Mu Chen shut off the shard mirror and walked out of the guest room without a word.
The Taiyi Sword Sect had sent twelve disciples to this Grand Tournament in all, and as foremost disciple, Mu Chen naturally stood high in the regard of his junior brothers and sisters.
So when word got around that "Senior Brother Mu Chen was one-shot in the Inner Mirror," most people simply refused to believe it.
The first to step forward was Chen Ming, ranked second among the Taiyi Sword Sect's inner disciples.
Third Realm, sixth layer, cultivating the sixth level of the Great Void Sword Canon. One level behind Mu Chen, true, but still a cut above his peers.
"Senior Brother, Sect Head Zhongli just said you came off badly in the Inner Mirror?"
Mu Chen glanced at him and started to describe the fight in detail, only to find, with the words already at his lips, that ordinary language simply could not sum up that experience.
How was he supposed to put it?
"He was controlling ten flying swords at once and still had a hand free to punch me?"
"A Third Realm cultivator produced something like a Sword Domain and then one-shot me with his fist?"
"His name is Loser Calls Me Daddy, and I did, in fact, lose?"
In the end Mu Chen squeezed out a single sentence.
"He's strong."
A pause. "Don't go."
Chen Ming was clearly unsatisfied with that answer.
"Senior Brother, even if you lost, surely you can at least say how he won?" Chen Ming said, frowning.
Mu Chen thought it over and told him the truth of it.
"Loser Calls Me Daddy?"
On hearing the man's mirror name, Chen Ming's face travelled from confusion to something distinctly odd, and settled at last on a subtle sort of indignation.
"Senior Brother, you rest. I'll go have a word with him."
"I said don't go."
"I'm just going to try."
Chen Ming thumped his own chest, his tone full of easy dismissal. "Senior Brother, your main line of attack is blending the substantial with the illusory. If your opponent doesn't crack under pressure, of course you'd struggle. I don't fight the way you do. Maybe I'll find the flaw."
Mu Chen made to stop him, but Chen Ming had already turned and gone.
He stood where he was and, in the end, did not chase after him, because he knew that catching up would change nothing.
That was how Taiyi Sword Sect disciples were. The more you told them they couldn't, the more they wanted to try it themselves.
Chen Ming poured in spiritual power and entered the Inner Mirror.
The wait for a match was short, five or six breaths at most.
The panel popped up with his opponent's information.
[Mirror Name: Loser Calls Me Daddy]
On the white platform, a circular arena rose into being.
The instant that phantom appeared across from him, Chen Ming settled into a stance of full readiness. He had learned from his senior brother's lesson and did not strike rashly.
The formation patterns lit.
Chen Ming set the sixth level of the Great Void Sword Canon turning, substantial and illusory sword-shadows crossing and weaving.
He meant to defend first and attack later, to study the man's methods, find the flaw, and seize the chance to strike back.
There was nothing wrong with the plan. The problem was that the other side never gave him a chance to "study" anything.
Within one breath the ten flying swords formed their formation. Within two they had shredded every one of his illusory shadows. Within three, a fatal gap had been torn open in his defense.
By the time he registered it, a fist was already pressed against his chest.
A thunderous boom.
Chen Ming's projected body burst into a sky full of drifting light motes.
Back in the guest room, Chen Ming withdrew from the Inner Mirror and stared at the ceiling for a long, wordless while.
So it was true. A man really cannot empathize with his past self… And now he understood completely why his senior brother had worn that look of a man with nothing left to live for.
But the disciples of the Taiyi Sword Sect carried a streak of stubbornness in their very bones.
Ordinarily that streak was a fine thing. Under certain circumstances, however, it did rather more harm than good.
For instance, now.
The first thing Chen Ming did after withdrawing from the Inner Mirror was not to reflect or take stock. It was to charge into the room next door and tell his third junior brother, "That 'Loser Calls Me Daddy' is genuinely fierce. Go try him!"
The third-ranked disciple was named Zhao Pingchuan, likewise Third Realm, sixth layer.
