DragonKnov
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Chapter 304
🕑 Added 2025-01-29 10:22:07 +0000 UTCThe suffocating miasma, thick had completely enshrouded the once hallowed of Kunlun, transmuting the sacred grounds into a waking nightmare.
The acrid vapor seared the lungs with each ragged inhalation, stinging eyes and throats until uncontrollable fits of coughing punctured the unnatural stillness. Scattered haphazardly across the bloodstained earth lay the broken, motionless forms of Kunlun's disciples, their bodies gruesomely contorted in the final throes of agony.
Some clutched at mortal wounds gushing vital essences, victims of the brutal onslaught of unorthodox martial artists. Others looked to have been hastily dragged beyond harm's reach by the whipping robes of the swift-moving Elders.
Yet amidst this vision of hell on earth, Ji Wuye stood immutable. His twin crimson irises, burning like royal rubies amidst the veiled murk, seemed to possess an unearthly gift for penetrating the poisonous miasma. The world before him crystallized as a transparent pane shimmered into existence:
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[!] Your passive skill, Quick Adaptation (C), has been triggered!
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What had once been a magnificent mane of lustrous white tresses, flowing like captured moonbeams, now hung in clotted ropes, saturated and stained in streaks of deep crimson.
His martial robe, pristine white silks delicately accented with aquamarine piping, were reduced to tattered, soiled wreckings, the once regal fabrics now macabrely patterned in an abstract calligraphy of blood.
The jian gripped in his steady hand - had been utterly transfigured by the press of combat into something primal and runic. Each edge that had entered an enemy's flesh was now mapped in a profusion of nicks and scores.
Despite the virulent toxins permeating his system with every labored inhalation, Ji Wuye evinced a demeanor that seemed to hold grinning mortality itself in mocking contempt. Though his gaze was bloodshot and ringed in crimson threads from the poison's insult, his eyes remained laser-focused and preternaturally sharp.
Though his lips were drained of all color, taking on an ominous cadaverous hue, they were set in an unyielding line of indomitable resolve. The supernatural ruby radiance in his pupils seemed to smolder ever brighter with each passing heartbeat as his expression remained as immutable as an ancient monument.
Meanwhile...
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[>> DEFLECTING BLOWS (D) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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[>> DEFLECTING BLOWS (D) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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[>> FELINE REFLEXES (D) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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…
The diaphanous notifications cascaded like ethereal rain across Ji Wuye's field of vision, each luminous update vying momentarily for his rapt attention before being sublimated by the spellbinding panorama unfurling before his disbelieving eyes.
But in this breathtaking moment, such routine updates paled into virtual insignificance compared to the riveting spectacle commanding the whole area.
Ji Wuye's blazing ruby gaze remained transfixed upon a solitary figure whose mere presence seemed to part the insidious toxic vapors encircling her.
Her every movement was transcendent poetry etched into fluid motion as her sword traced an immaculate argent arc, her diaphanous robes billowing in the updraft like cumulonimbus stormclouds.
The noxious purple mist, so recently an implacable, suffocating pall of encroaching mortality, now began to bend impossibly to this singular martial artist's imperious will.
The veiled toxins swirled and eddied around her in languid, hypnotic cycles as if drawn by the irresistible gravitational force of her aura alone. She became the mystic eye of a poisonous maelstrom, the virulent vapors spiraling ever inward toward her presence in tightening, horizontal helices.
With an almost dismissive gesture, as if bidding a minor distraction be gone from her sight, she dispatched the vast, condensed cyclone of toxins plunging earthward in a thunderous, cascading amethystine waterfall.
The forest expanse stretching beyond Kunlun’s sacred grounds abruptly disappeared beneath the billowing purple deluge as the crisp, untainted mountain ambiance was finally restored.
'Perfect, Sister Song,' Ji Wuye's thoughts flickered in ghost-like acknowledgment of the timely mastery. At the same time, his ravaged respiration eased, vibrant color flooded back into his previously bloodless lips, and Qi surged steadily through his taxed meridians once more.
The scattered ranks of unorthodox martial artists stood frozen, their expressions twisting in impotent astonishment as their coveted poisonous advantage dissipated like the dewy phantoms of morning subordinated to the harsh light of day.
But Ji Wuye was never one to indulge in mere spectatorship when the gravity of a pivotal moment beckoned.
With a fluidity and economy of motion that bordered on casual indifference, he released his death-grip upon his notched, battle-scarred jian, allowing the weight of the blade to clatter carelessly onto scarred battlefield .
His unhurried movements as he calmly surveyed the littered wreckage of strewn, discarded weapons carried an almost ceremonial beauty.
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Active Skill: Slash Breaker!
