Chapter 197 - 196: Rankings (2)
Who on earth is Lin Yuan? Lord Zhao thought, his mind reeling. I brought a genius into my house... but this is not a genius. This is.... Chu Kuang is at the peerless stage! How did he do this? How did he defeat Chu Kuang?
A few rows behind the Provincial Lord, Bai Chen was completely losing his mind.
The young Foundation Establishment cultivator was pacing erratically back and forth, his hands clutching his head, his eyes wide as he stared at the monolith.
"He did it! By the Heavens, he actually did it!" Bai Chen yelled, his voice cracking with a mixture of hysterical laughter and profound disbelief. He spun around, dropping to his knees beside Bai Qingyue’s wheelchair. "Cousin! Look at the board! Brother-in-law is sixth! He took them all!"
Bai Qingyue sat perfectly still, her delicate hands resting gracefully in her lap. The cool evening breeze caught her black hair, framing a face that was serene, yet illuminated by a quiet, fierce pride.
Bai Chen grabbed the armrests of her wheelchair, shaking his head rapidly as the sheer impossibility of the feat began to ground him.
"Wait... wait, think about this," Bai Chen muttered, his erratic excitement settling into a stunned awe. "Chu Kuang had exactly sixty tokens. Brother-in-law had one. Now Brother-in-law has sixty-one, and Chu Kuang has zero. That means they met. They clashed. And Brother-in-law completely subjugated him!"
Bai Chen looked up at his cousin, his eyes shining with reverence. "Cousin... Chu Kuang is at the Eighth Step of Dao Resolve! He is an absolute monster! How did Lin Yuan outplay a Peerless Genius of the Central Continent? How is it even possible?"
Bai Qingyue looked down at her cousin, a soft, beautiful smile touching her lips. Her eyes reflected the light of the monolith.
"Because he is Lin Yuan," she answered simply, her voice carrying an absolute, unshakeable faith that required no proof. "The Heavens established the rules of cultivation, Chen’er. But your brother-in-law has never once asked the Heavens for permission."
Then, Bai Qingyue remembered the times she had tried to make sense of Lin Yuan.
She remembered when she had first attempted to apply reason to him, after she saw him suddenly break into the Foundation Establishment Realm as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Then came the moment he effortlessly formed his Nascent Soul, completely overturning everything she understood about cultivation.
After that, Bai Qingyue had gradually stopped trying to understand her husband.
There were simply too many things about Lin Yuan that defied common sense.
She had finally accepted one simple truth.
Her husband was completely outside the boundaries of the ordinary.
High above the chaotic uproar of the provincial pavilions, at the absolute zenith of the Grand Court, the Five Emperors sat upon their thrones.
Emperor Tianxu, the host of the tournament, slowly opened his eyes.
The Qilin Emperor’s gaze did not project shock, nor did it project anger. Instead, a slow, profound smile spread across his majestic face, an expression that carried the weight of centuries of observation.
So, you are the fated one? Emperor Tianxu mused internally, his Void Refinement divine sense rippling gently through the fabric of the arena.
His mind drifted back, retreating several months to a quiet, unassuming memory. He remembered a disguised stroll through the filthy slums of a lower province. He remembered the brown fur sable draped over his shoulders, and the body-tempering of a young cultivator he had encountered.
It was not by mistake that I met you tempering your body that day, Tianxu realized, the profound intricacies of the Great Dao unspooling before his inner eye.
In the realm of Void Refinement, one began to understand that the universe was not a series of random collisions, but a vast, interconnected tapestry of Karma and Fate. Fate was a river that flowed relentlessly toward the ocean, sweeping the weak along in its current. But once in a millennium, a rock appeared in the river that refused to be moved. A rock that forced the river to change its course.
You were the rock in the dirt, Emperor Tianxu thought, his smile deepening as he looked at Lin Yuan’s name burning brightly in the sixth slot. I sensed your unyielding spine then, but I could not have predicted this. You have stepped into the crucible of the Heavens and decided to forge your own destiny. Truly, the Great Dao works in magnificent ways.
Beside him, the aura of Emperor Xiyan of the West Continent flared with boisterous, roaring laughter.
"Tianxu!" Emperor Xiyan bellowed, slapping the armrest of his White Tiger throne so hard it cracked. "Are you seeing this?! Your invincible Peerless Geniuses! A rat from the mud just crawled into their nest and stole the crown off one of their heads! Oh, this is getting incredibly interesting!"
