Chapter 117: PASS A TEST

CHAPTER

117

PASS A TEST

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Daojue’s gauntlets flashed every time it touched a string and it disappeared. And with how fast Daojue moved them, they flashed so constantly they seemed to be glowing steadily.

It took Daojue just moments to get rid of all the strings covering his body.

The spider didn’t sit around waiting for Daojue to free himself, though. Instead it turned to Jieyuan, who was still very much so locked up—and then crawled rapidly toward him, long legs skittering across the floor.

As it drew close, the spider’s legs raised the brunt of its body higher, and it vaulted smoothly over the still-stuck Shifting Feather floating mid-air. Its mandibles opened wide, revealing a dark, narrow fissure, glistening with thick, greenish saliva. A cloying, rotten stench struck Jieyuan’s nostrils.

But then there was a crystalline blur—and the spider reared back, its fangs vibrating wildly as it let out a high, shrill shriek.

Daojue appeared between him and the spider, one red-gauntleted arm stuck out to the side. A beat later, Gleaming End—which had sunk into the floor after Daojue had thrown it just now—flew straight into Daojue’s outstretched hand.

The spider stopped a few feet away. Jieyuan could still see the outline of it past Daojue’s back.

Daojue didn’t charge at it. Instead, he reached forward, and rapidly waved his hand around the floating Shifting Feather. All the strings binding it immediately snapped. Maeva hadn’t stopped drawing on his soulforce even for a moment, and the moment the Shifting Feather was freed up, she rushed back to his side, carrying the short-glaive with her.

Then, Daojue, without turning away from the spider, took a step back, and ran one of his hands over Jieyuan’s body. Daojue’s movements were quick, economical, and one green string after another snapped, the red gauntlet pulsing each time.

The touch of the gauntlet brushing against his skin wasn’t the cool, smooth lick of metal. It felt neither hot nor cold, and seemed to be completely without texture. It felt just like physicalized chroma, really—neutral, unreal, like color given form and mass.

It looked like physicalized chroma. Their surface was bare, plain, with just the laminar outline of scale mail, like your standard cultivator gauntlets, and it was pure red in color. Exactly tenth-shade red, in fact. Tenth-density physicalized chroma wouldn’t have looked any different.

Jieyuan’s soulsense told a different story, though. The real story.

The gauntlets had the slightly vague, indistinct presence of realmskill constructs.

Which could only mean one thing.

They were Daojue’s realmskill.

The realmskill Jieyuan had never seen any hint of before. The one he’d only thought to exist based on assumptions and conjectures—which had grown weaker these past few days, as he saw no signs of it even after everything that had happened so far.

And as Daojue cut off more and more of the strings binding him, Jieyuan focused on just what it was the gauntlet was doing. Daojue wasn’t destroying the strings on contact, not exactly. Rather, after the gauntlet touched them, Daojue would simply continue with the motion, keep moving his hand, and the string would snap, like it’d lost all its strength, all its durability.

Some sort of weakening effect?

Jieyuan didn’t get to think on it long. Within moments there were no more strings on him. Freed up, he moved not forward, to attack, but toward the side.

It wasn’t that easy to tell, but the spider seemed to have its eyes only on Daojue. Like it was evaluating. Wondering, maybe, just how its prey had done, and whether it was worth cutting its losses and retreating.

Before, Jieyuan had been all for avoiding a fight. But the spider’s power ability to bind him seemed too dangerous. Not to mention, those strings hadn’t felt like a beast-skill construct to his soulsense, but rather more like a chromal material. Meaning that the spider probably had other cards to play. He didn’t want to risk it coming after them again later.

Moreover, if it weren’t for Daojue, the spider would have reached him just now, and Jieyuan had the sneaking suspicion that whatever fate awaited him at its hands—or rather, legs—it wouldn’t be a pretty one.

There was such a thing as forgive and forget.

Jieyuan wasn’t much for it, though.

Even more so when it’d be so easy to get even.

Very slowly, so as not to draw any attention, he drew a scale throwing blade from one of his purses. He still had a hand free. Maeva was by his side, holding her Shifting Feather.

