After Changing to the Ruthless Way, the Brothers Cried and Begged for Forgiveness-Chapter 480: You’re Not Qualified to Trap Me
Elder Tie Shan was so angry his nose nearly twisted out of shape, yet he could not muster a single rebuttal. He simply sealed off his hearing and refused to engage with Ancestor Sui Bian any further. After a few remarks went unanswered, Ancestor Sui Bian’s gaze drifted, almost on reflex, toward Burning Heaven Valley. [If I go have a word with Fei Hong now, he probably won’t run. Huh? Where did Fei Hong go?]
Within the Four Voids Realm, Yu Zhao and Lu Jiu Yuan stood facing one another while the air around them seemed to congeal. The nearby disciples had already retreated far away for fear of being caught in the crossfire.
With a smooth turn of the wrist, Lu Jiu Yuan snapped open his folding fan. Frost-white veins bloomed across the fan’s surface, and the temperature around them plummeted; a chill seeped through the body. Yu Zhao’s current form was a body of will, insensible to hot and cold, and yet Lu Jiu Yuan still managed to draw from her a shiver that felt as if ice had penetrated to the bone.
Yu Zhao stirred a single thought and warmth welled up from her core, washing the cold out of her limbs; a soft radiance gathered at her fingertips. Lu Jiu Yuan warned her mildly: “Be careful.”
He flicked the fan. An ice-blue torrent surged forth like a whirling dragon. The breath of absolute cold closed in from every side; the space around Yu Zhao seemed frozen by that extremity of chill.
Yu Zhao formed seals with both hands and a light breeze sighed past. Her figure vanished from where she stood.
Lu Jiu Yuan frowned and swept his eyes through the emptiness. There was no one. Yu Zhao had disappeared into thin air. “Interesting,” he murmured.
He turned his fan again and a faint ice-blue sheen rose across his body, expanding outward from him as a center. In moments, countless fine ice crystals appeared in the air, and the gray-white world seemed glazed by a film of rime. He snapped the fan shut. The suspended crystals exploded at once and became a storm of blades that sliced through space with an ear-piercing shriek. Space bucked and shuddered. Even so, Yu Zhao did not appear.
His brows knit more tightly. His extreme cold should have shattered Yu Zhao’s illusion arts; why had she still not shown herself?
As the thought flashed by, the scattered ice crystals suddenly gathered into a colossal sword and drove straight for him. Lu Jiu Yuan’s expression sank. When the sword neared his face, he raised the fan and struck the tip with the end of its handle. With a shriek of fracturing ice, the sword shattered.
At that instant, the glittering fragments turned into a cloud of fine ice grains that brushed his body. The scene about him changed in a blink. The gray-white world vanished, replaced by a boundless sea of fire. Waves of flame surged toward him like a storm tide, scorching heat licked his skin, and greasy black smoke coiled upward.
Lu Jiu Yuan’s face grew colder. A cultivator of the extreme-cold path, he despised places where fire spiritual power ran thick. He knew this was an illusory realm woven by Yu Zhao, but it still needled him; if nothing else, it ruined his mood. He had thought to trade a few more rounds with her. Now he saw no need.
He said evenly: “Yu Zhao, your illusion arts are indeed superb, but you’re not qualified to trap me.”
Blue light flared in his eyes. He swung the fan hard, and a cold potent enough to overturn heaven and earth exploded from its ribs, sweeping across the fiery sea. Wherever it passed, flame froze in an instant and the burning ocean became an icefield. He stood upon that frozen plain, gaze like a blade.
Yu Zhao still did not appear.
Impatience nibbled at him, and with it a flicker of distaste for her slippery tactics. He drew a long breath and pushed the feeling down. In a battle against an expert of illusions, the gravest mistake was to grow restless. Illusory realms pivot on the caster; find where Yu Zhao’s will-body hid, and the mirage would break for real.
He let his mind go still until it blended with the world around him. Gradually, he sensed the faintest ripple, the thread of Yu Zhao’s aura. “There.”
He leveled the fan at a single point in the void. An ice-blue beam lanced forth. The moment it struck, the fiery illusion began to collapse and the scenery shifted back. Yu Zhao’s figure surfaced at last, flickering light and thin shadow.
Lu Jiu Yuan did not relax. Anyone seasoned in such battles knew that unless you killed the illusionist in one blow, you should never trust what your eyes showed you. He slashed the fan twice more. Two streaks of blue burst from the fan’s face and became twin ice dragons that roared toward Yu Zhao. One dragon seized her torso in its jaws; the other coiled about her, locking her tight. Both dragons pulled in unison. She struggled fiercely, but could not overcome the ever-rising tide of cold. In the end, her figure dimmed beneath the extreme chill, then broke apart into points of starlight and scattered into nothing.
Lu Jiu Yuan remained where he was, face steady, vigilance unbroken. Time trickled by. After the span of an hour with no change around him, he at last allowed himself to believe that Yu Zhao had been truly defeated and the contest resolved. He exhaled, closed his fan, and turned to leave.
His first step halted mid-fall. A gigantic white cage surged up from beneath his feet and snapped shut around him. Black-and-white qi lay over its surface like a film, eerie to behold.
He struck without hesitation. An ice-blue blast hammered the bars, but the instant his chill touched that twin-hued qi, it sank without a trace as if into the sea. Lu Jiu Yuan’s pupils tightened. “That black-and-white aura… it’s swallowing my extreme cold?”
No, something else was wrong. Yu Zhao cultivated the path of illusions; how was she deploying other offensive methods as well? The cage that held him was clearly formation arts. As for the black-and-white qi, he had no immediate answer, but he was certain of one thing: it did not belong to the illusion path.
He forced himself to stillness and studied the structure of the cage, tracking the flow of that gray-tinted pair of currents for a long time. At last, a conjecture as audacious as it was inescapable took form. Yu Zhao was not a pure illusion cultivator at all. She also mastered other Dao intents, and each of them could be drawn forth at need. Thinking back to the palpable solidity of her will-body, he finally pinpointed the faint discord that had been needling at him from the start. Yu Zhao, no matter how gifted, should not have been able to outstrip him with a body of will alone given the confines of her realm. And yet she had. [So that’s it. Other intents were lending her strength.]
He struck the cage again. Half of his cold vanished into the black-and-white qi; the rest was halted by the cage’s weave. Lu Jiu Yuan tested the bars once more and knew the truth: for the moment, he was trapped.
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Chapter 480: You’re Not Qualified to Trap Me
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