My Journey to Immortality Begins with Hunting

Qing Hancheng sensed Li Yuan's train of thought. Instead of rushing in, he began packing shadow blood around himself.0

The liquid aura gathered and stretched beside him, shaping a sword of thin crimson which was also several hundred meters along.0

Li Yuan watched the weapon take form and simply brought his own blade down.0

Qing Hancheng answered with a plain, unadorned swing.0

BOOM!The blood sword shattered again, bursting into mist, while Li Yuan's blade remained upright and unbroken.0

Qing Hancheng staggered back two steps, dumbfounded. Two exchanges were enough. That blade carried no tricks, only raw, crushing force meant to sweep everything aside.0

Across the gap Li Yuan's voice drifted over. "Still with me?"0

Qing Hancheng called back, "Why is that slash so terrifyingly strong?"0

Li Yuan dismissed the blade and flicked a hand. A fallen twig sailed to him; he pinched it, gave it a gentle shake. The twig quivered, faster and faster, until both the hand and twig seemed to freeze. Yet the wood turned oddly dull, as though light itself could no longer cling to it.0

"Everyone in the jianghu relies on two things, the weapon and the speed you swing it. Shadow blood just amplifies both. At the heart it's still weapon plus velocity equals force.1

"Add in vibration and the power spikes, but vibration wastes energy. Fold all that leakage into adomain, keep it utterly contained, and the vibration itself becomes the blade. That's blade qi.0

"Size doesn't matter so much as the density. That's why your sword shattered and my blade didn't. For now I can only forge this kind of construct, so I built 81 of them and fused them into a single blade. Make sense?"1

"..." Qing Hancheng remained silent.0

Li Yuan frowned. "No?"0

"Clearly our paths are poles apart," Qing Hancheng sighed. "My Cycle of Withering and Growth hides its nature. It looks like normal shadow blood, but at core it's a spiritual based attack. Your method seems all-embracing, except you can't conjure gardens from thin air."0

Li Yuan cut in. "That fire is just condensed Yang energy, not a garden of thoughts born from nothing like yours."3

"Ah, I see." Qing Hancheng nodded. "Then yours is pure, force-driven blademanship. Words won't help us. Let power, victory, and death explain our ideas."0

"Sure," Li Yuan agreed.0

They took their marks again. Each had just revealed a corner of their strength, hoping to spark enlightenment in the other. Their systems differed, yet the raw might they'd tasted commanded respect. Plans, plots, ambitions…all fell away. In both pairs of eyes there was only the other.3

A swift, paradoxical bond rose. It was admiration without mercy, the intent to kill without gloating, and gratitude hidden beneath the urge to win. Above all, there was respect.0

Had anyone insulted thebig oafat that moment, Qing Hancheng would have struck first. One insult, one corpse; a crowd, a massacre. Li Yuan would have done the same.0

Whatever paths and fates had shaped them, here and now they overlapped and became a single point of focus. Only with such mutual sincerity could either dare to step higher.1

Yet the feeling would last no longer than the moment itself.0

Qing Hancheng advanced, and out of nothing the ancient giant garden unfurled around him, pacing him as he advanced. What he'd shown before was merely the first layer; now the second opened.0

The sword in his hand, its edge a weave of azure and crimson, bent vision upon vision. Day vanished; furious fire sprang up in the night-shrouded garden.0

The garden was real. The flames were illusion. Reality and dream tangled together. Wood and fire were born together.0

Li Yuan became a lone traveler trapped in a blazing maze, with poison, flame, and vegetation in triple assault. Even wrapped in his own flame he felt flesh corrode under the toxin; maddening thoughts stabbed into his mind while countless plants, each blow at fourth rank strength, tore at him from every side.0

Qing Hancheng strode through the burning garden, far beyond mortal comprehension. Even a fifth rank foe, to him now, was little more than an ant.0

In the very next heartbeat, the temple master striding through the burning garden was dazzled by a blaze of savage, regal light.0

A crimson so bright it could blind erupted ahead, then surged forward as a white-hot shockwave that torched and annihilated everything in its path.0

The garden vanished to ash; the roiling poison smoke was gone; even the illusory flames winked out. No cinders remained, proving the garden from nothing had never quite crossed the line into true matter.0

Li Yuan stood at the centre of the unraveling dream, scanning the void.0

Qing Hancheng was nowhere in sight.0

Sensing the presence of life, Li Yuan flickered across the clearing, plucked a dead twig from a green rock outcrop, and slashed.0

KLANG!Twig met sword, ringing like dragon and phoenix locked in mid-air.0

Qing Hancheng had used some secret art to dart here and cloak himself, but Li Yuan's perception had long since reached the level of sensing even the most minute traces of life.0

