Chapter 51:
Limits
NO ONE IN BIXIA SECT expected the battle to be so intense.
Kunye was a martial expert of his generation, after all, and he was also Hulugu’s disciple. His master had nearly fought Qi Fengge to a standstill. Such an opponent wasn’t so easily bested.
Shen Qiao had already lost once, and it left a shadow in his mind. Winning the second round was even harder than winning the first—not only must he overcome his opponent, he also had to overcome himself.
Though the Bixia Sect disciples were worried, they took heart from seeing their sect leader standing next to them. They felt like, even if Shen Qiao lost, their sect leader could still fight. Only Yue Kunchi understood that Zhao Chiying’s forceful exit from her meditation had damaged her cultivation. If Shen Qiao lost this match, all fate held for Bixia Sect was to be carved up by the enemy.
But could Shen Qiao win?
He swallowed down his restlessness and refocused his mind entirely on the battle.
The martial path Kunye followed was the brash and unconstrained kind, forceful and domineering. There was incredible vigor and authority behind his every slash, each powerful enough to shake the mountains and earth. Whenever his blade qi struck the ground, the spectators felt it quake beneath their feet. As the saber whistled through the air, the sound shrilly droned in their ears. Those with poorer martial foundations were covering their ears already, unable to bear it.
But if someone thought this meant Kunye’s qinggong must be lacking, they’d be dreadfully wrong.
They fought from the flat ground all the way to the cliff’s edge, then they went on clashing fiercely even while they hung from the cliff wall. Rubble sprayed everywhere as true qi ran unbridled, the sight impossible to follow. Compared to Kunye’s domineering attacks, Shen Qiao’s moves almost looked too gentle. His sword took after the man himself—mellow and lingering like the brush of a flower against the cheek or the caress of the spring wind on a willow; unfailingly clear and pure, much like Daoism itself. But its very clarity seemed to lack that forceful, threatening edge.
But after they’d exchanged over a hundred blows and Shen Qiao showed no sign of flagging, everyone who’d been worried about him realized that things weren’t as they seemed. If Kunye’s saber was an unstoppable, rolling thunderstorm, then Shen Qiao’s sword—although it seemed no more than an unremarkable, gurgling trickle crushed beneath the saber qi—was an endless, uninterrupted flow that slowly transformed from calm and peaceful into something of awesome grandeur. It was like the hundred rivers that merged into the sea as it roared and galloped, capable of swallowing all.
The longer Kunye fought, the more shocked he became.
Back on Banbu Peak, he’d only been able to create eight blasts of saber qi. Today, he could summon nine. His mastery of the saber had leapt to even greater heights. He’d arrived here confident that he could match Shen Qiao even as he’d been before his injuries, and that he was certainly a match for today’s Shen Qiao, who’d suffered great losses to his martial arts.
He’d thought the man before him was no more than a shallow puddle, its depths discernable in a single glance. But when he reached his hand beneath the surface, he found that no matter what he did, its bottom remained out of reach.
This shallow puddle was in fact a deep pool.
Xuandu Mountain’s set of qinggong techniques, “A Rainbow Stretches Across the Heavens,” was true to its name. It arced like a rainbow soaring through blue skies, carefree and insubstantial. Shanhe Tongbei cut mark after mark of white sword qi into the steep cliff walls, creating the appearance of calligraphy. But on closer examination, the sword qi had carved deep, vicious gashes in the solid rock face. If such gouges were cut into a person, their bones would show through their rent flesh, and their blood would pour into rivers.
From afar, the weapons flashed and danced, their glinting contours overlapping. Yet the savage saber qi seemed totally unable to gain the upper hand.
Yue Kunchi breathed a sigh of relief. He turned to Zhao Chiying. “Shimei, I feel like Daoist Master Shen should be able to win this time, right?”
Zhao Chiying shook her head. “It won’t be that easy. Did you notice? Kunye can create nine bursts of qi with his saber now. That is equivalent with the highest level of sword intent, and his last burst is the most powerful of all. A slash of his saber gives birth to thousands of massively destructive afterimages. But he’s only done this once—and that was the one attack Daoist Master Shen nearly failed to block.”
Involuntarily, Yue Kunchi gasped, his heart in his throat once again. “Is he trying to exhaust Daoist Master Shen’s true qi?”
“He is,” said Zhao Chiying. “When it comes to true qi, Daoist Master Shen is no match for Kunye now. The longer the fight goes on, the worse it’ll be for him.”
Yue Kunchi began to panic a little. “Then what should we do? Doesn’t Daoist Master Shen realize what’s going on? Is he just going to let Kunye get away with it?”
Zhao Chiying didn’t answer. Naturally, she didn’t believe that Shen Qiao hadn’t seen through this tactic, but she also couldn’t tell what he had planned.
