"Plop!"
Beads of blood splashed to the ground. A cut as fine as a hair had appeared on Lian Youming's left cheek.
This man's saber technique truly was extraordinary.
The overbearing force of his saber aside, its speed and power had reached an inconceivable level, pursuing nothing but the ultimate in offense. As Lian Youming moved, his eyes darted rapidly in their sockets. Yet even with his astonishing eyesight, he could hardly make out the blade, seeing only an obscure red glow and a blurred saber shadow.
But Lian Youming soon realized that it was not his eyesight at fault. There was something strange about the long saber in this man's hand. Its shadow flickered back and forth, and the dense patterns on its blade seemed capable of affecting human vision. Intricate and interwoven, they appeared like layers of phantom images, making truth difficult to distinguish from illusion.
It was not just the saber. After studying it for only a couple of moments, Lian Youming felt the world before him blur as well, as though even his vision had been disrupted. Wearing wooden clogs, Gan Xuansu saw the change in his eyes, and his killing aura surged. He flicked his saber with a pair of swishes, and the extraordinarily long Ōdachi proved as nimble as an embroidery needle, its tip snapping upward toward both eyes.
Lian Youming's pupils trembled, reflecting a rapidly approaching point of red light. He turned sideways, twisted at the waist, and bent his upper body backward like a bow being drawn. The three-foot blade in his hand was an arrow poised to fly, its tip quivering like a nimble snake as he narrowly defused the killing move.
Having detected the strangeness, his gaze shifted. He stopped looking at the Ōdachi and instead watched Gan Xuansu's right