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The instant his calloused fingers closed around the hilt of new jian a transformative transfiguration occurred.
A soft, phantasmal azure light began to emanate from the length of the blade in fitful waves, crawling steadily along the burnished steel like the leading edge of frost claiming an autumnal brook.
SWOOSH!
Then, in the space of a single, endless heartbeat, Ji Wuye's body blurred into pure, undulating kinesis - no longer simply fast, but utterly transcendent, as though he had stepped partway into an interphasic realm of existence.
The very air seemed to shiver and dampen in concentric rings rippling outward from his form as the he dissolved into a vector of pure, unbridled momentum.
A sudden, cyclonic gale tore across the battlefield, the knife-edge winds violent enough to make the unorthodox martial artists' robes snap and billow like torn war banners.
Their expressions remained twisted in bewildered incomprehension, minds struggling to process the dual traumas of their dissipated poisonous advantage and Ji Wuye's lightning-transcendent transition into motion.
SLASH!
The sound detonated through the crystalline mountain air like fate's own sibilant whisper of mortality. A severed head launched skyward in a grotesque, tumbling pirouette, dispersing a vermillion crest of arterial spray that seemed to stitch the very winds with deep crimson embroidery.
Ji Wuye materialized with liquid grace beside the abruptly remaining corpse, his newly acquired jian held in a horizontal extension of perfect, zen-like stillness. Viscid runnels of blood sheeted down the killing edge in the jian's edge.
Reality came crashing back down upon the remaining unorthodox martial artists like the chill deluge of an ice bucket challenge. One voice, rough with desperation, cracked the stillness as its owner reflexively tried to rally his frozen comrades back into action:
"Get it together! The Kunlun disciples are still recovering from the poison - attack now while they're vulnerable!"
The barked command acted as a spark finding purchase in a long-dormant tinder, igniting an immediate response.
As one unified motion, the remaining unorthodox martial artists surged forward in a thunderous wave toward the scattered, weakened disciples of the Kunlun, weapons raised high in vicious arcs as they pressed their advantage through sheer ferocious speed and brutality of violence.
But -
SLASH!
This time, three heads arced through the dissipating mists in a perfectly synchronized danse macabre, their shocked faces frozen in rictus masks of eternal surprise as they viewed their own abruptly discarded corpses collapse boneless beneath them.
Ji Wuye's formerly magnificent white hair, now heavily streaked through with fresh crimson tributaries, seemed to dance and billow in the cyclone winds like spilled arterial silk caressed by the rushing zephyrs.
The jian in his grasp remained extended in the final pristine position terminated by his obliterating slash, rivulets of fresh vital essences sheeting down its length to confluences with the steadily expanding pool gathering at his feet.
"KILL HIM FIRST!" The hoarse bellow erupted from somewhere deep within the dwindling knot of unorthodox martial artists.
SWOOSH!
The battlefield atmosphere thickened with roiling, murderous intent as, the first one, a unorthodox claw-wielding martial artists transformed himself into a living cyclone of annihilating force.
His form blurred into a dervish of kinetic savagery, spinning with such ferocious rotational velocity that the very molecules of air surrounding him distorted and whipped into microscopic maelstroms.
The metallic talonsfused extensions of his fingernails caught the dim light in flashing arcs, their razor edges glinting like the serrated teeth of some mythic, eldritch beast as he bellowed the invocation of his technique:
"Phantom Claw - Second Move: Spiraling Talon Drill!"
Brilliant lancing pillars of azure Qi erupted in a coruscating corona around his whirling form, enshrouding the lethal vortex in a cocoon of scintillating energy that elevated his gyrating assault into the realm of unstoppable force.
HOWL!
The very air itself howled and parted in destructive concentric rings before his hurtling momentum, his rapidly revolving silhouette leaving ephemeral traceries of sapphire luminescence burning like the plasma trail of a celestial comet starved for atmosphere.
WOOSH!
Simultaneously, the very incarnation of death itself seemed to materialize in a plume of absolute darkness behind Ji Wuye's unwavering form.
Twin serrated daggers, gripped in a reverse hand position, caught the dim illumination in furtive winks of fractured light, their variously angled edges gleaming with a ravenous, serpentine appetite for the slick warmth of severed jugulars. The unorthodox dagger-wielder martial artist's whispered invocation carried the chill of the sepulcher into the crystalline mountain ambiance:
"Night Phantom Steps - Killing Intent in the Wind!"
Ghostly blue Qi traceries, like phosphorescent footprints of some restless revenant, inscribed his circuitous path.
But where others might have perceived the inescapable specter of mortality descending upon them from two opposing vectors of consummate lethality, Ji Wuye saw only the perfect cosmic alignments taking form - a grand stage orchestratedfor the trigger his skills.