After hearing Chen Ming out, he shook his head, unconvinced. "Perhaps Senior Brother's mistake was being too conservative. Against an explosive opponent like that, you meet attack with attack and never give him time to unfold that sword formation."
Chen Ming thought this made sense. Mu Chen thought it made none, but he did not stop him either.
Zhao Pingchuan went into the Inner Mirror, and came back out again very quickly.
The look on his face matched the other two exactly.
And still the matter did not end there, because once Zhao Pingchuan was out, he too turned to the fourth junior brother and said, "That 'Loser Calls Me Daddy' really is uncanny. Go give it a try."
What followed was a decidedly strange sequence of events.
"Fifth Junior Sister, your footwork's good. Go see if you can dodge that punch."
"Sixth Junior Brother, you specialize in defense —"
"Seventh Junior Brother, your escape art —"
"Eighth Junior Sister, your illusions —"
One after another, the disciples of the Taiyi Sword Sect queued up to enter the Inner Mirror, and queued up to be beaten back out of it.
Up and down the corridors of the Taiyi Sword Sect's encampment, disciples crouched and slumped against the walls in twos and threes, dazed, like people just woken from a nightmare. Some stared blankly at the seams between the floor tiles. Some moved their lips faintly, as though replaying those few short breaths of combat over and over. A strange fog of bewilderment hung in the halls.
The time it takes to drink a cup of tea went by.
Zhongli Yuan, Sect Head of the Taiyi Sword Sect, appeared in the doorway. Looking at the disciples crouched on the floor with the color of ash in their faces, he drew a long breath.
"All of you were beaten by this 'Loser Calls Me Daddy'?"
Eight heads tilted back to gaze at the sky.
Zhongli Yuan tilted his head back along with them and said nothing for a good long while.
"…Which sect is he from, exactly?"
Mu Chen shook his head. "The Inner Mirror only shows mirror names and realms, not sects. Third Realm. Which layer, there's no telling."
"Third Realm." Zhongli Yuan felt a sudden ache in his teeth.
He, the head of the dignified Taiyi Sword Sect, a first-rate sect standing for over two thousand six hundred years, had carefully selected twelve disciples for this competition — and in the Inner Mirror every last one of them had run into the same Third Realm cultivator and been knocked senseless.
"Go back and reflect properly. Continue your preparations tomorrow."
The old Sect Head forced the second half of the sentence back down his throat.
Where does something this uncanny even come from… Truly, each generation of Taiyi Sword Sect disciples is worse than the last. Had it been him in his younger days, he'd never have been thrashed like this!
The aged Sect Head's train of thought ran, remarkably, along precisely the same rails as his disciples'.
"Disperse, disperse." Zhongli Yuan waved a hand and turned to leave. At the end of the corridor, he faintly caught the voice of the ninth junior brother behind him: "So, Eighth Senior Sister, how many breaths do you think I'd last if I went in?"
Zhongli Yuan's steps halted.
"I said don't go!" came Mu Chen's voice from inside the room.
"Oh."
Zhongli Yuan slapped his own forehead, seeing nothing but a grey future for his sect.
Wailing and desolation reigned on the Taiyi Sword Sect's side of things. At the other end of this farce, however, the mood was rather different.
The Wenjian Sect's encampment, a guest room.
Gu Chengming withdrew from the Inner Mirror and rolled his stiff shoulders and neck.
Several straight hours of high-intensity matches. Even with a physique far beyond others of his level, he was somewhat worn down.
He glanced at the system panel, his eyes settling on the progress bars for the Son Coins.
[Son Coin: Great Void Sword (Complete)]
That was the very first one he had obtained, from the Third Realm seventh layer sword cultivator. Beneath it now sat a whole pile of unfinished coins — [Son Coin: Great Void Sword II], [Son Coin: Great Void Sword III], [Son Coin: Great Void Sword IV], [Son Coin: Great Void Sword V] and so on. All of them Great Void Sword.
Gu Chengming stared at those lines of text, moved despite himself.
The Taiyi Sword Sect certainly lived up to its name.