Emperor Nanheng, the Vermilion Bird of the South, leaned forward, her beauty veiled by a shimmering heat haze. "A Spirit Severing Early Stage suppressing a peerless Stage expert. The disparity in cultivation alone makes this impossible. The boy must possess a Dao Heart forged of pure adamantine, or a tactical intellect that rivals ancient war gods."
"Perhaps both," rumbled Emperor Beiming from the North, his Black Tortoise aura exuding a freezing calm. "The Lower Division has been stagnant for three centuries. It is about time the stagnant waters were disturbed by a true leviathan."
As the Emperors conversed in the high heavens, those below was descending into sheer, uncontrollable outrage.
In the Chu Province pavilion, the scene was one of apocalyptic fury.
The Chu Provincial Lord, a towering man whose very breath smelled of ash and blood, stood up. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and completely manic. Dozens of Chu elders and sect masters surrounded him, screaming in absolute denial.
"It is a trick! A malfunction of the array!" roared a Chu grand elder, waving his fists at the monolith.
"The array does not lie!" countered someone standing nearby.
"Then he cheated!" screamed the Chu Provincial Lord, his voice amplified by his terrifying cultivation, booming across the entire Grand Court and momentarily drowning out the chaos. "It is impossible for an Early-Stage ant to defeat my son! Chu Kuang was on the verge of Half-Step Transcendent! This Lin Yuan must have used a taboo Demonic Art! He must have poisoned the Young Master or used a forbidden soul-threatening artifact!"
The accusation rang out like a thunderclap.
Immediately, the crowd fractured. Some of the more arrogant Upper Division sects, eager to protect the sanctity of their hierarchy, began to shout in agreement.
"Investigate the Zhao Province!"
"Strip him of his tokens! Disqualify him!"
"A peasant cannot defeat a king without resorting to cheating!"
But voices from the Lower Division, finally sensing a champion among them, began to shout back.
"Cowards!" bellowed a sect master from the Golden Diting Province, his face red with vindictive joy. "The rules were absolute! Any method! Any weapon! As long as the opponent yielded and was not executed, it is a valid victory!"
"Exactly!" shouted Fu Lang’s sect master from the Fu Province, emboldened by the chaos. "Using a demonic art isn’t against the tournament rules! Elder Xuanji himself said ’full lethal force using any method at your disposal’! If your Young Master was foolish enough to get poisoned or outsmarted by a lower-realm cultivator, that is his own pathetic failure!"
"You dare insult the Chu Province?!" a Chu lieutenant shrieked, drawing a blade. "We will slaughter your entire sect!"
"But he clearly took Chu Kuang’s tokens! All sixty of them!" another Chu elder roared, completely ignoring the rules in favor of his rage. "This cannot go without an investigation! This doesn’t make sense! We demand the tournament be paused! We demand to see the memories of the pocket realm!"
The noise of the allegations, rose to a deafening pitch. It was a chaotic symphony of injured pride, furious denial, and frantic damage control.
Down in the Zhao pavilion, the screaming and the blatant, hypocritical slander began to grate heavily on the nerves of the Lin household.
Bai Qingyue, who had maintained her serene composure for weeks, suddenly gripped the wooden armrests of her wheelchair. Her knuckles turned bone-white, the wood groaning under her grip. Her eyes flashed with a rare, freezing anger. To hear these arrogant, pampered lords accuse her husband of cowardice and cheating simply because they could not fathom his greatness was a profound, and deeply personal insult.
Beside her, Bai Chen was far less restrained.
The young man was seething, his face flushed dark red with absolute fury. He stepped forward, putting himself between his cousin and the screaming Chu delegation across the arena, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword.
"You sore, pathetic losers!" Bai Chen screamed back at them, completely uncaring that he was a mere Foundation Establishment boy yelling at Spirit Severing monsters. "If your geniuses slaughter hundreds, it is ’orthodox might’! But the second my brother-in-law beats your golden boy into the dirt, it has to be a trick?! He didn’t cheat! He is just better than you! He is better than all of you!"
"Silence, you filthy peasant!" a Chu elder roared, gathering a ball of lethal Qi in his palm, fully intending to hurl it across the arena and obliterate Bai Chen where he stood.
Before the elder could unleash the strike, the sky above the Grand Court turned the color of solid, burnished gold.
Wooooom!
An overwhelming pressure descended upon the tens of thousands of cultivators, pressing directly against their souls. The gravity in the arena increased fifty-fold in a single breath.
The Chu elder with the raised hand was instantly driven to his knees, the ball of Qi in his palm snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.
Every single person in the amphitheater looked up.
Emperor Tianxu had raised a single hand from his throne.