The itch deep inside my torn left hamstring was driving me insane.
I sat on the crumbled edge of the eastern boundary wall, digging my thumb aggressively into the tight knot of healing muscle through my dark silk robes. It was the afternoon of the second day. Elder Zhao Feng's official, Imperial-backed inspection was scheduled for tomorrow morning.
Which meant, obviously, that he was going to try and murder us today.
I was staring at a patch of dry brown moss on the stones when the summer cicadas in the treeline suddenly stopped screaming.
It wasn't a gradual fade. It was an instant, collective cessation of noise, leaving a vacuum so heavy it made the atmospheric pressure drop.
"Five," Old Geezer's voice scraped against the inside of my skull. His tone was stripped of its usual mockery, replaced by a cold, metallic focus. "Core Formation. Stages Three and Four. They are masking their Qi signatures well, but they are rushing. They are not here to deliver paperwork."
My thumb stopped massaging my leg. The caffeine-withdrawal headache I had been nursing all morning flared violently. "Advance scouts," I muttered to the empty air.
"You have perhaps ten seconds."
I didn't jump up heroically. I carefully slid off the low wall, intentionally keeping my weight shifted to my right side to protect my compromised leg. I looked toward the main courtyard, measuring the distance against my absolute lack of mobility.
Before I could even initiate a limp, the smell of burnt copper and ozone flooded my sinuses.
Luo Yanfen dropped from the roof of the main hall like an anvil.
She didn't use the stairs. She just stepped off the terracotta tiles and let gravity do the work, her heavy leather boots impacting the cracked courtyard stones with a loud, unapologetic CRACK. Her fiery red hair was tied back in its usual fraying battle braid, but the Foundation Stage 9 aura rolling off her skin wasn't suppressed. It was leaking outward, heating the humid summer air until it shimmered and warped around her shoulders.
She marched straight past me, her amber eyes locked dead on the treeline.
"Stay out of my way," Yanfen snapped. Her voice was tight with the specific, aggressive joy of someone who had spent four days desperately looking for an excuse to hit something. "I haven't stretched my legs properly since the Army."
I stood still. I didn't have any Qi. I couldn't cast a protective shield, and a punch from a Core Formation cultivator would literally turn my ribcage into powder.
But I had Wei Liang's eyes. I had the dead man's lifetime of spatial awareness baked into my visual cortex, paired with a software engineer's obsessive, neurotic pattern recognition.
"I'll try not to trip you," I said softly, my voice completely flat.
The five scouts broke from the treeline three seconds later.
They wore dark gray infiltration robes, completely devoid of sect markings. Plausible deniability. If they killed us, Crimson Scale claimed the empty territory tomorrow. If they died, Zhao Feng had never met them in his life.
They didn't pause to deliver a monologue. The moment their boots hit the courtyard stones, the two men on the flanks blurred into motion, drawing short, brutally curved hooked blades.
Yanfen didn't draw a weapon. She let out a sharp, ugly laugh.
She lunged forward, meeting the center three head-on. The sheer, explosive concussive force of her Foundation Stage 9 Qi collided with their Core Formation auras. The impact sent a wave of blistering hot air across the courtyard that physically pushed me back half a step, singeing the tiny hairs on my forearms.
She fought exactly like she lived—blunt, explosive, and completely ignoring defense. She trusted her raw momentum to break their structure before they could counter. It was visually spectacular. It was also, mathematically, going to get her killed in about two minutes when her smaller Qi reserves ran dry.
The scout on the far left saw the opening.
He bypassed Yanfen entirely, his hooked blade gleaming as he completely ignored the girl and shot straight toward me.
"Right flank," Old Geezer noted.
I was already moving.
I didn't try to dodge backward. My torn hamstring wouldn't support the weight transfer, and dodging backward was exactly what a normal human would do. Instead, I took one sharp, highly unnatural step diagonally forward and to the left.
