Chapter 76: STRENGTH AND SPEED

CHAPTER

76

STRENGTH AND SPEED

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Strength could carry you through a fight.

But speed could end it before it even began.

Jieyuan had barely gotten a foot forward when the two tenth-signs came down on him.

The Xiyunfeng spearman charged head-on—spear first, more blur than man. The Gleaming Stone Sect traitor—the swordswoman—veered off left, and came at him from the side in a whirl, her good arm leading, sword swinging.

Fighting someone faster than you came down to two problems—the same two all fights boiled down to, really.

Not getting hit.

Getting hits in.

Jieyuan slid one foot forward, jerking his head back. Wind sliced past as the spearhead cracked by his jaw like a whip. A flash of heat grazed his jaw. His skin stung. His pulse kicked.

But his attention wasn’t on his face. It was on his right arm, as he parried the traitor’s sword—though not without faltering slightly.

Jieyuan clenched his teeth, focusing like he’d never had before. The very instant the spear cut past him and the sword was thrown off, he was already moving again.

The Xiyunfeng man pulled his spear back and struck again, this time with a broad sweep. The swordswoman went for a stab.

They were fast—recovery to strike in the blink of an eye. Before Jieyuan knew it, the attacks were coming again, from two different directions.

That wasn’t a level of speed he could react to.

Which was why he’d started reacting to this second round of attacks before he was even done reacting to the first.

That was the thing about precognition—about getting the picture before it was even painted.

It let you react before the act.

His left-hand Shifting Feather shot forward, meeting the spear strike—even as he twisted his body out of the sword stab’s way. Again he let his arm sag a bit under the blocked strike, then broke off into an abrupt deflection.

Not even a beat later, he was already moving again, bracing for the next clash.

Just knowing the future wasn’t enough. If the attacker was any good, when they saw they’d miss, they’d switch it up. And if they were twice as fast as you, they’d have all the time in the world to do it.

So you couldn’t do just react before the act—because the act would change when you reacted. So you reacted again—and again, the act would change in turn. And again and again until there was no longer any room for either side to squeeze in any other last-instant variation.

The trick was to string it all up together. Reaction to reaction to reaction. Yours, theirs, yours again. Over and over. And ensure you were the one who reacted last.

Huaxin did the stringing. All the action-reaction-action-reaction math. Tracked the rhythm. Mapped the beat. Told him exactly when and how to move.

The spearman went for another head strike. The swordswoman dropped low, striking at his legs.

But Jieyuan wasn’t looking at them—all his attention was on the sequence. The script he had to act out. And he did—without hesitation, without questioning whether Huaxin might fail him again, like it had with Daojue. Doubt would be death right now.

Huaxin’s normal sequences were already tough to follow. This one made those look like amateur theater. He knew he could do it—knew he would do it, as it was the future—but that didn’t mean he had an easy time. A thousand motions crammed into seconds—no room for error, not even one. Painfully precise. Utterly unforgiving

Fatebloom Sacrifice was the only reason he could pull it off. The radiant, golden power didn’t just amplify his strength—it gave him absolute control over his body. He told it what to do, and it obeyed. Without it? Maybe he could’ve managed the sequence—if he’d had the chance to simulate it a few hundred times first.

Even as it was, if his enemies had been any faster, Jieyuan wouldn’t have been able to come up with anything at all. Victory would’ve been impossible—Huaxin could only work within the bounds of possibility.

Jieyuan leaned back, knees bending. One Shifting Feather went up.

Strength didn’t come from any one limb—it came from the whole body. Spread apart as they were, his arms could only draw on a fraction of his strength.

But he had the strength of a fourth-sign orangesoul right now. Which was four times that of his opponent’s.

The numbers added up about right.

Both strikes landed—and stopped dead.

Jieyuan’s arms held. Didn’t so much as budge. A mountain wouldn’t be any firmer.

Even sped-up as they were, Jieyuan caught it. The twitch of an eyelid. The gleam of disbelief flickering in their eyes. Of confusion, of shock. Just like the traitorous tenth-sign from earlier, just before Jieyuan had sent him airborne with a kick.

It hit him, too—but in reverse. Cold calm surged through his veins. Just the razor-sharp clarity of knowing he’d finally turned the tempo in his favor. There’d be time for triumph later.

They must’ve seen him taking down the Fusongshi earlier. They’d have known he was stronger than he had any right to be. But they wouldn’t have the right measure of it. And he’d been playing down his strength so far, making it out to be just around theirs.

Faced with someone faster, not getting hit was already hard enough, even with precognition.

But that was just half the equation. You still had to hit back.

And that was even harder. Way harder.

It didn’t matter how clean your form was. Didn’t matter how sharp your intent. Precognition couldn’t force a hit. Couldn’t make it land.

Not if your target could see the attack. Not if they could dodge it.

The shock was fleeting—even more so in Jieyuan’s perspective. But just as the two pulled back, a yellow, white, and red blur crashed onto the swordswoman. Straight into her good, sword-bearing arm.

White from Maeva’s lab coat, yellow from her sundress.

And red from the cloudcraft she was flying on as she crashed onto the swordswoman.

If your opponent was faster, they had more say in whether you hit them than you did.

The trick, then, was to take their say way.

Made sure they didn’t see the attack until it was too late—or couldn’t get away, even if they did.

Unseen or unavoidable—either would do the trick.

But if you really wanted to be sure, leave nothing up to chance?

Then you went for both.

The swordswoman stumbled sideways—right into the other Shifting Feather, freed up when the Xiyunfeng disengaged. Her reaction was instantaneous, as she tried to twist—but the cloudcraft had half-wrapped around her, pushing her toward the attack.