Maeva, quick recap. Spider biology. What’s the kill spot here?

He’d studied spiders in biology class as Amyas, he was sure of that, but he’d be damned if he remembered the first thing about them.

“Well, if it’s anything like a mundane one,” Maeva said, “then it doesn’t have a brain the way mammals do. It should be diffused—”

Maeva, just tell me where to throw the blade.

“Between the eyes should do.”

Between the eyes it is.

The spider didn’t move, still eyeing Daojue. Daojue, likewise, did his best impression of a statue as he stared right back at it, both hands now on Gleaming End, still wearing his realmskill gauntlets.

Jieyuan didn’t know what Daojue was thinking, whether he was trying to scare it away or if he had some plan of his own, or if he was just waiting for the right moment to strike.

It didn’t matter.

Jieyuan whipped his hand out.

The Orangesoul blade shot forward—and burrowed cleanly into the center of the spider’s head, between its eyes, breaking the carapace and disappearing inside it.

A viscous, grayish blue liquid bubbled around the sunken blade.

One thing Jieyuan had been practicing a lot as of late was his throwing skills.

The spider shuddered, went still again, didn’t move, like it was paralyzed.

Jieyuan wasn’t sure if the blade had already done the trick—if it’d collapse next, dead.

And he didn’t get a chance to find out, because Daojue dashed forward, and swept Gleaming End sideway across the spider’s frozen body. The spear cut effortlessly through the spider’s body, perfectly bisecting its head.

Daojue jumped back before the resulting spray of blue and green hit him.

Jieyuan did the same. He needed a lot of things right now, but nowhere on that list was a poison shower.

“Let’s go,” Jieyuan said, immediately.

He glanced at the spider’s corpse, trying to catch sight of his Orangesoul dagger in the midst of all the gory and possibly toxic mess, but quickly gave up on it. He always tried to recover his scale tools, but sometimes it just wasn’t worth it.

They went straight toward the next pocket. He didn’t bother asking Huaxin, this time. The spider might have friends, and Jieyuan would rather risk running into a new beast than wait around and have more of those spiders come searching for the one they’d killed.

They went through the next few clearings without stopping. They passed by a beast on the way, at the edge of one of the pockets, but the two of them went straight past it, and it didn’t seem to follow them.

Jieyuan only stopped when they reached a spacious pocket mostly clear of vegetation and with a little rock outcrop near the center. It looked defensible enough.

It’d already been almost a day since their last break, so Jieyuan left Huaxin in charge of watching out for danger. They couldn’t do as Meiyao used to, where she’d ensure there weren’t any beasts in the region, so he had to settle for the next best thing.

He turned back to Daojue. “Let’s stop here.”

The red gauntlets had disappeared at some point. Daojue was back to wearing his standard metal ones, wrapped with a shroud. Jieyuan was pretty sure his realmskill summoned the red gauntlets over the normal ones.

“So,” Jieyuan said, “you have a realmskill.”

Daojue, of course, didn’t answer. Jieyuan hadn’t expected him to, though. He was still getting his thoughts in order, trying to figure out the best approach here.

Over the last few days Jieyuan had gotten an even better grasp on how Daojue worked, on what exactly it took to get him to speak. Since it looked like they’d be on their own for the foreseeable future, he’d actually put in the effort to figure out communication strategies.

Daojue didn’t react to statements, even ones with implicit questions. You had to ask him a question outright—and it couldn’t be one with an obvious answer, otherwise Daojue wouldn’t speak, either.

The problem, of course, was that whether the answer was obvious or not was from Daojue’s perspective, so you still had to put in some guesswork.

“What is it? What does it do?” Jieyuan asked. Straight to the point. There was no point mincing words with Daojue. “Some kind of weakening effect?”

“No,” Daojue said. “It is called Spectral Zenith Nullification. It nullifies Conceptual effects.”

“It nullifies?” Jieyuan asked. He leaned back against the one of the rocks. Daojue stayed put. “And wait—Conceptual effects? But that’d mean…”

Just about everything.