A spike of white-hot pain shot up my leg, making my vision pulse, but I forced my foot down. I stepped directly into the empty space between the attacker and Yanfen's blind spot.
I didn't throw a punch. I didn't summon magic. I just occupied the exact piece of geography the scout mathematically needed for his next footing.
The gray-robed man's eyes widened in shock. He had to violently adjust his trajectory mid-sprint to avoid colliding with my chest. He shifted his weight to his right leg, throwing his center of gravity off by exactly six inches.
Six inches was an eternity.
Yanfen was already spinning from a missed heavy punch on a different target. She didn't even have to aim. The scout's forced adjustment put his ribs directly, perfectly into the path of her sweeping back-kick.
CRACK.
The sound of his ribs shattering was sickeningly loud. It sounded like someone stepping on a bundle of dry kindling. The scout folded around Yanfen's heavy leather boot and was launched sideways into a stone pillar, spitting a thick spray of blood across the dirt.
Yanfen blinked, momentarily surprised by her own perfect, devastating connection.
I didn't stop moving.
I couldn't output Qi, but I was swimming in the ambient pressure of it. I could feel the displacement of the air. I walked through the chaos of the courtyard, my left leg dragging slightly, forcing my steps into an unhurried, measured stroll.
The second scout lunged for my neck. I paused, stopping my forward momentum completely. The sudden halt forced him to overextend his thrust. He sailed past my shoulder, the blade cutting a few strands of my hair.
His momentum carried him directly into Yanfen's waiting elbow. The wet crunch of his nose breaking made my stomach turn over violently.
I pivoted. My leg screamed. I took two steps forward, cutting off the retreat angle of the third and fourth scouts.
They saw me. They saw the "unfathomable" Sect Master casually stepping into their only escape route, completely unbothered by their auras, hands clasped loosely behind my back. Pure panic flickered in their eyes. They hesitated for a microsecond, their internal Qi flow stuttering at the perceived trap.
Yanfen didn't hesitate.
Her fists ignited. A trace fragment of raw, explosive heat wrapped around her knuckles, glowing a violent orange. She slammed both hands into the center of their compromised guards.
The detonation deafened me. The smell of burning hair and scorched flesh flooded the courtyard. The two men were thrown backward, their gray robes smoking, entirely unconscious before they even hit the ground.
The final scout, the leader, stood alone.
He looked at his four bleeding, broken subordinates scattered across the stones. He looked at the terrifying red-haired girl whose fists were literally smoking.
Then he looked at me.
I was standing exactly where I needed to be to cut off his line of sight to the main gate. My dark robes weren't even dusty. I hadn't raised a single finger, yet every time one of his men tried to move, I had somehow been standing exactly in the spot that forced them into the girl's meat-grinder.
To a Core Formation cultivator, it looked like I was manipulating the fundamental laws of probability.
The scout swallowed hard. He dropped his hooked blade. It clattered loudly on the stone. He turned and bolted for the perimeter wall, scrambling over the broken masonry like a frightened animal, tearing his robes on the jagged edges.
I didn't stop him.
The courtyard fell dead silent, save for the crackle of localized heat from Yanfen's hands and the wet groans of the unconscious men.
My left thigh was burning so furiously my vision was swimming with static. I locked my knee to hide the violent tremor in my leg. My mouth tasted like stale copper.
Yanfen stood amidst the bodies. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving, a thin layer of sweat making the soot on her face gleam. She looked at her smoking, bloodied knuckles. She looked at the perfect, contained geometry of where the bodies had fallen.
Then she slowly turned her head and locked her amber eyes on me.
She had survived the Crimson Phoenix Army. She knew exactly what a natural, chaotic fight felt like, and she knew what it felt like when someone else was quietly conducting the violence.
She marched toward me, stopping just inches away. The heat radiating off her armor felt like an open furnace door.
"Were you USING me?" Yanfen demanded. Her voice wasn't a roar; it was a low, ragged, dangerous growl.
