The Official Duel Begins

Facing the aggressive Xia Pingyun, Ji Ye's face remained as placid as ever.

He held his spear in one hand before him, while behind his back, three spirit guns—long, short, and long—rose into the air.

This was now a defining trait of cultivators born in all of Heyang City.

As an entirely new category of weapon, spirit guns had been around for a full decade or more, from the first prototype that appeared in the Yin Harmony Sect to the present day.

Over those ten-odd years, spirit gun manufacturing had continuously advanced. As the power they could unleash grew ever greater, cultivators had also tirelessly developed new ways to use them.

Just as with every other weapon in the world, where gifted users would develop more efficient methods through continued use, firearms, as a category of weapon, had likewise drawn immense enthusiasm from many cultivators.

Unfortunately, while firearms were undoubtedly efficient and powerful tools, their forms of variation were nowhere near as diverse as those of close-combat weapons.

Swords had sword arts, sabers had saber arts; staffs, great axes, halberds, soft whips—every one of the hundred weapons under heaven had its finest method of use.

At first, cultivators followed the experience of the past and attempted to devise matching arts for guns.

But the more thought they put into it, the more cultivators realized that the reason firearms, weapons born barely a decade ago, had spread so swiftly was inseparable from their simple operation and their return to simplicity in practical use.

No matter how fancifully one researched different ways to fire a gun, it was better to hurry up, channel more spiritual power, and fire two more shots.

Breaking cunning with force—after more than a decade of development in the cultivation world, this was the view firearms had left