Aura, realmskills, spirit-skills, chromal gears… Pretty much everything that mattered to cultivators. To chromal beasts and plants, too. To everything chromal, in fact. The whole point of chroma was that it could allow its holder to draw on Concepts to affect the world. To produce Conceptual effects. Which Daojue could apparently nullify.

“That’s…” Jieyuan thought back to when Daojue had used his realmskill on the strings earlier. “You were nullifying their durability, weren’t you? That’s how you were snapping them.”

Daojue didn’t respond. Which would imply the answer was obvious.

So yes.

“All right. I think I got it. But—that’s powerful. Absurdly powerful.” Which begged one question. “Why did you never use it before?”

If it were anyone else, he’d have thought they wanted to keep it a secret, avoid drawing attention. After all, Daojue had only become a cultivator after joining the sect, so he must’ve brought it with him.

But this was Daojue. Jieyuan didn’t think he was the type to hide like that, even if it was the smart thing to do. Not to mention, they’d been in the Dome for a while now—and these past few days, the only one there to see Daojue use his realmskill would’ve been Jieyuan. Considering their survival was at hand, Jieyuan just didn’t see Daojue holding back like that.

Daojue regarded him for a long a while, then said, “When it would have worked, I would not have needed it. When I would have needed it, it would not have worked.”

Jieyuan was pretty sure that he’d never seen Daojue say so many words together. And, of course, the one time Daojue spoke out properly, he did it as if he was telling some sort of riddle.

He thought back to every fight he’d ever seen Daojue in. From as early as in the Gleamstone Valley, then to Daojue’s duels during the Radiant Gold Tournament, and then to their fights the last few days here in the Dome. And he could see Daojue’s point. Most of the times, he’d seen Daojue struggle, there either had been nothing to nullify, or the opponent had been at a higher realm.

Not all of the times, though. But the past was the past, and Jieyuan was more interested in the mechanics of Daojue’s realmskill. Because depending on the specifics, if Jieyuan could plan around it, it might make the days ahead way easier.

“What are its limitations, then?” he asked. “How exactly does it work?”

The limitations were what he was mostly interested in here, really. Because the one time Jieyuan reckoned Daojue could’ve really used a nullifying effect was back in the Fatebloom Woods, when the inner disciple Yikongwei Rongkai had almost used Absolute Will Command to kill Daojue.

“I must touch the effect to nullify it,” Daojue said. “Chroma is expended on contact.”

Daojue said nothing else, so it fell to Jieyuan to fill in the gaps. If Daojue had to touch it…

“It only works on physical effects, then? And the chroma expenditure varies according to what it is you’re nullifying?”

Daojue said nothing. Which meant yes to both. That cleared some things up. So powers that directly acted on the mind, like Absolute Will Command, couldn’t be nullified.

And if the chroma cost calculations were anything like Absolute Will Command’s, then it might be that if you were trying to nullify something at a rank much higher than yours, it might cost too much chroma to make nullification worth it.

“Can you choose just what to nullify? As in, if you touch something with several properties, can you pick a specific property to nullify?”

“Yes,” Daojue said.

That might help with the chroma expenditure, then.

Jieyuan thought things through a little further, then nodded. “All right. I can work with that. Anything else I should know about it?”

Daojue didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

“I’ll be taking first watch, then,” Jieyuan said.

Or rather, more precisely, Maeva and Huaxin would be.

Daojue sat down where he was, in front of the rocks, crossing his legs and closing his eyes. Jieyuan did likewise, then took out some of the plants he’d picked today. He didn’t sheathe the Shifting Feathers, but rather set them on the ground on his sides, just in case.

Maeva had already stopped chanting, immersing herself in his senses. She’d be able to keep watch better than he could. Something might get past Huaxin, but not her.

That handled, Jieyuan inspected the flowers.  They were all new ones, so experience wouldn’t help him much here. Still, there was one—a small, dark rose—whose spirit-song felt rather close to that of a flower whose channeling rate he did know, courtesy of Meiyao.

