Li Yun raised an eyebrow.
"You actually forced a breakthrough?" he asked, with a faint note of surprise in his voice.
The Celestial Prodigy Camp was meant for cultivators between the 1st and 3rd levels of Spirit Manifestation Realm. Once someone entered the 4th level, he was no longer qualified to stay. In fact, several of the top geniuses already had enough accumulation to break through, and they simply chose not to.
The reason was foundation. Within the Spirit Manifestation Realm, every three levels marked an important threshold. Moving from the 1st level to the 2nd, or from the 2nd to the 3rd, was fairly simple.
Advancing from the 3rd level to the 4th was different, because it was the step into the middle stage of the Spirit Manifestation Realm. If a cultivator rushed through that barrier without building a strong enough foundation, his later cultivation could become much harder.
Lei Xuankong had clearly ignored that danger. His strength had gone up for now, but his future potential had probably suffered. It was even possible that he would struggle to get past the 4th level for many years.
"You forced me into this!" Lei Xuankong snarled, and his face turned vicious.
He understood the consequences perfectly well. He knew that he had damaged his own future by breaking through too early. In his mind, however, Li Yun was to blame for all of it. If Li Yun had not humiliated him again and again and kept rising at such an absurd pace, he would never have felt driven to take this risk.
"Die!" he roared.
Lightning poured from his eyes, mouth, nose, and ears, and countless lightning serpents coiled around his body. Then the serpents rushed outward and began to change. Horns grew from their heads, and their bodies became longer and thicker. Within moments, they had turned into enormous thunder flood dragons.
"Li Yun!" Lei Xuankong shouted, his purple hair lashing around his face. "Today I’m going to kill you and take back my Primordial Five-Thunder Seal."
He pressed both hands downward.
"Eternal Heavenly Thunder Burial!"
The thunder flood dragons came rumbling down, each one giving off terrifying electrical power. The sky around them seemed to turn into a sea of lightning, and the snow evaporated before it could reach the ground. The blizzard and the thunderstorm merged into a chaotic world of white and purple.
Li Yun stayed calm.
"Lei Xuankong, you were still too impatient," he said, and his voice could be heard clearly through the thunder. "If you had steadied your cultivation and properly gotten used to the power of the 4th level of Spirit Manifestation Realm, you might have been some threat to me if you caught me off guard."
He slowly raised his sword. "But as you are right now, you have no chance."
"Destruction Sword Intent!"
Li Yun swung, and the world around him seemed to grow colder. An astonishing streak of Sword Qi appeared in the middle of the endless blizzard and lightning, like a single ray of light piercing through eternal darkness.
In that moment, Li Yun released all the power he was currently willing to use from Destruction Sword Intent.
The whole battlefield seemed to lose its color. The falling snow appeared to stop, and the lightning that filled the sky seemed to freeze in place. For one brief instant, there was nothing but Li Yun’s sword.
The Sword Qi swept across the sky with overwhelming destructive force. It split the thunder flood dragons apart and tore the sea of lightning open.
Compared with Slaughter Sword Intent and Immortal Sword Intent, Destruction Sword Intent had fewer subtle variations. That simplicity, however, made its destructive power even more direct.
Nothing mattered to it except breaking whatever stood in front of it.
The Sword Qi struck Lei Xuankong with a boom. His chest caved in, blood burst from his mouth, and his body was flung backward like a broken kite. He crashed through one small mountain and then another.
His body punched through several snow-covered peaks, which collapsed behind him, and he only came to a stop after flying an enormous distance.
"Impossible..."
His face was full of disbelief, and he kept shaking his head.
"This can’t be happening."
He had given up part of his future and forced his way into the 4th level of Spirit Manifestation Realm. Yet even after all of that, he still could not beat Li Yun. The realization nearly broke him.
"Lei Xuankong."
Li Yun appeared in front of him.
"There was never any grudge between us to begin with. You were the one who kept choosing to come after me." His gaze turned cold. "If you want someone to blame, blame yourself."
Li Yun swung his sword without any hesitation, and Lei Xuankong’s head left his body. His eyes stayed wide open even in death, with fear, disbelief, anger, resentment, and unwillingness frozen inside them.
Li Yun calmly lowered the Profound Origin Sword to his side.
"Killing him gets rid of one future problem."
People like Lei Xuankong were troublesome. They were like venomous snakes hiding under rocks. Their strength in a direct fight was not always overwhelming, but they were always waiting for a chance to strike from the shadows. There was no point in leaving someone like that alive.
What did surprise Li Yun was the number of points on Lei Xuankong’s Frosthunt Token, which came to more than one thousand. Apparently, Lei Xuankong had killed quite a few participants over the past several days. Li Yun naturally took the points, and his total now passed five thousand.
The blizzard went on for several more days. Instead of easing, it grew even more severe. The suppression on ordinary cultivators reached almost thirty percent, and even Li Yun, who had chaos qi, was suppressed by around five percent.
Across the Frostbound Heavenly Range, the competition became more and more brutal, and people died every day. By this point, more than a hundred participants had probably fallen already, and not even half of the month-long trial had passed. The remaining days would no doubt be even more dangerous.
Three days after killing Lei Xuankong, Li Yun came across another Monarch-class Frost Beast.
This time it was a Glacial Direwolf, and it was even stronger than the Frostmane Lion. Worse still, it led a pack of nearly three thousand ordinary Glacial Wolves, which made it easily one of the largest beast groups in the Frostbound Heavenly Range.
Naturally, a target like that drew many powerful competitors. Nine cultivators ranked in the top thirty showed up, and three of them were even in the top twenty.
The battle that followed was far harder than Li Yun’s earlier encounter with the Frostmane Lion. He had to fight both the Glacial Direwolf and several rival geniuses while also breaking through the huge wolf pack around them. In the end, he still managed to take the kill. Chaos qi gave him a major advantage, because the environment suppressed everyone else heavily while he suffered far less interference. That difference mattered more and more as the battle dragged on.
After he killed the Glacial Direwolf, Li Yun’s points finally passed eight thousand.

Comments

Loading...