Chapter 928: Battle Against The Heavens II
I spat blood to the side and shook my arm until sensation returned. “Like I said, warming up,”
He watched me.
That was perhaps the most infuriating part of it all.
He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t excited. He wasn’t even curious. He looked at me the way one would look at a door being pushed by a stubborn child.
Fine.
If he wanted new, I’d give him new.
My blood began to boil.
Not metaphorically either. It heated inside my veins as my Qi rotation sped up. My heartbeat hammered louder and louder until every pulse sounded like a war drum. The pain in my arm didn’t vanish, but it became distant, as if it belonged to another poor bastard standing somewhere behind me.
The training with the Red Sun flashed through my mind.
Again.
Again.
Again.
That damned monster had beaten Shen Mo’s body through every possible angle until I started seeing flaws in the way I breathed. He had taken the Golden Titan and stripped away the brute stupidity from it, forcing me to move cleaner, shorter, faster. Less wasted motion. Less arrogance. Less relying on the fact that my body was absurd enough to survive what normal cultivators couldn’t.
The Red Sun’s style wasn’t mine.
But the lessons were.
I lunged again.
This time, I didn’t throw one grand punch. I stepped in low, angled my shoulder, and shot a quick strike toward the Enforcer’s ribs. He turned his wrist and knocked it aside. I followed with an elbow aimed at his sternum, then a knee toward his abdomen, then a backhand strike carrying Roaring Ki pressed into a thin shockwave.
He blocked all of it.
Barely moving.
No, that wasn’t accurate.
He was moving exactly as much as needed. Not a hair more.
I twisted around him, using the momentum of the deflected blow to launch a kick toward the back of his knee. His heel shifted half an inch and my foot struck empty air. His palm tapped my chest.
The world folded.
I flew backward, coughing blood before I even realized I had been hit.
The blow wasn’t strong. That was the insulting thing. He didn’t even strike me hard enough to break through my ribs. He struck the exact point in my Qi circulation that would make my body betray me. My meridians seized, my lungs locked, and for one breath, all the strength I had cultivated became dead weight.
I slammed into the ground, bounced once, then rolled back to my feet.
“Again,” I said.
The Enforcer tilted his head slightly. “You mistake repetition for improvement.”
“No,” I replied, wiping blood off my mouth. “I mistake pain for information.”
This time, I moved before he could answer.
I attacked from above, below, beside, and behind. Not illusions, not clones, just speed and angle. My body blurred across the chamber, every step leaving cracks in the red carpet. I used Roaring Ki to change direction mid-charge, Eternal Gold to endure the backlash, poison Qi to numb the pain, and raw physical force to make every strike heavy enough to crack mountains.
The Enforcer countered every single one.
Fist to wrist. Palm to elbow. Knee to knee. Shoulder to shoulder.
Every time I thought I had found a blind spot, his hand was already there.
Every time I changed rhythm, he changed with me.
Every time I added poison to the strike, it dissipated before contact.
Every time I pressed Qi into a hidden burst, he unraveled it with a touch.
I was on the offensive, but it didn’t feel like I was attacking. It felt like I was being allowed to demonstrate all the ways I was insufficient.
I feinted a blow to his head, dropped down, and shot two fingers toward his abdomen. The tips of my fingers extended like needles, blackened by a poison that could rot a Heaven realm cultivator from the inside out.
His hand caught my wrist before I reached him.
“Predictable.”
He threw me.
Not hard, but perfectly.
My body flipped through the air, and before I could correct myself, he appeared above me and struck my back with two fingers. My spine rang like a bell. I hit the ground so hard my vision went white.
I lay there for half a breath.
Then I laughed.
Not because it was funny. It wasn’t. It hurt like hell.
But there was something about it. Something about fighting a creature that had lowered itself to my level and still stood above me like a mountain. Something about the impossibility of it that stirred the part of me that once challenged the heavens and failed.
My fingers dug into the carpet.
I stood.
Blood dripped from my chin.
The Enforcer looked down at me. “You find this amusing?”
“I find it educational,” I said. “Also annoying. Mostly annoying.”
He raised his hand.
Snap.
The sound of his fingers echoed once, and the world vanished.
Everything became black.
Not dark.
Black.
There was a difference. Darkness was an absence of light. This was an assertion. A statement. A mand that sight had no authority here. The walls disappeared. The red carpet disappeared. The throne, the carvings, even the distance between us all collapsed into a world without reference.
Then the Enforcer’s voice came from everywhere.
“Domain, Delusions False and Real”
The moment the words settled, my senses twisted.
Up became left. Left became down. Forward became behind me, and behind me became something that did not exist until I thought about it. My body wanted to move one way while my mind insisted the world was shaped another. The domain didn’t simply deceive the eyes. It attacked the agreement between thought and motion.
A terrifying thing, really. My own creation used against me.
Against anyone else, this would be a slaughter. The moment they tried to dodge, they would move into the attack. The moment they tried to attack, they would present their throat. The moment fear entered them, the domain would give that fear direction and make it real.
Unfortunately for him, I too was quite good at that very domain.
“Domain!” I howled, forcing my Qi outward. “False and Real, Delusions!”
Nothing appeared. No black light. No ripple. No opposing sphere.
The Enforcer frowned.
I felt it more than saw it.
Last time I used my domain, it surrounded us both. It had spread outward, crude and violent, an arrogant declaration that I was forcing my nonsense upon reality.
But this time, nothing came.
For a moment, silence filled the black world.
Then the Enforcer’s expression changed. A smile crept up his face, slow and knowing.
“You used your domain, not outward, but onto your mind…”
I grinned, though half my face was already swelling from the beatings. “Deluding the mind is the best way to counter a stronger delusion. I can move however I want here!”
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