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Chapter 228 –Accepting, Apprehensive, and Avid
🕑 Added 2025-03-29 02:32:22 +0000 UTCYang Ru watched as Kang Lin fingered her contingency ring, ready to call Master at the slightest sign of his and Yang Xiu’s lives being put in danger. Good. There was nothing the three of them could do against a Golden Core cultivator. If the man moved to intervene, Master would be the only one who could help.
It occurred to Yang Ru that several months ago it would have bothered him to need such assistance. He would have seen it as his duty to protect his sister and his maybe future fiancé. To call Master in would have seemed shameful somehow.
Instead, Yang Ru had grown to better understand his role. He was the sect’s protector but only for those dangers he was equipped to guard against. There was no shame in admitting he was outclassed, and a cultivator at least a major realm above him outclassed him overwhelmingly.
It was an honor to die protecting the sect and its members and his family. But it wasn’t a good thing.
Yang Ru honored Ye Zan for saving Yang Xiu, but it would have been better if he had never had to make that sacrifice. His death was honorable. But not good.
Today, Yang Ru would do his duty, and he might die. But he would not court death. Protect Yang Xiu. Protect Kang Lin. Protect himself.
From the moment the flying cultivators had appeared, he’d been shifting his feet back and forth, trying to be unobtrusive but at the same time building Momentum. And he felt it working. The amount he created wasn’t much. But it was some. And it was increasing with each fidget.
He listened as his sister exchanged insults with the enemy cultivator, shifting his feet the entire time. Yang Xiu sure seemed to be enjoying herself. That girl loved to talk. Of course, he was sure that wasn’t her only goal.
Their conversation allowed Yang Ru to keep building Momentum. He appreciated that thoughtfulness on her part. They always did work well together. It was one of the advantages of being twins.
Eventually, though, she could stall no more. The Golden Core cultivator ordered his juniors to attack. The battle was about to start.
The juniors landed in formation—two, two, and one.
Yang Ru pulled his spear from his ring and readied it. At the same time, he began stomping, greatly accelerating his accumulation of Momentum. How much to build was more art than science, at least at his current level of experience with his techniques. He needed to blow through the two pairs in front and have enough power left to deliver an immense below to the one in back.
Too little, and his strike wouldn’t penetrate the boy’s qi shield. Too much, and he chanced the enemies advancing and not leaving him enough distance for a charge.
Ten seconds. He’d build Momentum for ten seconds, trusting Yang Xiu to hold them back for that long.
His sister was nothing if not deadly accurate with her bow. And fast. Every second was another arrow. All he had to do was count her shots to time how long he was taking.
Smooth. Fast. Accurate. Powerful. Each arrow Yang Xiu shot hit its target, keeping the enemies frozen in place.
And after the tenth one, he charged.
She knew his prey as well as he did—the one in back. While he sprinted toward the group, she kept them occupied, eventually disabling two of them by penetrating their qi shields and sinking arrows into their skin. As expected.
With the four of them distracted, none put up much of a fight—or even seemed to notice—as he charged straight through the middle of their formation. The boy at the end of the formation was the only one to react, readying his sword to strike.
Not that it did him any good.
Yang Ru had defeated a beast at the equivalent of peak Foundation Establishment when he’d barely reach Small Success with his two techniques. For the current fight, he was at Large Success with both, and his opponents were only at his level or slightly higher. One on one against him, they stood no chance.
With five against two, he didn’t know.
As Yang Ru drew just outside of an arm’s length, he converted a bit of the Momentum to give him speed, ducking past the sword swing that had become way too slow to hit him. In perfect synchronization with his body’s movements, he thrust with his spear and transferred the rest of the Momentum to power his strike just at it connected with the boy’s qi shield.
The shield shattered, and the spear kept going, penetrating the boy’s stomach with a wet squelch. He was sent flying from the transferred force and crashed into the wall a dozen feet behind him.
If not for having an enhanced body due to his cultivation, the boy would have died instantly, Instead, the Golden Core cultivator darted to the injured boy and fed him a healing pill.
The senior cultivator’s actions were to the good. Yang Ru and Yang Xiu were allowed to defend themselves, but Master didn’t want them causing the war to start. Instantly killing one of the Foundation Establishment cultivators would have been a escalation.
There were rules to the situation, however. The senior could heal the junior, but if the junior returned to the fight, it would become perfectly acceptable for the twins to use deadly force on the next one.
It would be interesting to see which choice the Jade Chameleons made.
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Amazed, Kang Lin watched the twins fight. She knew they were powerful. After all, she sparred with them often. But they hadn’t dominated her like they were doing to the five Jade Chameleon cultivators.
She beat Yang Xiu at least one time in four, maybe even one in three. And she came close to splitting her fights with Yang Ru.
