"This is... ridiculous."
Xie Yue no longer cared how Chen Ming had summoned such a shield; he simply glared at the shield, gritting his teeth as he desperately searched for a way to bypass this wall and attack Chen Ming directly.
At that moment, feeling the timing was about right, Chen Ming dismissed his Beast Soul Toolization and returned to his original form.
Only his claws remained enlarged, having been strengthened further with additional metal-element power and deeper dragonization.
"Again."
Chen Ming gave Xie Yue a casual reminder before charging forward himself.
Xie Yue had no time to think further. Swinging his Moon Blades, he attempted to use their sharp edges to cut into Chen Ming's weak points.
But every time he raised his arms to attack, Chen Ming's enhanced dragon claws would instantly appear along the exact path Xie Yue needed for his exertion.
Every attack Xie Yue launched was carefully calculated. He only struck after confirming Chen Ming supposedly could not react.
Yet somehow, every single time, Chen Ming interrupted him at the exact midpoint of his exertion—precisely when Xie Yue was unable to adjust or respond.
The Moon Blades were shaped like crescent moons and possessed almost no thrusting capability. Their damage relied entirely on slicing with the blade edge.
To unleash their true destructive power, they required a brief preparatory motion to build momentum, exchanging speed for increased cutting strength.
Even when using Spirit Abilities, the Moon Blades could not escape this short wind-up phase.
This was a limitation imposed by physical laws themselves.
Even when Xie Yue tried relying on speed to disengage, Chen Ming would always detect that preparatory movement during the charging phase and interrupt him immediately.
Xie Yue never even had the chance to retreat, reset his rhythm, and reorganize his attacks.
Under circumstances where every move was interrupted before completion, Xie Yue's performance became unbelievably poor.
His eyes turned red from frustration, yet not a single attack was truly completed.
Chen Ming barely expended much Spirit Power at all as he steadily forced Xie Yue into the corner of the arena step by step.
Then, exploiting a single opening, he casually shoved Xie Yue straight off the stage.
After a Spirit Saint-level bishop who had already been standing nearby caught and steadied him, Xie Yue looked at Chen Ming with disbelief filling his eyes.
"You saw through all my attacks?"
Xie Yue felt utterly stifled by the loss.
He clearly still had many Spirit Abilities he had not used.
He even still possessed his self-created ultimate move, Full Moon, as his trump card.
Yet during the first half of the fight, his attacks achieved nothing.
And during the second half, he was completely suppressed to the point he could barely move.
It felt as though he had fought with everything he had—
But when he thought carefully about it, it also felt like he had never truly managed to display anything at all.
Not only did Xie Yue fail to understand how Chen Ming accomplished this seemingly prophetic fighting style, even the others present could not comprehend it either.
"The ways humans exert force have limits. As long as you analyze the skeletal structure of the body, analyze the growth direction of the muscles and the mechanics of force generation, you can construct a model."
"If your calculations are sufficient enough, then every tiny muscular reaction can be used to reverse-engineer the next movement. Every lifted hand, every subtle detail, can reveal the body's coming action."
"Your Moon Blade Martial Soul is strong, and your technique itself is good. But your movements are too easy to predict. Your actions are too simple. Seeing through your next move isn't difficult for me."
Chen Ming explained this method in an extremely casual tone, despite it being something completely incomprehensible to normal Spirit Masters.
Scientifically speaking, the technique he used was a human movement prediction model generated through large-scale calculations based on human body structure.
Put in more martial-arts-like terms, it was basically Dugu Nine Swords.
The structure of the human body existed within fixed limits. The ways force could be generated were ultimately constrained.
As long as the proper predictive model was applied, one could deduce exactly how a person's movements would unfold.
This was extremely difficult to apply against beast-type Spirit Masters whose bodies underwent beastification, because even identical Martial Souls could produce different effects on different Spirit Masters. Changes in skeletal structure after Martial Soul possession were common.
But against tool-type Martial Souls—where the body was fundamentally still human and merely wielding a weapon—
It was far too easy.
"I can't understand it."
Xie Yue clutched his chest, feeling a suffocating frustration trapped inside him, but in the end he could only shake his head helplessly.
Three Spirit Ancestors taking turns fighting a single Spirit Elder—
Not only had they failed to win, they had even been defeated in the very areas they specialized in most.
No matter how proud someone was, they would no longer have the face to continue arguing after that.
Hu Liena staggered unsteadily, while the less injured Xie Yue carried the freshly treated Yan on his back.
The siblings lowered their heads and left quickly, feeling as though their faces were burning hot with humiliation.
Especially Hu Liena.
After learning that Bibi Dong was displeased with Chen Ming, she had originally wanted to suppress him in her own way to cheer up her teacher.
But after today's outcome, Hu Liena could not even imagine how furious her teacher would become upon hearing about it.
Moreover, Hu Liena herself was extremely prideful.
Among the three of them, she had lasted the shortest amount of time and had been utterly crushed in spiritual power by a Spirit Master of lower rank than herself.
To her, it felt as though her pride had been ripped to shreds.
But the rules of the Spirit Master world had always been simple—
The winner takes it all.
The loser swallows dust.
Once defeated, anything the loser said became wrong by default.
So the two who were still conscious did not even dare leave behind a harsh word before departing.
"At least they know how to accept defeat."
Chen Ming nodded and gave them the bare minimum evaluation.
After casually jumping off the arena, chatting with several Spirit Hall bishops nearby, answering a few questions regarding the Douluo Heart Method, and examining a few of their Martial Souls to offer development suggestions, Chen Ming returned to his normal routine.
Then, the very next day after this small incident, the team led by Lion Douluo and Glowing Feather Douluo finally returned to Spirit City.
Spirit Beasts were easy to kill, but difficult to capture alive.
Even low-level Spirit Beasts would fall into frenzied self-destruction once imprisoned by humans, while high-level Spirit Beasts could directly sever their own life force or simply self-destruct outright.
As a result, killing Spirit Beasts was easy, but imprisoning them as future Spirit Ring reserves was extremely difficult in this era.
For ten thousand years, humanity had never stopped attempting to domesticate Spirit Beasts.
Yet even after all that time, humans had only succeeded in taming a small number of naturally docile beast-types similar to livestock or horses.
And even those had to be raised from infancy.
For this hunting team, killing ten-thousand-year Spirit Beasts was simple.
But capturing them alive, ensuring they suffered minimal injury, and gathering a wide variety of species—
Even for this team, it still required considerable time.