Nearly every two or three matches he was paired against another opponent using the swordplay of the mutual generation of the substantial and the illusory. Their fighting styles all differed, but the underlying technique ran along identical lines — plainly all taught within the same school. The key thing was that after losing, these people would show up in the matching pool again before long.
Beyond that concentrated supply from the Taiyi Sword Sect, the rest of his Son Coins were scattered across a number of different opponents. Beating a man once did not fully unlock a coin. Just like the coin that little dragon had given him, they remained in an "incomplete" state.
Then again, Son Coins were genuinely useful to him as he stood now. They were stackable short-term boosts, and there was practically nothing in his current system that could replace them. To clear the room of [Love's Hundred Bones Resonance], he needed as many independent boost sources as he could get.
So —
My apologies, everyone of the Taiyi Sword Sect.
Your filial devotion is gratefully accepted.
The inner city of Floating Isle City, a quiet secluded courtyard.
Ji Yixi sat before a low table, several faintly glowing jade slips laid out in front of her.
The slips recorded the spiritual power fluctuations of Floating Isle City over the past three days, unusual movements at the encampments of the great sects, and all manner of intelligence circulating in the streets.
She cultivated the Records of the Great Qian. Though it allowed her to observe parallel world-lines, such observation was neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and it drained the mind terribly — especially now that the Eternal Life Sect's possible involvement had been confirmed, when any variable might set off a whole chain of changes.
For precisely that reason, gathering intelligence in the present world mattered all the more.
In midair, a fist-sized black dragon circled the roof beam in listless boredom, occasionally stopping to bat at the hanging gauze curtains with one claw.
Ever since the "father-acknowledging" incident that night, the little dragon had been in a state of acute discomfort, saying as little as it possibly could, terrified that one wrong word would drag it into another mortifying scene.
After a while, Ji Yixi set down the jade slip and shook her head.
"As things stand, there's no sign the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror has been tainted."
The little dragon snorted. "This Venerable One told you long ago that those turtle-necked cowards of the Eternal Life Sect don't show their tails so easily. Expecting one man to wander around inside for a couple of rounds and drag their hidden hand into the light is pure fantasy."
Ji Yixi did not argue. The Eternal Life Sect moved by secretive means. If they could truly be uncovered so easily, the imperial house of the Great Qian would have torn them up by the roots long ago.
Bringing Gu Chengming into the game had been an idle move from the start. If he turned up a thread, so much the better. If not, it would still let her observe how this "variable" named Gu Chengming operated, and where his limits lay.
She turned her gaze to the information on the jade slip concerning Gu Chengming.
And then she saw his mirror name.
— Loser Calls Me Daddy
"…?"
A question mark floated up above Ji Yixi's head.
Three days later.
The eastern district of Floating Isle City, the Cloud-Gazing Tower. One of the best-earning restaurants in the city, its three-story timber frame looked especially grand under the glow of the spirit lamps, and during the tournament it was packed to bursting every single day.
Three days was enough time for a name to go from utterly unknown to on everyone's lips in Floating Isle City.
And those four words — Loser Calls Me Daddy — landed squarely on exactly what cultivators most enjoyed chewing over after a meal.
At a window seat on the second floor, several young disciples from different sects sat clustered together, a few pots of spirit wine and a few dishes of finely cured spirit beast jerky on the table between them.
"Have you all heard?" one disciple in the grey-white Daoist robes of Tianji Pavilion lowered his voice. "About the Daddy-Calling Sword in the Inner Mirror."
Across from him, a Myriad Dharma Sect disciple who was stuffing jerky into his mouth nearly choked. "The what?"
"'Loser Calls Me Daddy,'" the Tianji Pavilion disciple explained. "That's the man's mirror name. They say no Third Realm cultivator alive has lasted ten breaths against him."
"Talking it up, aren't you?" The Myriad Dharma Sect disciple's face was all disbelief. "Under ten breaths? That's laying it on far too thick."
