The Most Familiar Enemy

Cultivation was the bedrock that determined victory or defeat between cultivators, but intelligence could, to a certain extent, bore straight through that bedrock.

Because he had always been so publicly active in the past, Xu Yuan's arts were no longer a secret to the Sect Alliance. As one of his most commonly used arts, Void-Stepping Slash had drawn immense investments of manpower and resources from the Sect Alliance to study its fundamentals, yet almost no one had managed to devise a perfect countermeasure to this day.

The earliest Void-Stepping Slash had possessed the fatal weakness of a fixed landing direction, making it possible to suppress him the moment he reappeared. But after Xu Yuan's improvements, its landing point could now follow his thoughts as his heart willed.

When fighting him, even someone as powerful as Wen Xinyun could only spread Source Qi through the air and counter him after he surfaced back into the physical world.

And thus, the Four Symbols phantoms suddenly teleporting caught everyone present completely off guard.

Xu Yuan included.

Because they had synchronized.

No, rather than synchronization, this Four Symbols Seal Art seemed to be even faster than him.

Unlike other spatial arts that could be cast instantly without any interval, Void-Stepping Slash caused its caster to briefly vanish from the physical world before reappearing. That period was exceedingly brief, but it did exist. The Four Symbols Seal Art had appeared at the landing point of Void-Stepping Slash before him, during the gap in which he vanished from the physical world.

But what the Sect Alliance higher-ups watching the match found regrettable was that the Four Symbols Seal Art could not penetrate Void Flash. Thus, despite being caught unprepared, Xu Yuan was not affected in the slightest by the suppressive effect of the Four Symbols Seal.