You’re it.

He held it up in front of his eyes, attuned it with a quick chant, and then began to slowly channel chroma into it, drawing it from his soul and creating a thin line of it between himself and the flower.

He started with a slow, steady channeling.

There was a grace period of sorts to essencification, he’d found. A period before the essencification proper began, before it’d start turning liquid. There’d be signs, at this point, if you were doing something wrong. For most plants, that was wilting if you were underchanneling, swelling if you were overchanneling. There’d be signs on its spirit-shadow, too, if you knew to look for them.

And that let you correct your channeling rate in time before the ritual really kicked in. Assuming you were fast enough about it, of course.

He’d found quite a few of these roses, so based on where he failed—because he would, no doubt about that—he could narrow down the right channeling range for the next one. And keep at it until he’d found the right rate.

Jieyuan caught it the moment the rose began to bloat between his fingers, and lowered the channeling rate. But then it abruptly wilted, and before Jieyuan could bring it back up, the essencification ritual came fully into effect. And the rose, instead of liquefying, crumbled to dust between his fingers.

Sighing, Jieyuan waved away the dust, and picked up the next flower. But then he stopped, realizing that Daojue had opened his eyes, and was looking at him.

“Something’s wrong?” Jieyuan asked him.

Instead of replying, Daojue reached out and picked up one of the roses on the ground. They were sitting close enough Daojue barely had to reach forward. Daojue stared down at it for a moment.

Jieyuan had a sinking suspicion. Don’t tell me…

Daojue attuned the flower so quietly Jieyuan didn’t hear his attuning hymn. And then Jieyuan’s soulsense caught onto the flow of chroma, from Daojue to the flower.

And then the rose turned into essence before his eyes. Just like that.

Daojue looked back up at Jieyuan. “Channel.”

Jieyuan was still staring at the little, swirling clump of liquid flowing in front of Daojue. That was free-form refining, just like Meiyao did it. Granted, it was just the first step of it, essencification, but there was no way Daojue could’ve seen this flower before. Daojue had figured it out on the spot, and gotten it right on his first attempt.

That shouldn’t have been possible. Not unless…

“Don’t tell me you also have some stupid bloodskill that tells you the properties of plants and—”

“Sovereign Material Intuition,” Daojue said, simply.

“That’s— That’s it’s name, then?” Left unsaid was the confirmation that Daojue did have a bloodright. “Material—it lets you intuit the property of materials as a whole, then? Plants and beasts parts?”

No answer. So yes.

So, basically, just a different spin on Meiyao’s Divine Plant and Beast Intuition bloodskills.

Before Jieyuan could ask further, Daojue let the essencified flower drop to the ground, splattering. And then Jieyuan sensed Daojue draw more chroma out of his soul, using it to form a line in front of him, one that then looped back into Daojue’s soul. The line wasn’t a static thing, though, but a flowing current of chroma.

One moving at a rate very close to how Jieyuan had been channeling chroma right before the essencification ritual had failed.

“You—”

“Match it,” Daojue said.

Jieyuan stared at it. He knew what Daojue was getting at, what he was offering him. A shortcut. The answer, really. All he had to do was create a loop of his own, and match it to Daojue’s to get the right channeling rate.

But Meiyao could’ve done something like this, and she hadn’t. Rather, she’d taught him how to figure out the channeling rate on his own. To watch for the signs, and adjust accordingly, until it became instinct.

One approach would get him results quickly, but the other one was way better in the long run. And Jieyuan had always been the type to think far ahead.

“I… Thank you,” Jieyuan said, “but I think I need to figure this out for myself.”

Daojue regarded him silently. The closed loop of chroma faded away.

And then, for the first time since Jieyuan had met him, Daojue smiled.

It was a faint quirk of the lips, a subtle thing. But not so subtle Jieyuan could blame it on the light, or pretend he was imagining it.

“You are like him,” Daojue said, before closing his eyes.

Jieyuan just stared at Daojue’s statute-still form.

And wondered whether he’d just passed some sort of test.