The forest held its breath.
Steam drifted in ragged curls from the Water Spirit Curtain encasing Yang Yin Long—a wavering dome of liquid light hammered thin by relentless impact. The Turtle Shield revolved in a heavy, wobbling arc, gouged and spider-cracked; the Jade Shield, once pristine, now spun in stuttering bursts, a chalky fracture running from edge to heart like a frozen bolt of lightning.
At his feet lay the sundered halves of the Golden Spirit Sword, its spiritual light extinguished. The last clash with the Wind Fang Wolf King had snapped the blade's will clean in two. Any ordinary cultivator would have wept then and there. Yang Yin Long simply breathed—long in, long out—tasting iron at the back of his throat.
Around him, the pack flowed like a gray river, tightening the circle by slow degrees. More than twenty wolves, pelts trembling with wind qi, eyes like cold lamps in the undergrowth. They were not frenzied; they were disciplined. Every lunge, every feint, every scrape across the barrier—the rhythm was controlled by the silver-furred monarch that watched him without blinking.
The Wolf King's breath plumed in the chill air, each exhale carving threads in the fog.
The curtain will hold for one, maybe two more coordinated waves, Yang Yin Long judged, sensing the strain through wrists and forearms. If the king moves with them, it breaks.
He didn't wait for that moment to arrive.
His right hand flicked, and a high-grade talisman shot from his sleeve, spinning end-over-end until the green ink sigils flashed awake.
"Wood Entrapment—bind."
The earth convulsed. Thick wooden vines exploded from the soil like coiled serpents tasting air, spiraling toward the Wolf King in a lattice of snarling growth. The first loop caught a foreleg; the second bit the torso; the third circled the neck. The vines tightened with a groan, bark fibers straining against sovereign musculature.
The Wolf King snarled and planted its paws, muscles swelling under silver fur. Wind qi surged—an invisible gale that tried to cut the bindings from within. Bark shredded; fibers unspooled; the vines sang as they stretched past reason but did not break.
Not yet.
The lesser wolves didn't pause. Trusting their king to free itself, they surged as one and slammed into the Water Curtain. The barrier shuddered so hard the mist above fractured like glass. Yang Yin Long felt the shock strike up through the soles of his feet and into his teeth.
He didn't check whether the vines would hold another breath.
In the same motion as the talisman, he palmed a small black bead and hurled it at the Wolf King's breast.
A first-order Thunder Pearl—no higher, nothing glorious, but reliable in all the ways that mattered. He'd bought three of them a year ago and hoarded them like winter grain. This was not the moment to be stingy.
"Burst."
A white arc kissed the bead.
KATHOOM—!
Lightning unfurled like a torn banner. For an instant the Wolf King became a shape of bone and flame inside a spear of light. The smell of burned fur rolled across the pack; a wet crackle sounded as arcs danced between vine and flesh. The king's roar tore the fog in half.
The pack hesitated—one heartbeat only—and then, enraged by their monarch's injury, howled and leapt.
They hit the Water Curtain in a storm. Claws screeched. Fangs carved. Bodies launched shoulder-first, using weight and wind qi like a hammer. The dome collapsed inward by a hand's breadth. The Turtle Shield skated across Yang Yin Long's elbow and took a hit meant for his ribs with a sound like a drumhead splitting; the Jade Shield stuttered and corrected, intercepting a fang-line that would have taken his ear.
He couldn't outlast this. Not with a shattered sword, a failing barrier, and half his meridians vibrating from backlash.
So he stopped thinking in terms of defending and thought only about ending.
He drew a long breath through the nose and let the world narrow: the ripples of the curtain, the timing of the pack, the pulse of the injured monarch still straining in vines that sang and frayed. He set his right foot, loosened his hips, and raised his hands.
Wood qi rose.
It didn't pour—it grew: budding in joints, uncoiling along tendons, unfurling in concentric rings that found their own geometry. From his forearm blossomed a vine of pure qi, supple as wet willow, alive with the springward urge of growth.
Metal qi followed, sheathing the living line in gleaming edge—turning flex into cut, grace into bite. A razor glow crept along the spiral, thin as a moonlit hair.