The blow was almost casual.0

Qing Hancheng hurtled away, coughing blood, then vanished once more.0

Li Yuan drifted after the new disturbance. With another swing, he knocked Qing Hancheng out of hiding again. This time he did not allow escape. Blade after blade flashed like lightning, leaving after-images that each carried the fathom-deep might of the Tranquil Sea Blade.0

Spawned from a chaotic ancestral seal yet locked inside his personal domain, the power was monstrous.0

Every exchange forced another mouthful of blood from Qing Hancheng. Had his sword not been the ancestral weapon of the Holy Tree Temple, it would have shattered ten times already.0

At last Qing Hancheng seized an opening, hurled himself back, spread both arms, and flung open his blood domain.0

Blood swords geysered out.0

Fire, poison, and wood unfolded again, but this time they were compressed inside a sanguine blade.0

Even under murderous pressure Qing Hancehng was evolving; a single second felt like days of comprehension. He swung an unprecedented strike that flooded him with elation.0

Li Yuan chose not to clash head-on. In mid-air the 81 qi blades fused to one and cleaved downward.0

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!The composite blood sword shuddered; layer after layer cracked.0

Poison, wood, and shadow blood were blasted apart, yet thefireinside slipped past Li Yuan's edge and slashed straight into his chest.0

A surge of manic fury, raw fear, and vertigo burst from his core, binding him for a heartbeat.0

His own flame began burning the intrusion to cinders, but that single frozen instant was enough.0

Qing Hancheng dived, came within arm's reach, and struck, not with a sword but with power itself.0

The garden rebloomed, this time with Li Yuan fixed at its very heart.0

Before, the greenery had rushed him head-on; now it rose on every side.0

Qing Hancheng knew ordinary attacks could never bring down this foe; Li Yuan knew his own blade, though unstoppable, was merely drawing blood, not ending the fight.0

Both understood the other was evolving by the second.0

Sword in hand, Qing Hancheng did not swing. A swing would break his rhythm and open a gap. Instead he poured everything into the fourfold domain—wood, poison, fire, and shadow blood—layer on layer, petal on petal, sealing Li Yuan tight.0

Now and then a blinding red flare tore out and scorched a segment of the prison, but the moment it burned, Qing Hancheng patched it. Sometimes a roaring fire-field burst from the garden's depths, but the four domains wrapped it up; a chunk might crumble yet nothing more.0

His face flushed; the constant mending was draining him fast. He could not keep it up long. But every breath, every instant, his insight leapt. The exhilaration was like nothing in his centuries of life. Li Yuan felt the same rush, seeing his own flaws and the bones of his opponent's power.0

The garden came not from Qing Hancheng alone, but from the countless wills sealed in the Wither Growth Sword, riding on his vast shadow blood. Yin and Yang gave birth, and matter appeared. The blood domain was pure fourth rank strength. The fire was a spiritual based attack, a souped-up version of theIntimidating Glarefrom the Cycle of Withering and Growth and amplified by the sword itself.0

Li Yuan's Nine by Nine Formless Blades and Tranquil Sea Blade were equally a marriage of his ancestral seal and shadow blood.0

His Dragon's Breath was also born from his ancestral seal fused with the Yang flame.0

The ancestral seal itself was a will; only because that will was strong enough could it pair with flame to produce such a skill, much like the garden.0

Yet Li Yuan's shortcomings were clear. He still couldn't fuse his ancestral seal with the flame at the fourth rank domain level and forge a brand new skill that could wipe out the garden.0

He could smash the impasse another way, of course. He needed only to let the Yang flame consume him, swell his body in size, spring clear of the garden, and then unleash a vast-area Dragon's Breath.0

Pulling that stunt would showcase his peak combat power of 69,496.0

Confronted with that kind of might, Qing Hancheng would be incinerated or at the very least be rendered unable to touch him again.0

Yet a brute-force win like that meant nothing to him.0

So Li Yuan began to think. He shelved Dragon's Breath and instead pushed his flame domain outward in rippling rings, each one breaking like surf and snuffing out the instant it struck the dike.0

For the moment Li Yuan and Qing Hancheng reached a new balance.0

Qing Hancheng searched for a way to keep the four nested domains stable, how to wield the power better and trace it to its source. If he succeeded, he believed he could truly step into third rank.0

Li Yuan hunted for a method to fuse the power of the ancestral seal with the Yang flame inside a single domain.0

Both men stood there thinking.0

They remained at Flying Swallow Terrace while the surrounding mountains crumbled into scorched, poison-soaked earth, furnace heat carrying the toxins outward. Anyone who dared approach would be dead within minutes.0