"Huh?" Liu San looked slightly surprised. Though he hadn't used his full strength in that slash, it had been enough to kill an ordinary martial artist in an instant. How had this kid managed to block it?
"Kid, you're a martial artist too? Not bad. But even a peak Ninth Rank martial artist might not be able to stop my throwing knives. This ends now!"
Killing intent surged in Liu San's eyes. He swept both hands out, and in an instant, three more streaks of cold light flew at Ye Yun from above, straight on, and below, forming a triangle! Their angles were vicious, sealing off every avenue of escape. The knives tore through the air with sharp, abrupt whistling cries!
The shadow of death fell over him in an instant! Ye Yun felt like a tiny boat caught in a raging tide, liable to be torn apart at any moment! He clenched his teeth. His focus was sharper than ever before. Deep in his soul, something seemed to be burning, crying out!
In his field of vision, the throwing knives seemed to slow by the tiniest fraction! He twisted his body desperately, his blade flashing in a flurry to shield his vital spots!
"Clang! Sshk! Clang!"
One knife was knocked aside, another skimmed past his ribs, and the last was barely deflected by the back of his blade before burying itself an inch into the tree trunk behind him!
It was his first fight to the death, and the tremendous strain left Ye Yun's vision going black. Liu San's throwing knives were terrifying! His strength, speed, and skill had all reached an extreme!
If not for his perception being far beyond ordinary after the fusion of his soul, and for having reached the Ninth Rank, he would already be a corpse on the ground!
"Tch, you're pretty tough." Liu San was growing impatient. He didn't want to drag this out any longer. He palmed two more Flying Feather Knives and advanced with a menacing grin. "My next throw will send you on your way!"
As Liu San closed in step by step, Ye Yun felt the cold killing intent radiating from him, and the pressure on Ye Yun mounted. His mind raced. He couldn't win by matching Liu San head-on! He had to catch him off guard! An idea flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning!
Just as Liu San's wrist lifted, on the verge of delivering a deadly strike, Ye Yun abruptly turned toward a patch of shadow behind Liu San and shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice hoarse: "Sixth Brother! Now!!"
"Sixth Brother?" Every hair on Liu San's body stood on end. He had been on guard against pursuers all along, and Ye Yun's desperate cry, brimming with delight, had sounded far too real! Could there really be an ambush? Almost instinctively, full of suspicion, he whipped his head around to look where Ye Yun was staring!
Now!
In the split second when the words "Sixth Brother" completely threw Liu San off balance and left a fatal gap in his defense, the will sleeping within Ye Yun—made extraordinarily resilient by his transmigration and the fusion of his soul—resonated with a fragment of instinct from the original owner's memories, long blurred but engraved in his very bones!
"Mountain-Crushing—Silk-Splitting!"
A roar from the depths of his soul exploded in his mind! He hadn't deliberately shouted it; the power erupting in that instant had driven it forth!
At that moment, Ye Yun forgot his exhausted arm and every constraint of technique! All his will, all his fury, all his instinct to survive poured into the ordinary standard-issue saber in his hand!
Using his body as the axis and his intent to guide his Essence Qi, he let the blade follow his body. With a resolve that seemed to split mountains and rend the heavens, he brought it crashing down toward Liu San's exposed neck!
There was no dazzling light, no earth-shaking boom.
Only a strand of razor-sharp energy, condensed to the utmost and almost formless, burst from the tip of the blade!
It tore through the air with a faint yet soul-chilling "shrrip," as though tough silk had been sliced apart in an instant!
The energy moved faster than the eye could follow, crossing the short distance between them in a flash!
Liu San had just turned his head and found no one in the shadows. "No good! I've been tricked!" he thought. But then a terror unlike anything he had ever felt, born from the instinct to survive, completely overwhelmed him!
He spun back in horror, only to see Ye Yun's falling blade—and... the formless edge, too fast to describe and so keen it froze his soul...
"B-Blade Qi Projection?! No... possi..." Liu San's thoughts didn't even have time to form his shock before the invisible, silk-splitting blade qi swept across his neck like a hot knife through butter, meeting no resistance!
Time seemed to freeze.
The shock, fear, and disbelief on Liu San's face were instantly etched in place. The life in his eyes faded rapidly, like a candle snuffed out by a gale.
He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but only a faint "Hrk..." escaped. A hair-thin line of blood slowly appeared across his neck.
The next moment, his head, still wearing an expression of abject terror, slowly separated from his body. With a dull thud, it rolled onto the ground carpeted with pine needles.
The headless body swayed. Blood gushed from the severed neck like a fountain, staining a wide patch of yellowed pine needles and damp earth beneath it. The air filled with the heavy stench of blood.
Deep in the Pine Forest, all was silent. Only the soft trickle of flowing blood and Ye Yun's own ragged, bellows-like breathing broke the silence, each sound unbearably sharp.
Ye Yun stood frozen in place, still holding the pose of his downward slash.
The blade of the saber in his hand, forged from ordinary ironwood, seemed to have nearly buckled under the sudden burst of power just now. It trembled without pause. Ye Yun tightened his grip on the saber, finally steadying it.
He stared blankly at Liu San's severed head on the ground, its eyes still wide open in death, filled with incomprehension and utter terror, as though they were still fixed on him.
What had just happened?
What was that razor-sharp sensation that had cleaved through everything?
Silk-Splitting... the Mountain-Crushing Saber Technique?
Somewhere deep in the original owner's memories, there seemed to be a blurred image of his grandfather practicing saber techniques... But hadn't that just been an extension of basic saber forms?
Blade Qi Projection... The words Liu San had cried out before dying exploded in Ye Yun's mind like thunder!
A mid-grade martial artist?! He had only just sensed Essence Qi and entered the Ninth Rank, a nobody at the very bottom—and yet, at the brink of death, he had unleashed Blade Qi Projection, something only mid-grade martial artists of Sixth Rank and above could master?!
Absurd! Shocking! Exhilarating! And... terrifying!
Where had this power come from? Was it a mutation caused by the fusion of souls? Something unknown brought on by transmigration? Or a secret buried deep in this body's bloodline?
Ye Yun shuddered violently, jolted out of his shock at the power. An overwhelming sense of crisis doused him like icy water, leaving him cold from head to toe!
He couldn't stay here! No one could be allowed to discover that world-shattering slash!
Otherwise, what awaited him wouldn't be glory, but endless trouble, suspicion, and even... death! His identity as an orphan of the Ye Family was already sensitive. Revealing this unfathomable power on top of that would be tantamount to courting death!
He fought through his violent exhaustion and the waves of empty, stabbing pain coming from deep within his soul, forcing himself to calm down as his mind raced to figure out how to cover his tracks.
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