In truth, Shen Qiao was also probing.
He was probing his own limits.
The Zhuyang Strategy was capable of rebuilding his foundations, of forging his muscles and bones. And since the Zhuyang Strategy combined the strengths of the three schools of thought, the internal cultivation it produced must in turn carry the characteristics of all three schools.
Daoism extolled that the greatest virtue was to be like water—to strive was to not strive. This was in perfect harmony with his original style of swordplay. They came from the same source, so he had no problem executing it.
Buddhism praised solemnity and reverence. There was the terrifying glare of Vajrapani but also the gentle submissiveness of the bodhisattvas. It was something unspeakably profound. The Zhuyang Strategy integrated this concept into its true qi, hard to Daoism’s soft, a perfect coupling of strength and gentleness. The two coexisted in harmony, embedding a core of iron into his flexible sword strikes, letting them switch freely between a murmuring stream and a turbulent ocean tide.
Confucianism was a bit more miscellaneous in its contents. When Tao Hongjing had penned the Zhuyang Strategy, he’d taken from Confucianism its kindly tolerance and used that to adjust and combine the strengths of all the schools. When a practitioner exhausted their true qi, their Dantian would continuously refine more. It was like a barren tree blooming anew in spring, returning the dead to life.
Before, Shen Qiao had Xuandu Mountain’s true qi as his foundation. When he first cultivated the Zhuyang Strategy, he’d made surprisingly little progress. Only now, as he recultivated everything from scratch, did he realize what was wondrous about the Zhuyang Strategy. Indeed, it deserved to be named the world’s most extraordinary book. The many people who fought over it likely didn’t even grasp what was truly profound about it.
Even more incredibly, Tao Hongjing must have known when he penned the Zhuyang Strategy that it would be impossible to preserve a book during such tumultuous times. He must have foreseen that its contents might not remain intact after he passed away. And so, although the Zhuyang Strategy was composed of five volumes, each volume was independent from the rest. Readers wouldn’t get a sense of disconnect by reading each individually. If someone could cultivate with all of them, then of course they’d achieve complete perfection. But if they only had one or two, that wouldn’t render their martial arts incomplete. At worst, it only lessened the effect.
And so, in this battle, Shen Qiao was also using Kunye to test the result of many days of cultivation. Day-to-day sparring could never bring out the full extent of his abilities. Only by facing a true life-or-death crisis could he plumb the actual depths of his potential, allowing him to ascend to an entirely new echelon.
The martial path was like rowing a boat upstream: if you didn’t advance, you’d decline. Otherwise, the likes of Qi Fengge and Hulugu wouldn’t have risked their lofty status and decades of martial achievement in favor of progressing along a path that could mean their very death.
At the moment, Shen Qiao’s situation was precarious. His sword qi was getting almost completely crushed by Kunye’s saber qi, and little true qi remained in his Dantian. Nearly depleted, his attacks were much slower than before, and the power of his sword qi was gradually waning. It seemed he might lose at any moment. Kunye slashed at him, and a terrifying burst of true qi exploded outward. His saber intent transformed into an all-encompassing net that surrounded and enveloped Shen Qiao. Its energy arced in at him, strong enough to incinerate the brush to ashes and transform rivers to vapor—a hundred birds were snuffed out in an instant!
This was the ninth blast of saber qi that Kunye took so much pride in.
Hemmed in on all sides, it seemed there was no way out but to take that ferocious saber qi head-on. Kunye was indeed a worthy disciple of Hulugu. Nearly nobody in all the land could withstand such a slash from him.
With his body suspended in midair, he channeled all his true qi into his blade and then swung it down over Shen Qiao’s head, his spirit so magnificent it seemed he might slice the sun and moon into two.
Shiwu’s eyes were wide, staring unswervingly across the chasm at the two on the other side. He forgot to breathe.
He wanted Shen Qiao to win more than anyone else, but even he, a pure novice in martial arts, could see how dire the situation was.
Above Shen Qiao were the boundless heavens, beneath him was a bottomless abyss. In all of heaven and earth, the only place he could stand was on was this precipitous cliff, dozens of meters tall. At this moment, he hung by a thread, and there was no time to escape with his qinggong. What in the world could he do to block his opponent’s all-out strike?
Zhao Chiying’s brows pinched, and she couldn’t help but reach over to cover Shiwu’s eyes. She didn’t want him to see his shifu’s blood splatter.
Shiwu had already lost one shifu—one dear person. He wouldn’t be able to withstand losing another.
She was overcome with regret. She should have been the one to fight in the first place. If she’d known this would happen, she would never have agreed to Shen Qiao’s request. Because he’d been so calm and composed, she’d thought that he had some secret weapon to use against Kunye. She never expected Shen Qiao to actually fight for his life, to end up in such a perilous spot!