The following week, the atmosphere in the Verdant Mountain Sect shifted. The impending tournament cast a competitive pall, and the disciples selected for the squad—Zhang Fan and Liu Mei—were given extra resources and training. The rest, including Li Yao, were expected to maintain their duties and serve as training partners.
Li Yao didn't mind. Being a training partner for the increasingly frantic disciples was a perfect laboratory for his "Unseen Ripple."
He was paired with Zhang Fan in the dueling circle—a flat, packed-earth ring inscribed with simple formation runes to contain stray energy. Zhang Fan cracked his knuckles, a confident smirk on his face.
"Try your 'emptiness' trick on this, Junior Brother," he taunted, his body already flaring with the gathered energy of the Energy Perception Realm. The air around him wavered with heat.
"I shall do my best to be an instructive void," Li Yao replied, settling into a basic, non-threatening stance.
Zhang Fan lunged. His fist, wreathed in a faint, fiery aura, shot towards Li Yao's chest. It was the "Shattering Rock Fist," a basic but powerful Verdant Mountain technique.
Li Yao didn't block. He didn't dodge. He simply breathed out, focusing on the Second Verse. He became the ripple. He let his awareness expand to feel the pressure of the incoming force, the flow of Zhang Fan's fiery energy, the way the very air law bent around the attack.
At the moment of impact, he didn't resist. He accepted. And in that acceptance, he created a microscopic point of void in the path of the fist's kinetic energy.
Thwump.
The sound was wrong. It was dull, hollow, like punching a sack of sand. Zhang Fan's fist connected, but the force didn't transfer. The fiery aura around his hand guttered and died on contact, snuffed out like a candle in a vacuum. Zhang Fan stumbled forward, his own unchecked momentum carrying him past Li Yao, his arm feeling numb and strangely empty.
He whirled around, his face a mask of confusion and anger. "What did you do?"
"I was struck," Li Yao said, blinking innocently. "Your form is very powerful, Senior Brother. It quite took my breath away." This, too, was technically true.
"Again!" Zhang Fan roared, this time channeling more energy, his aura burning brighter. He unleashed a flurry of blows, a storm of fists and kicks meant to overwhelm.
Li Yao moved, but it wasn't the agile, darting movement of a skilled martial artist. It was a drifting, almost lazy series of shifts and turns. He was like smoke. He didn't evade the attacks so much as he allowed them to pass through the spaces he was no longer occupying. Where a glancing blow did land, it was met with that same profound, energy-sapping hollowness.
To the watching disciples, it looked bizarre. Zhang Fan was a whirlwind of power and fury, and Li Yao was a ghost at its center, untouched and unbothered. His robes didn't even rustle properly.
"Stand still and fight!" Zhang Fan bellowed, his energy reserves depleting rapidly from the wasteful, unconnected assaults.
"Fighting requires meeting force with force," Li Yao mused aloud, sidestepping a kick that seemed to slow and die as it neared his leg. "I find I have very little force to meet you with. It's a personal failing."
Elder Guo, watching from the sidelines, stroked his beard, his eyes narrowed in intense focus. He wasn't seeing a fight; he was seeing a demonstration. Every time Zhang Fan's energy was nullified, it was a lesson in the fragility of conventional power against this new, unsettling principle.
Finally, panting and enraged, Zhang Fan gathered all his energy for one final, desperate technique. He stomped the ground, and a wave of Earth energy, sharpened into stone shards, shot towards Li Yao along the ground. It was the "Rumbling Earth Spike," a technique that was impossible to dodge by conventional means.
Li Yao looked at the incoming wave of sharpened stone and energy. He didn't jump. He didn't try to smash it. He simply knelt and placed a single palm on the earth in front of him.
He became the Unseen Ripple at its point of origin.
The wave of Earth energy and stone hit his palm and simply… flattened. It didn't explode. It didn't deflect. It was absorbed into a point of absolute stillness. The sharp shards of rock lost their edge and momentum, crumbling into harmless dust that settled at his knees. The ground behind him was completely untouched.
Silence.
Zhang Fan stood, chest heaving, staring at the completely neutralized technique. His confidence was in tatters.
Li Yao stood up, brushing the dust from his knees. "A most impressive technique, Senior Brother. The control required to unleash such power is truly admirable."
His tone was so genuinely complimentary that it completely disarmed Zhang Fan's anger, leaving only a hollow, bewildered shame.
Elder Guo stepped forward. "Enough. Zhang Fan, your energy is wild and unfocused. You rely on brute force. Li Yao… has shown us that there is more than one path to defense. Meditate on this."
As the crowd dispersed, buzzing with confused whispers, Liu Mei, the quiet Mist-Talent girl, approached Li Yao. Her eyes, usually downcast, held a spark of keen intelligence.
"That was not a sect technique," she stated softly.
Li Yao smiled. "Is the wind a technique? Is the stillness of a pond a technique? I merely practiced being… receptive."
She studied him for a long moment, then gave a slow, thoughtful nod. "To be so receptive that you receive nothing at all. An interesting path." She turned and left without another word.
That night, in the depths of his meditation, Li Yao felt the single drop of void essence in his dantian pulse. It didn't grow larger, but it seemed to deepen, its darkness becoming more absolute. By nullifying Zhang Fan's attacks, by being the ripple that defined the wave, he had comprehended a fundamental truth about the Earth Law: its need for a solid medium. He had given it nothing to push against, and so it had failed.
The Void Scripture shimmered in his mind, new concepts unfolding.
He was no longer just emptying himself. He was learning to use his emptiness as a tool, a lens, a shield. The Mortal Foundation Realm was about building a vessel. He had built an abyss. And now, he was learning that an abyss could not be filled, but it could certainly swallow anything foolish enough to try.
The tournament at the Nexus Peak was beginning to look less like a distant dream and more like a very interesting place to be profoundly, world-alteringly empty.