Xu Xun looked up and grinned at Yun Qingyin, his pure blue eyes curving into crescents.
"I fight my own way."
"Every time I throw a punch, it tells me which direction to strike."
"It sees."
"I just follow it."
"That's how it was before, and that's how it is now."
"I trust it."
Yun Qingyin's brows drew together for an instant.
"It?"
From the beginning, Xu Xun had said there was something inside him helping him.
That thing, sealed within him and never seen, seemed to possess insight and judgment far beyond Xu Xun's own level.
Yun Qingyin's fingertips brushed across her zither. Her face was reflected in its blue-green jade surface.
She fell silent for two breaths.
Then she raised her head toward Xu Xun. In her eyes, where stardust seemed sealed, surged an intense, almost blazing light.
"Then let me see."
"How far your 'it' can help you."
"I want to see whether that 'it' you keep talking about will actually come out."
All ten of her fingers pressed onto the strings.
This time, she did not pluck, strum, or scrape them.
Her ten fingers lay flat across the seven strings, their pads pressed flush against them.
Then she poured her Saintly Breath into the zither without pause.
The zither gave off a steady, sustained hum.
That hum spread from inside the instrument to the sky above the Arena. It grew from faint to vast, from gentle to heavy, from calm to impassioned.
The sky above the entire Arena filled with countless blue-green points of light condensed from the zither's music. Tens of thousands of them shone like a sea of stars awakened.
Yun Qingyin's purple dress whipped in the storm of Saintly Breath stirred by the music. Her black hair streamed behind her, and her bare