"Oh?" Tuyue's drowsiness vanished on the instant. She straightened, eyes brightening as she studied the transparent currents circling Lin Hui. "You actually blocked that. What is this?"
"A secret art of my own cultivation—Surrounding Wind," Lin Hui said evenly.
Ssst. He drew his longsword.
Mistborn. Since the day he was born into this world, rumors of this singular class of beings had never left his ears. They stood at the absolute peak, looking down on everything beneath them. Everyone else was their instrunt. Their plaything.
And now he was about to challenge the apex of that world. The strongest of all Mistborn.
He closed his eyes for a mont and reached out with his mind-spirit toward Tuyue, standing only ters away. She was like a cluster of concentrated sunlight—blazing, blinding, radiating an oppressive weight that raised a prickling numbness across his entire body the instant his awareness drew near.
He opened his eyes.
"Dao Master of the Clear Wind Dao—Lin Hui. Please enlighten ."
"If you can actually injure ," Tuyue smiled, "you'll have earned the right to have
rember your na."
"Then let's find out."
Lin Hui raised Ruyi and held nothing back. Three law seals blazed into gold behind him as he activated Featherweight Ascension.
Chi! He crossed hundreds of ters in an instant, passing clean through Tuyue's position—only to feel nothing but empty air at the end of the stroke. He imdiately broke sideways by several hundred ters.
Boom! A massive fluctuation brushed past and drove into the sea behind him.
A void opened in the water—a cavity hundreds of ters deep and over a hundred ters wide, punched straight down through the surface of the ocean. So invisible force held the surrounding water pressure at bay, maintaining the hollow as a vast, pitch-black shaft. It lingered there, wrong and absolute.
Lin Hui rode the Wind Force above it and looked up at Tuyue, who materialized slowly in front of him.
Is this a Mistborn's speed? For the first ti in his life, he had encountered sothing that could et him on his own terms.
"Is that the speed you're so proud of?" Tuyue's smile was faint, almost gentle. "It's fast. I'll grant you that. But it still belongs to the mortal realm. If you're planning to rely on it to fight —you will die. Certainly." She paused, then let out a soft, musical laugh. "Though naturally I couldn't bear to kill you outright. A specin this fascinating isn't sothing one simply finds."
A thousand ters in an instant—Lin Hui had already reached that threshold. And still it wasn't enough. He had long understood that Mistborn would be formidable, but the reality was sharper than anything he had prepared for.
He drew a slow breath. Leveled Ruyi.
"Again."
Swish! He vanished from the spot.
The world dissolved into a shapeless blur. Only Tuyue expanded rapidly in his vision—he cut across her neck in a single sweeping stroke, Ruyi flashing like a crack of lightning—
He hit a phantom.
The next instant, Tuyue was behind him. Her palm ca down onto his back.
Boom!
In the fraction of a second before it reached his skin, the colossal force made contact with Surrounding Wind first. The transparent current of air held for an instant—then collapsed entirely. Even before the strike connected, his flesh was already distorting slightly from the pressure alone.
Then a strange fluctuation passed through his body.
Swish! The palm passed through him.
She had also struck a phantom.
This—?!
In the distance, Gongsun Xinlian's fists closed. Her face went still with shock. On the far Moon Tower, the two Black Cloud City Lords fell into identical silence. Even they had been shaken—to say nothing of the one directly involved.
Tuyue hung motionless in midair, staring at her own right palm. She looked as though she could not account for what her hand had just done.
"That was…?" She turned slowly. Her eyes found Lin Hui. "What was that?!"
"…I don't know." He was quiet for a mont. He t her gaze. "I sensed danger and moved. Everything else followed on its own."
He wasn't lying. He had felt the threat, his body had reacted before thought could form, and then it was over.
Micro-Flash.
The special effect he had written off as a tool for finishing weaklings—it had a real purpose, and that purpose was not passive. It was ant to be triggered actively. He had just done it. And in that single compressed instant, he had stepped entirely outside the reach of Tuyue's blow.
For a mont, it had felt as though he'd entered so other plane altogether—detached from matter, from the physical world, from consequence.
"Are you mocking ?!" Tuyue's expression fractured.
"I'm only describing what happened." Lin Hui was still turning the sensation over in his mind.
"Do you genuinely believe that trick gives you any chance of beating ?" The warmth in her voice had burned away entirely. "Who do you think you are? A secret art—a single secret art—and you imagine yourself our equal? What are you, exactly?!"
"I'm not a 'what,'" Lin Hui said, tightening his grip on Ruyi. "I'm a person."
"You dare—!" The last of her composure gave way. Tuyue thrust her right hand high into the air. "I've changed my mind. I'll carve off that mouth first, before it ruins my mood any further."
Ssst. An enormous, translucent Void Force manifested and coiled around her raised palm—twisting, compressing, tightening—until it resolved into a thin glove of faintly blue-tinted force fitted to her hand.
"Die."
She was gone.
I can't keep up. Lin Hui threw himself into motion at the sa instant—and realized imdiately that even at his absolute limit, he couldn't match her. He was a practitioner of speed-based martial arts. Speed was his entire approach. And he could barely track her.