Then again, Yang Ru was most effective when he had room to charge, and Yang Xiu was at her best when she had someone to engage in melee while she attacked from range. The two really did complement each other perfectly.
Regardless, they appeared to be adults playing with children for how effective the five gray-robed cultivators were. Yang Ru could have easily killed the one he attacked by simply going for the head instead of the stomach. Even a Major Healing Pill wouldn’t have helped if he’d done that.
Kang Lin silently cheered his restraint. If one of the Jade Chameleons happened to die so be it. But demonstrating that any killing wasn’t the intent was important. There were two factions still waiting to determine which way to jump. Being strong was good. Being bloodthirsty wasn’t.
As overpowering as Yang Ru’s single move was, Yang Xiu’s constant barrage of arrows kept the entire enemy group on a reactionary footing. They couldn’t break free to get close enough to attack her, and without someone disrupting her, she could control the entire fight.
Less than twenty seconds in, one of their opponents was completely out of the fight and would have perished had the Golden Core cultivator not administered a pill. Two more were injured to such an extent that they were paying more attention to the arrows sticking out of them than to anything that was going on around them.
That left only two cultivators still fighting.
Granted, the Jade Chameleon Sect in Sixth Flawless Flowing City was in shambles with a lot of members going back to the main branch and few higher realmed members being dispatched to take control. The five Foundation Establishment cultivators fighting did not look like the best that sect had to offer.
Still, one had to have a certain level of talent to be accepted into a sect and even more talent to reach their realm at their obvious youthful ages. They were not the dregs of their sect by any measure. Five of them should have been sufficient to deal with even two very talented members of a big three sect.
That the twins defeated the five so easily meant the twins were more than talented. They were elite, on par with the top several disciples in their realm in the Poison Claw Sect.
Which wasn’t a huge surprise. Kang Lin knew they had A rank talent and had been given top heaven grade cultivation methods and techniques. The weird thing to her was that, if they were elite and she held her own when sparring with them, what did that say about her? What did it say about the techniques Master distributed?
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Yang Xiu continued to pepper the two uninjured Jade Chameleon cultivators in front with arrows while her brother launched the last one into the wall hard enough to damage several stones.
The two began rushing forward, a move she approved of. After all, just standing there taking hit after hit from her wasn’t accomplishing anything for them, especially since they were down to a four-on-two from a five-on-two and half their remaining squad seemed uninterested in continuing the fight. She liked winning, of course, but it was more fun to win against a competent opponent than one behaving like an idiot.
Of course, the fact that two Foundation Establishment cultivators were sprinting toward her did present something of a problem. One on one, she was able to perform well against either Kang Lin or her brother. When both of them teamed up against her, though, Yang Xiu performed much worse than either of the others did in a one versus two fight.
Recently though, something had changed that significantly improved her chances against multiple opponents who reached melee range—her shield had reached Mastery. Advancing to such a level of expertise with the skill held a lot of advantages, of course. For one, the skill become more powerful. For another, it became easier to use and easier to modify based on her wishes. It also became much more efficient in terms of qi usage.
The main impact of that particular technique reaching Mastery, however, was that her shield reached its true potential, becoming like Master’s in that it automatically reacted to opponent’s strikes and shielded only the necessary area. Instead of a thin layer of qi protecting her entire body, the shield transformed into thick armor defending a small portion. The shield took less of her concentration, required less qi to operate, and withstood much more powerful strikes.
What was not to like?
She hadn’t had much time to practice with it, but the small bit she’d done before leaving for the city had given her confidence that nothing her Foundation Establishment cultivator enemies did were going to pierce it.
In the short time Yang Xiu had before her opponents reached her, she had a choice to make—try to hold off both of them with a barrage of strikes to each of them or focus on one to take him out of the fight. Were she not so assured of the strength of the shield Master had provided her, she might have gone with the first option. Since she, however, completely trusted it and him to keep her safe, her choice was obvious.
She calmly watched both enemies run toward her while she lined up her shots, calculating angles and speeds. When the time was right, she deflected one arrow off a tree and immediately shot another at the cultivator on the right. As planned, the deflected arrow hit first, disrupting the qi shield just long enough for the second arrow to penetrate it.
That time, she decided against targeting a hand or a leg.
Thunk!
The arrow buried itself in his chest, and the boy looked down at it with wide eyes.
“Be thankful that I’m not trying to kill you,” Yang Xiu said. “A fraction of an inch to the right, and that would have punctured your heart.”
While her target had stopped, his companion hadn’t. He swung his sword, hard, aiming at her neck. A kill shot.
The blade glowed with pearl-white light. Wind. Her Ice qi, like Water, was weak against Wind.
She had no time to do anything. Not to dodge. Not to get an arrow or her bow between the sword and her skin. Nothing.
The only thing she had time to do was to fervently hope she hadn’t misplaced her faith in Master and her shield.
