The air froze the moment Mo Yuan's rather "arrogant" words left his mouth.
Xu Rongzhi stood inside the iron gate, his calm expression like a sheet of frozen ice. But once those words landed, the first crack appeared.
His pupils contracted slightly. The practiced curve of his smile vanished, revealing a face devoid of warmth.
He was silent for a moment, then gave a soft laugh, shorter than any of his earlier ones and without a trace of courtesy.
"Mr. Mo Yuan, that was... a bit much."
"Or should I take it as you mocking me?"
His voice remained steady, but its final note dropped half a pitch.
Then he raised his right hand. Without looking back, he made a downward gesture toward the forces behind him.
The movement was small, but its meaning was unmistakable.
The twenty-odd silver mecha hovering over the estate adjusted their positions in unison.
The Soul Guidance Ray emitters beneath their hulls shifted from a slight tilt to a locked aim. The hum of charging energy merged above the treetops into a low, unbroken drone.
Xu Rongzhi's hand hung in the air for about half a second before it fell.
"Take him down. Dead or alive."
The order came out sharp and clean, without a moment's hesitation.
Mo Yuan did not even look at the mecha.
The instant Xu Rongzhi raised his hand, Mo Yuan had sensed the change in his Soul Power field. That subtle shift in energy flow was the warning sign of any large group of Soul Tools entering attack mode.
His response was almost simultaneous.
A pale golden film of light sprang from his waist.
A trigger-activated Ninth-Level Soul Guide Shield deployed in less than a millisecond, enclosing his entire body in a translucent spherical barrier.
A fine web of runes flowed across the shield's surface. Every ring of markings rotated and re-formed without pause, like a ceaseless weave of energy.
The first concentrated volley struck.
Beams of varying colors fired at once from the twenty-odd mecha: bluish, high-energy piercing rays; orange-red thermal rays; and several near-white, high-speed pulses.
They wove a dense net of light through the air and slammed straight into Mo Yuan's shield.
The instant the net touched its surface, the golden barrier flickered violently, then steadied.
The runes across the shield sped up sharply, spreading the rays' energy evenly over the entire barrier before dissipating it layer by layer through multiple energy buffers.
Mo Yuan stood at the center of the shield with his hands in his pockets. He had not even changed his stance.
The first volley lasted about five seconds. Then, at Xu Rongzhi's signal, the beams paused.
Dust and smoke drifted around the shield. The golden barrier remained intact, though a faint gray trace of energy scorching had appeared on its surface.
As the runes flowed, those marks quickly faded, like grime washed from glass.
Mo Yuan brushed nonexistent dust from his clothes and said evenly, "If you insist on taking it personally, I won't deny that I was talking about you."
Xu Rongzhi narrowed his eyes.
"Hmph! A Ninth-Level Soul Guide Shield," he said. "Not bad. But how many of those can you carry? And with your cultivation, how long can you keep using them?"
He did not wait for an answer. He raised his right hand again.
The second volley followed at once. The beams were denser this time, their angles more devious. Several cut in from the sides, trying to bypass the shield's thickest frontal defenses.
But Mo Yuan's shield was spherical. It had no front or sides; every inch of its surface offered exactly the same protection.
The second volley achieved almost nothing more than the first.
"Keep going!" Xu Rongzhi said.
A third volley. A fourth. A fifth.
Wave after wave of beams poured down. The shield's surface shifted from gold to incandescent white as its energy buffers ran at full speed, yet it showed no sign of breaking.
Mo Yuan stood at the center of the shield, but his attention was not on the mecha.
His eyelids were lowered, and a faint blue light glimmered deep in his eyes.
He was analyzing them.
His [Analysis] authority had activated automatically with the first volley.
The energy frequencies, wavelength distributions, modulation methods, and intervals between pulses—every physical parameter of every ray was broken down in his mind into its most basic components, then compared against the Soul Guidance Ray models he had worked through countless times in the laboratory.
A conclusion emerged faster than he had expected.
The Soul Guidance Ray systems on these mecha were fundamentally no different from the models he had studied before.
Their power had been increased, and their emitter arrays had undergone minor optimization. But the underlying energy excitation structures and frequency modulation principles came from the same source.
In his mind, he spent a short while designing a simple absorption array.
The idea was straightforward: channel incoming energy of specific frequencies into a resonant circuit, use destructive interference to neutralize the rays, and convert the remaining energy into a reserve of Soul Power he could use.
The entire process could be built into a sufficiently small device.
Then he got to work.
He stayed where he was, but pulled his right hand from his pocket.
The air above his palm began to warp slightly. Fine metal particles drifted out of his Storage Soul Tool and gathered into a silver-gray stream over his hand.
The particles swiftly wove together between his fingers, solidifying and taking shape. The entire process took less than a second.
A silver-gray bracelet covered in exceedingly fine runes appeared in his palm.
Mo Yuan fastened it around his right wrist. The instant it touched his skin, its runes lit up one after another, shifting from pale blue to deep blue before settling into an almost transparent glow.
It was all done quietly and neatly, as though he were putting on an ordinary accessory.
Xu Rongzhi noticed.
But before he could make sense of it, the sixth volley arrived.
The beams came straight at Mo Yuan.
Mo Yuan raised his right hand. The bracelet on his wrist activated before the beams could touch the shield.
A Barrier shimmering with a strange halo expanded from the bracelet, covering the outside of the Ninth-Level Soul Guide Shield.
The instant the beams struck the shimmering Barrier, something entirely different happened. Instead of exploding or scattering against its surface, they flowed silently into it like streams entering a lake.
Every beam disappeared into the Barrier without so much as a ripple escaping.
The halo on its surface pulsed faintly, then steadied.
Standing at the gate, Xu Rongzhi showed the first clear crack in his composure. He frowned, utterly perplexed.
"Continue!"
The beams kept pouring down.
Every ray that struck the shimmering Barrier was absorbed, channeled inward, and converted in the same way.
The runes on Mo Yuan's bracelet grew visibly brighter. After the absorbed energy passed through the resonant circuit, part of it flowed back into several Amplification Soul Tools on his body, forming an efficient, self-sustaining cycle.
By the end of the twelfth volley, Xu Rongzhi finally understood. His people were attacking Mo Yuan, but those attacks were replenishing Mo Yuan's energy.
"Damn it! Everyone, cease fire!" he shouted.
The beams stopped abruptly.
The air still smelled of ozone and metal vapor from the intense heat. More than twenty mecha hovered overhead, faint smoke trailing from the emitters beneath their hulls.
Dark red patches of overheating had appeared on the surfaces of their main cannons.
Mo Yuan stood where he was, the bracelet on his wrist still glowing softly.
The Soul Power converted from those last few volleys had roughly replenished everything he had spent maintaining the Soul Guidance Shield, with plenty left over to sustain his various Amplification Soul Tools.
"What? Want to keep trying?"