The Final Four
The semifinals were scheduled for the fourth day of the age-group competition. Over the previous three days, most of the elimination rounds in the other groups had been cleared. The eight-year-old group's final four had been announced, with Long Tian's name in third place. Two people ranked above him: a boy named Gu Yan from an academy in Spirit City, whose Martial Soul was the Silver Thread Spider and whose Soul Power was at level sixteen; the other was Long Tian himself. In fourth place was a child from an academy in a village outside the city, whose strength was unremarkable and who was essentially just there to make up the numbers. After losing to Long Tian in the final-three round, Murong Qing had been placed in the fifth-to-eighth group by the ranking system, where she was competing for a better position.
The one who drew the most attention was Gu Yan, ranked first. In each of his previous three matches, he had defeated his opponent in a single move. The Silver Thread Spider's silk was as fine as hair yet exceptionally tough, and it often wrapped around his opponents' joints before they noticed a thing. With a gentle tug, he would send them sprawling, unable to move. Long Tian had watched his matches from below the stage. The silk was released so discreetly that even with Shadow Vision, he could barely make out the path of a flicker of silver.
That evening, Zhao Xiaopang came over, his face full of worry. "Long Tian, did you see Gu Yan's spider silk? You can't see it at all! What if he wraps it around your neck?"
"He wouldn't dare wrap it around my neck. The rules forbid lethal attacks." Long Tian was arranging his competition clothes. "But it really is hard to guard against him wrapping it around my arms and legs. I plan to use Shadow Vision to lock onto its path the instant he releases it and predict where it'll go."
Zhao Xiaopang nodded, seeming to understand only half of it, then turned and went to bring Chen Hao some water. Chen Hao had also reached the semifinals in the thirteen-year-old group. His Ironback Wolf Martial Soul, combined with the explosive power of his three rings, had crushed opponents all the way through. Only a level-seventeen opponent had given him some trouble, but in the end, he had landed a series of blows thanks to his superior speed. The two were competing in the semifinals on the same day, and the atmosphere at the inn had been tense for several days.
On the day of the semifinals, the sky was clear and the breeze gentle. Every seat in the stands was occupied. As Long Tian stepped onto the stage, his gaze swept over the spectators below and caught an unfamiliar face in the crowd. A thin middle-aged man sat in the northwest corner of the stands, dressed in drab gray everyday clothes, his hands resting motionless on his knees. He looked no different from the citizens around him who had come to watch the spectacle, but Long Tian noticed that he sat far too straight. His posture had barely changed since the competition began, like someone accustomed to lying in wait.
Long Tian withdrew his gaze and faced Gu Yan as he approached from the opposite side.
Gu Yan was slender and delicate-featured, with a pair of narrow eyes. His footsteps were extremely light as he walked. He gave Long Tian a slight nod in greeting, then let his arms hang naturally at his sides without taking any sort of attacking stance. But his fingertips were slightly curled, and Long Tian's Shadow Vision faintly caught a thread of exceedingly fine silver light hanging from them, nearly blending into the light around it.
At the referee's command, Long Tian took no chances and unfurled both wings at once! His left wing quivered with shadow, sliding him three steps aside, while golden light gathered on his right wing, ready to strike. Sure enough, the instant he moved, a nearly invisible silver thread appeared on the ground where he had stood, hooking toward his ankle from behind like an invisible sickle. Had he been a fraction slower, he would have been tripped already.
That strike was fast! Long Tian's heart tightened. He drove Shadow Vision to its limit, and a layer of dark light swept across the depths of his pupils. In his shadow vision, the silver threads hanging from Gu Yan's fingertips became much clearer. Like transparent strands suspended in the air, they were spreading out at tremendous speed to cover three sides around him.
"Entangling Thread Formation." Gu Yan spoke in an even voice. "Three threads have already been laid within two feet of your feet, two to your left rear and one to your right front. The only place left for you to stand is a patch of open ground three steps square. Your next step will land on spider silk no matter which way you move."
Long Tian glanced around. Sure enough, through Shadow Vision, he saw the translucent silver threads stretched into a web around him. The corner of his mouth twitched. "Then I won't move."
He gathered power in his right palm and fired Light Bullets in rapid succession! Three bullets of light shot out in a fan toward Gu Yan's front and both flanks. Gu Yan dodged sideways and hooked his fingertips at the same time. The silver threads snapped taut, drawing in on Long Tian from every direction like an invisible net! Long Tian was ready. Both wings beat at once, bursting with streams of gold and black light. The Yin-Yang Twin Wings accelerated him in an instant, sending him flying diagonally out of the net at the last moment before its openings tightened. A silver thread brushed his shoulder, leaving an exceedingly fine white mark without even breaking the skin.