"I saw with my own eyes what one of our senior brothers looked like coming out of the Inner Mirror — Third Realm, fifth layer." The Tianji Pavilion disciple's voice dropped further. "Eyes glazed over, sat on his bed staring into space for ages, muttering something about being an unfilial son."
The Myriad Dharma Sect disciple swallowed the jerky in his mouth. His expression grew complicated.
The table fell quiet for a moment.
"…Has anyone worked out which sect he's from?"
"No one can. The Inner Mirror only shows mirror names, no sect information. But going by the fact that he uses a sword formation, odds are he came out of a major sect."
"Could be a rogue cultivator too," another put in. "A real genius doesn't have to come from a famous house."
"A rogue cultivator, at the Third Realm, controlling ten flying swords in a complete sword formation?" The Tianji Pavilion disciple shook his head. "That much spiritual sense capacity is flatly impossible without a top-tier technique behind it."
They batted the matter back and forth for a while, and in the end no one could reach any conclusion.
At that same hour, in the central district of Floating Isle City, the talisman market.
Inside a talisman shop called the Thousand-Mechanism Shop, two cultivators picking through Concealment Talismans were talking in low voices.
"So is that rumor true or not, you reckon?"
"Which rumor? There've been far too many lately."
"That one. They say there's a man whose mirror name is Loser Calls Me Daddy, and he's beaten every single one of the Taiyi Sword Sect's competing disciples."
"That's absurd. One man beat an entire sect's tournament roster?"
"Which is why it's called a rumor. And they say it isn't just the Taiyi Sword Sect either. These past two days there've been more and more disciples coming out of the Inner Mirror with something wrong in their faces."
Behind the counter, the shop's proprietor, an unnamed old man, pricked up his ears. The ledger in his hands had not had a single page turned.
In two days he had already heard no fewer than seven or eight versions of the "Loser Calls Me Daddy" rumor.
The most outrageous version held that the man was actually a Fifth Realm grand cultivator in disguise, slipped into the Third Realm matching pool to bully the weak. Others said he was an undefeatable phantom the Mohist Gate's own cultivators had put in for testing purposes.
But without exception, no news had ever come out of this person being beaten.
And as time went on, the story spread wider and wider, fermenting steadily through Floating Isle City.
When a rumor has fermented to the point where even the old man hawking talisman paper at a roadside stall can offer an opinion on it, the core disciples of the great sects can hardly remain unmoved.
The overwhelming majority chose to wait and watch. A handful confident in their own strength quietly entered the Inner Mirror to find out for themselves, then quietly came back out and joined the ranks of the watchers.
And among all the sects, none took a keener interest in the affair than the sort who delighted in calculating cause and effect down to the last thread.
The Tianji Pavilion encampment.
Tianji Pavilion had stood for over three thousand years, famed throughout the world for its arts of derivation.
Its disciples had always conducted themselves under the sign of one word: concealment. Conceal your edge, conceal your skill, conceal your designs.
One line from the Sect Head's admonitions had been passed down generation to generation: "Heaven's secrets must not be leaked; leaked, they lose their power." Steeped in that culture, most Tianji Pavilion disciples were steady in temperament, disliked ostentation, and were half a beat slow in word and deed, lending them an otherworldly air of "let the winds blow and the waves crash, I stand unmoved."
Most Tianji Pavilion disciples were like that. But every rule has its exception.
Wang Yan, the party leader and foremost disciple Tianji Pavilion had sent to this Grand Tournament, was that exception.
Speaking of this Wang Yan, the general feeling inside Tianji Pavilion was one of love and hatred in equal measure.
Wang Yan's talent was beyond question. Third Realm, sixth layer, thirty-six years of age, cultivating Tianji Pavilion's most treasured art, the Tianji Derivation Art.
The art was renowned for reckoning heaven's secrets. Cultivated to its profound heights, it allowed one to glimpse the threads of destiny and anchor the future.
Wang Yan's mastery of it was the highest Tianji Pavilion had seen in a century, and the Sect Head had not been sparing with his praise: "This boy's aptitude in the way of derivation may fairly be called heaven-granted. Given time, there is no reason he could not glimpse realms that none of Tianji Pavilion's past worthies ever touched."
