Chapter 3789 — Blinding the Dog's Eyes
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 3
The martial art he specialized in was as blunt and unsubtle as his own temperament: seemingly an ordinary, run-of-the-mill technique, yet in truth formidable. Among the common martial arts of the cultivation world, it ranked as the foremost of the hard and unyielding—Iron Cold Palm.
Qiao Hongcai was a cultivator of the ice attribute, and Iron Cold Palm was likewise one of the martial arts reserved for ice-attribute cultivators!
Seeing Qiao Hongcai take that stance, Meng Zhou burst out laughing. "Iron Cold Palm? You dare trot out a scrap of chicken ribs like that, and think to answer my Twenty-One Forms of a Thousand Legs? Qiao the Waste, you're begging for death—don't blame me for kicking a man when he's down!"
With that, the thousandfold leg shadows already encircling Qiao Hongcai tightened abruptly. Never mind that amid so many shadows true and false were all but impossible to tell apart—even if the smoke of his ancestors' graves did rise and he somehow guessed right, dodging the single lethal leg, every remaining shadow stacked together would still pack more than enough killing force to snuff out a peak Heaven-Rank expert outright!
Of all the common martial arts, Iron Cold Palm's destructive power ranked among the first tier—but that was all. Beyond raw lethality, Iron Cold Palm fell short in every other respect, not even measuring up to the bottom rung, and its straight thrusts and lack of variation were especially damning. If it could not so much as land a blow on a man, what use was all that force?
Thus Iron Cold Palm had long been acknowledged in the cultivation world as a martial art of chicken bones, bottom of the barrel even among ordinary common techniques. Even a rootless, resourceless lone cultivator at the very bottom of the pile would turn up his nose at such scraps—unless he happened to have a hole where his brains ought to be.
By contrast, the Thousand Legs that Meng Zhou had cultivated was in a far loftier class: in offense and defense alike, and in the natural boost it lent to body speed, it ranked among the rare and excellent choices. Between the two lay the difference between heaven and mud.
Put simply, strip away the matter of innate body attributes, set Thousand Legs and Iron Cold Palm side by side, and let ten thousand cultivators choose—at least nine thousand nine hundred and ninety would pick Thousand Legs without a moment's hesitation. As for the remaining ten, nine of them would still choose Thousand Legs after a brief pause; only the last one might conceivably entertain some sudden whim for Iron Cold Palm, and in the end he would probably give up on it too.
It is no exaggeration to say that between experts of the same tier, a Thousand Legs user facing an Iron Cold Palm user could not be called absolutely superior—but he could be a hundred percent certain of holding absolute initiative.
Under normal circumstances, a master of Iron Cold Palm might brim with killing force yet never so much as graze the hem of a Thousand Legs expert, left only to be toyed with at his opponent's pleasure. Such was the advantage that the martial art itself conferred.
If experts of the same tier suffered so great a disadvantage, how much worse when one stood at peak Heaven-Rank and the other only at early Foundation Establishment? To anyone with an ounce of common sense, such a matchup held not the slightest suspense.
Qiao the Waste was bound to die this time—that was the thought that leapt into the minds of nearly every Qingyun Pavilion newcomer in the crowd below. Naturally, Wei Zhao and his companions were the exceptions.
In the span of a breath, Qiao Hongcai's plain and unadorned Iron Cold Palm met Meng Zhou's gathered thousandfold leg shadows—and then a tremendous quake shook the stage, as a giant golden palmprint flashed forth and tore straight through the leg shadows!