Chapter 91: The Strongest Young Man
Elder Qiao Mingzhen left Tianyu with quite a lot to think about.
For several minutes after the old man disappeared from Arena Two Hundred, Tianyu remained seated on the stone floor with Bingya beside him, neither particularly eager to stand. The formation had already restored the arena to its ordinary state. Gone were the rocky valleys, frozen ridges, fire pillars and fields of mist. There was only polished white stone beneath them and the distant sounds of other disciples training throughout the enormous district.
Bingya rested his head between his paws.
He did not need most of those techniques.
Tianyu glanced at him.
"I noticed."
You noticed after being hit repeatedly.
"I noticed while being hit repeatedly."
Bingya's tail moved once.
Tianyu leaned backward on his hands and stared at the ceiling.
That was what bothered him most about the fight.
Not that Elder Qiao had beaten them.
Tianyu had expected to lose once he learned the man was a Spirit Transformation elder suppressing his cultivation. Even restricted to the same realm, decades of experience could not simply disappear.
What bothered him was how unnecessary most of Qiao's techniques had been.
The floating fire bombs.
The light clones.
Invisibility.
Laser attacks.
Flame pillars.
Flight.
Precognition.
Qiao had used all of them, but not because he required them to defeat Tianyu.
He had been testing reactions.
How Tianyu handled attacks from outside his vision.
How he responded when sight became unreliable.
Whether he recognized traps.
How quickly he adapted to ranged pressure.
How effectively Bingya and Tianyu communicated when separated.
The actual fighting style beneath everything had been almost insultingly simple.
Punch.
Kick.
Elbow.
Knee.
Palm.
Movement.
Fire.
That was it.
Except each piece had been refined until there was almost no separation between technique and martial art.
"The fire never interrupted his movements," Tianyu murmured.
Bingya lifted his head.
Tianyu stood and demonstrated slowly. He threw a straight punch.
"When I attack with Frost Rend, I attack with Frost Rend."
He reset.
"When he punched, the punch itself was already the fire technique."
Another punch.
"He blocked with his arm, and flame protected the block. He stepped, and fire changed his acceleration. He missed a strike, and the fire extending from it still forced me to move."
Bingya understood.
One technique. Many uses.
"Exactly."
Tianyu looked at his clawed hands before allowing the transformation to withdraw fully.
His father fought similarly.
Shen Xuanfeng possessed many techniques, certainly, but Tianyu had always noticed how little he seemed to need them. His father could take one movement and change it depending on range, terrain and opponent. A Frost Claw was not simply a claw attack. It could extend through ice, create a freezing trail, lock joints, strengthen a grapple, tear through a weapon, or leave frost inside the wound.
Tianyu had learned techniques.
His father had learned principles.
Qiao was the same.
Tianyu looked toward Bingya.
"We are wasting Frost Rend."
We use it well.
"We use it strongly."
That was different.
He crouched and touched the arena floor.
Frost spread from his fingers.
"What if Rend does not stop after cutting?"
Bingya watched.
Tianyu scratched four lines across the stone.
Ice immediately formed inside them.
"If the claw touches something, frost should remain. If I grab someone's arm, it should start freezing before the grapple even finishes. If you bite someone, your frost should enter through the bite."
It already does.
"More."
Bingya approved of that philosophy.
Tianyu grinned.
"And if we understand freezing properly, maybe we don't need Ice Prison as a separate technique every time. Every attack becomes part of the prison."
He could already imagine it.
A claw strike freezing one side of an opponent.
A kick leaving frost beneath their foot.
Bingya's breath slowing the opposite side.
Mist increasing frost accumulation.
Then, without ever stopping to perform a separate binding technique, the enemy discovered that the battlefield had gradually closed around them.
That was how Elder Qiao fought.
Support did not sit beside the main fighting style.
Support became the fighting style.
Bingya stood.
We need practice.
"After lunch."
Now.
"We have a comprehension evaluation this afternoon."
Then before lunch.
Tianyu considered it.
"Reasonable."
He lasted another forty minutes before deciding there was something else he needed almost as badly as training.
People.
Tianyu had never understood cultivators who deliberately isolated themselves for months.
Yes, solitude could be useful.
Yes, meditation required silence.
Yes, sometimes other people were annoying.
But other people were also entertaining.
They argued.
They competed.
They told stories.
Most importantly, they could fight you.
Tianyu had spent his entire childhood surrounded by people. Guards, relatives, servants, soldiers, craftsmen, other children from Mistforge. Even when he trained alone, Bingya was beside him.
He had no intention of spending his first year at the Heavenly Flame Sect quietly sitting inside a room cultivating until someone remembered he existed.
