Chapter 3750 — The Long Wait
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
For at the speed Yu Jiang had now revealed, that earlier strike, glaring as its flaw had been, would still have left him a fair chance of evading if he had gone all out. Had Wei Zhao simply and honestly cashed in the one killing move that might put the opponent down, the joke would truly have been on him.
Clearly, after falling into Wei Zhao's psychological trap, the creature had not been as panicked as he had let on; rather, he had turned it around and set a snare of his own. Had Wei Zhao believed he had spotted a fatal flaw and thrown everything into a desperate all-out assault, he would by now be a corpse on the ground.
A dangerous, cunning creature indeed—scheming in every last inch of him!
Closing on Wei Zhao, Yu Jiang raised the sword qi at his fingertips high, and from the set of his stance it seemed he meant to cleave Wei Zhao in two from head to foot with a single stroke.
And in truth, had he brought that stroke down so directly, and had Wei Zhao failed to evade it in time, such an end would have been all but certain—for this sword qi was sharper and mightier than the last, and even meeting it with the strongest of his arts, the Roaring Fire Eight-Trigram Palm, Twenty-Second Stance, Wei Zhao might not have matched it.
Unfortunately for him, why would Wei Zhao be foolish enough to stand there and let himself be hewn?
As the sword qi bore down on him, Wei Zhao's instinct was to twist aside and dodge. Yet before he could move, a lethal warning flared up from the depths of his instincts, and at the same moment the jade pendant's space began to signal incessantly.
Watching Wei Zhao's sidestepping motion, Yu Jiang's eyes took on a flicker of contemptuous mockery. As expected—before absolute strength, every scheme and trick was a superfluous joke. Bring out one's strongest killing move directly, and the opponent had no chance whatever of escaping this calamity!
Not to dodge meant death; to dodge meant death as well. This was his bottom-of-the-box strongest killing move: the Life-Reaping Chain Sword, Twenty-Fourth Stance.
A fearsome technique that could be cultivated only after reaching the mid Foundation Establishment stage. His opponent was nothing but a rootless rogue cultivator at the mere peak of the early Foundation Establishment stage—how could he possibly evade it so easily?
A single sword descending from on high seemed to grant the opponent a chance to dodge, but in truth it granted none at all—for the Life-Reaping Chain Sword, Twenty-Fourth Stance, did not end with this one sword. Behind it waited a second, still more lethal sword.
Sure enough, Wei Zhao had barely begun his motion to dodge right when he discovered that another "Yu Jiang" had been standing there all along, no one knew since when, sword qi of peerless sharpness likewise gathered at his fingertips. This "Yu Jiang" had been waiting here for some time!
It was not the true body, merely a phantom conjured for a time by the power of the Life-Reaping Chain Sword, Twenty-Fourth Stance. Yet though the man Yu Jiang was false, the sword qi was utterly real, its might identical to that gathered at the fingertips of the true body.
At a mere thought, this second, trailing sword qi and its phantom could appear anywhere within two zhang of him. Thus, however the opponent dodged, he might at best evade the first sword—but he could never, ever evade the second. This was the ruthless tyranny of the Life-Reaping Chain Sword, Twenty-Fourth Stance!
"Rest easy and die," Yu Jiang said with a faint smile at the "terror-stricken" Wei Zhao. Because Wei Zhao had dodged, the sword qi in his true body's hand had been cleanly split apart—but the one in the phantom's hand struck Wei Zhao squarely in the back.