When word of that got out, everyone in Tianji Pavilion, high and low, looked twice.
One must understand that the Sect Head of Tianji Pavilion was famously tight-lipped. Prying a single "good" out of him counted as enormous praise, and the words "heaven-granted" had never once been applied to any disciple before.
Had that been all, Wang Yan's emergence would have been an unqualified blessing for Tianji Pavilion.
But that was only the love half of the love and hatred. As for the hatred…
In short, it came down to this: Wang Yan was far too flamboyant a man.
More than once the Pavilion Master had lamented in private to the personally-taught elders, "If this boy could just sew his mouth shut, he'd be perfect."
But perfect men do not exist, so Tianji Pavilion could only resign itself.
The Tianji Pavilion encampment, Wang Yan's guest room.
The furnishings inside were rather more disordered than in the other disciples' rooms.
Several opened jade slips lay spread across the writing desk, and in the corner sat heaps of spirit stones and copper coins, seemingly jumbled but in truth arranged according to some particular pattern — the auxiliary implements he used for his daily derivations.
Wang Yan sat behind the desk turning a copper coin over in his fingers, listening to the junior brother across from him deliver a report.
The one reporting was Tianji Pavilion's third-ranked disciple, Su Qiming, Third Realm, fourth layer.
He was one of the few in Tianji Pavilion who could keep pace with Wang Yan: steady in temperament, meticulous in his work.
"A Third Realm cultivator, exact layer unknown. Since entering the mirror, not one defeat."
"A complete sword formation of ten flying swords, domain suppression that appears to be an Embryonic Sword Domain, and utterly terrifying close-quarters melee capability. His most notable result is defeating the Taiyi Sword Sect's foremost disciple, Mu Chen, Third Realm seventh layer. Afterward a number of Taiyi Sword Sect disciples went to challenge him in turn, and every one of them lost."
Wang Yan leaned back against his chair, tilted his head toward the ceiling, and laughed.
Seeing that smile, Su Qiming felt his stomach drop.
He knew his senior brother far too well. Whenever that smile appeared, it meant Wang Yan was about to do something that would give the Sect Head a headache.
"Senior Brother, the Sect Head instructed us to conserve our strength before the tournament, and not to wear down our minds tangling with strong enemies inside the mirror," Su Qiming ventured as a reminder.
"I know." Wang Yan tossed the coin up.
Su Qiming let out a small breath of relief.
"I plan to run a derivation first." Wang Yan caught the coin again.
Su Qiming tensed right back up.
Tianji Pavilion's arts of derivation stood alone in the cultivation world. Given enough information, they could compute cause and effect itself.
"Senior Brother means to derive this man's techniques and weaknesses?"
"Correct." Wang Yan set the coin back on the desk and began rummaging through the jade slips. "First let's see how many cards he's actually holding. Then I'll decide whether to step into the ring myself."
The weight on Su Qiming's chest eased a little. If it was purely derivation, it shouldn't cause any trouble.
Granted, it wouldn't lead to the sort of public humiliation the Taiyi Sword Sect had suffered — but even falling into a losing position would cost Tianji Pavilion face.
Half an hour later.
Wang Yan sat cross-legged at the edge of the formation diagram, eyes half-closed, fingers tapping lightly at empty air.
Tianji Pavilion's derivation arts differed fundamentally from ordinary divination. Divination petitions the Heavenly Dao for guidance, and the answers it returns are vague and ambiguous, requiring a great deal of interpretation. Tianji Pavilion's derivation instead casts every already-determined fact into the web of cause and effect and exhausts every possibility to deduce the likeliest outcome.
Put simply: divination reads a fortune. Derivation solves a problem.
The problem Wang Yan meant to solve now had a great many variables.
It was, by the standards of his career in derivation, quite time-consuming. Working out the technique and style of an opponent at his own level normally took him a few dozen breaths at most.