So after leaving Arena Two Hundred, he opened the sect map.
"What department?"
Bingya sniffed the air.
Frost.
Tianyu smiled.
"Excellent choice."
The Frost Training Grounds occupied part of a mountain where the Heavenly Flame Sect maintained several artificially controlled climates. As Tianyu approached, the temperature dropped steadily. White stone gave way to frozen paths. Artificial snowfall drifted over the training fields despite clear skies elsewhere in the sect, and hundreds of disciples practiced among frozen lakes, ice pillars and chambers designed to withstand extreme cold.
This area felt more familiar.
Not Mistforge.
Nothing here was simple enough to resemble Mistforge.
But familiar.
The cold helped.
So did the smell of snow.
Tianyu and Bingya wandered for only a few minutes before they found two disciples training beside a frozen lake.
The first was impossible to miss.
He was large.
Not Bao Kun large, but broad enough that he looked as though somebody had begun designing a defensive cultivator and then forgotten when to stop. He was sixteen, round-faced, cheerful-looking, and wore the standard Heavenly Flame robes somewhat loosely around his middle. Pale blue flames floated around his fists.
Not ordinary fire.
The flames gave off cold.
Every time they touched the ground, frost spread outward.
His name was Huo Pang.
The second disciple was almost his opposite.
Lu Chenxi was lean, messy-haired and expressive, with an easy grin that made it look as though he had already thought of three bad ideas and was deciding which one to attempt first. Light flickered across his hands as he repeatedly vanished from one point and appeared several meters away in bright flashes.
Tianyu stopped.
Lu Chenxi stopped.
They stared at each other.
Then Lu pointed.
"New disciple."
Tianyu looked behind himself.
"No one there."
"I meant you."
"I know."
Huo Pang laughed.
That was approximately how the friendship began.
Within ten minutes, Tianyu had introduced himself.
Within fifteen, Lu Chenxi had challenged him to a race across the frozen lake.
Within twenty, Bingya had joined despite claiming the exercise was childish.
Within thirty, Huo Pang had suggested they combine Frost Aura with his Frostfire to see whether the flames could remain stable inside Tianyu's mist.
Within an hour, the four of them were training together as though they had known one another for considerably longer than sixty minutes.
Huo Pang used Frostfire, a rare dual-state elemental affinity. His flames behaved like fire in movement and consumption but removed heat instead of producing it. When they spread across an object, they burned blue-white while freezing the material beneath.
Tianyu loved it immediately.
"That makes no sense."
Huo Pang looked offended.
"It makes perfect sense."
"It is fire that freezes things."
"Yes."
"That sentence is nonsense."
"It is Frostfire."
"That does not explain anything."
"It explains the name."
Lu Chenxi appeared beside Tianyu in a burst of light.
"I've been telling him this for a year."
Huo Pang threw Frostfire at him.
Lu vanished.
The flame froze a tree instead.
Tianyu laughed.
They spent most of the session practicing affinity resistance rather than actual combat. Huo Pang sent controlled Frostfire through Tianyu's Frost Aura while Tianyu attempted to resist the contradictory elemental structure. Lu Chenxi used pulses of concentrated light against Tianyu's eyes and perception, forcing him to adapt to sudden changes in brightness.
In return, Tianyu released cold against both of them.
They were impressed.
Not merely by the amount.
By how naturally the cold responded to him.
"You've been using frost since awakening?" Huo Pang asked.
"Before that, technically. My family's entire bloodline is frost aligned."
"That explains it."
Lu Chenxi sat upside down on a low branch, apparently because chairs lacked imagination.
"You're also Second Stage already."
"So are some people here."
"Some," Lu said. "Not most new disciples."
Huo Pang nodded.
"We've been here a year."
Both were sixteen.
Both were still in the lower Foundation stages.
And neither seemed ashamed of it.
That told Tianyu something important about the Heavenly Flame Sect.
Talent mattered.
But when nearly everyone around you had talent, it stopped being enough to define a person.
After training, they sat beside the frozen lake eating snacks Huo Pang had somehow carried inside his storage ring.
Tianyu accepted one.
Then another.
Then realized Huo Pang was still eating.
"How much food do you carry?"
"Enough."
"Define enough."
"No."
Lu Chenxi stole one.
Huo Pang slapped his hand.
Tianyu smiled.
Yes.
He could get used to this.
Then he remembered something.
"Does the sect have rankings?"
Both seniors looked toward him.
Lu grinned.
"You really are new."
"I arrived yesterday."
"Yes."