Finally, Fire qi. He did not let it explode as before; he compressed it, breath by breath, until heat soaked into the metal sheath and turned the golden vine red-white at the edges. Not flame licking, not sparks spitting—heat residing, a smith's patience rather than a volcano's tantrum.
' Scorching Metal Vine.'
He moved.
Turn of the hips.
Weight from the ground.
Arms following only at the end of the chain.
He spun.
The vine wrote a circle of hurt in the air.
SHHKK—SHK—SHK—SHK—!
Every touch was a confession from matter itself: that flesh could be persuaded to part if asked with sufficient reason. The first wolf's flank opened from shoulder to belly in a red line that sealed black at the edges; the second's foreleg severed clean, cauterized to a stump; the third caught the backstroke across the jaw and went down with half a face, smoke lifting from bone.
He didn't stop.
A second rotation took three more, and the third rotation—shorter, tighter, more controlled—ripped a long gash across the ribs of an eighth-stage brute, knocking it spinning end over end. The pack recoiled in a scatter of paws and whimpers. Some tried to dart low under the sweep and got caught by the return angle; others leapt and met the upper arc. The vine met every altitude with the same answer.
By the time Yang Yin Long's heels planted and he halted the spin with a breath that hurt his back, the leaf-litter was a slurry. Half the pack lay still; the rest danced sidewise, ears flattened, eyes wild. The eighth-stage wolf limped, bleeding badly, torn open to the bone at the ribs.
He didn't grin, didn't crow. He simply adjusted his breath and prepared to do it again.
Which is when the Wolf King, lightning still crackling off singed fur, tore the vines apart.
They didn't break all at once; that would have been merciful. They lengthened, screaming as fibers uncoiled past reason, sawed by wind from the inside out. The last loop around the neck snapped with a report like a bowstring, the recoil whipping deep grooves in the ground.
The monarch moved.
The world tilted.
It wasn't speed that made the Wolf King frightening; it was authority. When it came on, the pack didn't dare move with it. The wind wrapped its body as a sheath wraps a blade, and everything less than monarch in its path simply… made way.
The first impact was on the Turtle Shield—a blow so heavy it changed the poor artifact's shape. The second was fangs on the Jade Shield, and elegant jade became shattered chalk—a million pale snowflakes tumbling inside the Water Curtain.
The third impact was on Yang Yin Long.
He didn't remember the flight, only the tree arriving. The bark bit his back; breath fled his chest in a single ugly sound. His vision doubled and refused to become one again. Somewhere in the mess of sensation he felt the Water Curtain cinch itself smaller, tighter, a reflexive contraction around the single thing it still called center.
The Wolf King staggered, too—its breast burned where the Thunder Pearl had kissed it, fur curled at the edges of that wound, skin blistered beneath. It wasn't unharmed, merely unaccustomed to harm. Its lips peeled back from long knives.
They both understood what came next.
The monarch gathered itself, wind pressing into a shape around its skull—a helmet of invisible edge.
Yang Yin Long forced his right hand to stop shaking.
Metal qi first: density, bite, weight. Not showy, not bright; the kind of strength you argue with only once.
Then Fire qi: compression without detonation, heat stored in structure, the promise of softening any matter that dared pretend to permanence.
His palm brightened by degrees until the air above it wavered. The Scorching Metal Palm hummed without sound.
The Wolf King leapt.
He didn't retreat. He turned half a step to the side—a cultivator's bow to inevitability—and met the monarch's head with the precise economy of a man hammering a chisel.
CRR-RAAACK—!
The palm didn't break bone—it changed bone. In the instant of touch, the heat persuaded the skull to become something else. The crash was both sound and feeling—the yielding of structure, the scream of wind qi suddenly with nothing smooth to flow around.
The Wolf King reeled, legs splaying as equilibrium abandoned it.
Yang Yin Long didn't admire the moment. He stepped in, let his weight cascade, and set the second strike down at the exact same point, as if he were stamping a seal into wax.
The skull caved. Not shattered—collapsed, rippling inward; the eyes went out like lamps pinched between fingers. The body slumped forward on dead nerves, jaws still trying to close.
They stopped a hand's width from his throat.
Silence.