This time, though, every attempt to lock onto "Loser Calls Me Daddy's" technique system caused the variables to scatter in bizarre directions, as though the techniques on this man were not one art or two, but an entire composite system nested within itself.
At last the copper coins on the derivation diagram stopped trembling, and the final result condensed into a beam of spirit-light projected into the air.
Wang Yan opened his eyes and looked at it.
— "Advised: fulfill your filial duty."
"…?"
A question mark floated up above Wang Yan's head.
Just then a knock came at the door, and Wang Yan hurriedly dispelled the light.
"Senior Brother, how did the derivation turn out?" Su Qiming's voice came from outside.
Wang Yan opened the door with a smile on his face that never reached his eyes. "Highly instructive."
Su Qiming noticed the almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of his senior brother's eye.
"So the result was?"
"I'll win for certain!"
The moment Su Qiming heard that, he knew things had gone wrong.
"Senior Brother, the Sect Head said —"
"The Sect Head said 'conserve your strength, don't wear down your mind.'" Wang Yan sat down on the couch and picked up his shard mirror. "I'm only going to fight one match. That won't wear down anything."
Su Qiming started to protest, failed in the end to stop him, and merely sighed and withdrew from the room.
If Senior Brother said certain victory, then presumably it would be fine… probably?
Before he left he glanced back at Wang Yan, who was pouring spiritual power into the shard mirror. His face was calm, but the fingers gripping the mirror had tightened, the knuckles gone white.
It should — probably — be fine?
Wang Yan held the shard mirror in his palm and fed spiritual power in at an even rate.
Inside the mirror.
White platform. Circular arena.
A hundred feet ahead, light gathered into a tall, straight phantom.
Wang Yan stopped the coin flickering through his fingers, raised his gaze, and let it settle on the words floating above the other man's head.
[Loser Calls Me Daddy]
The corner of Wang Yan's mouth twitched twice. The derivation result, "Advised: fulfill your filial duty," flashed through his mind — and far from inspiring any awe, it stoked an even fiercer hunger to win.
The formation patterns along the rim of the arena lit one after another, and the instant the countdown ended, the barrier sealed shut.
Wang Yan did not indulge in a moment of arrogance. His opening move was Tianji Pavilion's killing art.
A flick of his wrist sent three copper coins tearing through the air into a triangular arrangement, hanging suspended. His hands wove seals at blinding speed as he barked in a low voice:
"Six Lines Sealing Severance — Derive Heaven, Form the Formation!"
The three coins split at once into hundreds upon thousands of golden phantoms, weaving with Wang Yan at the center into an enormous eight-trigram diagram.
The diagram turned without cease, every trigram devouring and disgorging the spiritual qi around it in a frenzy.
Tianji Pavilion never fought force against force. They fought by deriving an opponent's next move, laying traps in advance, making every step he took feel like sinking into a bog, until the power of cause and effect strangled him outright.
The formation was set. Wang Yan lifted his eyes and looked ahead.
Ten flying swords surfaced around the phantom without the slightest warning, the sword formation revolving slowly.
Wang Yan's eyes narrowed. Kun position, Gate of Life, a probing attack in three breaths. Qian position, Gate of Death, seven follow-up moves hidden there.
Derivation results fed steadily into his mind. His fingertips shifted, ready to pluck at the nodes of the eight-trigram diagram and counterattack.
The phantom opposite, however, did not follow a single one of the lines he had derived.
The ten flying swords blazed out with dazzling light — but they did not surge forward to kill. Instead they all turned their points around at once, aiming at the phantom itself.
Then the phantom moved.
Boom!
The white platform gave a muffled groan of overburdened stone as the phantom shot forward like a cannonball out of the barrel, dragging all ten flying swords with it, and smashed brutally into Wang Yan's eight-trigram diagram.
Wang Yan's pupils shrank to points. Tens of thousands of variables surfaced in his mind, and every last one of them pointed to the same result.
— Cannot be stopped.
Wang Yan did not even have time to crush the death-substitute talisman in his hand.
