"..."
Ning Xue stared at him, half terrified, half enchanted.
"And her energy beam?" she whispered.
"Same logic, don't block, don't resist... Slice."
He gestured a clean line in the air.
"A thin blade of energy with two horizontal slips. Her beam hit the knife-edge and slid around it like water around a fin."
Ning Xue felt her entire worldview tilt.
She had always assumed the way to beat an attack was simple:
Be stronger than the attack.
He made it look like:
understand the attack → understand its direction → waste least of your own energy → let the enemy beat themselves.
And the frightening part?
It scaled perfectly.
If she learned these principles on small stones and small beams, she could replicate them at continental scale.
"Energy is irrelevant if the method is flawed," Wang Xiao said.
He looked at her then, expression soft.
"The Star System was meant to teach this. Every constellation was a metaphor for motion, not a spell pattern."