"Different departments maintain separate rankings," Huo Pang explained. "Combat rankings. Alchemy. Medicine. Artifact forging. Rune inscription. Formations. Beast mastery. Scholars. Even some arts have rankings."
"Painting?"
"Yes."
"Poetry?"
"Yes."
Tianyu considered that.
"Do people fight over poetry ranking?"
Lu Chenxi became very serious.
"Violently."
Huo Pang sighed.
"They argue."
"That is violence for scholars."
Tianyu ignored them.
"What do rankings give you?"
"Contribution points every month," Huo Pang said. "The higher the position, the more points."
That immediately made sense.
Tianyu thought of breakfast.
"How many?"
"Depends on the ranking and your position."
Lu swung himself upright.
"If you're top ten in a major department, you can live very comfortably."
Tianyu's interest increased.
"Top of the fighter ranking?"
Both boys became quieter.
Tianyu noticed.
"Who?"
Lu answered first.
"The Azure Knight."
Tianyu stopped chewing.
"What?"
"The Azure Knight."
"No."
"Yes."
"The Azure Knight?"
"Yes."
Tianyu stared at him.
"The one who fought the Void Swordsman?"
"Yes."
"The one people talk about in inns?"
"Yes."
"The Knight of Fate's son?"
"Yes."
Tianyu slowly lowered the food in his hand.
"How old is he?"
Huo Pang answered.
"Sixteen."
Tianyu stared.
"No."
Lu laughed.
"That was my reaction."
"I thought he was at least twenty."
"Most people do."
"Maybe thirty."
"He looks young."
"I thought that was cultivation."
"No."
Tianyu sat upright.
"He is actually sixteen?"
"Yes."
Something about that offended Tianyu's sense of scale.
He had heard stories about the Azure Knight for years.
The young prodigy who carried the legacy of the Knight of Fate.
The rival of the Void Swordsman.
A combatant whose battles involved fate and space techniques that ordinary cultivators could barely understand.
Sixteen.
Tianyu rubbed his forehead.
"What realm?"
"Sixth Stage Foundation Establishment."
This time Tianyu actually laughed.
Neither senior joined him.
His laughter stopped.
"You're serious."
"Yes."
"How?"
Huo Pang and Lu exchanged a glance.
Then Lu lowered his voice.
"You really don't know the full story?"
"I know his father defeated Zarathiel, the Sovereign of Destiny."
"Don't say it's name. Call it, The One Who Knows," Huo Pang corrected.
Tianyu nodded.
Everyone knew that story.
Five years ago, the creature known as The One Who Knows had appeared as a world-level calamity. It possessed powers over destiny so abnormal that entire armies became useless against it. Those not destined to fight it sometimes found themselves literally incapable of reaching it. Attacks that should have missed somehow struck. Events bent toward favorable outcomes. The creature could observe possible futures, summon heroic figures from history through destiny, reverse events, distort the flow of time and choose paths through combat that almost always led toward victory.
For months, people had believed it was some heavenly guardian.
Then cities began falling.
The Knight of Fate eventually defeated it.
And died doing so.
"I know all that," Tianyu said. "The Knight of Fate saved the world from something people thought was heavenly and discovered it was worse than most demons."
Lu Chenxi leaned closer.
"The creature isn't dead."
Tianyu stopped.
Huo Pang immediately looked around.
"Lower your voice."
Tianyu stared at them.
"What do you mean?"
Lu spoke quietly.
"It was sealed."
"In what?"
Lu pointed vaguely in the direction of the sect's central mountains.
"In him."
Tianyu's expression slowly changed.
"The Azure Knight?"
"Yes."
Silence.
Even Bingya looked interested now.
Tianyu remembered every strange rumor he had ever heard about the Azure Knight.
The impossible growth.
The fate techniques.
The warnings.
The title people sometimes used when they thought nobody important was listening.
The World Calamity.
"That's why they call him that?"
Huo Pang nodded reluctantly.
"Some people do."
Lu Chenxi continued, clearly enjoying possessing information Tianyu did not.
"The Knight of Fate sealed The One Who Knows inside his son before dying."
"Why?"
"No one knows."
Tianyu frowned.
"Then why would he do it?"
"That is exactly the problem."
Lu lowered his voice further.
"The One Who Knows could see different futures. Not guesses. Paths. Entire possibilities."
Tianyu listened carefully.
"If that creature could examine all those futures before a battle," Lu continued, "why would anyone assume its defeat wasn't part of one?"
Huo Pang groaned.
"Here we go."
"Think about it."
"I have."
"Not correctly."
Huo Pang turned to Tianyu.
"He has theories."
"Reasonable theories."
"You think every coincidence is destiny."
"It is literally a destiny creature."