The short-glaive went right under the stump of her right arm and into the side of her chest, cutting in deep, tearing flesh and fat—then deeper, cleanly, burrowing itself in the gap between two ribs. And then deeper still, until the blade had almost entirely disappeared into her side.

He caught a glimpse of her face—eyes blown wide, lips slack, skin drained of all color. Already halfway to dead.

But it was gone as he whirled around, wrenching the blade out of her, turning forward again.

The Xiyunfeng spearman put some distance between them after he’d blocked his attack, but had lunged right back when Jieyuan had concentrated his attacks on the swordswoman.

Now the man was barely a foot away, coming back at him.

But Jieyuan’s arms were swinging out with the force of his turn, and as he faced the spearman again he dropped both Shifting Feather’s weight to a tenth, drew on all of his strength, and let both of them loose.

The two short-glaives shot forward—not spinning, but ruler-straight, arrow-like. Edges turned inward, facing each other, barely an inch between them.

The spearman reacted instantly, digging his heels into the ground and jumping back again.

But something as light as the Shifting Feathers were right now, thrown with that much strength?

They flew fast.

Faster than even a tenth-sign redsoul could hope to move.

Unseen attacks. Unavoidable attacks. Both worked against a faster opponent.

But there was a third way. A simpler way.

You just hit them faster.

The tenth-sign had barely managed to back away an inch before the Shifting Feathers burrowed straight into his chest, side-by-side, right through the lungs.

Glaives were cutting weapons—not meant for thrusting, and even less for throwing. But like with most blades, theirs did taper to a sharp tip at the very end.

Thrown hard enough, anything with a point could pierce.

And the Shifting Feathers pierced deep—blades turned inward, so that as they drove in, their broadening edges carved past the lungs and sliced through the man’s heart from both sides.

Jieyuan stepped aside, and the swordswoman’s body collapsed beside him with a soft, boneless thump. No groan. Not even a twitch. His soulsense picked up nothing, her soul and aura both gone.

A beat later, the spearman toppled backward.

Jieyuan stretched out both hands. The Xiyunfeng tenth-sign hadn’t even finished falling when the Shifting Feathers tore free from his chest and flew back to Jieyuan.

He closed his hands around their shafts to the thump of the Xiyunfeng hitting the ground.

Two more to the tally.

Jieyuan took a deep breath.

Time elapsed… fifty seconds, since he’d killed the first tenth-sign. About ninety seconds total. Five and a half minutes left.

If there was one good thing about fighting opponents that fast, it was that battles ended quickly, one way or another.

Even still… he reached a hand up, wiping the sweat soaking his forehead. He was running hot as coal. The fight had taken less than thirty seconds—but it’d taken more of him than all of his duels so far. The heat from the blue flames didn’t help any, either. He felt like he was in a furnace.

He glanced about. No more tenth-signs closing in on him—but the chaos was still there. Stronger, even. More corpses littered the ground than before, most of them disciples. The tenth-signs remained little more than blurs as they flashed about, clashing and clashing. Rippling wind, shooting crystals.

Already several of the buildings lining the streets were little more than ruins as the combatants spread further and further apart, claiming more and more of the area.

And then there were the walls of flames just at the edges of it all, sky-high, ferocious, an ocean of blue fire, spilling in, closing in on them. Already smoke—grayish, thick—was rolling into the battlefield.

This close Jieyuan could see that the flames fed on metal and stone—bits and pieces of the buildings flaking off, crumbling to dust, vanishing. There was a bitter, rotten smell to it—and distantly he could hear the crackling, the creaks, and the crashes as the nearby buildings fell apart.

But those sounds were swallowed by the unceasing rings of metal and crystal.

He forced himself to breathe in again—anything to fight the roar of the flames inside him, pushing him to throw himself into the fray again. To throw himself back into it. To raise the tally. Higher. Higher.

He gripped the Shifting Feathers harder.

Without needing to be told, Maeva flew his cloudcraft back to his side.

If Fatebloom Sacrifice lasted longer, if he hadn’t been running so low on chroma—maybe he could’ve turned all of this around on his own.

But as things were, he had to prioritize.

And the priority was finding Meiyao, Yongyi—

A presence flickered at the edge of his soulsense, behind him.

And Jieyuan was struck by a rush of BLOOD. Of MIGHT. Of DOMINATION.

Wide-eyed, staggering, he spun around, readying the Shifting Feathers, unsteady but waiting on Huaxin for the sequence.

But what he saw was Daojue coming to a sudden stop a couple feet away.

Daojue looked as worse for wear as Jieyuan had ever seen him.

His robes were torn through in a dozen places—jagged, blood-dark slashes carving across silk. Sweat slicked his hair to his brow, strands clinging to his face like ink-brushed strokes.

But none of the cuts looked deep. And Daojue stood straight. Unbowed. No limp, no falter. No hitch in his stance.

And Gleaming End—still shrouded, gripped in both hands before Daojue—was slick with blood from tip to halfway down the shaft.

Daojue hadn’t come out unscathed—but the two tenth-signs from earlier had been in a much sorrier state even before Jieyuan killed them. Not just that. From the looks of it, Daojue must’ve taken down an enemy or two himself.

Fatebloom Intuition and Sacrifice were massive advantages—but Gleaming End was at Orangesoul and could cut through anything. Daojue was also better at martial arts—not to mention faster and stronger.

But then all of that stopped mattering.

Jieyuan’s soulsense warped again—just like it had with the gleamstone barrier, right before it had shed its shape for a serpent’s.

Daojue unraveled before him—not in flesh, but in essence.

But it wasn’t a crystal serpent he turned into.