Yun Qingyin spoke, her voice much calmer than before, yet that calm carried the heavy foreboding of something about to pour forth.
"You let me have three moves. I accept your favor."
"But for your next move, I will not hold back again."
All ten of her fingers descended upon the zither strings at once.
This time, she did not pluck them.
Her fingertips hovered half an inch above the strings, seven wisps of cyan breath as fine as gossamer hanging from them, each wisp connected to a single string.
Drawn by her fingertips, the seven strings began to vibrate on their own, from the faintest tremor to the fiercest quake, from the slowest rhythm to the most urgent. All seven strings gave forth seven utterly different melodies at once.
The low notes fell like sinking mountain ranges, the middle notes surged like tides crashing ashore, and the high notes burst like shattering ice.
The seven melodies intertwined and converged above the Arena, forming a mass of roiling, ever-changing cyan sound-clouds.
The sound-clouds grew thicker, denser, heavier. They blanketed a third of the Sky Vault above the entire Arena, and the laws within the Coiling Dragon Pillars gave off a continuous, low hum.
"Musical Dao: Seven-Colored Collapse."
As Yun Qingyin spoke those five words, the seven cyan wisps hanging from her fingertips snapped apart.
At the instant they broke, the seven strings let out an earth-shaking cry in unison.
That cry transformed into seven pillars of melodic light in different colors, shooting skyward from the zither. The pillars intertwined, fused, and condensed in midair.
In the end, they became a colossal cyan pillar thirty meters in diameter, crashing down toward Xu Xun.
As it crushed downward, the giant pillar carried seven entirely different melodic frequencies. Every one of them shook