Ken refused to kneel. His body shook, but his eyes burned bright with defiance. Lightning coiled around his arms, a serpent's snarl of desperate energy.
"I am Ken Renzo of the Cloud Continent! My Qi bends storms!"
He thrust his palms forward—"Tempest Severing Wave!"
A wall of roaring light shot toward Herja. Then another. And another. The attacks filled the sky, fracturing the floating arena with the brilliance of a small sun.
Herja didn't move. Her aura remained dim, like the faint hum of a faraway star. Each blast of Qi that touched her simply… vanished. Not exploded. Not deflected. Vanished—like sound swallowed by a void.
Her expression softened with a trace of pity.
"I've given you enough chances, Ken Renzo. Now…"
Her eyes gleamed with emerald fire light.
"I'm ready to move on."
Herja made a funny movement and whipped her right arm like whip her thumb and index finger coming together, she flicked Kenrenzo with her index finger!
KA-BOOM!
Ken's aura shattered in an instant, the lattice of his Qi collapsing like broken crystal. His chest seized as the flow of energy through his meridians inverted and then ruptured. He didn't even have time to cry out before he was flung backward, his body tumbling end over end.
The crowd's collective gasp drowned the silence that followed. Ken's figure hit the arena's golden boundary light, burst through it, and vanished into the shimmering mist below.
For one suspended heartbeat, no one spoke.
Then the Emperor's voice rolled across the heavens, deep and commanding, resonating through every cultivator's bones:
"Fear not. I have the boy."
Golden tendrils of Qi rose from the mist, cradling Ken's unconscious body like a fallen son.
Herja exhaled softly and turned away, her footsteps echoing faintly on the stone. "Cloud Continent's prodigy," she murmured, "too bright to see the shadows."
Prince Edward's lips parted slightly as Ken's broken form disappeared into the golden mist. For a long moment, he said nothing—his royal mask, usually so perfectly composed, cracked just enough for the faintest tremor of disbelief to flicker across his features.
He had fought Ken Renzo before. He knew the man's strength—the precision of his wind Qi, the near-perfect rhythm of his meridian flow. Ken was not weak. Ken was a prodigy. And yet Herja had erased him with a flick.
"So that's… the strength of Mystic Central's champion," he murmured, his hand tightening, "That wasn't power. That was...negation."
Across the arena, Herja stood as though none of it had happened. Her expression was calm, even bored. Her aura was faint, barely perceptible to those who could not see beyond surface flows of energy. But I had watched the whole exchange with the Eye of Heaven, the truth unfolded layer by layer.
I focused my intent and watched the threads of reality deepen into a luminous geometry. Herja's Qi was unlike anything I had ever witnessed. It had a bottomless well like feel to it. When Ken's lightning had struck her, I saw it briefly. It had been subtracted. The additive energy of Ken's technique had entered Herja's field and simply ceased to exist. Like a drop of water into a well.
My brow furrowed.
It was well understood to cultivators that we lived in a world of polarities, up, and down. sweat and sour, hot and cold, positive and negative, additive and subtractive. Therefore it was an accepted school of thought to cultivators within the martial path that mental energy or Intent was a ''negative force'' or 'subtractive.' Intent was what guided or shaped 'Qi' yet Qi itself was regarded as a positive or ''additive force.'' Meaning whatever Intent that Qi was shaped by, Qi would produce more of it. But in Herja the reverse seemed to be true, Her Qi seemed to be subtractive, meaning her qi didn't multiply, it subtracted!
Herja was something incredibly rare, known as 'Flips' in some cultivation circles. Human beings born with flipped polarity pools. They had additive mental energy and subtractive Qi and
A cold thrill ran down my spine. "So that's what she is," I thought. "A 'flipped cultivator' whose very Subtractive Qi can nullify all Additive Qi based attacks. Furthermore, a subtractive based attack on a regular additive cultivator would prove devastating to them.
"If her Qi is subtractive… then perhaps her negative QI pool capacity defines how much in coming damage she can erase."
My spiritual senses stretched further, tasting the faint ripples left in the air. I felt where her presence had bitten into space itself, small absences in the world's flow—pockets of null energy.
"What happens if the incoming damage is more than her pool can swallow?" I wondered aloud. "And what happens if two subtractive energies meet? Would they nullify one another—or would they merge into something far more catastrophic?"
Curiosity burned in me like a second sun.
I turned inward and summoned the Philosopher's Stone—a relic of pure transmutation, its spiritual presence coiling in my consciousness like molten gold. Its surface shimmered with runes of balance and opposition, the eternal dance of addition and subtraction, creation and erasure.
"Stone," I whispered mentally, my thoughts rippling through the bond, "show me the truth of negative Qi."
The Philosopher's Stone pulsed once, light blooming like dawn behind his eyes. Ancient symbols unfolded in my mind's space—spirals, inversions, equations of energy. I saw that Qi and thought were twin forces Qi was the additive impulse of being, and Mind as the subtractive impulse of form.
The Philosopher's Stone dimmed, as if retreating into contemplation.
I looked back toward Herja, who now stood still as a statue, the faintest shimmer of void dancing at her fingertips. He smiled faintly, not out of arrogance, but wonder.
"Subtractive Qi," I murmured. "A miracle gift, or bloodline power, given to perhaps one in ten million births. But could it be learned?"
And for the first time since the tournament began, I felt a whisper of excitement. Not fear, not rivalry—but the pull of an incredible discovery, the promise of spiritual knowledge, the chance to reflect and comprehend a deeper truth so deep it threatened to undo the very model I sought to master.
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