Tianyu raised one hand.
"Wait."
Both stopped.
He looked toward Lu.
"You think it deliberately lost."
"Possibly."
"And deliberately got sealed inside the Azure Knight."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Lu spread his hands.
"That's the frightening part."
Tianyu stared toward the distant central mountain.
The idea was uncomfortable.
He knew enough about battle planning to appreciate it.
If The One Who Knows truly possessed the ability to examine future paths and select outcomes favorable to itself, then its final battle created an obvious question.
Had the Knight of Fate actually defeated it?
Or had he reached the future the creature wanted him to reach?
Huo Pang interrupted.
"The current Knight of Fate knows far more than we do."
"Obviously."
"If the Azure Knight had actually been possessed, corrupted or replaced, do you think the sect would simply let him sit around under a tree?"
Lu shrugged.
"Maybe that's what destiny wants them to think."
Huo Pang stared at him.
"You are impossible."
"Open minded."
"Paranoid."
"Prepared."
Tianyu smiled.
He liked both of them.
Then another thought occurred.
"You said he is first in the fighter ranking."
"Yes."
"Does he fight people?"
"No," Huo Pang answered immediately.
Tianyu blinked.
"Why?"
"Because people enjoy being alive."
Lu nodded solemnly.
"He doesn't fight ordinary Foundation disciples anymore."
"What about people at his stage?"
"They lose."
"Higher stage?"
"They lose too."
"Then who does he fight?"
"Elders."
Tianyu leaned forward.
"Spirit Transformation?"
"Yes."
There it was again.
The impossible scale.
A sixteen-year-old Sixth Stage Foundation cultivator regularly fighting Spirit Transformation opponents.
Tianyu should have found that discouraging.
Instead, something inside him lit up.
Huo Pang saw it happen.
"No."
Tianyu looked toward him.
"No what?"
"No."
"I haven't said anything."
"Your face did."
Lu Chenxi began laughing.
Huo Pang pointed a warning finger.
"Do not challenge him."
"I wasn't going to."
"You absolutely were."
"I was considering meeting him."
"Same beginning."
Tianyu looked genuinely offended.
"I don't challenge every strong person I meet."
Bingya looked at him.
Lu looked at him.
Huo Pang looked at him.
Tianyu sighed.
"Fine. Many."
Huo Pang rubbed his forehead.
"The Azure Knight is not someone you walk up to and bother because you're bored."
"I am not bored."
"That somehow makes it worse."
Lu leaned closer.
"He usually sits under the Heavenly Sunfire Tree."
Huo Pang slowly turned.
"Why did you tell him?"
"He was going to ask someone else."
"That doesn't mean you help."
Tianyu stood.
Huo Pang grabbed his sleeve.
"No."
Tianyu looked down at the hand.
"I am only going to talk."
"Promise?"
"I promise not to challenge him immediately."
Huo Pang released him.
"Immediately?"
Tianyu smiled.
"That is the strongest promise I can responsibly make."
Lu was nearly falling over laughing now.
Bingya stood and shook frost from his fur.
We're going, aren't we?
"Obviously."
Huo Pang sighed deeply.
"If you disappear, I am telling the Disciple Council we tried."
"You've known me for an hour."
"And already I feel responsible."
Tianyu pointed toward him.
"That means we're friends."
Huo Pang looked horrified by how effectively Tianyu had trapped him.
Lu slapped the larger boy on the shoulder.
"He's right."
"Don't encourage him."
Tianyu opened his sect map.
"Heavenly Sunfire Tree."
The map shifted.
A route appeared.
It was far.
Tianyu smiled anyway.
He had arrived at the Heavenly Flame Sect expecting strong people.
He had already found them.
A Spirit Transformation elder who could dismantle him with basic punches.
Two seniors who had welcomed him into their training without caring that he was Lord Shen's son.
And now, somewhere beneath a tree so vast it could be seen from the heavens, sat a sixteen-year-old boy who carried one of the most terrifying creatures in history inside his soul.
The Azure Knight.
Sixth Stage Foundation Establishment.
Strongest young fighter in the Heavenly Flame Sect.
Possibly the vessel of a being that had once manipulated the fate of the world.
Tianyu started walking.
Bingya followed.
Behind them, Huo Pang shouted one final warning.
"TIANYU!"
Tianyu looked back.
"WHAT?"
"DO NOT ASK HIM IF HE'S SECRETLY THE ONE WHO KNOWS!"
Tianyu considered this.
"That had not occurred to me."
Huo Pang's face fell.
Lu Chenxi covered his face.
Bingya looked toward Tianyu.
Now it has.
Tianyu grinned.
"Now it has."