Beiming Xuan twisted and turned through the air, doing everything he could to evade Chu Shihan's increasingly heavy, trickily angled Sword Qi slashes, trying time and again to open the distance again.
At the same time, the jade at the center of his crown flashed urgently. More torrents of water appeared from nowhere in midair, gathering together, then taking on utterly different forms and properties in the blink of an eye—
Part of it suddenly boiled, steam billowing out and scorching heat waves rolling forth; another part condensed into fine ice crystals, white mist chillingly dense, cold piercing to the bone; some streams turned thick and dark green, carrying the pungent stench of decay; hidden currents, heavy as mercury, also continuously disrupted the path of the crimson silk ribbon and Chu Shihan's movements.
Faced with this composite assault coming from every direction and at varying distances, carrying both physical and energy-based properties, the Three-Inch Sword Domain clearly could not cover every angle.
Scalding heat, bitter cold, corrosion, increased weight... Several water-aspect properties that should have conflicted with one another and been nearly impossible to coexist had all been imposed upon the water needles surrounding Chu Shihan through Beiming Xuan's breathtakingly precise control. They intertwined and complemented one another, producing an effect where one plus one was greater than two.
This had long surpassed an ordinary contest of spells. It was a profound understanding and ultimate expression of water's very nature and the limits of its transformations, as well as an almost cruel test of the caster's mental strength and fine control over spiritual power.
The threat posed by the composite attack suddenly soared!
Boiling water and bone-chilling currents washed over him in turns, their abrupt shifts between heat and cold testing the stability of his protective aura; corrosive dark-green streams