Chapter 414: Chapter 414

The sight left the Lu Xuanxian momentarily blank. A beat later wariness and bewilderment clouded his eyes.

A living man, he seemed to wonder, yet he’s shaping himself like a lingering soul steeped in pure Yin energy. How is that possible?

An obsession sculpted by Yin birthed a ghost; the living had no part in that. And yet the man before him was doing exactly that, or something even stranger.

Thoughts could not keep pace with action.

Lu Xuanxian’s battlefield and the vast wheel of weapons behind him had finished coalescing just as Li Yuan’s own preparation reached completion. It was as though the two had stepped back, brewed their ultimate moves, and triggered them at the very same heartbeat.

Lu Xuanxian stood amid the ruins, the wheel of steel hundreds of feet wide whirring behind his back. His eyes went round at what faced him.

In the center of Li Yuan’s skull, still nothing but bone, a vertical pupil had opened. It was half-illusory, half-solid, an eye woven of Yin energy enmeshed with his soul rather than any flesh. Beneath it his body ignited, flames rolling like a storm.

A body of blazing Yang, and an eye of chilling Yin… Yin and Yang, opposites jammed together yet fused around a single point.

The blade in Li Yuan’s hand was bathed in both energies, Yin stalling at his grip and hilt and Yang raging along the edge.

Lu Xuanxian frowned, as though confronted with a puzzle beyond reason.

Li Yuan didn’t care. He took one deliberate step forward.

That was the cue. Lu Xuanxian attacked.

Swords, spears, and pikes crashed down like a monsoon, swirling and diving like bees around a hive. The weapons never properly landed, always recoiling, angling, returning to strike again.

Yet Li Yuan’s lone white pupil dilated, and every assault unraveled before him into threads of pure energy, a giant spiderweb whose gaps he could see as clearly as daylight.

He stepped once and slipped through dozens of lethal paths as though they’d never existed. He lifted a finger and tapped an incoming rusted sword. Though the sword roared with momentum, his touch was outside its killing line.

KLING! A light flick sent it skidding off-course to stab uselessly into the earth.

Li Yuan walked on, sideways through the whirlwind of steel. On a battlefield with no road at all, he advanced step by step toward the man commanding everything, raised his blade, and fixed that vertical eye on Lu Xuanxian.

Lu Xuanxian felt no fear. His eyes blazed, his halberd raged.

The weapons spinning through the air froze and snapped about. Then like a legion of drones locked onto a target, they speared toward Li Yuan, intent on burying their enemy in a coffin of cold iron.

It was the kind of moment where, if you moved a fraction too soon, your foe would readjust; a fraction too late, and you would be skewered.

Li Yuan chose neither. He erupted from stillness, charging ahead, the cold vertical pupil in his skull tracking the Martial God of a bygone age without a flicker of emotion.

Yin and Yang coursed along his blade, crimson and white mingling as he burst straight through the all-sides ambush of Formless Blade Qi, as ten thousand invisible blades emerged around him.

Lu Xuanxian’s halberd came down. It was unstoppable and  absolute. But Li Yuan’s Yin eye had already mapped every angle. A heartbeat earlier he’d shifted, letting his blade graze along the halberd with a shriek of metal. Muscles snapped taut; he unleashed a half-moon slash.

The deep-red crescent was still Dragon’s Breath, except it was sharper, crueler, and as lethal as a fire-belching dragon clamping its jaws around a throat. The molten arc wrapped Lu Xuanxian, re-incinerating flesh that had almost healed.

Inside the flames, Lu Xuanxian’s expression remained wild and fearless. A finger twitched.

Li Yuan, as though forewarned, drifted sideways. Behind him lightning-bright weapons streaked past. Another volley, another miss. In the same flow he swung again, and Dragon’s Breath swallowed Lu Xuanxian whole.

Klang, klang, klang! Weapons rained to the earth.

Only Lu Xuanxian’s head was left, roasting in the heat, still glaring at Li Yuan.

Li Yuan did not hesitate. Blade and fire flooded over the remnant; the ghost general dissolved to ash.

Curiously, the weapons he had conjured remained, embedded in the ground, proof that creations born of will could gain real and independent existence, persisting after their maker’s demise.

Li Yuan methodically destroyed every last weapon, then sat where he stood. He had no idea what state he was in; he could only rein Yin and Yang back carefully. Let them mingle unchecked and he’d detonate without any help from enemies.

A long time passed, then longer still.

Li Yuan exhaled at last. Balance returned to his body, and he had also grown a new head. Yet something was different. There was a faint, intermittent ache between his brows.

