distance, watching. The aura suggested someone posted there to protect you."

"...That would be my brother's doing." Liu Xiao's expression settled. Her eldest brother, Liu Wujun, was never careless. After receiving word of the situation, putting contingencies in place would have been instinctive for him.

She simply hadn't expected the enemy to be reckless enough to field High Divine Officer–level combat power. Fighters at that tier occupied a rarefied stratum in the Inner City—each one a figure of immense authority, supporting a vast network of subordinates whose survival depended on their patron's continued existence. They were not deployed lightly.

This was precisely why true death matches between High Divine Officers rarely occurred. The unwritten rule was clear: once a victor emerged, the loser yielded concessions rather than forcing the winner to risk catastrophic injury for a killing blow. Both sides walked away intact.

Unfortunately, Liu Sheng had miscalculated. He had encountered Xia Si—someone who didn't know those rules existed.

"Xia Si, you need to be careful," Liu Xiao said, her voice grave. "Every High Divine Officer carries a web of intersecting interests behind them; they never represent only themselves. Killing him outright, after he'd already sought terms—that could bring far worse trouble down on you."

"It doesn't matter," Xia Si replied, her smile serene. "As long as they learn to be afraid, everything else will follow."

Liu Xiao started to press further—then thought of her younger brother, the increasingly inscrutable Lin Hui. She looked at Xia Si's composed face and swallowed her words.

By now, the other disciples had found their footing. Seeing that Xia Si was as calm and unhurried as ever, they surged around her at once—excitement and undisguised admiration bright in their faces, everyone talking over one another. A few pressed forward to offer towels to wipe the sweat from her face.

"Do we still head into town?" Liu Xiao asked.

"No need," Chen Sui said, a trace of resignation in his voice. "This has escalated well beyond what the Hongfei Sect can account for."

"You're right. I should leave as well—staying longer will only put all of you at risk." Liu Xiao nodded.

She looked up. A tall figure in a silver-trimmed white robe was descending in a Moth Carriage. She recognized him—an old friend of her eldest brother, a Trueblood Noble. His arrival in a Moon Tower Moth Carriage was a declaration of protection that could not be ignored or misread.

The carriage drew close. The blond man aboard glanced down; his gaze met Xia Si's. They exchanged the faintest nod—two apex presences acknowledging each other with quiet, calibrated restraint.

A moment later, Liu Xiao boarded the carriage and rose into the sky.

Chen Sui and Xia Si turned back toward the Clear Wind Temple, the Fushan Sect elder's body in tow.

…

Far away, well outside the Mist Zone, the ruins of Yanshan lay still—but at Tianzhan Cliff, a great battle was on the verge of erupting.

Gray Mist surged around the black cliff face, driven by shrieking winds. High above, flocks of Human-headed Birds wheeled on vast dark wings, circling in slow spirals and peering down at the two figures below. The Mist posed no obstacle to their vision.

Tianzhan Cliff—by every survey of the region, the single point of strongest wind concentration in the outer Mist Zone near Tuyue.

Lin Hui stood at the cliff's edge. Behind him, the abyss swallowed itself in roiling Mist—the darkness below so absolute it bled into the gray like a wound in the world.

The gale tore around him, trailing long streamers of Mist in its wake. He had brought no Tranquil Incense. He simply stood within the tempest, composed, the chaos moving around him like water around a stone.

Across from him, Yun Xiazi—Grand Elder of the Nine Dreams Sect—stood entirely in white, long hair pinned with a silver ribbon. A small Mist-free pocket had formed naturally around her. She regarded her opponent with quiet calm.

"Do you know what lies below?"

"I don't." Lin Hui rested his hand on the hilt of Ruyi. "But it doesn't matter. Neither of us is going down there."

"Below is a monster habitat called the Extinction Flesh Sea," Yun Xiazi said. "Descend forty thousand meters, and you'd see them—creatures of immense scale, monsters that far surpass the Destructive level. They rarely move. So long as we don't go near them, they pose no more threat to us than a Harmless-level beast."

"And?" Lin Hui still wasn't sure where she was heading.

"The wind here isn't natural," she said, her tone dropping slightly. "It is the collective breathing of the Extinction Flesh Sea. Remain too long, and their mind-spirit pollution will begin to seep in."

"I've cultivated here for quite some time and noticed nothing." Lin Hui drew Ruyi in a slow, deliberate motion, angling the tip toward the ground. "Enough preamble. Even I can barely remember the last time I fought without holding back."

"It doesn't matter." Something unreadable passed across Yun Xiazi's face. "Whatever power you bring, I can absorb it. To avoid killing you by accident, I'll open with one-tenth of my cultivation."

She pressed her right index finger lightly to her temple.

Boom.

Boundless Internal Force detonated from her body in an eruption of blinding white light. In a single instant, it swallowed the entirety of Tianzhan Cliff. Within a hundred-meter radius, the air itself was displaced—transformed into a domain of dense, solid white Internal Force that pooled and blazed like a luminous lake. The howling winds were driven flat. The ground vanished beneath their feet, buried under a sea of brilliant white.