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Chapter 302
🕑 Added 2025-01-27 10:02:21 +0000 UTCThe thunderous shockwaves of the raging battle extended even to Elder Qiao's towering high peak, where Ji Wuye's Senior Sisters stood motionless, their eyes transfixed on the chaotic carnage unfolding below.
Despite the overwhelming din of clashing blades and deafening explosions, Shen Bi, Lian Rougang, and Qiu Xia remained rooted to the peak, their fists clenched so tightly their knuckles turned white.
At the same time, Elder Qiao sat utterly serene at an ornately carved round stone table, her slender fingers elegantly plucking the strings of her zither.
The tranquil, melancholic melody drifted through the air, providing a stark contrast to the hellish scene below. Her delicate features and flawless porcelain skin glowed with the vitality of a woman in her late twenties, giving no hint of the profound wisdom she possessed.
With willowy arms and an unflinching amethyst gaze, she remained the very embodiment of tranquility itself - even as the raging storm of battle raged mercilessly below.
Almost all of Kunlun's Elders now either valiantly blocked the enemy's vicious advance or found themselves embroiled in desperate combat against the Masters of the unorthodox faction. Yet Elder Qiao's preternatural calm remained unshaken.
"This is truly...chaotic," murmured Qiu Xia at last, her normally impassive eyes reflecting the faraway turmoil like twin mirrors.
Her long, lustrous dark hair, meticulously tied back in an elegant updo, fluttered faintly in the warm mountain breeze. Even as her piercing gaze remained riveted on the battlefield far below - where Kunlun's brave disciples fought with every fiber of their being - her usually melodious voice betrayed a somber, quiet solemnity.
Standing at her side, the diminutive Shen Bi appeared outwardly fragile, her petite hands trembling faintly as Qiu Xia reached over to envelop them in a comforting grasp.
Her luminous doe-eyes, once so full of youthful spirit, now held an emptiness bordering on dazed shock at the horrors she witnessed. Yet somehow, she too managed to compose herself - jaw clenched as she forced herself to look upon the bloody havoc continuing to escalate below.
'Is this truly what Junior wished for us to bear witness?' On the other hand, Lian Rougang wondered inwardly, unconsciously raking a hand through her own raven tresses, now disheveled.
A storm of tumultuous emotions flashed across her exquisite yet care-worn features as she stared down at the escalating mayhem beneath the peak.
The weight of Elder Qiao's stern command not to descend felt like an unbearable burden, only compounding the inner conflict swirling within her breast.
"This is his request - and my way of honoring it," came Elder Qiao's a clear, melodic voice that carried a soothing resonance at last, breaking the heavy silence that had enveloped them.
Her cryptic words were accompanied by a delicate puff of fragrant sandalwood smoke, curling sinuously through the air like a ghostly serpent as it was exhaled from between Elder Qiao's full, tinted a soft rose lips.
She took a long, slow draw from the long-stemmed ivory pipe cradled elegantly in her hands.
By now, the exquisitely carved zither lay idle upon the round stone table before her, its haunting melodies stilled as Elder Qiao silently observed Ji Wuye's Senior Sisters - each woman seemingly lost in somber introspection after hearing their beloved Junior's parting, unsettling words echo from beyond the veil.
"Master..." Lian Rougang's tremulous voice finally broke the heavy silence, hesitant yet weighted with a torrent of roiling emotions she could not fully conceal.
Turning away, she lowered her head, her distant gaze glazed over as if reliving countless cherished memories of days long past. "Forgive my rudeness in asking, but how long have you and my Junior been...planning this?"
Her wavering tone cracked ever so slightly on the final words, every fiber of her being battling the mixed feelings of heartache, confusion and quiet acceptance warring within her breast.
"Hmmmm..." Elder Qiao paused thoughtfully, bringing the ornately carved ivory stem of her pipe once more to her full tinted a soft rose lips.
After a soft, measured puff, she exhaled a billowing plume of pale fragrant smoke, watching it spiral lazily upwards before dissipating amongst the curling vapors of battle below.
"Not that long," she said at last, the faintest of enigmatic smiles playing about the corners of her lips. "But he's the one who brought me into it, truth be told." Her quiet, tinkling laughter carried an undercurrent of mystery, as if she alone was privy to some profoundly inscrutable cosmic joke.
The delicately formed plume of smoke she had just expelled seemed to swiftly dissipate and vanish into the chaos below at the mere sound of her gentle mirth, like an ethereal spirit scattering on the winds.