With a thought, the ache blossomed, and a vertical pupil opened up in the center of his forehead.

The vertical pupil hadn’t sprouted from flesh and bone at all. It was more like a design painted on the skin of his brow. Yet if Li Yuan so much as thought about it, the eye drifted.

He began to experiment in earnest. One moment the pupil floated to his cheek, the next to his throat, then his arm, even sliding along his spine. Wherever it went he saw a different vista and felt the currents of energy flowing in that direction.

A few tries were enough for the principle to click.

Li Yuan’s own soul, glued to a strand of Yan Yu’s Yin energy, had been drenched in the valley’s ambient Yin and condensed into this strange result. He’d grown a new organ not unlike the core of a ghost. Because it was only an organ, not a whole body, it lacked a ghost’s immortality. Yet by the same token its owner was not shackled to any ghost domain.

The eye drew leftover Yin from its surroundings but never touched the greater well of Supreme Yin. He had stumbled onto a new power by following the rules and tripping over them in the dark.

Just then Li Yuan glanced at his own status screen.

“Eh?” A small gasp escaped him.

A fresh entry had appeared in his skill list.

NEW! Ultimate Skill, Earth-Soul Heavenly Eye - Rank 4 (1/1)

He looked at the rest of his updated information. His combat power was now 4,530~121,663. That was about a 20,000-point jump to his peak.

And yet, for all that change, the System still labeled him as fifth rank. His base combat power stayed stuck at 4,530, proof enough something hadn’t clicked.

What’s going on? Earth-Soul Heavenly Eye? I just invented this, so how does the System already know its name? The same thing happened with Mortal World Transformation. This world is so mysterious, mysterious and terrifying.

Probing deeper, Li Yuan realized with a jolt that his ancestral seal still hadn’t fused with his body. He rewound the battle in his head, then saw why. He had balanced his ancestral seal and flesh, even harmonized them. But balance wasn’t the point. Their relationship had to be symbiotic, causal. The ancestral seal had to be born of the flesh itself, a perfect match forged within, not grafted on from elsewhere. Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by NoveIꜰire.net

Even prodigies like Qing Hancheng and legends like Lu Xuanxian couldn’t break this rule.

Their ancestral seals fit their bodies at first. But once they brushed the ceiling of fourth rank, they could no longer mend the inborn defects of their ancestral seals, so the scales never truly balanced.

Li Yuan faced the mirror image of that problem. He could balance his body and ancestral seal, yet they would never match. The seeds that formed his own ancestral seal did not truly belong to him, and his flesh now was an amalgamation of Yang flame and Yin energy. The end result was similar to mismatched gears in a watch too precise to forgive.

He was no different from Qing Hancheng or Lu Xuanxian. He could not shatter the iron laws of this world. Yet somehow he had still acquired a genuine fourth rank ultimate skill, Earth-Soul Heavenly Eye. How?

Li Yuan thought long and hard. Maybe his talent was where the bug lay. But was it even a single talent? No. It was four—

The first was his Eternal Youth, a flat-out cheat; he had yet to meet another living person with infinite lifespan.

The second was his ability to see the combat power of others, though it bugged out when analyzing anything related to pure Yin and Yang.

The third was his harmonious night bonus from Yan Yu. As long as she existed, stat points would keep trickling in.

Finally, the fourth was his ability to increase the mastery of any shadow blood skill or technique by simply allocating points.

Now, the fourth perk was glitching whenever the power wasn’t shadow blood.

Li Yuan was still categorized as fifth rank, yet he held a fourth rank ultimate skill and combat power miles above the ordinary fifth rank. That forced him to slice his natural gift into four talents and wonder if each one came from somewhere else entirely.

Unbidden, he recalled the day he crossed into this world, that distant, submarine rumble and Yan Yu’s voice riding on it.

Mystery upon mystery; without more clues,  Li Yuan could only shelve it. He rubbed his brow and rose.

A strange aura clung to him, like an iceberg growing in a furnace. Fire yearned for fuel, yet ice felt nothing, and together they muted each other’s extremes.

Li Yuan glanced at the sky. Still night. Their titanic duel hadn’t even dragged the rim of dawn above the hills.

The Xie residence has to be a smoking ruin by now. No time to wander, I have to go back. The ghost cavalry are fierce, but Ocean Province’s 30,000 armored cavalry aren’t kittens either. Besides, the Emperor’s dead and the Xie patriarch went down with him. Odds are both camps will team up to hunt the assassin.