Everyone in the hall harbored their own thoughts, their expressions a motley assortment. Some shook their heads, some sighed, and some simply picked up their teacups and lowered their heads to sip, treating it as nothing more than a low-grade farce.
Suddenly, an elderly elder seated at the far end of the right-hand row snapped back to his senses, his gaze abruptly sharpening.
"Wait."
His startled voice was not loud, but it drew the gazes of several people around him at once.
"That boy's cultivation-the eighth level of Qi Condensation?"
Those words were like a pebble dropped into still water, sending ripples spreading rapidly outward.
"Hiss..."
Several sharp intakes of breath sounded almost simultaneously.
Only then did many in the hall belatedly realize it. As they exchanged looks, a trace of shock they could not conceal surfaced in their eyes.
Half a month ago, during the outer sect tournament, what realm had Chu Yunfei been in?
The eighth level of Body Tempering.
Merely the eighth level of Body Tempering.
In half a month, he had advanced from the eighth level of Body Tempering to the eighth level of Qi Condensation.
An entire major realm lay between the two.
Even across the entire Great Qian Imperial Dynasty, such a cultivation speed was unheard of.
An old man seated on the left silently counted on his fingers, then lowered his hand. He said nothing, but his slightly blanched fingertips betrayed the turmoil within him.
What did that mean?
Ordinary disciples usually needed six months to a year of accumulation to break through from the peak of Body Tempering to the first layer of Qi Condensation.
And to cultivate from the first layer of Qi Condensation to the eighth level of Qi Condensation, even talented disciples with excellent aptitude needed at least two to three years.
Chu Yunfei had taken half a month.
Fifteen days.
"There's no need to make such a fuss."
A somewhat languid voice sounded from the right side of the hall.
The speaker was Zhao Qingyang, one of the Azure Mystic Sect's elders and a pillar of the sect.
"Chu Yunfei used to be a Spirit Martial genius. Who doesn't know that? Not a single disciple his age in the entire Azure Mystic Sect could match him. Later, his cultivation fell for some unknown reason, reducing him to a cripple. That's why he wasted his years in the outer sect."
"As for now, put plainly, he's just recovering his strength. Naturally, retracing a path he's already cultivated is much faster. That isn't difficult to understand, is it?"
"Exactly. He's only recovering. There's nothing surprising about it," someone immediately agreed.
"Who knows what happened to him back then? His cultivation suddenly dropped, and now it's just slowly recovering. It's hardly anything remarkable."
Everyone nodded, as though, having found a reasonable explanation, they could comfortably cast that earlier sense of unease to the back of their minds.
After all, admitting that an eighteen-year-old youth possessed heaven-defying cultivation talent was not a pleasant matter for most of those present.
Especially the elders whose disciples had cultivated for over a decade only to barely touch the threshold of the Spirit Martial Realm.
It would be good if that was all it was.
Recovery meant there was a limit, a ceiling. It meant he could, at most, return to his previous level.
And the former Chu Yunfei had only been at the seventh level of Spirit Martial.
Zhou Huanzhang stroked his long beard, the smile at the corners of his mouth deepening as he turned to glance at his disciple, Xu Changqing.
The fifth level of the Spirit Martial Realm against the eighth level of Qi Condensation-a crushing victory.
There need not be any suspense.
Sect Master Zhang Qingfeng never joined the discussion.
He sat at the head of the hall, his gaze resting on the Giant Que Sword on the table, his expression as calm as still water.
No one knew what he was thinking.
Only when Chu Yunfei returned to his cave abode and shut the stone door did his expression truly darken.
His thoughts still churned, refusing to settle.
His father had been an upright man. While he lived, everyone had shown him a measure of respect.
After his death, his old friends had fallen silent, others coveted his belongings, and his son had been trampled underfoot as a cripple.
He could not even protect a sword.
Chu Yunfei closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.
"This sect."
"And to think you kept defending it while you were alive."
He did not know what Chu Batian had experienced in Demon Abyss Valley back then, nor what hidden circumstances lay behind the so-called "violation of sect rules."
But he knew one thing clearly: to reclaim his father's Giant Que Sword, he had to win the match three days from now.
That was the only path.
There was no other choice.
Chu Yunfei sat cross-legged on the stone bed, formed seals with both hands, and slowly began circulating the Boundless Creation Scripture.
Spiritual power flowed through his meridians, drawing the surrounding Spiritual Qi into his body, strand by strand.
The spirit-gathering stones embedded in the cave abode's rocky walls glimmered faintly, emitting a soft light that turned into a thin mist of Spiritual Qi swirling around Chu Yunfei.
He was already at the peak of the eighth level of Qi Condensation, only a hair's breadth from the ninth.
Yet that hair's breadth was often the hardest to cross.
Time passed in silence.
An unknown amount of time went by.
Chu Yunfei slowly exhaled a breath of turbid air and opened his eyes.
"Too slow."
The spiritual power in his dantian had indeed increased a little, but it was still not enough to pierce the barrier to the ninth level.
At this rate, the chance of breaking through within three days was vanishingly small.
He needed a more efficient method.
Pills, demon cores, spirit stones-any resource that could hasten his breakthrough.
But he had already used up the demon cores on hand, and few pills remained.
Although he still had quite a few of the six thousand low-grade spirit stones from his earlier Pill Pavilion profit share, his dantian's Qi sea was already several times larger than an ordinary person's.
On top of that, after cultivating the Boundless Creation Scripture, his Qi sea held ten times as much spiritual power as anyone else's.
The benefit was that Chu Yunfei was stronger when fighting someone at the same cultivation level. While others exhausted their spiritual power and lost, his was abundant and enduring, giving him every advantage.
The drawback was that he also needed ten times as much spiritual power as others to break through.
Thus, trying to break through within three days by absorbing these low-grade spirit stones was no different from a fool babbling about dreams.
They did not even meet the requirement for maintaining the flow of time in the divine cauldron's Spiritual Qi space.
So far, he had not used the time-flow space even once.
Then there was only one way left now!!
Bang.
Just then, a tremendous crash came from outside the cave abode.
It was not a knock at the door. Someone had kicked it.
Chu Yunfei's expression darkened. Spiritual power automatically began circulating within him, and his right hand had already closed around the hilt of the Abyss-Devouring Sword beside him as he strode out of the inner chamber and pushed open the stone door.
Bright sunlight filled the courtyard.
Two figures stood there.
Chu Yunfei recognized the one in front: Situ Shuang'er.
She had not appeared again since the last tournament. He did not know why she had come here today.
Half a step behind her stood a young man.
The man appeared to be in his early twenties. He wore a black brocade robe with a gold-patterned belt at his waist, and had handsome features and an exceptional bearing.
His long, narrow phoenix eyes tilted slightly upward, carrying a measure of innate arrogance and disdain.
Chu Yunfei's gaze lingered on the man for a moment.
He was not mistaken.
This man's presence was powerful.
"You're Chu Yunfei?"
The man spoke first. His voice was not loud, yet it carried an oppressive sense of looking down from on high.
He did not even look Chu Yunfei in the eye. That sidelong glance swept over him as though he were appraising something utterly insignificant.
Chu Yunfei leaned against the doorframe, his expression calm.
"Who are you?"
The corners of the man's mouth shifted slightly, his expression almost a smile.
"You're not worthy of knowing my name yet."
The instant his words fell, his imposing presence erupted without warning.
An invisible pressure surged out of the black-robed man's body like a mountain toppling, crushing outward in every direction.
At that moment, the air seemed to solidify, becoming suffocatingly heavy.
Chu Yunfei's pupils contracted.
"This is... the Heavenly Origin Realm?!!"