"Junior Brother?" Shen Bi's soft, plaintive voice suddenly cut through the heavy moment like a dagger, instantly commanding everyone's rapt attention as all eyes snapped towards the diminutive young woman.
A roiling aura of palpable unease and dread radiated from her slight frame, and Lian Rougang instinctively whipped back around to face the distant Lower Level battlefield once more.
But as their gazes rapidly focused downwards upon the raging carnage, Shen Bi's exquisite porcelain features contorted into a rictus of pure, unadulterated horror unlike anything they had ever witnessed. A tremor seemed to pass through her very soul at whatever fresh atrocity she now beheld.
At the same moment, Qiu Xia's own expression grew taut as a bow string, the elegant composure she had steadfastly maintained finally cracking as her dark eyes reflected a solemn gravity. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath.
Lian Rougang, on the other hand, raised a trembling hand to cover her mouth in a gesture of abject horror - her wide, disbelieving eyes remaining utterly transfixed upon the unfolding chaos beneath them.
Not one of the Senior Sisters could tear their anguished gazes away from the atrocities playing out in dreadful clarity before them.
The scene unfolding on the ravaged battlefield was one of utter, unfathomable devastation. Cutting a swath through the Heart of Carnage itself strode their beloved Junior Brother Ji Wuye - moving with the cold, remorseless grace of the demon.
Piles of savagely mutilated corpses marked his grisly wake, some torn asunder and rent into pieces with such terrifying ease that they were rendered utterly unrecognizable as anything remotely human.
He left no quarter for mercy or restraint, his jian tracing a grim, bloody pattern of indiscriminate slaughter amidst the ranks of the unorthodox martial artists.
Even from their lofty vantage atop the peak, as martial artist at the Fourth Realm allowed them to perceive every soul-shattering atrocity unfolding below with pristine, inescapable clarity.
And there, standing amidst the evergrowing charnel mounds of eviscerated dead and dying, was the unmistakable shock of long snowy hair belonging to their most cherished Junior Brother.
Yet it was the sight of his eyes - those once warm, lively orbs now glimmering with a cold, fathomless indifference, as though all last vestiges of his humanity had been ruthlessly scoured away - that prompted their very hearts to freeze in their chests.
"Is...is that really my Junior?" Shen Bi's tremulous voice shattered the discordant silence, stuttering in disbelief as she violently struggled to process the incomprehensible vision laid bare before them all.
The initial shock of witnessing the full-fledged battle had long since given way to a deeper, more profoundly unsettling realization taking root.
Her rising panic and anxiety were rapidly subsumed by a swell of visceral horror and outright denial as she watched helplessly while Ji Wuye enacted his remorseless, indiscriminate butchery with the same gentle hands that had once reassuringly squeezed her own.
The caring, tender-hearted Junior Brother she had so cherished from the instant they first met now seemed like a distant, hopelessly fractured memory in the face of his utter ruthlessness.
"Th-The way he moves...it's...it's like he's someone else entirely..." Shen Bi's lips barely shaped the words, her fragile voice scarcely audible over the distant cacophony of slaughter.
As her spiraling thoughts descended into haunted delirium, the visage of her once beloved Junior warped and merged sickeningly with the nightmarish flashes of sadistic bandits who had brutally ravaged her village all those years ago.
Despite her increasingly frantic attempts to deny it, Ji Wuye's form - now drenched head to toe in a fathomless crimson tide - gradually transfigured before her very eyes into an eerie, all-too-familiar facsimile of those very same marauding butchers.
Beside the distraught Shen Bi, Qiu Xia's outward reaction proved more restrained, yet no less viscerally conflicted.
Her exquisitely arched brows knit together in a series of finely nuanced micro-expressions - raising fractionally, lowering, furrowing in consternation - while her delicately manicured hands alternated between clenching into trembling white-knuckled fists and falling limp at her sides.
Her full, rose-petal lips, at one moment pursed into a moue of naked frustration and the next tugged into a taut line of tense bewilderment, wordlessly reflected the inner struggle raging beneath her customarily composed façade.
She drew in a deep, steadying breath, her obsidian eyes refocusing downwards as the encroaching strands of confusion at last coalesced into a moment of piercing, unshakable realization.
Without a word, Qiu Xia reached over to grasp Shen Bi's trembling hands in her own, gripping them firmly as if to share an anchor against the encroaching tides of madness. Only then did she finally find her voice.