I kept my face completely, aristocratically blank, desperately trying to control my breathing so I wouldn't hyperventilate in front of her.
"I was providing... context," I said. My voice was a little thinner than I wanted it to be.
"You steered them," she accused, pointing a leather-gloved, bloody finger at my chest. "You didn't throw a single strike! You just walked around and made them step exactly where my fists were already going!"
"Did you... prefer missing?" I asked.
Yanfen opened her mouth to scream. She closed it.
She looked back at the four Core Formation cultivators bleeding in the dirt. She was Foundation Stage 9. She should have lost that fight in two minutes, overwhelmed by their denser Qi. Instead, she had dismantled them with a brutal, terrifying efficiency she had never achieved on her own.
She turned back to me. Her jaw was tight, but I saw the minute flare of her nostrils. It was grudging, deeply irritating, overwhelming satisfaction. She had won harder than she had ever won in her life, and she was absolutely furious that she liked how it felt.
"Don't do it again without telling me," she snapped, turning away so quickly her braid whipped through the air. I could see the tips of her ears turning a violent shade of red.
Before my lungs could properly process oxygen again, the pristine blue interface of the system panel snapped open.
[ SOUL CULTIVATION BOND ARRAY — STATUS UPDATE ]
[ Resonance Advancing ]
[ Target: Luo Yanfen — Stage 0.6 → 0.8 / 5.0 ]
[ Trigger Event: Non-Verbal Combat Compatibility / Strategic Trust ]
The phantom spike in my head throbbed.
"A conductor and a hammer," Old Geezer murmured. His voice was quiet, completely lacking its usual acidic mockery. "You fight like a ghost, boy. It is entirely undignified. But it is horribly effective."
I didn't answer. I just watched Yanfen angrily kick a dropped sword out of her way, while I stood frozen, waiting for the burning in my leg to recede enough for me to take a single step without collapsing.
Ten miles away, in a silk-lined command pavilion pitched at the base of the mountain range, Zhao Feng sat behind a heavy mahogany desk.
He was holding a cup of expensive spiritual tea. His heavy jade rings clicked softly against the delicate porcelain.
The tent flap opened. The surviving scout from the advance wave stumbled inside. His gray infiltration robes were scorched and torn, and he was heavily favoring his left leg. He dropped to one knee, pressing his forehead to the rug.
Zhao Feng didn't look up from his tea. "You are early. I assume the ruins were as empty as the reports suggested?"
The scout trembled. "Elder. The perimeter was guarded."
Zhao Feng paused. He set the teacup down, his brow furrowing. "By the Glacier Sect prodigy?"
"No, Elder. The... the crimson-haired girl. And the Sect Master."
Zhao Feng's eyes narrowed into dark slits. "Wei Liang? I shattered his meridians myself. The man is a walking corpse. Did he deploy a hidden artifact?"
"No, Elder," the scout swallowed, a bead of cold sweat running down his nose and dropping onto the carpet. "He didn't use an artifact. He didn't use Qi. He didn't even draw a weapon."
The silence in the command pavilion grew suddenly, suffocatingly heavy.
"Explain," Zhao Feng commanded. The velvet smoothness was completely gone from his voice.
"He... he just walked," the scout stammered, his eyes wide with remembered panic. "Every time we tried to strike, he was already standing in the exact position that ruined our footing. He conducted the battle without throwing a single punch. He fought entirely with positioning. We couldn't touch him."
Zhao Feng leaned back in his heavy wooden chair. He looked at the trembling scout.
A cultivator who fought with overwhelming Qi was dangerous, but measurable. You could calculate their reserves. You could plan a counter-attack.
But a man who fought a Core Formation squad by simply walking around them? A man who didn't use Qi because he apparently didn't need to?
That wasn't a martial artist. That was an anomaly.
Zhao Feng looked down at his desk. He didn't say anything. He just stared at the porcelain teacup, watching the expensive liquid slowly, steadily grow cold.