Before that thought completed, a pale blue palm struck his left shoulder like a bolt from a crossbow.
Swish! Micro-Flash. The strike phased through. But she pivoted in the sa motion, redirecting before the Miss had fully registered, driving toward his chest—
Swish—swish—swish—swish—swish!
Above the surface of the sea, Lin Hui and Tuyue blurred across the air in exchange after frantic exchange. His figure flickered and strobed, slipping each incoming blow by the narrowest possible margin. His own counterstrikes couldn't find the edge of her sleeve. The disparity was total. Her palm strikes agitated the air in enormous, concussive waves—each miss still powerful enough to drive another deep, black cavity into the seawater far below. The cavities clustered and accumulated, transparent shafts punched into the ocean's face, lasting long after the blows that made them. Seawater churned. The disturbance spread outward, building into waves that radiated across the surface in every direction.
"What manner of secret art is this?" Xie Chang'an's voice reached Gongsun Xinlian quietly. "Tuyue is considered weaker among the Mistborn, but even her most basic palm force is enough to level a small city. Is she holding back?"
"No." Gongsun Xinlian didn't blink. "She isn't holding back. The mont the fight began, she attempted a mind-spirit invasion—a direct rewrite of Lin Hui's cognition. It failed. Sothing repelled it before it could take hold."
She tracked each blur of movent across the water.
"Then she moved to close-quarters combat at her full speed—which far surpasses his—and that flickering secret art blocked her again. In that state, it seems nothing can make contact with him."
As she continued, the disbelief in her voice deepened. "Tuyue hasn't fully committed yet. To hold her to this—even this far—is already remarkable beyond anything I would have predicted."
"Agreed," Xie Chang'an said. "But precise strikes won't carry her—she'll move to the area-of-effect next. Watch the port. Don't let the waves reach it."
"Understood." Gongsun Xinlian gave a small nod.
On shore, the mbers of the Clear Wind Dao could see nothing. They could only confirm that the Dao Master's aura remained—present and undiminished. They waited in rigid silence. The only sign of the battle reaching their world was the coastal port: the ocean swells had grown noticeably larger, and the moored fleets rocked with increasing unease.
"You have to have a limit!" Tuyue's attacks multiplied in speed—and then accelerated again. She could still go faster.
This is— Lin Hui cursed inwardly. He could barely parse her silhouette now. The gap between them was approaching sothing unmanageable, and Micro-Flash—just as she had predicted—was nearing its ceiling.
Active use of the effect could deflect anything completely. But there was an interval of less than a second between triggers. During that window, he was exposed—nothing to do but take the strike. And every activation consud his mind-spirit at a rate unlike anything the sword arts demanded. In this brief span of fighting, a faint, creeping exhaustion had already taken root. He had no room to drag this out.
Seizing the opening as Micro-Flash deflected another palm, Lin Hui broke backward several hundred ters and brought Ruyi to level.
"Wind!"
A gale ignited around him—the opening form of the Wild Wind Sword Technique, built for short-burst acceleration. He had barely initiated the movent when a pale blue palm struck him squarely in the center of his chest.
He hadn't been fast enough.
Boom. The impact hit Surrounding Wind first, which shattered in an instant, shedding a fraction of the velocity. Lin Hui threw Ruyi up horizontally, bracing both arms behind the flat—
Chi—chi—chi—chi—chi! Layered rings of airflow tore outward from behind him as the wind worked to redirect the force.
It wasn't enough. The force was imasurably beyond any threshold he could absorb. He was a child stepping in front of a moving train. His body locked rigid for an instant under the compression—and then he was blasted backward.
Sonic rings erupted around him as he tore through the Mist, trailing sharp concussive pops across the open air. Thousands of ters of open water blurred beneath him before he struck the sea.
Boom! An eruption of spray climbed hundreds of ters, shattered into layered curtains at its peak, and fell as a slow, hanging rain—spreading across the Mist around the impact point, thickening it.
"There." Tuyue withdrew her hand, her expression easing back toward its usual composure, the fury of a mont ago already smoothed away as it had never been. "I genuinely thought you were going to force
to bring out my true body. I didn't expect—" She stopped.
Her expression hardened. Her head turned upward.
"What is this?!"
She was not alone. In the sa instant, Gongsun Xinlian lifted her eyes. On the distant Moon Tower, the two Black Cloud City Lords raised their heads in unison.
Rumble—
Thunder split the Mist—a crack of pale blue lightning that lit the sea and everything above it. And in that light, the phenonon taking shape in the sky beca visible.
A vortex. Vast enough to swallow the entire sky above the water—not sothing that had appeared suddenly, but sothing that had been gathering for so ti, condensing in silence while the fight unfolded, only now completing itself. Dark clouds blotted out the sun. Lightning threaded through the mass in branching, stuttering lines. From the dead center of that enormous spiral, a slender, grayish-black tail descended—a waterspout reaching down through the air. Directly beneath it, the churning sea and the Mist it fed spiraled upward to et it, forming a matching column from below.
Under every watching gaze, the two tails reached each other and joined.
Crack. A lightning strike illuminated the convergence point—and within it, perfectly centered where sky and sea had rged, the poised silhouette of a figure holding a sword.
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