Heavenly Secrets Aid, Situation Slightly Changes

The instant his palm struck his chest, Chen Wuya felt as though his organs had been smashed by an iron hammer, a metallic sweetness surging up his throat. Yet he did not spit it out. Instead, he gritted his teeth and forcibly pressed that rebounding blood and qi back into his dantian. This strike was not self-mutilation—it was using the shock to awaken the dormant flow of Misaligned Force within him. He knew that if he did not make a move now, he truly would not be able to evade the next axe blow.

The alien expert Wu Chi narrowed his eyes. Though his giant axe remained raised, not yet fallen, he had already sensed a change in his opponent's aura. That palm strike had looked reckless, but it had actually caused the originally sluggish true qi to briefly flow back. Frowning, he retreated half an inch and warily watched Chen Wuya's lowered hands.

Several pebbles on the sand suddenly gave a faint hop.

Then came a second, a third, as if an invisible pulse were beating beneath the earth. Wu Chi's brow furrowed tighter, and his grip on the axe subtly clenched. He had fought through countless campaigns, yet had never seen such force—it did not travel in straight lines or erupt with great noise, but silently spread like water seeping into cracks.

Chen Wuya slowly lifted his head. Blood still streaked the corner of his lips, but the impatience had vanished from his eyes. Amid the excruciating pain just now, a passage he had long forgotten suddenly surfaced in his mind: "Force need not travel straight; what bends may reach hidden depths. Momentum need not take form; when intent moves first, the opening appears."

It was a fragment from the Heavenly Machine Scroll that he had read before