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[!] Your passive skill, Feline Reflexes (D), has been triggered!
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The translucent screen flashed across his perceptual periphery like the phantasmic lightning of a summer squall, but Ji Wuye's body was already a whirling dervish of liquid grace in motion before the words even materialized.
His blazing ruby irises, bejeweled blades as sharp as a master gemcutter's tools, locked with laser-intense focus upon the circuitous path of the dagger-wielding martial artists .
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[!] Your passive skill, Deflecting Blows (D), has been triggered!
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While this dagger-weildering martial artists believed their lethal vectors had culminated in an unassailable pincer calculated to entrap even the most evasive of targetsm but...
CRASH!
The battlefield atmosphere seemed to resonate with the crystalline song of lethal transcendence as Ji Wuye's Qi-infused jian arced upwards in one devastatingly elegant cyclone of azure luminescence.
The trailing comet's tail of sapphire radiance left ephemeral replications of its path burning like lingering spectral afterimages scorched upon the mountain winds.
The meteoric blade met the unorthodox dagger-wielder martial artist's cross-trailing daggers with the sound of shattering crystal orchestrated on an elemental scale, the razor-edged knives explosively disintegrating into a diffuse, multitudinous cloud of metallic shrapnel - each jagged fragment refracting the dim illumination like a fleeting, deadly star blazing its final moments before oblivion.
On the other hand, the dagger-wielder martial artist's expression contorted into a visceral rictus of shock and disbelieving anguish as the sheer, unquantifiable force of Ji Wuye's resonant collision launched his form sideways in an unstoppable soaring ballistic arc.
BOOOOM!
The thunderous crash of the unorthodox dagger-wielder martial artist's body being flung backward echoed like the ominous peal of a wrathful war drum, heralding the opening salvo of a cataclysmic conflict.
Yet in that same eternal instant, Ji Wuye's fingers had already released their ensphering grip upon his jian's hilt, permitting the ensorcelled blade to fall in a rigorously controlled ambient descent.
However, before the sublime inexorabilities of gravity could fully claim sovereignty over the falling weapon's arcane materials, Ji Wuye's hand had already reacquired and resecured its grasp in one supremely fluid, unbroken motion of kinetic economy.
It was at this pivotal juncture of continuity that yet another diaphanous notification shimmered:
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[!] Your passive skill, Feline Reflexes (D), has been triggered!
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He pivoted with the infinitesimal impetus and economical redirection of a celestial body altering its immemorial orbit around some unseen gravitational nexus, facing the cyclonic vector of the incoming gyrokinetic threat with baleful coalescent focus.
The whirling, taloned vortex that was the claw-wielding martial artist had become a blurred, indistinct trail of annihilating centrifugal force by the time its lethal radius entered the defensive sphere of Ji Wuye's presence.
Those merciless, glinting talonsfused extensions of steel alloy snagged and sundered a ribbon of fabric from Ji Wuye's blood-drenched white martial silks.
But then -
CLANK!
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[!] Your passive skill, Deflecting Blows (D), has been triggered!
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The calculated, flawlessly executed gambit of momentarily releasing and then reacquiring his jian - a trick to reset triggering the Deflecting Blows.
The catastrophic collision of Ji Wuye's seamless defensive mastery against the cyclopean rotational momentum of the spiraling talons produced an ear-shattering concussive detonation that seemed to encapsulate and concentrate the abyssal might of celestially-ordained entropy itself within the confines of an infinitesimal singularity.
CRASH!
Fractal replications of the resonant shockwave propagated outwards through the crystalline atmosphere in rippling, concentric rings of ultrasonic force as the taloned unorthodox martial artist's burnished steel extensions instantaneously and catastrophically deconstructed into a kaleidoscopic, centrifugal malestrom of hyper-accelerated shrapnel birthed into violent, frangible being.
Each infinitesimal shard, temporarily elevated into its own immaculate materialization of the lethal art, refracted the dim battlefield illumination in lucent, pinwheel-like arcs of refracted incandescence before winking out of existence in the span of a final, futile kineticism.
On the other hand, the side effect of Deflecting Blows caused the unorthodox taloned martial artist's form was instantly rebounded across an impossibly vast distance, bodily hurled backwards as if struck by the unstoppable open palm of an enraged celestial itself.
Yet even as these two seemingly apocalyptic threats were successively neutralized....
"We got him! HAHAHAHAHA!"
Those two unorthodox martial artists, they were merely the visible part of the trap, the flashy distraction meant to hold his attention.
His crimson eyes detected the truth too late as shadows seemed to solidify around him, transforming into a ring of unorthodox martial artists who had used the chaos of battle to maneuver into position. They had encircled him completely.