"Perhaps...we never truly understood the depths of his capabilities after all," she murmured, the words seeming to hold a profoundly weighty implication beyond their surface meaning.
"Junior..." The strangled utterance from Lian Rougang's lips cut through the heavy silence like a razor's caress, the rare tremble in her usually stern tone betraying the deep fractures spreading through her vaunted composure.
It marked the first time she had ever allowed herself to speak so openly and unguardedly before her Junior Sisters. Yet her despairing words seemed to go utterly unnoticed by them in that moment, their attention utterly transfixed elsewhere.
"This...precision in taking lives..." Lian Rougang's pained whisper trailed off into silence once more as her gaze remained utterly locked onto the remorseless figure of Ji Wuye carving his bloody swathe through the valley below.
The cold, fathomless emptiness burning in his eyes in that instant was nothing like the expressions of someone who had taken lives before out of sheer self-preservation or reluctant necessity. This went far beyond the clumsy, anguished actions of a disciple forced to strike a fatal blow in the heat of conflict, as they had all experienced during the trials at the Fifth Floor of the Tower.
This was something else entirely - a level of sheer, calculated brutality and butchery that spoke of an underlying breadth of experience vastly.
Throughout it all, Elder Qiao simply observed the visceral reactions of them in eloquent silence, her serene countenance betraying only the faintest glimmers of exasperation at their naivete. Sighing softly to herself, she allowed her thoughts to wander.
'They're still so terribly green...Did they truly think the path of the martial artist was solely about protecting and defending without ever being called upon to take lives? Foolish children.'
Based on their stricken expressions alone, the sheer depths of their fear, shock and denial at bearing witness to Ji Wuye's unflinching methods were almost palpable, like a miasma clinging to the very air around them.
Yet at the same time, Elder Qiao viewed such emotional fragility not with disdain, but rather as an inevitable - frankly, utterly typical - stage that all righteous martial artists were forced to confront at one point or another along their journey.
With a subtle shake of her head, Elder Qiao allowed her inner musings to wander.
'After all, just how long has it truly been since any of them last witnessed the realities of outright slaughter on a scale like this?'
Raising the exquisitely carved ivory stem of her long opium pipe once more to her full, tinted a soft rose lips, she inhaled deeply - allowing the faintly sweet, heady fragrance of the finest Pu'er tobacco to suffuse her senses like an intoxicating vapor.
Another billowing plume of pale smoke swirled hypnotically into the mountain air before dissipating just as rapidly as it had formed, scattering on the faint winds like a ghost.
How many years had it been since the last tragic blood-drenched campaigns of the Great War that had once claimed the lives of countless martial artists across Jianghu?
Elder Qiao sighed softly to herself, her thoughts adrift amidst those long-faded yet indelible memories of an era that now seemed akin to a hazy dream half-recalled upon waking. 'The Jianghu has remained too peaceful for far too long...but now all that is poised to change, it seems.'
Her introspective inner monologue trailed off as her piercing gaze refocused upon the young ladies standing vigil before her.
To the her surprise, their demeanor had undergone a palpable shift in the interim - the lingering trepidation and naked fear that had gripped their expressions only moments prior had now vanished entirely. Replacing it instead was a look of unmistakable, blazing determination burning in their eyes.
Raising an elegant silvered brow at their unlooked-for transformation, Elder Qiao felt a faint ripple of intrigue. Pushing herself up from her seated position in one fluid, graceful yet unhurried motion, she drifted closer towards the precipice overlooking the valley below.
Her piercing stare fell unflinchingly upon the raging chaos once more. As the sounds of distant, savage battle were borne to her ears on the warm mountain winds, the faintest of bemused smirks seemed to tug at the corners of Elder Qiao's full, painted lips - an expression of equal parts knowing amusement and quiet approval.
'That’s the Windblade Emperor’s disciple, isn’t it?' Her keen gaze locked onto Ji Wuye's blood-drenched silhouette at the center of the strife.
Beside him, however, another figure had joined the fray—Song Jia. She moved with equal lethality, finishing off any enemies still clinging to life in Ji Wuye’s wake. For a moment, Elder Qiao focused on Song Jia, her movements swift yet fluid, her strikes calculated yet merciless.
What intrigued her even further was the synchronicity of their movements. Ji Wuye and Song Jia fought as if they were extensions of one another, their techniques so perfectly matched it was almost as if they shared the same martial art.
Comments
musashi
...almost... tftc
