Chapter 4802 — A Fierce Battle
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Wei Zhao had faced many formidable foes, but an opponent like Leng Rufeng he had never met. Even when he had faced the Old Sect of the Western Mountains, he had been nowhere near as shaken as this.
Facing the Old Sect of the Western Mountains, he had known the gulf in strength was vast, so whatever heaven-defying means they produced had seemed only natural. Leng Rufeng was different. Wei Zhao had fully believed he had a fighting chance—but after witnessing that staggering scene, he knew at once that he had been fooling himself.
In the end, his own cultivation was simply too low. A mere mid Nascent Soul cultivator facing an expert comparable to the late Profound Ascension stage—by any measure it was far too much to ask. If he could win under such conditions, that would be the true abnormality.
Even so, there was no chance Wei Zhao would concede so easily. On the contrary, he was now truly fired up. Some men weaken before the strong; others grow stronger. Wei Zhao was plainly the latter.
Seeing the battle intent surging ever more fiercely in Wei Zhao's eyes, a faint change came over Leng Rufeng's expressionless face. Slowly he raised the ice blade in his hand and leveled it at Wei Zhao. "Yield, or die."
Wei Zhao's pupils contracted sharply. The pressure this man had given off before was terrifying enough, but now, with an ice blade in hand, that incomparable oppressive force had multiplied more than tenfold. It felt like a great mountain pressing down on his head—rebellion was out of the question; to merely keep his feet steady now would mark him as a rare tough specimen indeed.
Blade force! A thought flashed through Wei Zhao's mind. This was the realm every bladesman in legend dreamed of—not an aura conjured from mighty true qi and cultivation, but a blade force born purely of devotion to and understanding of the blade, wrested into being to stand against heaven and earth themselves.
Swordsmen held to the union of man and sword; bladesmen, by contrast, held to carving out a world of their own. Once blade force was achieved, ten thousand men could not stand against it.
Wei Zhao was shaken to the core. He had never imagined his opponent was a monster who had cultivated blade force. No wonder the man could cleave his five-element killing aura in two with a single stroke. How was he supposed to fight this?
Seeing Wei Zhao stubbornly refuse to yield, Leng Rufeng had no patience to wait further. Without another word he casually slashed. The ice blade, a mere few feet long, had grown to a giant blade several zhang in length by the time it reached Wei Zhao's head. Below the arena, Ning Xuefei turned pale with fright—at this rate, Wei Zhao would be split clean in two!
Fortunately, that moment of extreme peril did not last long. When Ning Xuefei peered through her fingers at the arena again, Wei Zhao had already darted more than ten zhang away, and appeared to be safe and sound.
"Interesting." Leng Rufeng regarded Wei Zhao with new respect. No one knew better than he the power of this world of ice and snow; the constraints it placed on the functions of the physical body were, frankly, insane. Combined with the devastating terror of his blade force, let alone a mere Nascent Soul expert—even a Profound Ascension expert of his own level would be unable to move, fit only to be cut down with a single stroke.
Yet to his surprise, the speed Wei Zhao had displayed in that instant was still considerable, seemingly little different from before. That was truly baffling.
How could Leng Rufeng know that Wei Zhao had only been using the Transcendent Butterfly Microstep before, whereas this time, to save his life, he had gone all out with the Transcendent Limit Butterfly Microstep? To sustain sufficient physical function, he had now resorted to an extreme-overload state at tremendous cost—only thus could he guarantee his speed. (To be continued...)