The kill

The perception-obscuring law churned frantically around Yi Huainan. He even burned his source law power, splitting his form into dozens of shadows in an instant, each carrying energy fluctuations identical to those of his real body.

Dozens of Yi Huainans flew through the void at once. Some shot upward into the asteroid belt, some sank into deep space below, and others scattered to either side.

Every shadow's trajectory had been precisely calculated. No two would choose the same direction.

This was his most powerful escape technique. The shadow-clone technique consumed enormous amounts of power, draining nearly a third of his source law power the instant he used it.

He had used it only a handful of times throughout his nearly century-long career, always to gamble for his life when faced with certain death.

Every shadow was real, and every one carried a portion of his law power. They would dissipate on their own after a while, but until then, no means of perception could distinguish his true body.

Then he changed course and flew at full speed in another direction. He did not fly straight, but in an arc, using the intersecting gravitational pulls between nearby asteroids to make his trajectory almost impossible to predict.

Each time he rounded an asteroid, his perception-obscuring law subtly adjusted its coverage, allowing his energy fluctuations to leak out in different directions and generating a mass of false signals.

He was gambling.

Gambling that Xu Wuyi's Order Perception could not locate his true body among so many false signals in so little time. Gambling that the asteroid belt's gravitational interference would make his energy fluctuations even more chaotic.

Gambling that the concealment instincts honed over a hundred years on the Astral Battlefield would surpass their limits at this moment.

He accelerated faster and faster,