All he saw was a fist swelling to fill his entire field of vision.
That punch carried a tide of blood and qi vast enough to move mountains and overturn seas. Before the wind of it even landed, the virtual space around it had already begun to show the faint signs of collapse.
Crack!
There was never any suspense.
The instant Wang Yan's projected body met that fist, it disintegrated into a sky-wide rain of light.
The panel appeared.
[Match Concluded]
[Defeated by: Loser Calls Me Daddy]
The Tianji Pavilion encampment, the guest room.
Wang Yan's eyes flew open and he sucked in air in great gulps, staring at the deep-blue shard mirror in front of him, gaze vacant, mind a blank sheet.
The faintest footsteps came from beyond the door, followed by Su Qiming's tentative inquiry:
"Senior Brother, how did it go?"
Wang Yan did not answer.
Su Qiming pushed the door open and found his senior brother slumped on the couch, face as pale as paper, the three copper coins he normally polished bright with handling scattered across the floor.
He hurried two steps forward, poured a cup of hot tea and held it out, thinking, this is bad.
— It really has all gone wrong again, hasn't it.
Senior Brother said certain victory just now. Surely it didn't end in a draw?
"Qiming." Wang Yan lifted his head to the ceiling, his voice drifting. "What do you suppose is the ultimate height of the Tianji Derivation Art?"
Su Qiming blinked, then answered by the book. "The Sect Head once said: to reckon without a single oversight, and to perceive the whole of heaven."
"Haah… At least by that measure, I did reckon correctly."
Hearing that, Su Qiming's stomach lurched. Surely Senior Brother's reckoning had come out as a loss, and he'd claimed certain victory to save face, only to go in and get thrashed bloody?
With that in mind, Su Qiming tried to console him. "Senior Brother, a duel changes in an instant. Anyone can slip up once —"
"It wasn't a slip."
Wang Yan cut him off and began to laugh.
"It's that I ought to fulfill my filial duty."
Su Qiming swallowed and took half a step back. "Senior Brother, calm down. The Sect Head told you to conserve your —"
"Hah! Even if I must be filial, I'm going to be the most filial one of all!"
That's it. Senior Brother has genuinely lost his mind.
At that same moment.
The Wenjian Sect encampment.
Gu Chengming looked at the freshly refreshed system panel before him, and his eyes lit up.
[Son Coin: Tianji Reckoning (Complete)]
Coins dropping again?
And filled to the brim in a single match?
Before this, the only one to fill a coin in one match had been that Third Realm seventh layer foremost disciple of the Taiyi Sword Sect.
Somewhat surprised, Gu Chengming cast his mind back over the fight just finished.
That last opponent really had been different from the others.
The man's reaction speed far outstripped others of his level. Facing the sword formation of ten flying swords, he had not been settled in short order like everyone else. Instead, on the strength of some extraordinarily precise predictive ability, he had maneuvered inside that sword formation with room to spare for a full ten breaths.
Harder to handle than that Taiyi Sword Sect foremost disciple, and his technique ran along very distinctive lines… Tianji Pavilion?
Gu Chengming thought back to the disciples in grey-white Daoist robes he had seen in the plaza on his first day in the city.
Tianji Pavilion was famed across the world for its arts of derivation. If the man was indeed from Tianji Pavilion, the ability he had displayed made perfect sense.
Whichever house he was from, though, a Son Coin in hand was good news.
[Son Coin: Tianji Reckoning (Complete)]
[Effect: Upon activation, grants a short-term "Spirit Perception" boost. During the boost, precision in sensing spiritual power fluctuations is greatly increased.]
Well satisfied, Gu Chengming filed the coin into his panel and checked the overview again.
Completed Son Coins to date: two.
Great Void Sword. Tianji Reckoning.
One boosting sword intent, one boosting perception — and the two boosts did not conflict. They could be stacked.
It was still a very long way to clearing [Love's Hundred Bones Resonance], but at least the direction was right.
Gu Chengming drew a deep breath.
The Daddy Dao. Truly a path with a bright future.
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