He stayed airborne rather than landing again. With the Yin-Yang Twin Wings spread steadily, he circled halfway through the air and dove down at Gu Yan from an angle above him. Golden light on his right wing condensed into a wing blade, while dark mist from his left wing followed, blocking Gu Yan's retreat. Gu Yan looked up at the approaching light of interwoven gold and black, his pupils contracting slightly. His palms snapped together-
"Spider Silk Woven Wall!"
Dozens of silver threads crossed and wove together into a dense net before him, colliding head-on with Long Tian's wing blade! Golden light exploded. More than a dozen silver threads snapped, but well over half remained tough enough to wrap around the surface of the wing blade. Long Tian felt his right wing stick as though glued, hindering its movement. He immediately dispersed the golden light on that wing, then beat his shadowy left wing hard, veering his whole body off course. He rolled through the air, escaped the range of the spider silk, and landed thirty feet behind Gu Yan.
The instant he landed, he opened the gates of his Soul Rings once more. The light and dark Qi he had spent many days refining in his dantian fused for an instant, and chaos-colored light gathered and compressed in his palm. Rather than use a wing blade, he condensed that mass of the Power of Chaos into a ball of light the size of a fist and thrust it toward Gu Yan! The moment it left his palm, the ball became a stream of chaos-colored light, traveling nearly twice as fast as a Light Bullet along an erratic path!
Gu Yan could not clearly see where the light was coming from. He hastily wove a wall of silver threads, but the instant the chaos light ball struck-bang! Great swaths of silver thread shattered, and the aftershock sent Gu Yan skidding backward several feet, his boot soles scraping piercingly against the stone slabs. When he steadied himself, his face showed shock. He looked down at the remnants of spider silk split apart by the impact in his palm, then raised his head to look at Long Tian.
"That final strike of yours..." He paused. "The color was wrong."
Long Tian offered no explanation. He merely withdrew the power in his palm and stood where he was. He could feel the backlash from fusing light and dark stirring faintly in his dantian, while a dull ache spread through the walls of his meridians. If the fight dragged on, he might not be able to endure it. Outwardly, however, his expression was normal and his breathing steady, as though that last strike had been no more than a casual move.
Gu Yan fell silent for several breaths and looked at the broken spider silk in his palm. Then he suddenly smiled. "Half my web has been shattered. There's no point in continuing." He raised a hand to signal his surrender to the referee. As he turned and walked off the stage, he glanced back at Long Tian. "Let's fight again next time."
Long Tian breathed a sigh of relief and felt the dull ache in his dantian slowly subside. He withdrew his wings and walked off the stage. Zhao Xiaopang came rushing over with a tea tray, so excited that he nearly tipped one of the bowls onto Long Tian's head. Chen Hao was waiting in the rest area for the neighboring semifinal. From more than ten steps away, he gave Long Tian a thumbs-up, then the referee called him onto the stage.
Long Tian sat down below the stage, his gaze drifting involuntarily toward the stands in the northwest corner. The man in gray was still in the same spot, his posture almost unchanged, his hands still resting on his knees. But there was something more in his gaze as he looked at Long Tian, as though someone had caught hold of the end of a thread and was slowly pulling it out.
Long Tian looked away, took a sip of water, and etched the gray-clothed man's face into his mind.
That afternoon, Chen Hao won his semifinal as well. His opponent was a sixteen-year-old strength-type Soul Master. After using the Ironback Wolf's superior speed to circle him around half the arena, Chen Hao crushed him with a single blow. At dinner, Zhao Xiaopang spent more than two hours recounting the matches at the table, gesturing as he spoke. Although most of it was his own embellished version, neither Long Tian nor Chen Hao interrupted him.
After dinner, Long Tian returned to his room to cultivate as usual. After extinguishing the lamp, he felt for the rolled-up plans in the dark, opened them, and studied them for a while. The new crease was still there; he had not deliberately smoothed it out. Someone wanted to look, so he would let them. The plans contained only half a page of incomplete principles. The truly crucial insights into refining were in his head, where no one could steal them.
He closed the plans, shut his eyes, and entered meditation. In his dantian, three Soul Rings turned dimly in the darkness. Light and dark Qi rubbed back and forth along the edges of the gates of each Soul Ring, tiny points of light flickering in the chaos like sparks. He could feel the walls of his meridians changing slowly, becoming more pliable than before. The time they could withstand the two forces mingling had grown a little longer than it had been a few days ago.
Outside the window, an autumn wind rose, rustling the window paper. Far away, in a gray-brick building somewhere in the city center, the man in gray from the stands that day was bent over a desk beneath an oil lamp, writing a report, his brush scratching across the paper. At one point, he stopped writing and looked up at the night outside the window. Then his gaze returned to the paper, and he drew a line beneath the words "Power of Chaos."
Then he folded the report, tucked it into an envelope, and sealed it with a stamp of dark gray wax. A blurred pattern was pressed into the wax, flashing briefly in the lamplight: a sword and a star crossed each other, but a fine crack ran through the center of the star.