It came first as a deficit—the absence of claws on barrier, of breath on fog, of wind chewing leaves. Then it arrived as a presence: the quiet shape of a forest willing to resume being a forest.
The remaining wolves did the math their king could no longer do. The wounded eight-stage brute staggered once, whined to a sky that had stopped listening, and fled. The mid-stagers didn't try to carry their dead. They were not cultivators; they weren't taught to love their own legends.
Yang Yin Long stood in the middle of a circle of steam and stench and did not move until his hands stopped shaking.
Only then did he let the Water Spirit Curtain loosen and fall away into mist.
He folded the ruined pieces of the Jade Shield into his bag. The Turtle Shield, valiant to the end, wouldn't survive a second mending; he set it gently against a trunk and bowed to it as one would to a plow worn down by faithful years.
The halves of the Golden Spirit Sword he wrapped in cloth. There would be time—later—for grief, or gratitude, or the vulgar mathematics of replacement.
He sat with his back to a tree and took stock, the way farmers count seeds after hail:
Mana: low, but not crushed.
Meridians: ached along the metal and fire routes; wood channels warm and compliant.
Artifacts: one gone, one broken, one memorialized.
Body: bruised everywhere that could be bruised, a cough tasting of copper, two ribs speaking in sharp syllables.
And yet—
He smiled, small and private.
"Technique… still counts."
He let his breath smooth. In the quiet, the thoughts he'd pushed aside during the fight returned in order, like dutiful servants:
One — His Scorching Metal Vine technique worked outside the theory table. The compression phase was the key; fire couldn't sit on the surface, it had to live inside the metal sheath. He'd nearly blown his own hand off the first time he tried a shortcut. Lesson recorded, debt to pain acknowledged.
Two — He needed late-stage spells—real ones. The handful of entry-level methods honed to razor discipline had carried him far, but scaffolding isn't a house. He'd survived on control and improvisation; the next time might require presence—weight in the world that only a perfected art confers.
Three — Concealment would matter more than victory. He had stepped from seventh to ninth layer of Qi Condensation between yesterday's dawn and this morning's blood. The sect had eyes for sudden brightness. He could explain away the realm rise—fight, fear, fortune. But if anyone sensed the potential sleeping in his dantian, or the three gourd fruits concealed like ordinary vine's children, curiosity would graduate into hunger.
He pulled a strip of cloth from his belt, bound his ribs tight, and stood. The simple act of getting upright hurt enough to be instructive.
"Lesson four—carry more pills," he muttered, half to himself, half to the trees. "You're not a poet. You don't need to savor the pain to appreciate the Dao."
He surveyed the ruined ground one last time. The Wolf King's core would fetch a price; its hide, even burned and caved, could be worked. But staying meant attention, and attention was a currency he couldn't afford.
He cut free what he could with a utility knife and moved on, steps steady, breath disciplined into the familiar geometry of the Qi-Nurturing Technique: Wood feeds Fire, Fire refines Earth, Earth births Metal, Metal nourishes Water, Water returns to Wood. The quiet circle completed itself, and in its wake his thoughts cooled.
By the time the sun tilted west, he'd put two ridgelines between himself and the battlefield. The forest changed timbre; the wind lost its knife and became merely a hand on the shoulder. Insects remembered their business. A hawk wrote its single sentence across the sky.
Only then did Yang Yin Long permit himself a sliver of reflection that wasn't a tactical critique.
"If every trip down the mountain is like this," he said softly, the humor dry as old wood, "it's a wonder the immortals haven't run out of mortals to recruit."
A branch creaked above, answered by another farther along—just trees talking to wind, no teeth in the sound. He rolled his shoulders and set his course toward the faint tug of the city's warding formation—distant, familiar, judgmental.
He would need to change techniques soon—exchange the neutral grace of the Qi-Nurturing seed for a trunk strong enough to carry a Foundation. He would need to choose eyes that would not see too much of him and a library shelf that would pretend not to mind being plundered.
He touched the inside of his wrist where a new pulse sometimes seemed to beat—a rhythm not entirely his own—and let his hand fall.
"Later," he told the ache, the hunger, the memory of violet light and lotus ash. "Later comes when I say it does."
And walked on.
The forest let him pass.
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End of Chapter 10 (Corrected).