He charged to the base of the tornado, and the assault of flying rocks finally ceased.
With no time to think, he threw himself straight into the murky, overwhelming force.
Whooo…
The howling wind screamed past his ears, nearly dragging him along the ground. He cast a spell to anchor himself in place. With his level of cultivation, he could endure it without being swept away entirely, but holding on like this was draining him. The constant expenditure of energy could not be sustained.
Worse still, a barrage of debris and rubble pelted him without end. The dense, drumming impacts sounded as though someone were beating a drum against his body. His protective qi barrier trembled on the verge of collapse, and his sword rang out in a ceaseless clatter.
He had never encountered such a scene, never experienced anything like it. He could only think, “This is bad,” and had no idea how to respond.
After enduring it for a while with no solution in sight, he reasoned that resisting head-on was worse than going with the flow. He released his stance, and the wind snatched him up at once.
The sensation was beyond description. He was flung about in every direction until his head spun, and he immediately regretted charging into the tornado.
Hovering at the eye of the storm, Zhong Ruochen felt every corner of the wind pillar. Yu Qing’s intrusion naturally fell within her control, and she had no intention of letting him off easily. Her arms swept in continuous arcs, her body wheeling through the air as though performing a graceful dance.
Light and shadow within the wind pillar shifted rapidly, as if heaven and earth were parting, clarity separating from murk.
Outside, the stands erupted in commotion. Many spectators pointed at the tornado, watching with their own eyes as it turned noticeably clearer. The dust and stones swirling within condensed, at visible speed, into spheres of various sizes.
Lifted off the ground, Yu Qing was like duckweed torn from its roots, with nothing to brace against. He was tossed about at will, and the suffering was unbearable. His body tumbled ceaselessly in the wind. Unable to fight back effectively, he was struck again and again by the earthen spheres. His cultivation was rendered useless; striking out wildly in every direction achieved nothing. He did not know how much longer he could hold out.
In desperation, he grasped at any method available and instinctively deployed the Wandering Dragon Technique to resist.
The result surprised him greatly.
In an instant, he felt as though he were riding the wind. The crushing pressure vanished, replaced by ease and freedom.
His body steadied slightly, and comprehension struck him in a flash. He immediately applied the footwork of the Wandering Dragon Technique, borrowing the wind’s momentum to move with it. He circled through the whirlwind like a fish in water, and the pounding impacts against his body ceased entirely.
Every fragment of debris spiralling through the wind became a foothold for him to leap, pivot, and glide.
In other words, he could break free of the tornado’s grasp at any moment.
With the means to protect himself secured, his panic faded. His mind steadied, and he had the presence of mind to notice other things. His left fingers throbbed faintly. He glanced down and saw blood. The flying rubble must have grazed and split the skin earlier.
A minor wound. He paid it no mind, nor did he have the attention to spare for it now. He looked around and quickly located his opponent, then rode the wind upward at speed.
Zhong Ruochen, casting spells in the air, was genuinely astonished. She had not expected him to regain control of himself in a whirlwind spinning at such velocity. Moments ago he had been flailing helplessly. Could his intuition truly be that sharp? She swept both arms wider, intensified her spell, and drove the tornado to spin even faster. The earthen spheres struck with greater speed as well.
It was no use. Yu Qing could now ride the wind freely. The faster the tornado spun, the faster he spun with it. At equal speed, the spheres could not harm him. Instead, they became stepping stones for him to ascend rapidly.
Seeing this, Zhong Ruochen showed no alarm. Instead, she let out a contemptuous, “Hmph,” and her hands wove another incantation.
The tornado lifted off the ground. The clear qi rose; the murky qi sank.
Yu Qing suddenly realised that the earthen spheres he had been using to propel himself upward were gone. They were all spiralling downward.
The upper portion of the tornado turned transparent, becoming formless wind.
Without form, the wind allowed the spectators below to see Zhong Ruochen clearly, suspended in the sky like an immortal, and Yu Qing still spiralling upward.
At the base of the tornado, a rumbling cloud of dust billowed. The earthen spheres clattered to the ground one after another, and in moments they piled into a small hill within the arena.
The two figures within the formless vortex continued to rise, seeming to repeat the soaring ascent of the previous round. Every head in the crowd tilted upward.
Higher and higher they went. Gradually, Yu Qing noticed something wrong. Using the Wandering Dragon Technique to ride the wind upward, he had already climbed a considerable distance in his spiral ascent, yet the gap between himself and his opponent seemed no smaller than before.
He quickly grasped the problem. No matter how he rode the wind upward, it was futile. This tornado was controlled by her hands. He was borrowing her wind. She would only let him close the distance if she wished it. If she did not, he could never catch her. She could widen the gap between them at will by commanding the wind.
He looked down. The vast arena had shrunk to a tiny patch far below. That alone told him how high they had climbed.
Something was wrong. His opponent could not possibly be taking him up here for a scenic view.
Indeed, Zhong Ruochen, carrying him skyward in the whirlwind, had no good intentions. Once Yu Qing was in the air, there would be no gentle, spell-assisted landing for him. She could let him ride the wind upward, and just as easily she could let him plummet at terminal velocity. She wanted to see whether his cultivation could withstand the consequences of his body slamming into the ground at full speed.
Sensing the danger, Yu Qing dared not climb any higher. He immediately activated the Wandering Dragon Technique and burst out of the formless tornado, intending to drop back to the ground.
Zhong Ruochen flicked her sleeve in a sweeping motion. The invisible tornado lashed out like the tail of a dragon and dragged Yu Qing back into the wind pillar.
He quickly escaped again with the Wandering Dragon Technique.
In the blink of an eye he was pulled back in, hauled upward once more.
Zhong Ruochen toyed with him the way a cat toys with a mouse, again and again.
