The people around Li Yun slowly disappeared, but he noticed none of them. He was not in despair, however, and he was not doubting himself. His mind was entirely taken up by one sentence, the words the Verdant Sword Sage had spoken: "Speed alone can’t beat me."
Li Yun went over those words again and again. The path Yuan Zhenhai had suggested was not wrong. As long as Li Yun had not comprehended the Temporal Dao himself, overwhelming speed was still his best chance of defeating the third-floor guardian.
The problem was that speed alone was incomplete. Even if he could attack before the Verdant Sword Sage swung his sword, his attack still had to enter the Temporal Domain, and the moment it crossed into that area, it stopped.
That meant Li Yun needed two things. He needed enough speed to act before the guardian could attack, and he also needed a way to break through the Temporal Domain.
’But how?’ Li Yun frowned. ’What can break a domain that freezes time?’
Countless ideas came to him, and he threw them out one after another. Brute force seemed unlikely to work. Stronger Sword Qi would still be useless if the Sword Qi itself froze, and a bigger sword formation would mean nothing if every sword stopped moving.
Devouring Intent would not help either, since temporal power was not ordinary energy that could simply be swallowed. Destruction Intent might work someday, but his current comprehension was nowhere near strong enough to destroy temporal laws directly.
’Besides speed, what am I missing?’
A day passed, and Li Yun found no answer. The second day came, and then the third, and by then no cultivators were left around the Everlasting Pagoda at all. Li Yun stood there alone. Four days went by, then five, and his thoughts stayed fixed on the same problem.
Time kept moving, and half a month passed. No one had come near the Everlasting Pagoda for several days, and dust slowly gathered on Li Yun’s robes and hair, but he did not notice. The sun rose, crossed the sky, and sank below the horizon. Night came, and stars filled the darkness, until at last another dawn arrived.
The eastern horizon slowly brightened, and a faint line of light appeared. Li Yun’s gaze drifted toward it without his realizing it. The sun slowly rose, the darkness retreated, and the first sunlight spread across the world.
Something inside Li Yun suddenly stirred.
"Hm?"
His eyes widened as he stared at the sunrise. For a brief moment, it felt as though lightning had struck his mind, and then everything became clear.
"So that’s what I was missing."
A brilliant light burst from his eyes. Countless insights that had stayed separate suddenly came together: Fast Sword and Slow Sword, the principles of space, the Old Fisherman’s attacks, the Void Severing Sword Style, and the Verdant Sword Sage’s Temporal Domain, along with the ideas of speed, stillness, and movement.
The answer had never been speed alone. It was the relationship between movement and stillness. Fast Sword pursued extreme movement, while Slow Sword pursued something close to absolute stillness.
If the two were truly fused, his sword would no longer simply be fast. Its speed and its slowness would exist at the same time.
His body moved almost on instinct. The Profound Origin Sword appeared in his hand, and Li Yun swung it. A streak of Sword Qi flashed out at a terrifying speed, so fast that even Li Yun could barely follow its path.
Yet there was something fundamentally different about this strike. The sword had not simply moved quickly. Its movement carried a strange sense of stillness, as if the sword had crossed the distance without truly going through the process of crossing it.
Several enormous trees hundreds of meters away suddenly exploded one after another with loud booms. There were no visible sword marks on their trunks, and the outside of each tree remained almost untouched. Instead, they had shattered from within.
"It’s finally finished."
Li Yun gazed at the distant horizon, where a sword scar so thin it was almost invisible stretched across the land, and a satisfied smile slowly spread across his face.
This sword technique belonged entirely to him. He had taken Fast Sword and Slow Sword, two techniques built on completely opposite principles, and gradually fused their characteristics. Then he had added the spatial insights he had gained from the Void Severing Sword Style. The result was no longer just an improved version of either technique. It had become something new.
It kept the terrifying speed of Fast Sword while also carrying the strange rhythm and unpredictability of Slow Sword. The spatial principles drawn from the Void Severing Sword Style added another layer, letting the sword arrive at the exact moment and place where the opponent’s defense was weakest.
Its most frightening quality was that even Li Yun did not fully decide its path before he attacked. Once the sword was released, instinct and opportunity guided it, and if the opponent revealed even the slightest weakness for an instant, the sword would naturally chase that opening.
Li Yun looked toward the brightening horizon, a faint smile still on his face.
"This technique was born while I watched the first ray of sunlight cross the horizon, so I’ll call it Horizon Sword Light."
By the time an opponent truly saw that line of sword light, the decisive moment would already be over.
Li Yun slowly sheathed the Profound Origin Sword. He could clearly feel that his combat power had gone through another transformation. Even so, he did not go straight back to challenge the third floor of the Everlasting Pagoda, because there was another weakness he wanted to deal with first, and that was his physical foundation.
He had already cultivated the ninth-tier secret art, the World Bearing Devil Suppressing Physique, to its sixth layer. At that stage, his body could bear an effective weight one million times its natural mass.
That horrifying hidden weight had let him overpower opponents in close combat again and again, even when their raw cultivation should have given them the edge. But the sixth layer was not the end. The seventh layer multiplied that weight again, to ten million times.
Li Yun’s true cultivation had already reached the 7th level of Heavenly Core Realm. Combined with his bloodline, his physical foundation, and his various comprehensions, his combat power was already approaching that of extremely powerful Spirit Manifestation Realm experts. His body was finally strong enough to attempt the seventh layer, so he entered seclusion.

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