Yu Qing broke into a cold sweat. He realised he was meat on her chopping block. It was only a question of how she chose to carve him up. He had not even managed to face her directly. Was it already over?
The two were now at a tremendous height. Most of the spectators below could no longer make sense of what was happening.
Only a few discerned that Yu Qing was entirely under Zhong Ruochen’s control.
In the VIP seating, Xiang Lanxuan stood near the edge, gazing up at the sky. She shook her head gently, feeling a pang of regret for Yu Qing.
She had secretly watched his bout with Shi Dao in the Ding Yin district, the one where Shi Dao had conceded. That match had convinced her that Yu Qing was more than capable of giving Zhong Ruochen a real fight. She had been looking forward to the spectacle. But Zhong Ruochen had clearly identified Yu Qing’s strengths and chosen a strategy that prevented him from so much as touching her before the outcome was decided. It was a clever approach.
Tossed about in the air with no way to fight back, Yu Qing was genuinely panicking now. It was as if an invisible hand kept snatching him up, releasing him, and snatching him up again.
Was he supposed to shout his surrender from up here? Just imagining the scene made him cringe. Then he thought of that figure watching from the stands, and his heart ached.
Round and round he tumbled, back and forth, when suddenly something swung into his field of vision. The necklace around his neck had slipped out from beneath his collar at some point.
He grabbed it, about to tuck it back inside, when his whole body shuddered. That familiar sense of his soul loosening from his flesh washed over him, as though his very spirit had trembled.
He immediately looked at the necklace in his hand. The bead nestled in the silver mesh pouch was the very one he had recovered from Yun Xi’s remains in Little Cloud Realm.
The first time he had touched it, the sensation had been exactly like this. Later, perhaps because he had worn it for so long, touching it had produced no reaction at all. He could not fathom why it was responding again now.
A closer look revealed the cause. Blood.
The wound on his finger had torn open again in all the tumbling. Blood from the cut was seeping into the bead, and it was being absorbed at a visible rate.
He touched the bead again with his finger, but the out-of-body sensation was gone. He assumed it had been his imagination. He touched it several more times. Nothing.
Instinctively, he channelled his spiritual energy into it to investigate. His heart lurched.
Before, probing it with his energy had felt like examining a plain stone. Now, however, he sensed a space within. It was hazy, vast, and formless. In that haze, something seemed alive, yet he could not see it. It seemed to be speaking to him, but he could not hear a word. Even the impression that it was speaking was nothing more than a feeling.
What unsettled him further was that the hazy expanse within felt strangely familiar. Of course, he was not truly seeing it. It was, again, only a sensation.
For reasons he could not explain, he felt he could command the object. He tried channelling his energy to manipulate it, hoping to discern what lay within the haze. Sure enough, thin wisps of dark red and black, interwoven, began to seep from the bead.
Demonic qi. Yu Qing’s eyelid twitched. A cold sweat broke out. He did not know what was happening, but he was certain this was demonic qi. He had seen this bead absorb it before. He simply had not expected that he could make it release it.
Caught in such dire straits, he had no leisure to study the matter in detail. He had only let his attention wander for a moment. Whatever thought had struck him, he quickly looked up at Zhong Ruochen above, then glanced left and right at the rushing updrafts.
His brow twitched. He did not know whether it would work, but he poured his energy into the bead and tried once more. The thin wisps of demonic qi emerged again and were immediately sucked away by the currents.
He increased the output at once, but dared not overdo it lest anyone notice. Otherwise, he would easily be mistaken for a practitioner of some demonic path, and the crowd would beat him to death on the spot.
While secretly deploying his hidden measure, he watched Zhong Ruochen’s reactions above.
Zhong Ruochen, for her part, was growing puzzled. The man below had stopped struggling. She checked their altitude and decided it should be sufficient. She was about to cast the spell that would send Yu Qing plummeting to a gruesome end when her body suddenly convulsed. Her qi flow seized. She felt the intrusion of something nameless.
She swiftly raised a protective barrier, pressed both palms to her dantian, and drove the foreign presence from her body.
The formless wind pillar, no longer sustained by her control, collapsed into nothing.
Yu Qing, who had been waiting with bated breath, felt the entanglement snap. Quiet elation surged through him. If not now, when? He dove headlong downward, desperate to break free and flee.
Zhong Ruochen’s body was falling freely as well. Her eyes cleared. The demonic qi that had affected her was slight, and she had already dispersed it. She glanced down and saw that the man had seized the chance to run. Fury flared in her chest.
But commanding the wind to drag him back was no longer possible. His dive had already built tremendous momentum, and the force behind it was beyond what her cultivation and realm could contain through wind manipulation alone.
She plunged after him, channelling energy to accelerate her descent, to close the distance.
In terms of cultivation, she did edge slightly above Yu Qing. Even though she had entered the world of cultivation later than he had, her diving speed was slowly eating into the gap between them.
Yu Qing kept glancing back. He knew he could not evade her. It was not that he feared being caught. It was that he could not possibly strike the ground at this speed. The impact force was simply too great. Even as an Initial Mysterious realm cultivator, he would be reduced to a smear of flesh and bone.
He flung his arms wide, casting a spell to expand his resistance, and steadily, persistently slowed his descent.
Zhong Ruochen could not anticipate the exact moment he would decelerate. Caught off guard, she too slowed abruptly, but she still shot past him, brushing by his side.
She had slowed down.
Yu Qing, however, had no intention of letting the moment pass. The earlier ordeal had been nothing but humiliation, and this was the instant he had been waiting for. He dove again. The Hidden Dragon form of the Wandering Dragon Technique activated. He cut diagonally toward his opponent, and the cold gleam in his hand descended without mercy, aiming straight for Zhong Ruochen’s head.